Wechsler's Altered Minds, like Poyart’s Solace,
is an exhausted collapse of three dimensional space onto video projection of
the same, and they in fact feel like exactly the same film in their genres. It
isn’t simply that they are bad films with loosely suggested alternative
pathways. You could throw in an interesting revision like Closer To God, a feminine wet dream like Into The Forest, which is a girl power fantasy couched in patented
nonsense, and still come away feeling like you’ve seen the same film five
times. A Slate contributor with better access than I was onto this years ago.
Much like the encroaching mono culture surrounding our vegetable and food
crops, your standard movie is synchronized according to the same beats in the
script, making it all into mediocre content which doesn’t even shoot for a
distinctive sensibility, let alone feel memorable. We still discuss Ordinary People because it took the types evolved within its ensemble and
made them frightening, and in some ways unforgettable, something on which the
title capitalizes, branded through our skin by Mary Tyler Moore. Hirsch suffers
by comparison in this throwaway excuse for suspense, but it is more than that.
To reverse the pyramid, since I don’t give a flying fuck about not spoiling it,
Hirsch’s character once played Manchurian Candidate games for the American
government, so it therefore logically follows that a Vietnam veteran who
snapped stalks and tortures the children of his therapist, and a sad dying man
reveals all so that recovered memories don’t create another Amityville Horror sequel.
Wechsler has no excuse for his story, not even the consequences of napalm. All
the guild does in this film is intimate that Authority’s folly reverberates for
cheap thrills through the generations. It is a shame, because within his
pseudo-intellectualism, Hirsch seems to wish to convey that liberalism without
boundaries is lost in a fog. He has done this before in short dramatic roles:
an obstetrician diagnosing Tay-Sachs disease, or a newspaper publisher paying
lip service to diversity without looking too closely at the familial ugliness
beneath. In various ways, Hirsch is a more subtle Woody Allen, taking a
piercing, critical look, at the much vaunted Jewish secular liberalism. As
experienced through VNA’s Nancy Lotz, Jewish secular liberalism annihilates all
in its path, and does so regardless of the fact that the dowager gave as good
as she got. These women are impossible, and I mean fucking impossible, willing
to carve my flesh into cannibalistic shares for the doorsteps of the Program,
only to discover, when the dust of the Sinai clears, that we want the same
goals. I had a job offer in October before these technical catastrophes, and
now a West African disposes of my fecal puss daily, like a large wildebeest female
stricken by parasitic brain spores the dowager has to shoulder without an
exotic animal license. I think anyone in reasonable health would have imploded
by now, hit the destruct button, though we’re never told why Farrell gets to
play survival of the fittest against a rather weary Hopkins. Poyart makes an
equally cheap point about euthanasia, hoping his audience will remain perplexed.
I am, as I’ve written repeatedly, sympathetic to mercy killing; for those who’ve
had enough I believe in its legality. Poyart seems to think those gifted with
precognition will settle the matter. The FBI will be just fine with that.
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