Natasha Richardson, in my estimation, never really seemed to fit in her films, except for The Handmaid's Tale, and in that laughably histrionic Margaret Atwood vehicle, none of the big names fit, because it was a turbo charged warning which was so grandiose that it metamorphoses its own mockery. Often the industry does this intentionally. Sometimes my own heaviness achieves this by accident. Alpha and Beta is a case in point. I showed it to one of the agency aides, in my nine year revolving door with the system, before I let Mary Johnson have it for her now defunct site, and I expected that Esmin the easy Jamaican soul would have been offended. "You're funny!" she said, laughing, on her scan of the final page. I wasn't trying to be. My world had shattered, and I was desperately trying to glue the egg back together, and in a rather convoluted sense, this entire account is a sort of vomit on my ruptured idealism. I screamed in Linda's voicemail, in my nervous breakdown, during that fresh turn of the century, (think I'm recovered?) "I believed in you!" And that is the truth. I thought she represented a triumph of integration.
Today, I am in fact much closer to Karl Shapiro's defense of the notorious Tropic of Cancer, which I am still reading. Miller is, for me, a stop and start nihilist, and though he is terrific with oral cadence, and a necessary voice, he isn't a great writer, hardly as canonical as his defenders would like. Henry James achieved more with his attenuation in the relic of the Victorian age than any of the leftists who mushroomed in the thirties. Miller is so raw he makes the throbbing radioactive vein in my chest seem cowardly, when I discuss which minority [substitute nigger bitches if you are in the she needs lithium like her mother category] exploited me in what fashion. They were not all uncouth brassy caste stricken Medicaid recipients, but a substantial minority of all those women in my revolving door have taken their toll. With my every transfer a feat of engineering physiological memory, I'm damned unless my remaining intellect can pick up my body after my next mistake, can guilt trip my way out of my corporate landlord before I lose myself, and I am doing that, at only fifty three, numb with apathy and avoidance, resilient only because of a corrosive-- well, I understand, in certain respects, the destructive attractions of the jihadists, though for me decapitation is lame. Everyone can breathe easy there.
So it perplexes me. Natasha Richardson cannot internalize, like Jodie Foster, who was a great actress because she internalized identity conflict. Ms Foster is not Ellen. DeGeneres radiates dyke like a wallowing hippo. Jodie Foster doesn't fit the categorical LBGT mold. Oh, I am not challenging her private intimacy so much as complimenting what will soon be lost, and that is the ambiguity of the outsider. It is what has made the child actor with whom so many of us came of age a powerhouse. Richardson, by contrast, is a two dimensional doll for thirteen year olds, hard to cast in the appropriate venue, but it is her role in Past Midnight which triggered my recent distress, conjoined with Benitiz's outreach. The soldier did not do anything wrong, exactly, and I never understood Hang Outs and now, duh, it is a chat scroll, but I am done whoring myself for nothing and should have ignored him. If I can find a divorcee like Cecil Morales who has the intellectual affinity for which I am starved, which is why I cannot forgive Josie Byzek, then yes, I'll take him, but I do not want anymore PC fantasy, as such. I was never shallow enough.
Natasha often paid a heavy price for similar psychological risks, despite the fact she'll never have a legacy beyond historical relevance, unlike Vanessa.
Showing posts with label past midnight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label past midnight. Show all posts
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Ultima Preda: Chances of Fortune
"I take the side of the animals though," Terrence Hill, Eastwood's dialectical absudist
There are reasons Natasha Richardson interests me as an industry standard-bearer, particularly when juxtaposed against Jodie Foster, the child tom boy who never played lesbian but still challenges gender in subtle fashion, even as a forceful straight heroine who will do what she has to for an imperiled daughter or son. Sequenced into this, Past Midnight is your standard plot point thriller, nothing particularly special about it or Richardson's performance, except that it has the visceral undercurrents that are pertinent to the faux feel good economy of the first Clinton presidency. As an aside, I have no reason to give a flying fuck if Hillary prevails, as the Obama administration managed to kill me; I simply didn't realize this when I supported Barack in the Pennsylvania primary in 2008. If I thought I was a gasping fish out of water in my very early forties, I was under a misapprehension, as I may be hanging on nearly a decade later, but just that, despite consumption of fish oil; Hillary, it is sort of a naturalized anathema. The husband was sexually intriguing, liked women too much, and it remains an embarrassment that his seminal fluid became an impeachment vote while Saudi Arabia's bin Laden was brewing his spectacular blow. There is enough blame to go around for 9/11, but morally Clintonian narcissism was a nearly fatal distraction, so I cannot quite forgive the 42nd president, and think the left is incredibly stupid to elevate his wife for her public injuries in relation to Bill's philandering, but that is the United States, in a nutshell: a pretty woman who wants to engage in social justice becomes a social worker, sets eyes on Rutger Hauer, who cannot possibly be guilty in his role as a slightly more attractive genotype of Anthony Hopkins-- just as Clancy Brown is a tinsel variation on Ron Perlman, who had the courage to humiliate himself as second in rank in The Quest for Fire. Natasha's Laura preens off compliments, picks up her torch, and gets drawn into a threat which would keep most women under psychiatric care for the rest of their lives. Pluralism rarely takes account of the toll in its insistence on the inherent intrinsic value.
We never get to see the aftermath. Films aren't very good at evolving, or in this case, devolving characters, this is why Victor Hugo could write a tome like Les Miserables and we have flawed great classics that do embody full lives of our projected alter egos, even if they are ponderous reads, but Past Midnight strikes chords in terms of how liberalism crushes the spirit of the noble crusade, and ties in with the ambulatory carelessness of Richardson's 2009 death. Yes, on the surface, this seemingly content and happy starlet with her authentic Hollywood romance was simply the victim of a mishap. Beneath the surface, she really wasn't thinking about her age and the risks of learning to ski at 45. Foster, as a more conflicted woman, would have been more instinctually wary. The greater the talent, the better the intuition. Spastic was never held at knife point by a rural slasher with womb triggers, but the dowager has been subjected to everything else short of attempted murder, and yet, even in victimhood, remains, surviving with rage addicted tenacity, while Natasha's vivacious privilege becomes the suddenly absent, perhaps more to her fortune than the pondering with which we cling to temporal circumstance. As a figurine, a paper cut out of the Clinton era, she manages to let the pieces of her part in this film fall into place.
There are reasons Natasha Richardson interests me as an industry standard-bearer, particularly when juxtaposed against Jodie Foster, the child tom boy who never played lesbian but still challenges gender in subtle fashion, even as a forceful straight heroine who will do what she has to for an imperiled daughter or son. Sequenced into this, Past Midnight is your standard plot point thriller, nothing particularly special about it or Richardson's performance, except that it has the visceral undercurrents that are pertinent to the faux feel good economy of the first Clinton presidency. As an aside, I have no reason to give a flying fuck if Hillary prevails, as the Obama administration managed to kill me; I simply didn't realize this when I supported Barack in the Pennsylvania primary in 2008. If I thought I was a gasping fish out of water in my very early forties, I was under a misapprehension, as I may be hanging on nearly a decade later, but just that, despite consumption of fish oil; Hillary, it is sort of a naturalized anathema. The husband was sexually intriguing, liked women too much, and it remains an embarrassment that his seminal fluid became an impeachment vote while Saudi Arabia's bin Laden was brewing his spectacular blow. There is enough blame to go around for 9/11, but morally Clintonian narcissism was a nearly fatal distraction, so I cannot quite forgive the 42nd president, and think the left is incredibly stupid to elevate his wife for her public injuries in relation to Bill's philandering, but that is the United States, in a nutshell: a pretty woman who wants to engage in social justice becomes a social worker, sets eyes on Rutger Hauer, who cannot possibly be guilty in his role as a slightly more attractive genotype of Anthony Hopkins-- just as Clancy Brown is a tinsel variation on Ron Perlman, who had the courage to humiliate himself as second in rank in The Quest for Fire. Natasha's Laura preens off compliments, picks up her torch, and gets drawn into a threat which would keep most women under psychiatric care for the rest of their lives. Pluralism rarely takes account of the toll in its insistence on the inherent intrinsic value.
We never get to see the aftermath. Films aren't very good at evolving, or in this case, devolving characters, this is why Victor Hugo could write a tome like Les Miserables and we have flawed great classics that do embody full lives of our projected alter egos, even if they are ponderous reads, but Past Midnight strikes chords in terms of how liberalism crushes the spirit of the noble crusade, and ties in with the ambulatory carelessness of Richardson's 2009 death. Yes, on the surface, this seemingly content and happy starlet with her authentic Hollywood romance was simply the victim of a mishap. Beneath the surface, she really wasn't thinking about her age and the risks of learning to ski at 45. Foster, as a more conflicted woman, would have been more instinctually wary. The greater the talent, the better the intuition. Spastic was never held at knife point by a rural slasher with womb triggers, but the dowager has been subjected to everything else short of attempted murder, and yet, even in victimhood, remains, surviving with rage addicted tenacity, while Natasha's vivacious privilege becomes the suddenly absent, perhaps more to her fortune than the pondering with which we cling to temporal circumstance. As a figurine, a paper cut out of the Clinton era, she manages to let the pieces of her part in this film fall into place.
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