Absorbed Maximale

"I knew what it meant. He knew what it meant."-- a eulogy

Michael Almereyla does more than draw the viewer’s attention to what acting approximates in the 2017 Majorie Prime. One of his major themes is the price of the burdens we carry, encased in a rather skeptical presentation of what we leave behind in the residuals of virtual reality. Senility and suicide present themselves here beyond being an issue of sociological concern. Both as a condition, (dementia) and a destructive act overriding survival (corresponding suicides) Almereyla presents a family stifled and suffocating on itself. Geena Davis, never entirely impressive as the Vitamin D American girl caught in a vortex through association, in her A list days, (The Fly, Thelma and Louise), has mastered the projection of a crabby 60 year old who knows the runaway train is coming, and sends out her warning signals with a certain degree of fatalism. As it is present in the pilot of The Exorcist in her solicitation of the priest, it is present in Majorie Prime in subtler fashion, only in this world Geena’s character is a troubled mother with an equally problematic mother daughter relationship. Tim Robbins, as he does in Code 46, carries the onus of being surly and frustrated vanilla, filling in all these melancholy lacunae until it’s his turn to linger. Hamm has to project being a lifelike composite of a husband we never knew, and almost as Spielberg does in his mawkish afterword in A.I., Michael leaves us with an open ended question about empathetic software mimicking the ghost of the human spirit. We aren’t informed as to whether or not the primes are voluntary, but each character goes through the motions, rebellious resignation in tow. These moral obligations around virtual memory already resonate here and now: Google has rules about what happens if payments for the domain lag, everyone has an opinion about the erasure of Gawker as a distinctive, now archival, media voice, questions swirling about how Peter Thiel defines his libertarian beliefs against a worrisome, and mighty, plutocratic streak. Neither longevity nor voluntarily taking one’s own life appear palatable in Almereyla’s, and by extension, Robert Redford’s vision. To qualify a previous post, I realize the aging potentate of Barefoot in the Park is probably not micro-managing Sundance Studios, but I read cues in this project easily attributable to what we know about Redford’s public person. The column he wrote after Newman’s death stayed with me, in a particularly masculine no nonsense manner.

If we look at where we are headed, through Almereyla's lens and other dystopian minded thinkers, libertarian outcry, if not defeated outright, is always compromised. Kokesh, the boy soldier idealist, envisions a free market utopia, but still plays cowboys and indians with an apparently zealous authority. Harassing stoners, intimidating militant quadriplegics comes easy; mass murder not so much. Nick Gillespie doesn't know where the total lack of boundary and freedom collide; (little did I realize Nick and I have far too much in common) Austin Petersen is aiming for a synthesis so the establishment can satiate his political ambition. How do we all fit under the same tent? More importantly, personal liberty is elusive, as an empirical matter. I need not remind my viewers that I gave notice hours before my power chair's demise, and if it is in any way binding, I'm still here, constricted. For every Fee contributor celebrating market dynamism, there are 15 to 20 Americans like me and my parental generation shackled to a rather troubled medical entitlement system. I heard Adam chant, "the state will fall," like a Baptist hymn. Eventually, the way things are going, it must, as our ability to enact in a concerted effort to change our paradigms, this is limited. On the small scale, however, government processes are already overwhelmed, not to remind you of Flint Michigan, or San Diego's homeless. I have lived five minutes to midnight for a very long time. There is only so much our inner resources can spare.

Thick Middle

"You saw me standing alone."-- Blue Moon

Let us go back, on a shoestring budget comparable to what the unfortunate Victor Garber deals with on Frequency, sure enough he titillated us more as Garner's father on Alias, even if that series was too heavily dosed by Dan Brown's badly deployed medieval fantasy, to remember that The Seventh Sign is a tasteless Demi Moore vehicle, exploiting an actor with Downs Syndrome-- even I shall concede Mongoloid is a harsh designation, exactly why I deign to recall it to you-- as an intoning seer of doom. But did the mentally retarded actor himself have the cognition to realize he was being stereotyped as a harbinger of the Apocalypse? 
This is how the casting scouts for The Exorcist wanted to use me and others when they found us at Rusk Institute. I would have been that much less destitute in the contemporary century had I stood up to the case management staff and at least met with the production crew on its fishing expedition, before the movie made such an indelible impact that it fatally palled the decade. The movie was one of the first I transfixed myself for on whatever computer, through a streaming provider, Prime, I believe, years ago, and would have no difficulty streaming it again. I believe my generation was cursed by the film, by the novel which preceded the film, by David Foster Wallace superimposing the film in his best Oblivion short story before David Foster Wallace hung himself leaving his sorry ass to rock the noose. Didn't he bother to consider what his wife would experience upon discovering his body? We'll let this sincere testament of dread answer for why I have kept my distance from the Fox revival, not a prequel, nor a sequel, but an offshoot. Though I am unforgiving of actors in general, Geena Davis (phew) is not a lead who ever really held my interest, even giving birth to larva in her Jeff Goldblum nightmare. But I will say I admire that this particular subset of horror, as a genre, tries valiantly to take evil seriously, as Wallace does, and I do too, which is why Wallace ended badly, and you can have no doubt I'm still shrieking, mindful of the line in the sand. I'm not the Virginia Tech Asian, but my broken life form nudges closer to that shooter's break, as Maigret would have put it, on a daily basis. I could use Callum's absorption technique for Horse. The anus is faster than the stomach. Real torture, such as we find in Lear, or the MGM version of Samson, makes most viewers flinch, so horror is usually married to camp, to ensure the audience has its shields. The lupine variety which subverts our expectations best, in a playful, but ruthlessly curt fashion, is An American Werewolf in London. I have not seen it in a long time, but its beat, its tracks, its satire, and its sad sharp shooting conclusion, makes us forgive Hollywood every so often. Naughton doesn't seem to have aged well.