Jingle Most of the Way
You know what movie I don't want to watch all the way through? Arnold Schwarzenegger's Jingle All The Way, the cringingly funny Christmas classic that Netflix offered up for a 20 minute thrill. I think it's funny that he's threatened by his disgusting hipster liberal intellectual neighbor, who is decidedly a villain and a demon upon closer inspection (as are they all), but overcomes him with good old-fashioned American hatred and head-down dogged determination. Nevermind that our protagonist is emotionally unavailable and his wife is drowning in a manicured, ticky-tacky mental prison of her own demise, her deep-seated loneliness and depression are no match for what I'm sure is another in a long string of promises and false lessons from our silk-shirted huckster hero. There's nothing that can get some stupid toy into the hands of a needy child quite like the pure intensity of the reddest Austrian you know, and as symbols of devotion, protection and dedication go, action figures might as well do.
It strikes me that we open on Arnie desperately grasping at straws in his sales job spouting flatly empty promises to who need ridiculous and impossible things, and telling them that they're his #1 priority because they simply cannot be told that they aren't. Whether he's reading that correctly or not, he has to bend to their every whim, because the consequences for not are unthinkable. As with the toy, Arnold's wife will take his child away if he doesn't somehow pull off this Christmas miracle. Nevermind that he wastes his life buried in paper behind a desk shouting into a telephone while micromanaging spreadsheets. It's common practice for his assistant to hold up and flip through signage to communicate messages to him because the idea of having adequate time between phone calls to speak like a human isn't realistic. He bleeds desperation and pressure, everything about this strikes me as a comic dystopic outtake from a much better movie, something in Brazil's B-reel. It's far too sympathizing for me to decide he's an asshole ten minutes later.
Nevermind that he slaves this way to feed and clothe the family he's decried for neglecting. Motherfucker I am out here feeding you, is that not perfectly clear? The man is a lion; he laughs at hobbies and personal reflection. He needs money, because that's how his family interprets love. Do you see where they live? In 2015 that kind of area is gated when built. 2016, sorry.
Whatever. There's some goofy shit and he's so loud and it's awesome when people fall down. Everything about this is fucked, the essence of consumerism and an absolute boiling point of misdirected intention intersecting at a terminal endpoint that would give any sane person a nervous breakdown and force a total reevaluation of priorities, which his family seems to demand but likely might not accept. You cannot tell me it would have meant the same to that kid for his Dad to have been home with him all that time rather than scouring the malls all hours like some verminous post-apocalyptic scavenger. He needs it Christmas Day. Bitch you need to be thankful Christmas came at all, there'd be no presents for three Christmases if I knew the legitimacy of my contribution to my family after 8-10 hours a day of pressure-cooker sales 50 weeks out of the year was ultimately proved worthy by whether or not the right toys were under the tree.
The movie is about misplaced values. It's about putting too much emphasis on the wrong things, and I agree that their family would have been better off in a smaller, shittier house, with fewer toys, and more time for the father to be around making stuff with the son and doing family projects. If the point of the movie is that Arnold needs to stop grinding away at the wrong things and focus more on the important stuff, family love and enjoyment, I support that entirely. I'm imagining Arnold learning his lesson here and staging a Jerry Maguire walkout, demanding to know "wchooos camin' wit meh?!" He loves, he looses, he loves again, he has heartfelt realizations about his deepest issues and displaced priorities and focuses on his artistic side. They move out of the suburbs and into a lower rent community, but Arnold is working with a not-for-profit and finding he doesn't miss his suburban now that what he does with his time means real change for helpless people.
I wonder how pleased his wife and son would be then. Maybe they'd be amazed at the openness and warmth of their new patriarch. Or, it could be that this man wasn't the gripping acquisition-driven man his wife married, that she liked nice things, and took pride in having the kind of house and accouterments that comes with a successful husband who knows how to close and just wants to spend his free time loving the people he sacrifices all his free time for. I wonder if it ever occurred to these people that they got more out of telling Arnold that he was fucking everything up than they would from having him smiling and blinking from across a coffee table every night, asking them what they wanted to do. Particularly if that meant a hit in quality of life, and little Jordan or whatever his name is didn't get to have his clearly brand-name shit. There's a benefit not often perceived by young people to having their AND-1s and crisp preppy stuff, those who don't have it recognize it the most and those who are also at this level often take it as a baseline for prospective playmate material. But that's none of my business. You don't need to be rich to give your kids a good life, but I do understand the impulse to try to give them the best. The movie tends to reassure us this guy is an asshole repeatedly, and I'm like, yeah. He is an asshole. I don't want to hang out with this guy. But they tend to attract and raise people like these, for whom I have little sympathy as well. The whole thing gestures toward a cultural ouroboros nobody can benefit from, elbowing me in the ribs and going, "THAT guy doesn't know how to work the system." It's a broken, garbage system, and I don't agree with working it, and I don't admire people who do. So. In letting go of the emotional bonds Jingle likes to tug at we can all take pleasure in giggling at Sinbad shrieking.
Watch the parade scene and the warehouse scene in Jingle All the Way.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
T's Take on The Last Hunga Gamezz
So, yeah.
If you saw the first of the two last Hungry Games, you don't need me. If you care at all you'll have seen it and liked it, or you're just a bad person who can't pleased.
Wait.
What we're seeing in this fourth iteration of a jonky euphemistically feminine dystopia wherein the mincing, fashion and art-focused cultural swine of a neo-doofus, nega-liberal populous allows the enslavement of entire swathes of humanity (districts, as you will come to know them) in favor of the special indulgence of the .00001% because they're just sort of weak artsy lady-people who don't even understand things like whatever. They care about aesthetic and poetry and culture and literature and all that other artsy-fartsy idiot stuff that dangerous Intellectual people indulge in when society runs away with itself. It's not even discussed that this one district in more than a dozen(?) exists entirely in a state of tireless pandering to and worship of its most elite members, nor how crushing and oppressive and bitter, heartless, cruel that regime might be to serve from the inside. I would rather have found this entire sequence to events to have been viewed from the perspective of a janitor in a government building than the Great Miss Everdeen. The parallels are appropriately cutting, the requisite pomp and circumstance are offered to the title Hunger Games wherein young, supple, reasonably attractive combatants are sentenced to assassinate one-another in effectively sentient, deadly environments that resemble any sort of Truman Show that could possibly make any sense at all. We are all Katniss, of course, in that we are thrown by society into impossible circumstances, ill-equipped but convinced that humanity alone can save us even in a harsh wilderness of predatory instinct and industrial construct.
I should alert you to a spoiler here. The Whatever'th Hunger Games are even announced by title, only to have that illusion dumped at the first opportunity and allow a will-they-won't-they un-pissing contest between noncombatants Petra Malark and Whatsits Thorsbrother. There is zero chemistry, at all, and everything is just fine I guess. Good talk bruh.
It's a political documentary, and it always was. There happened to be some high points early in the production, but there might be in just such an uprising. The author and perhaps the movie production crew took far too much/little care in creating a believable end to the successful pundits of a newly run revolution. The wartime champions, the ones that will win you an empire; the Churchills... they're not fit to rebuild & they don't want to. It's best to let them to their cabins, to their solace, to their lovers and their comforts and whatever ease therapy might provide them. Unchallenged and without the need of the common man, their relevance evaporates and they are suddenly and horrifically Real People. You don't want to look at them any more, and are horrified by your repugnant reaction to them.
Imagine that: if the 300 Spartans just sort of waited it out and killed their way through the million or so (I don't know about history) human beings thrown at them. Imagine if that worked. And then it was just like, "Okay, Leonidas. Just... go home." So he did. And he won. And it was over.
And he did a good job. But, like, you still gotta go to the market on Sunday. So, here's Leonidas at the market.
And then he goes home again and eats the food from the market.
Thanks for watching.
*credits*
I just walked away from this IMAX climactic opus, this ultimate peak of the four-part masterwork that's been stealing my imagination for what feels like a rival to the fucking Harry Potter series, and I'm just... I walked out of that theater feeling ultimately unresolved. I felt completely cheated, and completely hollow, and like none of it was really worth anything, and that the people who could possibly benefit from my having suffered this ordeal would be the unseen masses who were supposedly fought for in all of this. The wholeity of humanity at this point consists of violent revolutionaries and cultish, slavish pundents who only exist to serve a ruling class that now rejects and despises them, rather an inversion of the former rather than a reformation of true meaning.
I rather think we might have spared a half minute to delve into that than spent still more forlorn long-shots and meaningful looks between would-be lovers. In retrospect, it feels like a lot of people had to die for Katniss's pride. It feels more true that she'd have been tackled and strung up there with lascivious old Patriarch in the end, figures like herself rarely escape martyrdom (sad but true). Her negligence in leaving Snow to be torn and bludgeoned apart by the masses was a particularly hideous and unforgivable breach of the humanity to which Katniss would appear to want to have represented. My eye was immediately drawn to the canny use of resources in this critical moment of execution (one must always appreciate an instance of Two Birds with One Stone) but certainly not to its dedication to her character or really the subject matter at hand. Her inflexibility is both the thing establishes her as the best thing since sliced bread in this oppressed world and a tragically wounded and irredeemably broken person capable of and perpetrating crimes just as morally bankrupt as her competitors. I had rather hoped that more of her detrimental reflexive tendencies might be addressed, overcome, that she might learn her perspective was in some way incomplete and worthy of reappraisal.
Nope! Don't worry, you didn't need to do this at all. You were exactly right, all along, there was never a point to anything the opposition believed, and you're entitled to leave them to suffer at the hands of whatever the most savage individual(s) might have to offer you in the assailants' moment of ultimate passion and the criminals' moment of ultimate vulnerability.
Just do whatever you want to the bad guys.
They're bad.
Snow was laughing because Katniss had become him, and learned (without understanding) that all the morality she'd been clinging to all this time evaporates in the face of individual gain & the grasping for safety. Once consequence had been removed, she wouldn't do her enemy the condolence of a relatively painless death. She wanted him to be destroyed, utterly, because it was a fitting message to the attentive remainder of humanity. It has been said that a populous can be judged by its treatment of its captors, and if Katniss intended to make the point that intolerance cannot be tolerated, she communicated rather a conflicted message given that it contained wanton cruelty in and of itself. How is a public stoning less barbaric than a Hunger Game? At least Katniss was given the opportunity to procure her bow and arrows. Dude was tied to a stake and like a thousand people bumrushed him.
Thank God the rule of law has been restored.
Color me dissatisfied with this interpretation of justice. I rather hoped I'd paid to be uplifted by this fantasy world, but the only thing that made any sense at all was to just let it fizzle out once the remaining combatants had slunk from the chessboard to take up with their comforts while the New World Order organizes and implements itself. A sensible society would either put Snow to work or execute him humanely; what Katniss allows is an unthinkable treachery that goes beyond poor taste and into the territory of truly evil. I'm not interested in her position, however emotionally just a viewer might perceive it to be; the type of society where one person gets to decide that another is torn to pieces on live television is precisely the thing you've built yourself to oppose. YOU MAY NOT TORTURE PEOPLE TO DEATH. Also, you shouldn't do it on primetime for capitol and political gain. No more may you enjoin others to do the same, and walk away as though allowing and endorsing such a thing is not to confer complicity in it.
So once Katniss has had her Princess Peach removed from the plotline she is free to be inhumanly cruel to a person who repeatedly showed restraint when in a position to destroy her, utterly disregarded the democratic process which she herself has just instilled, undermined the principles of her new world order before even bothering to produce any stable template or mode of conduct to replace the at least functional one which she has just caused to implode, and vanished to the countryside without a word of explanation.
If this ending is unsatisfactory, you may possibly sense my point.
If you saw the first of the two last Hungry Games, you don't need me. If you care at all you'll have seen it and liked it, or you're just a bad person who can't pleased.
Wait.
What we're seeing in this fourth iteration of a jonky euphemistically feminine dystopia wherein the mincing, fashion and art-focused cultural swine of a neo-doofus, nega-liberal populous allows the enslavement of entire swathes of humanity (districts, as you will come to know them) in favor of the special indulgence of the .00001% because they're just sort of weak artsy lady-people who don't even understand things like whatever. They care about aesthetic and poetry and culture and literature and all that other artsy-fartsy idiot stuff that dangerous Intellectual people indulge in when society runs away with itself. It's not even discussed that this one district in more than a dozen(?) exists entirely in a state of tireless pandering to and worship of its most elite members, nor how crushing and oppressive and bitter, heartless, cruel that regime might be to serve from the inside. I would rather have found this entire sequence to events to have been viewed from the perspective of a janitor in a government building than the Great Miss Everdeen. The parallels are appropriately cutting, the requisite pomp and circumstance are offered to the title Hunger Games wherein young, supple, reasonably attractive combatants are sentenced to assassinate one-another in effectively sentient, deadly environments that resemble any sort of Truman Show that could possibly make any sense at all. We are all Katniss, of course, in that we are thrown by society into impossible circumstances, ill-equipped but convinced that humanity alone can save us even in a harsh wilderness of predatory instinct and industrial construct.
I should alert you to a spoiler here. The Whatever'th Hunger Games are even announced by title, only to have that illusion dumped at the first opportunity and allow a will-they-won't-they un-pissing contest between noncombatants Petra Malark and Whatsits Thorsbrother. There is zero chemistry, at all, and everything is just fine I guess. Good talk bruh.
It's a political documentary, and it always was. There happened to be some high points early in the production, but there might be in just such an uprising. The author and perhaps the movie production crew took far too much/little care in creating a believable end to the successful pundits of a newly run revolution. The wartime champions, the ones that will win you an empire; the Churchills... they're not fit to rebuild & they don't want to. It's best to let them to their cabins, to their solace, to their lovers and their comforts and whatever ease therapy might provide them. Unchallenged and without the need of the common man, their relevance evaporates and they are suddenly and horrifically Real People. You don't want to look at them any more, and are horrified by your repugnant reaction to them.
Imagine that: if the 300 Spartans just sort of waited it out and killed their way through the million or so (I don't know about history) human beings thrown at them. Imagine if that worked. And then it was just like, "Okay, Leonidas. Just... go home." So he did. And he won. And it was over.
And he did a good job. But, like, you still gotta go to the market on Sunday. So, here's Leonidas at the market.
And then he goes home again and eats the food from the market.
Thanks for watching.
*credits*
I just walked away from this IMAX climactic opus, this ultimate peak of the four-part masterwork that's been stealing my imagination for what feels like a rival to the fucking Harry Potter series, and I'm just... I walked out of that theater feeling ultimately unresolved. I felt completely cheated, and completely hollow, and like none of it was really worth anything, and that the people who could possibly benefit from my having suffered this ordeal would be the unseen masses who were supposedly fought for in all of this. The wholeity of humanity at this point consists of violent revolutionaries and cultish, slavish pundents who only exist to serve a ruling class that now rejects and despises them, rather an inversion of the former rather than a reformation of true meaning.
I rather think we might have spared a half minute to delve into that than spent still more forlorn long-shots and meaningful looks between would-be lovers. In retrospect, it feels like a lot of people had to die for Katniss's pride. It feels more true that she'd have been tackled and strung up there with lascivious old Patriarch in the end, figures like herself rarely escape martyrdom (sad but true). Her negligence in leaving Snow to be torn and bludgeoned apart by the masses was a particularly hideous and unforgivable breach of the humanity to which Katniss would appear to want to have represented. My eye was immediately drawn to the canny use of resources in this critical moment of execution (one must always appreciate an instance of Two Birds with One Stone) but certainly not to its dedication to her character or really the subject matter at hand. Her inflexibility is both the thing establishes her as the best thing since sliced bread in this oppressed world and a tragically wounded and irredeemably broken person capable of and perpetrating crimes just as morally bankrupt as her competitors. I had rather hoped that more of her detrimental reflexive tendencies might be addressed, overcome, that she might learn her perspective was in some way incomplete and worthy of reappraisal.
Nope! Don't worry, you didn't need to do this at all. You were exactly right, all along, there was never a point to anything the opposition believed, and you're entitled to leave them to suffer at the hands of whatever the most savage individual(s) might have to offer you in the assailants' moment of ultimate passion and the criminals' moment of ultimate vulnerability.
Just do whatever you want to the bad guys.
They're bad.
Snow was laughing because Katniss had become him, and learned (without understanding) that all the morality she'd been clinging to all this time evaporates in the face of individual gain & the grasping for safety. Once consequence had been removed, she wouldn't do her enemy the condolence of a relatively painless death. She wanted him to be destroyed, utterly, because it was a fitting message to the attentive remainder of humanity. It has been said that a populous can be judged by its treatment of its captors, and if Katniss intended to make the point that intolerance cannot be tolerated, she communicated rather a conflicted message given that it contained wanton cruelty in and of itself. How is a public stoning less barbaric than a Hunger Game? At least Katniss was given the opportunity to procure her bow and arrows. Dude was tied to a stake and like a thousand people bumrushed him.
Thank God the rule of law has been restored.
Color me dissatisfied with this interpretation of justice. I rather hoped I'd paid to be uplifted by this fantasy world, but the only thing that made any sense at all was to just let it fizzle out once the remaining combatants had slunk from the chessboard to take up with their comforts while the New World Order organizes and implements itself. A sensible society would either put Snow to work or execute him humanely; what Katniss allows is an unthinkable treachery that goes beyond poor taste and into the territory of truly evil. I'm not interested in her position, however emotionally just a viewer might perceive it to be; the type of society where one person gets to decide that another is torn to pieces on live television is precisely the thing you've built yourself to oppose. YOU MAY NOT TORTURE PEOPLE TO DEATH. Also, you shouldn't do it on primetime for capitol and political gain. No more may you enjoin others to do the same, and walk away as though allowing and endorsing such a thing is not to confer complicity in it.
So once Katniss has had her Princess Peach removed from the plotline she is free to be inhumanly cruel to a person who repeatedly showed restraint when in a position to destroy her, utterly disregarded the democratic process which she herself has just instilled, undermined the principles of her new world order before even bothering to produce any stable template or mode of conduct to replace the at least functional one which she has just caused to implode, and vanished to the countryside without a word of explanation.
If this ending is unsatisfactory, you may possibly sense my point.
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