Skip to main content

Discussing "The Social Network": film about the maker of facebook

"Immoral", Patrick? What word is left for people who steal and rape if you're gonna call a group "immoral" for disagreeing with you on film quality. Jesus. (Daniella Isaacs, response to post, Mike Ryan, “Armond White Responds to Lisa Schwarzbaum’s NYFCC Complaints by Calling Her Racist,” Movieline, 20 January 2011)


I think it's high quality, Daniella, but I do think it immoral -- meaning that I think it's a film aiming for high acclaim that couldn't really care less for those without the talent to reach a kind of co-equality with entrenched Mayflower-descendent types: the bulk of most joe and jane facebook users out there. I think it "argues" that we really ought to be keying in on these people, be fascinated by them, because, despite their debauch, they CAN work significant wonders, while the rest of you out there enjoy the genuine magic but only to come up with your own flat notes of nothing. When people are at real risk of losing under-girding for their already highly suspect and susceptible respectable social standing, I don't much like films which "argue" that if it further beyond-all-doubt looks like we've moved from something that could at least pretend to be a Jeffersonian democracy -- with each "man" the equal to any other — to simply an Asian khanate, it actually pleases, because it's more in-sync with core truth of the distribution of focused talent or descendant-born corporeality, with the proper regard owed those who either are or who actually do matter.

I know there's the moral girl, the one who couldn't do Harvard, but despite being named and brought up at beginning and end, she's still undistinguished. (Probably, she's MOSTLY a haunt, only owing to her insubstantiality.) We find that you can't properly moralize 'till you've proven you're matter. Otherwise, she's just the sharpest swish a slight, untenable cold breeze could manage: She could completely fade away, and it is only YOUR obsession, grand facebook-maker, which matters.

No?

Link: Armond White Responds to Lisa Schwarzbaum’s NYFCC Complaints by Calling Her Racist (Movieline)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...
3 comments
Read more

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...
2 comments
Read more