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Showing posts from May, 2018

Solo: a review

Interesting. There's an argument from Ann Douglas in her "Terrible Honesty," that something akin to crude male swagger gave life to the 1920s, freeing a generation from the dreaded smothering Victorian Titanness. In this movie, arguably, male swagger comes across in a feminine form, as being free from "the burden" of greater knowledge. With who is really in the know at the end, one feels that the capacity to hold oneself back in informed, partial restrain, while admiring the simple boys who are all innocent and do not know, belongs to the enwisened woman, who is more mature in years than her mate, and more really for the helm. There's something of "White men can't jump" about this film; the foregrounding of greater female awareness and maturity, and life as an outlaw, as meaning taking pleasure in how preening as a rebel, makes one boyish, harmless, and intensely likeable. This is not a movie about establishing your own space, but in takin...

Deadpool 2: a review

The movie is about protecting youth, yet "youthfulness," being vulnerable and showing unabashed enthusiasm -- making fully evident your needfulness -- is set up for gross punishment in this film, by our hero. The group of individuals that are degraded by having to go through an audition where two enthroned nerds (one of whom was already telling a hopeful young man that heroism comes in being servile to tasks which, in actually delivering on doing them, by common parlance means accepting you exist for nothing further than, as only ever to be degraded) gauge your applicability for what proves a show-group -- the longest trial involves a young woman, being perhaps encouraged to surrender her pride and resort to begging, for ostensibly possessing no talent at all (she succeeds owing to "luck," which in showbusiness is usually synonymous for a good-looking but otherwise undistinguished talent succeeding through the homophone of "luck," "f*ck"in...

Jordan Peterson

I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous (Bernard Schiff) No real introspection on his (Schiff's) part on why he was once so enthralled by Peterson. What he offers, shows him as being admirably and properly open to new ideas and energy, not as having some part of himself linked to a "call for the wild" he may not be so regretful to have helped cultivate, legitimize and unleash to the world, as he makes it seem here. It's not an apology, but a salute to himself, and a diminishment of the "real" opponents to verile creativity within the university, who would have seen nothing about Peterson, from the start, that would drive them to inculcate him at U of T and count him a friend. There remain a couple years here where you can mock professionals who don't end up caging their thinking within acceptable protocals... those who become youtube stars, pop psychologists... who have problems with peer reviews. I think he's ...

Film Reviews, Updated

Avengers: Infinity War You're Not Really Here Ready Player One Unsane Isle of Dogs Black Panther 15:17 to Paris Downsizing Star Wars: the Last Jedi Thor: Ragnorok The Snowman Mother It Logan Lucky / Patterson / Hell or High Water (discussion) Beguiled  (discussion) Detroit Dunkirk  (further discussion) Dunkirk  (discussion) War for the Planet of the Apes Spider Man: Homecoming The Mummy Wonder Woman Baywatch Alien Covenant King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Guardians of the Galaxy 2 The Circle Zookeeper's Wife Life Beauty and the Beast  (second of two essays) Beauty and the Beast  (one of two essays) Kong Island Logan Get Out Nocturnal Animals Fantastic beasts and Where to Find Them Arrival Loving The Witch Hacksaw Ridge Dr. Strange Moonlight Inferno Keeping Up with the Joneses The Accountant Birth of a Nati...

Review of Avengers: Infinity War

"Avengers: Infinity War" brings to bear a connivance – our willingly accepting a purge; our warranting that we've earned it – we ourselves may bring to the fore, in real life, as an alternative to a worse fate we sense could be upcoming on our horizon.   The plot seems  similar to  "X-Men: Apocalypse" in that a grand tyrant appears in view with plans to cull huge portions of humanity, but not all: one batch of living souls will live, the other, perish. In that film, we note, the tyrant, too, believes his cause justified, but the film itself never gives him beyond partial support – his wiping out of humanity rests on his belief that humanity is bad, and the film shows him, with its showcasing of humanity's nuclear arsenal, as having a bit of a case there, but also because they are "false gods," i.e., weak, which is evidently Hitleresque.   In "Infinity War," the tyrant,  Thanos , is never undermined as not possessing a ...