quality control

so, there's this guy i know who does >30% of the graduate education for an internationally famous film program. after 7 years, his masters decided that he had “no ‘acknowledged record of successful teaching.’”

children of men

children of men isn’t the first over-rated commercial piece of wanna be hollywood shit directed by rich-fuck alfonso cuarón, but is is by far the most offensive, servile and christ-loving. in the summaries of the pd james novel we read, there seems to have been some sort of class critique, at the level of bothering to wonder who would collect the garbage in a world with a labor shortage cause by infertility . alfonso decided that shit didn’t belong on screen. even if in 1992, the novels publication date, james was too dumb to account for cloning as a way of making more people to exploit , alfonso’s movie came out in 2005! there’s no way for you to know whether this blog entry was written by rrr or a clone there of. surely there was a production meeting about this at universal. was no one taking notes? and how did the infertility epidemic get rid of cell phones?

marie antoinette: not sofia coppola’s first film about a sexually troubled girl, but surely her emptiest and most conservative . although only a developmentally challenged 6 year old would see this film as a history lesson, we still object to the glorification of a hapsburg insect who fed on the blood of the french people for most of her life and plotted actively against the revolution with citizen capet ‘s exiled brothers. if sophie’s going to listen to gang of four she might get a better lesson in historiography from “it’s not made by great men” instead of “natural’s not in it.”

The Prestige
Not Christopher Nolan's first film with an M Night Shyamalanesque twist, but surely the most predicable, though we like Rick Jay a lot for a capitalist. Nicola Tessla so hot right now, probably because we are running out of power and still have to plug in you laptops.


The Science Of Sleep
Not the first French film about a relationship to over motivate formal devices, thus depriving them of any value as thought, but surely one with the most cardboard sets, though Charlotte Gainsbourg makes us want to smoke.


The Last 20 Minutes of Short Bus
Not the first film to rip off Ken Anger, Jack Smith, and Pasolini, but surely the most self congratulatory. It’s main fantasy isn’t about sex, but about the east village still mattering.

Summer Palace
Not the first movie by a Chinese director who tries to use politics to sublimate his desire for his actress, but surely the flimsiest. Marketed as the first cinematic representation of the events at the gate of heavenly peace, it in fact marks the final stage of the mainland’s adoption of bourgeois ideology.

the departed

The Departed isn’t Martin Scorsese’s first return to form, but it is his weakest. Nonetheless, we are reassured that Marty can still reach the level of Harold Becker’s City Hall (Columbia,1996).

The illusionist/the black dahlia/hollywodland

These movies bank on the sort of cinematic self awareness of which The Player and The Matrix are our favorite recent examples, favorite recent example, unfortunately they work more like the moment at the beginning of Charlie’s Angels when L.L. Cool J acknowledges that one can always walk out of stuff like the T J Hooker movie playing on the plane.

crank

The dream of perpetual motion foundered by the beast with two backs.

We don’t feel like running with an inguinal hernia. We grow old and fat.