Everyone has the blues
In this light, as my wife is delved into some new series of supernatural girl detective novels and I am nursing a mild fever and stomach flu, we could take a look at a few movies that the Movie Network has played recently. First, there was "The Weather Man" starring Nicolas Cage as a successful weatherman whose personal life and family are falling in shambles. The average people that he constantly meets wherever he goes get angry when he doesn't stop to give them enough friendly attention, his ex-wife has found a new love interest, his fat tweenage daughter doesn't seem to get enthusiastic about anything except smoking, the teenage son is being slowly reeled in by a pedophile, and to top this off, his father, an old successful writer of upper class WASP heritage and a perfect gentleman to boot, is dying of cancer.
I actually liked this movie a lot, although it was quite depressing with all the blue and white scenes of cold rain and snow, so it really could have used a few more laughs, and of course boobies. Of course, in the scene where Cage's character angrily faces the pedophile and tells him that his son was only fifteen, I couldn't help but chuckle at the Canadian gay rights group Egale and their current demands of lowering the legal age of consent to 14 years and that the adult gay men should be legally allowed have anal sex with 14-year-old boys. But that's just me. Even so, I really can't say anything bad about this film, although I understand why it made so little money at the box office. I enjoyed it, and would recommend it for other viewers with my tastes.
"Elizabethtown" is another quiet and low-key movie set in the Flyover Country. I guess that prettyboy Orlando Bloom told his agent to get him a more serious role, who then landed him this part that was most likely originally meant for Zach Braff. A young hotshot running shoe designer whose latest creation is about to fail spectacularly travels back to small town America to attend his father's funeral, and over there he learns many important lessons about life in general, plus he finds true love in the form of the perky airline stewardess whom he first befriends, when he is quite conveniently the only passenger on his redeye flight, and then keeps in contact with. So I guess that there really is a chance for all those single men to successfully hit on stewardesses, waiters and members of other similar professions. Of course, just like those proverbial blind men whose tactile experiences of an elephant are vastly different depending on where they stand, men in general experience women and their behaviour very differently depending on where they stand on the attractiveness scale, as was comically explored in this SNL skit about sexual harassment. The rules really are different for attractive people, as somebody once noted.
Normal people and their values and customs are treated far less respectfully in "Rent", the movie adaptation of the hit musical that once again showcases us the innate glory and nobility of the urban lumpenproletariat, even if we boring normos can't really appreciate and admire it behind all that graffiti, crime, urine, misery, disease and various assorted social pathologies. Now, I do enjoy musicals more than a straight man probably should, but I normally like my musicals in a bit more traditional Broadway spirit. Before watching this movie, I had already read Steve Sailer's review, but I didn't expect that the paragraph
The two heterosexual white guys have all these cool minority friends! Indeed, "Rent" functions as a sensitive liberal male's wish-fulfillment fantasy about a new and improved form of diversity. Hanging with diverse pals demonstrates your moral superiority over other Caucasians, but, frustratingly for young white social climbers, actual live minorities are seldom content to play their assigned roles as silent props in your fashionable lifestyle. In particular, real black friends might insist on playing their hideous rap music and real gay friends their sissy disco music. In "Rent," however, the diverse trendsetters all like 1970s white boy rock, thus validating Mark's and Roger's hipness quotients.
would then turn out to be even more
true as I had imagined it to be. All these cool friends who just accept
this edgy nerd just for the way he is, even though many of them later
turned out to have a solid middle class background and upbringing. The
genuine homeless mumbling and freezing on the street, heh, forget it,
other than perhaps trying to film them into your little movie about the
gritty reality of the streets. And all those hot chicks just throw
themselves at our whitebread heroes, their minority brothers not being
around to even bat an eye. (Could somebody remind me, is there a
canonical male equivalent of what is called "Mary Sue" in the sci-fi
circles?) Too bad our hero didn't chill with the losers who weren't as
telegenic as his circle of bohemian friends: I sure would have loved to
hear him explain to them why he chose to leave his middle-class life
for this.
As I watched this movie, I couldn't really understand
why I was supposed to care about any of these lowlife characters,
especially considering the ungrateful asshole
way (sorry, but no other word really applies here) that they treated
their black friend who had "sold out" and yet allowed them to live
rent-free in a giant place in Manhattan whose renovation would have
probably brought him a pretty penny. When the noble drag queen with a
golden heart and a sassy spirit appropriately named "Angel" (I am not
entirely sure why the other characters referred to him as "she", as he
was not a transsexual) emptied a big garbage can on the street so that
he could use it to smash the padlock, my wife asked me if they are just
going to leave all that garbage lying there. In my opinion, that one
small observation pretty much sums up everything about these characters
and the ugly world that they choose to inhabit. Once you reject the
middle class values such as future time orientation, don't act so
surprised when you don't exactly get to enjoy the material lifestyle of
the middle class.
There were so many particular stupid moments
in this movie that I have already blissfully forgotten most of them.
Off the top of my head, I found it rather humorous how that black guy
erased the menu on the restaurant blackboard and wrote "Fight AIDS!" on
it, considering that these characters didn't really seem that concerned
about how the HIV spreads and what kind of behaviour spreads it most
efficiently. (Of course, we should all know by now what "fighting AIDS"
is really euphemism for: this notion has nothing to do with, you know, actually trying to decrease the number of future transmissions.)
In
the neighbourhood as a whole, I couldn't help but notice the total
absense of children and old people, considering that the way that all
these people live, they would naturally replenish their ranks very
effectively. The poorer the part of town, the more children there
usually are. Of course, this strange distortion of reality is a
necessary part of the "zipperless fuck" (sorry about that again, but
this is by now an established idiom) fantasy of the white boy narrator,
in which the edgy underclass lifestyle has no real consequences to
anything important, at least as long as you are white. A handsome white
boy can even be HIV-positive and be no worse for the wear, but the
minority characters who have the bad luck of becoming HIV-positive have
a somewhat shorter half-life. (However, I suddenly understand a lot
better this whole concept of "white privilege".) I understood that
there was going to be some kind of protest against urban renovation,
but I didn't really understand what the female performance artist's
(who was clearly borderline or had some other exciting personality disorder) gyrations on the stage had to do with it.
But
hey, it's not like The Phantom or Cats or Wicked or other successful
Broadway musicals are particularly known for their quest for realism,
since they are all about the music, man. However, just like Steve wrote
in his review, the music of "Rent" was mediocre at best. Rock opera can
work, as "Tommy" demonstrated, but during the songs that were heavily
accompanied by electric guitar, I could barely make out one word here
and another there. But it's not like this even matters, since this
music was just a bunch of nondescript riffs. Even for the life of me, I
couldn't hum a single bar from any song of this movie, other than that
well-known one that I had heard before.
The worst offender when
it comes to mumbling incomprehensibly was probably that song they sang
in the restaurant that they could now all afford to go because the drag
queen had suddenly got a wad of money somewhere (gee, I wonder where),
instead of, like, spending it on more mundane things such as rent or
heat. This song, joyfully performed to mock a group of stodgy
businessmen sitting at another table, was apparently about the way that
these people boldly reject the middle class values and lifestyle, but
don't seem to have the guts to also reject, say, the free AZT that
their tax dollars provide them. That other song about how there is no
past or future, and there is no day but today, could pretty much be the
anthem of the underclass.
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