I had no desire to see Mamma Mia! which in a way is odd as I like both Abba and musicals. But a friend prevailed on me to see it last week, and it turns out my initial instincts were correct; it’s not a very good film. Indeed, being a musical and using Abba songs are precisely where the film doesn’t work.
All the reviews I’ve seen have mentioned Pierce Brosnan’s terrible singing, but I haven’t seen much criticism of Meryl Streep’s performance, which is much worse, and also does more to explain what’s wrong with the film. Read more↴
Two bad reviews of The Dark Knight: bad in the sense that they’re poorly executed reviews, as well as being highly critical of the film. There are a number of annoying things about John Pistelli’s review, but the politically important one is the claim that:
Batman, operating outside the law to protect the defenseless people, represents a kind of Bush/Cheney figure, doing what he has to do for the good of the homeland.
He seems to have somehow forgotten that George Bush is the president of the US, and so he can hardly be said to be “operating outside the law”; indeed, the Bush administration’s particular mode of employment of the law is one of its distinguishing features.
Lenin’s review also struck me as kind of wrong, but it took me a while to figure out why. Read more↴
The Pacific Film Archive is currently running a series on Soviet science fiction, surely the genre than which nothing greater can be thought. Today’s entry was the amazing 1924 Bolsheviks on Mars masterpiece Аэлита. Read more↴
I heard yesterday, with this post half-completed for a couple of months, that Antonioni had died.
LA is beautiful. I’m not sure if that’s the point Antonioni is trying to make in Zabriskie Point, but he makes it anyway. And Death Valley, as it appears in the film, is beautiful too. What are we to make of the pairing here? The easy way to read it would be as a romantic opposition: the unspoilt beauty of the desert vs. the degenerate construction of the city. But Antonioni blocks this interpretation whenever it appears as a possibility in the film. In part, this is necessitated by the very nature of LA—as a city, its so strangely unfinished and temporary, a landscape of shacks thrown up along monstrously overgrown dirt roads; any competent depiction of LA (and Antonioni’s is more than competent) cannot posit the city as civilization to nature’s other. Read more↴
Discussing the question of when the Russian Revolution changed from revolution to counter-revolution, a friend of mine gave, I think, the only unassailable answer: in 1920, when Trotsky stopped fighting the civil war by traveling around on a train with a brass band.
I was reminded of this when &catherine posted something about the tATu best of, which I wasn’t aware of but which is pretty good. Apart from most of the tracks from Dangerous and Moving, the album includes the closest tATu have yet come to dubstep, a pleasingly eerie remix of “Cosmos,” and a “Bollywood” version of “Craving.” Which works surprisingly well, but more importantly served to remind me of a great film I saw a while back (with, coincidentally, the same friend who so wisely analyzed the Russian Revolution), Bhagam Bhag. Read more↴
…but communicative capitalism is interested in you. Read more↴