Monday, January 2, 2017

Incipient Titan Shellac

"Talo tayo dito."-- Rodrigo Duterte

How men like Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson are behind the scenes, with the tap off, is difficult to ascertain. There are moments, glimpses, and despite his ineffectual political jabs, Clint Eastwood is an admirable force. Nicholson, comparatively, is a lecherous pig, but the two of them are some of the very last supernovas of "the industry ". Their leonine coda is comprehensible and informed on my world, and I declare the right to mourn. I may grasp Dita's angle, but millennial celebrity, crowd funded as it appears to be, leaves me chasing after its linguistic relevance; Ben Landis is another example. I respect his metrics-- and that comes with qualifier, namely, that a million plus followers may not be as relevant as media shorthand makes it out to be, but as I tweeted to Ben, he is a more glamorous version of my brother. To me he is just people. Observant, yes, good debater, but still people. I cannot puff chest feathers over the fact that he was gracious to me, though I appreciate it. Put Clint in his place and spastic would turn to stone. She would go "ga" and the stardom of an actor near the twilight of his life would instantly achieve what a corrupt Protestant housing agent has thus far failed to do: create a passive savant. In As Good As it Gets, that would be the dog, "Boo".
I wanted to see this movie, and agree with Ebert's cadaver on nearly every point of his review. Does this mean a short post? Yes, no, perhaps. I'd augment the bolo critic who became a freak only to this extent: Brooks and Andrus were hoping situational irony would override the lack of credulous sexual tension between Jack and Helen Hunt. Hunt works with Spacey, but her shared wounds with Nicholson did indeed deserve more subtly, and perhaps darker torsion. And for a guy trying out homosexual regression, Greg Kinnear might have been vying for an executive position at Cosmopolitan. Skeet Ulrich was a much more energetic truism, his strip scene wonderful in its sheer predatory aspects, but as I once said in a poetry workshop, this movie was a cop out. The pooch, however, almost made me reconsider dislike of terriers. Boo had marvelous comic timing. Language cannot create that kind of dramatic disbelief that Brooks asks of us to get what we want out of our most famous bastards, but literature has a parallel mechanism that films, in their turn, cannot quite achieve. In the same way the receptionist at the desk was felled by Nicholson's genre technique, Orhan humanized the Turkish dilemma for me, made me care, with Chekhovian pathos, against a turbulent genealogy unlike any inverted verbals I grew up with out of Luce's signature periodicals. I am struggling a great deal with multicultural conscience these days, and don't have any easy answers. Snow prepared me for Mevlut Mert, and the swift judicial ban issued on the case. Whether it's Erdogan or a military coup, however, if Turkey falls, then my advancing age may see the advent of a third world war. Writers always know ahead of time, but how often do we stop the inevitable? 

No comments:

Post a Comment