"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.
"My colleagues have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of dining well and having a warm suit." Stendal, p144
I stopped to watch The Last Castle this afternoon, as opposed to remaining steadfast to Georges Simenon recycles. I was never particularly huge over Redford, but he too is an ailing link to my vanishing boomer lexicon, a language where one of the last real boomer superstars knows what its like not to have Paul Newman, and so I made a reluctant choice, not sorry to see the late Gandolfini in action up against the straight arrow icon.
The story wants to be a real world metaphor, like the late 80's Big Night, Tucci's critically acclaimed love child, but seemingly doesn't make a great deal of sense. I certainly couldn't figure it out as anything more than a pissing contest where your crime doesn't define you until it does? Irwin's piece de resistance appeals to me, of course, and like the damaged Aquilar, Redford as Irwin sacrifices his superlative status as the last American superstar, for an idea about fundamental fairness, or something, I am not entirely sure, the point taken that Colonel Winter, like Aquilar, loses self control in just that moment it takes to violate military code, to prevent Irwin's last act of defiance.
I've been thinking about my personal course of action, as forcing police officers to arrest me, the stress of that would finish me, even if the last thing a cop cares about is making an angry quadriplegic angrier still, and why can't she accept that she needs an attendant? Housekeeping help? I never did not accept it; that isn't the point. I have taken a series of blows from which recovery has been difficult, and this Christian landlord of mine, whatever my slavering hatred, has liabilities, aside from Ms. Richardson's ability to terrorize me, and I'm too angry to stand down, stopping just on the verge of letting her goad me into insulting her last fall. I cannot keep standing down on these matters, and if I have to earn myself a jacket, then the state has another notch in its belt.
Monica Carr was one of my first so called aides, during an early episode without a power chair. Welfare assigned her to me for 12 hours a week. I actually needed the help, and she could not do it, reported me to her police district for harassment. There was no Trudy google-girl then, and Debra Horne was conspicuously absent when another woman named Star, from Homemaker Services, tried to steal my commission as a contract journalist for HTP. Can I trust discussing this with O'Brien? I'll try; then I'm calling the cops, filling a complaint, and appealing to AG Harris, who is supposed to be aggressive.
There is a bemusing sense of frustration when you catch a film in the middle, or at various points in its arc, know that you do not wish to follow through and pay attention, to the extent your hearing loss can field the lack of captioning. As a child of suburban familial dysfunction, I did not care for Green's screenplay in Snow Angels, and wasted my time with it on Wednesday with familiar repugnance for certain pretensions within the independent genre, when I would have been better off doing something else if I could not sleep, my writing life essentially funneled into the immediacy of always being *on,* my professors never having been faced with this problem, as the Internet was in its infancy in the eighties, but Rockwell's performance provoked me, my eyes fixated on his knuckle scabs on his hands in his final scenes with Beckinsale. Superimpose this meaningless intensity of blame onto a terrorist's cause, and this is basically my ravaged psyche on indigestion, fish oil, tobacco juice, and yet, within my self-hatred, I get distracted by putting on my Jerry McGuire failed scholar cap, asking what makes an independent different from a Bruce Willis action flick? A practiced academic would be able to make an immediate differential. I have to struggle, and come up with allegorical realism. Beckinsale's Annie is not particularly kind, to her husband or her lover, or the little girl, though she is wry with Angarano's Arthur, whose nascent attachment to the attractive four eyes girlfriend is a kind of anecdote to the sour familiarity of human maturity.
I'm weary of Robert Redford's pulp in the mill with his Sundance, but of course it will outlive him, his liberal film school, because he's Redford, the movie star who could act, guilty that he had the blonde nadir going. His look was never my type. I could engage in some sardonic hyperbole towards the American Nordic hero who is getting old, Redford, which of course I do not mean, but after the Charlie Hebdo attack? Poking at prominent figures for ventilation leaves us all socially uneasy, even me, who normally would not care, and look at what I'm doing, my diffident dance with a well meaning klutz who destroyed part of my personal history because she was nervous. Maureen, my neighbor, was a blonde klutz in the same manner.
