Mighty Men

I have written about the Douglas'es before on LiveJournal, and when I finish moving my content and making revisions, this post may merge with those, since I'd like to probe deeper, but it seems that the only reason It Runs in the Family (2003) had to be made was to give the father and son a generational vehicle, and that is not good enough. To use David Denby's term for Demi Moore, Michael too often over defines himself for my taste, but papa bear Kirk, who is sad to see in this movie, always made his dramatic definitions work before the mortality crumple; I certainly find this relevant. I will note two things: physical frailty is handled with typical Jewish humor, a known conceit, and this is the only film in which Kirk's ethnicity seems genuine, and not under the careful and rigid control of the studio to make the actor's identity clean and tidy for Protestant America.

In conjunction with my last post, I think humanity has screwed itself, over-succeeded to the point that we're set to wipe ourselves out, give or take 2000 years, and when the crisis hits, diversity will kiss its sweet ass like the pipe dream it is. All these disaster movies, end of the world movies, or the apocalypse as played out on the Supernatural, I cannot say the drama of gloom and doom has no influence on my cynicism, but my dystopian sentiments come from environmental observation of the human animal. We are basically more stupid than we'd like to believe, and cannot rocket toward 11 billion without drastic consequences.