Zero Theorem

In terms of dramaturgical import, Tilda Swinton's collapse to the floor is a repeat pattern maneuver with Dionysian potential. In The Beach, it has no relevance within an already fragmented and contradictory climax, not as a signifier of colonial conquest  and its destruction which fomented the anger of Achebe's productive years; it rings hollow as an expressive gesture, and yet it hearkens back to Michael Clayton, much starker, bleaker, an existential implosion where all one can do is drop to your knees and pound the carpet. It is a distinctive motion, a signature only Swinton can enact, learned in the rough on the set of Orlando, which itself is less a responsible to Woolf's satirical aim and more pastiche, aping the farce masculinity in the loss of her Russian lover, because our fool proof procedures turn out to be flawed after all. This is why she is amply suited when cast as the foil against individual identity in our futurist speculations, a modern Medea melded within the characteristics of a rodent-like opportunism, utilitarian, grasping for power.

Clayton was a slap in the face to those who believe in due process. We're exposed, the audience, to how things truly operate in the alpha world. As in house counsel, Swinton is the lawyer who thinks corporate insulation will allow her to override the annoyances of victimization, disavowing personal loyalties over lapsed ethics. In The Beach, muddled as it is, she is a comical version of Conrad's Kurtz who cannot seem to grasp that agrarian harmony is contingent on the metropolis, and it is the city, invariably, which leads to the anxiety of transhumanism. It may be resisted by self-determination, but the city state is the collective power of human intelligence, as well as our downfall, the mechanization of rote efficiency, but that collapse brings us back to the mythos of origin, snake like, hubris buckling in upon itself toward the Oedipal pathos of dramatic exaggeration, with the chorus in the background beating its breast as triumph fractures. We either abandon it or put it under lock and key. 

Bigfoot's Sensory Perception

For example, if the animal does not have enough food, is it a kind of cruelty or not?"--Adisorn Noochdumrong, not quite the autocrat

Thailand seems to be a hot property, in this century, for an uneasy cultural fusion between permissiveness, hegemony, and corruption, almost as a guild-province rather than a country. It is where the youngest brother of The Legacy, Emil, gets imprisoned for a sour deal. It is the locale of choice for the clever travel detective author Timothy Hallinan, who skillfully juxtaposes innocence with a stark nihilism which makes Roman tempers picturesque, and it is almost part of the cast in Danny Boyle's flailing film with DiCaprio, The Beach.

DiCaprio also seems to be the gilded boy always under threat when he takes the side of the vulnerable. It is a motif he seems to consistently deploy in films like The Titanic, The Quick and the Dead, or playing Howard Hughes.

The narrative exasperation DiCaprio adopts strikes the right tone of skeptical disillusion with material accouterments and ennui, but Alex Garland should have sued Hodge over that screen play. Every major scene backfires like a faulty transmission in a Ford station wagon: the talking shark, the dead Daffy, the killing of the American jackasses toward the conclusion, in which Tilda Swinton engages in nearly the exact maneuver as she does in Michael Clayton: the dramatic collapse of the true believer exposed for crossing too many lines.

Though the adaptation here is less ridiculous than The Blue Lagoon of Brooke Shields' sexual peak, the killing of the last three Americans by the Thai pot farmer seems arbitrary. However, there is a touch of survival of the most ruthless going on here. Subsistence manufactures brutality out of its own necessity, and athleticism isn't always an advantage in subtropical climates. 

I came up with a fairly good idea for a pitch last week, (of 6/15/15) and fed it to OZY anyway (why I do these things I am not quite sure, I have been angry with the lies of the American left for a long time, which isn't to convey that conservatives don't deny reality when it suits them) and then dared to pitch it to Wapo, but it made me reflect upon the difficulty of gaining access, especially when it is all about pedigree, and I am trying to figure out how to cajole my quarry without being overly forceful. (Sigh) Freelancing without a contract is a bitch.