THE NEW SCUM
Let's Have A War...
I’ve been occupied the past few weeks. Not by anything important. Just the usual. Caught between life and death. Caught between a fist and a kiss. Between a job and a gun. A burning building and 27 story leap to the street. Between desire and disbelief. Disbelief with my grocery bill.
In other words writing.
I’d better assert this right away. This article is a mess of things that excite me. It’s civilization as a nightmare illusion, a three dimensional spreadsheet perpetuated by machines that hypnotize meat. Our cars, the cost of gas, laundered sheets, air conditioning and our lies to lovers are prayers and death rituals.
We’ve learned to curate virtual selves, but we’re losing track. Nothing tracks. Well the world breaks your heart it is because you expect too much of it. - especially the human element. Your lovers will betray you. Your government and the very soil beneath your feet, because you dreamed of MORE. So much more that you couldn’t see the beauty of the scum in front of you.
On with the show.
Canadian cinema is tanking at the Box Office. Well. Yeah. I’ve been hearing the for the past 58 years I’ve been on Earth.
“It’s all about the quality of the film and what the guests want and what our visitors want to see at the movie theatre. I don’t think it has to do with the fact that it’s a Canadian film,” he said.
Jacob spoke about the film industry Wednesday after it was announced he will receive the Legend of Cinema Award at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this spring, becoming only the second recipient of the honour after filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
He said another challenge homegrown films face is attracting high-profile talent, as many Canadian actors and filmmakers chase bigger paydays in the U.S.
“If you’re a Canadian star and you can make $500,000 a year or $5 million in Hollywood, what are you going to do?”
Jacob said that while Canadian films have lower visibility, their struggles aren’t just “a marketing problem.”
“The awareness is a little lower, but it’s also the quality of the content — it’s not bringing droves of people to the theatres.”
Don’t like reading? Watch this. Rather simplistic, but accurate.
A movie is not only the image on the screen, the sound from the speakers. It is the translation of all this by the brain. It is the social milieu. It is the year you see it, your age, the state of your marriage. It is what happened on the way to the theater, what you expect to happen after, it is who is next to you on each side. It is how they smell. It is who sits in front of you. Who is or isn’t kicking your seat from behind. It is your worry about the call from the doctor. It is that you got laid. Or didn’t. Or are about to. Or know you never will again. It is your envy: of the filmmaker, of the couple necking down front. It is the popcorn. The Goobers. That you have to go to the bathroom. That someone is eating a smelly tuna sandwich. Did they smuggle it in? It doesn’t seem fair, that the cheaters get the sandwiches and the rest of us get shit on. It is your suspension of disbelief. The scene that motivates an eye roll. It is your critique of the acting. It is you trying to remember where you’ve seen that actor before. It is your prediction of what’s going to happen next in the film. It is your pride when you are proven correct. It is your surprise when the filmmaker defies your expectation. It is life, which you only get to live once. You prepare for it, but it will surprise you anyway. The film is predetermined but revealed to you only through time, incrementally. This makes you think it is a living thing, a thing for which you can change the outcome. You yell at the actors on-screen. You clench your teeth as if it will help. And even though the movie is predetermined, the world is not. So the movie can change in this way, too.
Antkind, Charlie Kaufman
And this is the best movie I encountered this past year…
Sex, drugs, delinquency, Black power, alternative culture and, of course, rock and roll: these are just some of the themes, which have attracted the attention of the cinema’s bottom-feeders over the past eighty years. A few of the resulting films have become cult classics, but most were simply tacky - few would probably now want to sit through two hours of “High School Hellcats” (1958) or “Hot Rod Rumble” (1957). The posters produced to promote them, on the other hand, are wonderful period pieces that vividly evoke the social fears, temptations and taboos of bygone eras.
Up until the introduction of the Hayes Code in 1934 Hollywood had few inhibitions; the poster for “Girl Without A Room” (1933), for example, left audiences in little doubt as to how the young lady planned to find accommodation. Later in the decade, it became necessary to adopt the old tabloid trick of pretending that titillating content had a redeeming social message - thus the producers of “Marihuana” (1936) were obliged to present it as a warning about the dangers of drug addiction. In the 1950s, it was the Beats and juvenile delinquents who put a chill into middle-class hearts - and, of course, attracted middle-class kids to the drive-in screens.
Then, in the 60s and 70s, came ‘Blaxploitation’ movies like “Shaft”, Russ Meyer’s mammary-obsessed epics like “Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill”, and even an animated sexploitation story, “Fritz The Cat”. The posters for these films, from Alberto Vargas’ artwork for “Ladies They Talk About” (1933) to Alan Aldridge’s photomontage for Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls” (1966), are masterpieces of visual innuendo, offering, in most cases, far more that the movies actually delivered.
Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard is a searing critique of the political machinery that undergirds a society drowning in its own filth and apathy. This volume of the cyberpunk graphic novel series, illustrated with grimy brilliance by Darick Robertson, follows Spider Jerusalem—the acerbic, drug-fueled, gonzo journalist—as he plunges headfirst into the cesspool of electoral politics. What emerges is not only a deeply cynical but alarmingly prescient examination of democracy’s fragility in an era of media-driven manipulation.
Enough. Another war has been started in the Middle East by the U.S and Israel. The THIRD ONE in my short lifetime.
I always end with a tune. An old but timely one.
Cheers,
TC.