Heron Shrike

Our system is designed to achieve justice, not vengeance. Robby Soave of Reason

 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.

Aurevoir, Mon ami

Of course, in the indigence tableau of choices, free broadcast is offering a film to honor Mary Tyler Moore, Just Between Friends. Ted Danson walking in the doorway as if caught with his pants down; Ebert saying it had a made for television feel, which it did. Despite progressive analysis of Moore as sexually assertive against Dick Van Dyke, I never saw her character, as Mary Richards, basically all she knew how to play, as anything but brave and glaring veneers, which made her angry and repressed matron all the more terrifying in Ordinary People. (I agree with certain online critics that Ordinary People ignites genuine terror, and it is due entirely to Moore miraculously winding up her fury into something we all desire to flee. Oh it is dated, with all the known elements, Hirsch the patriarch who can absorb anything, but if anything indicts Episcopalian America, Ordinary People deserves a shrine.) But as to this Reagan era teleplay, the premise was interesting, and might have been a vehicle for vicious recrimination which doesn't, in fact, so easily resolve. It was too civil, and lacked courage to truly say something about marriage, family.

Facebook at least did me one service, and that is to realize I cannot roll backward and go home. Looking at my mother's sister in her anniversary photo with my uncle. I cannot go back, so, if I step off Presby, I am essentially on my own. I am so scarred that the mold no longer fits, sitting down to my sister in law's eggplant after a vigorous affair with a computer consultant who lived westward past Longwood Gardens: I'm not there anymore, and realized, that if so many days back, I grabbed O'Brien's follow like a floating life raft, it was a rather brittle salvage effort: I am not strong enough, not anymore, either for my complacent unhappiness as a life long public housing tenant with one sole agent, or to survive the violent disruption I'm shortly to bring upon myself. I have no answer, truly. I can battle waiver services again, but my temperament is such, that if I terrified Eddie the day after her sexual conduct, minority attendant conflict resolution 2.0 may get me a jacket, or killed. These rationalizations from all the duress I've eaten, maybe the next one won't, what? Maybe the next one won't swindle me? Try to extort me?

In that sense, my failure to see Moore, despite her comedic timing, as anything more than a titular representation of a fait accompli, might be forgiven. Always there, her gregarious teeth, her occasional references to diabetes.