What I\u2019ve been watching.<\/p>\n
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas<\/strong><\/em>: Actually pretty fun, once you get past the narcissism and abuse of women.<\/p>\n EDIT: I should say that the latter two elements aren\u2019t things I wish they\u2019d left out of the movie. They add texture to what could have been a plasticky, \u201cdrugs R fun!\u201d, self-consciously edgy cliche. F&LILV<\/em> manages to be neither a cautionary tale nor an ad for addiction.<\/p>\n Whiplash<\/strong><\/em>: Miles Teller is a super actor. This is not the movie to see him in. It\u2019s a joyless film full of sports-movie cliches transplanted to the arts. And it acts like it\u2019s making a wrong-but-countercultural \u201cabusive teaching is the best kind!\u201d movie, but does a ton of CYA \u201cno wait, that doesn\u2019t actually work and anyway is bad\u201d correct-but-boring bet-hedging.<\/p>\n Alice, Sweet Alice<\/strong><\/em>: Catholicism as hothouse of evil. This will work really well for some people; it\u2019s this specific \u201970s horror style for which I have a very low tolerance, the self-serious hysterical style. Like Who Can Kill a Child?<\/em> and Don\u2019t Look Now<\/em>, both of which are much better than this. But its alternate title is Communion<\/em> so there are people in my audience who will probably like it. It\u2019s probably better than I think it is.<\/p>\n The Ice Harvest<\/strong><\/em>: Perfectly serviceable John Cusack Christmas noir. I enjoyed this a lot but it\u2019s slight.<\/p>\n M. Butterfly<\/strong><\/em>: Directed by David Cronenberg! This was pretty terrific. I\u2019d already liked the play by David Henry Hwang a lot; making it a movie adds not just Jeremy Irons, though that\u2019s excellent, but also a broader historical scope. The very brief Cultural Revolution scenes give the movie a lot of depth. I don\u2019t mind that the final scene spells out the entire arc of the play\u2019s symbolism for you, because what we\u2019re seeing, in that moment, is a man who\u2013unlike 99% of us\u2013has finally realized who he is, what role he is playing in his own life. Unsurprisingly it\u2019s a moment of pitch-black camp. All of death is a choice of genre\u2026.<\/p>\n The Craft<\/strong><\/em>: This is a really vindictive movie. (If you\u2019re wondering how I managed to make it this far without ever seeing The Craft<\/em>, I think by the time it came out I was too self-serious to just plunge myself into the Heathers<\/em> of it all. Wish I\u2019d seen it way back then, though.) I mostly loved the first half of it, the \u201990s Goth-chick girl-gang stuff. Loved<\/em> Fairuza Balk\u2019s howling response when a boy tries to apologize for his horrible behavior: \u201cYou\u2019re sorry? You\u2019re sorry?!<\/em> He\u2019s sorry! He\u2019s sorry!\u201d, just shrieking and shaking herself back and forth like a possessed jack-in-the-box. It\u2019s the response I think most people who have really been wronged would love to make.<\/p>\n But then as the movie progresses, two things happen. First, the girl gang turns on its own, which I know was heavily foreshadowed but come on, this is such a cliche, women be backstabbin\u2019 etc. And also, there is just no forgiveness for anyone ever, and all the vengeance is presented with such delectation. It\u2019s for the pleasure of the audience. That\u2019s why we see the main villain twisting and laughing and begging on a bed in a mental hospital for like five minutes\u2013it\u2019s not enough to know that someone is punished. We have to really get a good taste.<\/p>\n The \u201cYou\u2019re sorry?!\u201d scene works because you feel so deeply for the girl who won\u2019t forgive, who sees the greasy cruelty hidden in so many pleas for mercy, but you also know she doesn\u2019t have control of the narrative. The movie\u2019s whole finale is even more merciless, and I think we\u2019re meant to feel satisfied instead of repelled. (This even though the person who\u2019s most thoroughly punished was really obviously acting out of past hurts.) The least-Christian feature of the movie isn\u2019t the witchery but the casual rejection of forgiveness.<\/p>\n The race stuff would be poignant I guess, if the writers had bothered to give the black girl a personality. Or any background traits besides her skin color.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I\u2019ve been watching. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Actually pretty fun, once you get past the narcissism and abuse of women. EDIT: I should say that the latter two elements aren\u2019t things I wish they\u2019d left out of the movie. They add texture to what could have been a plasticky, \u201cdrugs R fun!\u201d, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7],"tags":[290,38,31,119,18,299],"class_list":["post-9125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-all-of-life-is-a-choice-of-genre","tag-forgiveness","tag-god-bless-the-1990s-because-no-one-else-will","tag-horror","tag-race","tag-use-each-man-after-his-desert-and-who-shall-scape-whipping"],"yoast_head":"\n