Paul Simon - Surprise: YAY! A new Paul Simon album! Boo. It kind of stinks. He's an old dude trying to sound "relevant." That's never going to end well. Plus, Paul Simon and electronica are != unsucky. However, there is one song called "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" Amen Paul. Two months and I am outta here.
The Who - The Endless Wire: Yay! A new Who album! They're old dudes NOT trying to be really relevant. It ends pretty well. I mean, this is no Who's Next, but come on, what is? Plus, there's a line in "The Mike Post Theme" that goes like this, it goes: "There comes a time in every little punks life when he has to write a song for his common law wife." Brilliant songwriting. Plus it comes with a bonus DVD that I'll never watch. Plus it has a tri-fold case which is cool. Plus it weighs less than a regular CD because it's printed on paper. Plus, when you play it backwards it synchronizes exactly with The Wizard of Oz played backwards starting from the point where Dorothy meets the Wizard. Neither one makes any sense whatsoever!
Little Miss Sunshine: I laughed. I cried. I hurled.
Oh wait, no, that was Wayne's World. This one there was no hurling. It was pretty good with funny parts and sad parts and maybe superfluous parts (the part with the cop) a some neo-neo-realistic parts. But that's just my opinion. Here is the opinion of this other dude (it's always a dude) on Amazon dot com ("It's dot net!") presented in its beautiful entirety. Best. Amazondotcomreview. Evearh. With. Added. Links.
The cognoscenti of today's cultural mafia would have us believe - once again, at the risk of our otherwise being branded as rank philistines - that this is a brilliant movie, one that cuts right through the muck and unmasks reality without restraint (we've now got to "keep it real" at all costs, and of course restraint is most unfashionable). Yet Little Miss Sunshine is actually no more than another tired exercise in postmodernist banality, and it couldn't be less authentic. Inauthenticity in the name of authenticity is the real order of day (e.g., the tattoo phenomenon; Oprahism). Really, hasn't this juvenile drivel become boring yet? Apparently not to most. We now live in a state of mass permanent adolescence where entertainment capacity is the supreme measure of value. Friends, the Brave New World is indeed upon us. Little Miss Sunshine is thus certain to win Oscar gold, or at least garner some nominations. Yes, it's come to this, it's that dreadful.
I suspect that many profess to like this movie for the sole reason that they feel obligated to like it. One must give our cognoscenti and their dictatorship of relativism credit: they've convinced the many that there is really no better and worse, but only difference. There is no truth, only opinion. Thus all becomes equally worthy of celebration, including dysfunction. Here we see some of this regime's diabolical mendacity, for sickness requires treatment, not applause.
Having been instructed that this is a wonderful movie, I rented the DVD and dutifully performed the familiar ritual of this Brave New World: I pressed Play. Less than two minutes passed before I divined exactly what this movie would be, what pseudo-philosophy drives it. This is how transparent today's deconstructionist dross has become for those with eyes to see.
As a grad student, I lived in a house where the owner rented out every room. Over several years, three film students lived there. Through them, I was exposed to many more film students of both the undergrad and grad student variety. Almost without exception, all of them were entirely vacuous (this extraordinary correlation between film students and vacuity must remain a subject for another time). Is it even necessary at this point to mention that virtually all of them subscribed to today's reigning orthodoxy - that is, almost all of them were faithful subjects of today's dictatorship of relativism and had absorbed (consciously or unconsciously, usually unconsciously) its adolescent pseudo-philosophy of postmodernism/deconstructionism with its cheapened pre-Socratic flux worldview? They were also very chic, in today's shameless vulgarian sort of way of course. For example, virtually all of them had at least one tattoo (a herd of "individuals"!), and all felt that they were eminently authentic (ah yes, "authenticity" - got to "keep it real"). In short, they were all very fashionably ironic, yet blissfully unaware of the depths - rather, the shallows - of their irony.
Why do I mention these film students? Because Little Miss Sunshine reeks not only of today's chic pseudo-philosophical adolescent barbarity, but also of amateurism (some cinematic antidotes: the films of Bresson, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Tarkovsky - here there are truly authentic depths).
The characters are completely typical of this slick amateurism's taste for decay:
-Son: a 15-year-old waifish (thus fashionably effeminate) caricature of a Nietzschean who's taken a vow of silence until he enters flight school as a means (obviously, though unstated in the movie) of exercising his frustrated will to power. (This caricature, incidentally, is yet another slap to Nietzsche's face born of a typically superficial (mis)understanding of his philosophy - Nietzsche would despise him and his creators).
-Uncle: A suicidal homosexual Proust scholar. Very likeable, of course, among the least repulsive of the characters.
-Grandfather: An unbridled vulgarian and heroin addict. The sum total of his life's wisdom? "F**k as many women as you can," he instructs his pseudo-Nietzschean grandson. I kid you not.
-Father: A failed motivational speaker. Of course, we're meant to note the tremendous - tremendous! - irony in the relationship between his Oprahist self-esteem program and his wreck of a life. (Incidentally, have you noticed how some form of Oprahism is now almost unavoidable in every field? In religion, syncretism and ecumenism; in education, self-esteem building, etc. etc. etc.)
-Mother: A somewhat rode-hard-and-put-up-wet shell of a woman who can barely contain her disdain for her husband. A rather defeated and ghostly figure, though with (ironically!) some semblance of her maternal instincts intact.
-Daughter: The one character whom the filmmakers would have us believe is unstained by the dysfunction in which she's immersed. She has a wonderful smile, likes ice cream, wears nerdy glasses, and is pudgy - thus in the abyssmal world of this film, on these bases alone she qualifies as Little Miss Sunshine (these flimsy bases subtly indicate this film's rank poverty, by the way). Yet - ironically! - even this seemingly angelic figure also reeks of the odor of corruption: She's attracted to the wildly twisted world of beauty pageants populated by prepubescent girls made-up and dressed as adolescent strumpets (the filmmakers obviously wished to evoke JonBenet Ramsey here - nothing is sacred). What's Little Miss Sunshine's dance routine music, inspired by her vulgarian grandfather? Superfreak by Rick James, the magnum opus that famously captures Mr. James at the height of his poetic artistry: "She's a very kinky girl / The kind you don't take home to mother." No need to describe the predictably salacious gyrations this artistry inspires in Little Miss Sunshine. But wait - most ironically! - her filthy routine ignites a scandal at the pageant, itself a model of sanctimonious filth!
Dysfunction, disorder all around. Yes, very fashionable. No, not at all cutting edge; to be on the cutting edge today actually requires a complete rejection of all of this nonsense.
Just what is all this? Is it simply meant to entertain us? I have no doubt that to get themselves off the hook, the filmmakers would say so. After all, in the Brave New World, this alone is a sufficient ground to serve up any kind of dreck at all. But is it really possible that a movie suffused with so much dysfunction, so much existential disorder and confusion, all presented as comedic, isn't meant to communicate something more than mere entertainment? Do you know anyone with such a grim view of life who is satisfied merely to entertain when presenting this view? Could it be that presenting such dark dysfunction in a comedic fashion is itself a philosophical statement? (We're not dealing here with the lighthearted - yet infinitely more profound - comedy of the Marx Brothers variety).
This is nihilism; more precisely, today's cavalier, chic nihilism where absurdity, meaninglessness, decay, disorder, and dysfunction of every variety are - ironically! - treated as norms and indeed prescribed as such. Unorthodoxy is the new orthodoxy (Sooooo ironic! Yay!).
This is a coarsened, vulgarized, film student version of pre-Socratic flux philosophy (unconsciously, of course). All is chaos, movement, and instability - yet not in a cosmic sense as for the pre-Socratics, but inwardly. And all of this is presented - here we return to today's debonair nihilism - cheerfully! The not so subtle message: There really is no order attainable in our lives. The most we can hope for is manageable dysfunction. We must accept it and indeed come to see dysfunction as our normal condition (the irony!). There is no real transcendence possible in this life, not at all.
The filmmakers would no doubt retort: "No no no! You've got it all wrong. It's an uplifting story, a story of hope...." No. Each character's life is a disaser, a model of disorder, and remains so through the end of the story. It seems otherwise, but to go into how this is so I'd have to continue much longer.... Suffice it to say that, in spite of appearances, there is no redemption possible in this bleak world. Defeatism is at the very core of this movie, and this defeatism is itself at the very core of nihilism, which is itself at the core of today's postmodernism/deconstructionism, which is itself at the root of today's consumerist dictatorship of relativism....
I'd give this movie zero stars if I could, but I suppose one star is okay since it does contain two healthy streams of dialogue (though the healthy counsel contained here is given by - ironically, of course! - models of decline).
In the end, the makers of Little Miss Sunshine (such an ironic title!) give us cause to once again quote Shakespeare's epitaph for this age:
"O shame, where is thy blush?"
Pirates of the Carrriibbeeaann Part 2: The Curse of the Black Pearl Part 2: The Curse of the Deadman's Chest Part 1: In Which Piglet Sees a Heffalump: What a disappointment. Basically the only good thing in this whole movie was when Winnie-the-Pooh got eaten by the Kraken (that's 'Kray-ken,' not Crack-hen.' You can ask my son. He will correct you). Well, that and the part where the natives were portrayed as cannibalistic savages.
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