Fuck me, what a pile of shit Three Days of the Condor was. It has either aged terribly or it was overrated when it came out. I gave it 15 mins before fast forwarding it in case it had hit a slump.
I was quite enjoying this movie for half an hour. I recognised it was a bit shit but somehow the German language made it quite bearable and it was exploring ideas of totalitarianism and autocracy so I gave it a go.
Then it just got silly very quickly so I dumped it. However one thing in it's favour was the way the Germans handled the love scenes. With wit and creativity. I've got no problems watching people fucking but I don't like to watch actors getting romantic any more than I would want to watch my friends.
Room 237 is a documentary about interpretations of Stanley KubricksThe Shining. I heard it was well received at some film festival and I was looking forward to catching up with it as I'm familiar with the film, Kubrick's style of leaving messages and coded thoughts/secrets and most of all I've been following Jay Weidner's analysis on this subject for a year or so.
Sadly I've overdone it and this documentary was badly made, boring and prone to waffle and pseudo interpretations that at times trailed off with children in the background of phone interviews.
I've written a review of The Shininghere if you want to get into earlier thoughts on the subject. There's also a recent interview with Jay that takes his thinking even further and is a must listen on the topic.
It might be because I learned from child actorBen Fellows, and a separate Twitter follower, that Nicholas Cage is a violent person who has pimped underage girls in Hollywood before he became famous that I've gone right off him. He has also been seen punching his girlfriend and/or female partner by acquaintances of mine. These might just be claims but when two people corroborate each other on a character I tend to listen.
This movie is just another shitty bent cop movie. If you like tits and coke with nut crushing anti-hero detective dialogue this flick is for you. I switched it off after about 15 minutes. I couldn't stomach his shit acting any more. The only movie he was ever good in was Leaving Las Vegas and now we know he was paying himself.
Norma Rae is the kind of pro-activist film Hollywood is no longer allowed to make. It won Sally Field an Oscar in 1979 for her performance as an underpaid cotton manufacturing worker emboldened by a visiting Union activist to set up a union for the employees with the usual obstacles put in place by the management who are hopelessly fixated on the scientific method of timing all the workers for the maximum productivity.
We now know from the unscientific method that people are more productive if they are happy and taken care of by employees. It's a warm movie with a slice of American life that I think still exists but is rarely brought to life as the mediated American way has drifted towards displays of crass consumerism, celebrity worship, sports distractions and military priapism....or Alien shit.
Movies about people coming together and taking on relentless greed are no longer made by the US. The big money investors don't wish to give the proletariat any ideas so fantasy is what they are served up with. Protesters or movements in movies are portrayed as Communists and radicals by Hollywood because that keeps the very people who are being exploited by greedy business in their place.
The only irony worth exploring is this movie won the Oscar in the same year that Deng Xiaoping instigated the special economic zones in China. The very places that took the manufacturing of the cotton and denim that Norma Rae is fighting for a better wage to produce.
There's an answer to this race to the bottom of lower production costs but it doesn't involve unconscious consumerism, botox materialism and relentless greed by business.
It might however involve 3D printing and design coding where ostensibly most products will become close to free. That will have an impact on Brands who have nothing different from their competitors and even more so on those who have anything substantive to say.
The Hunger Games is much better than I expected. I don't usually watch Hollywood but this production caught my eye as it was interpreted by the conspiracy crowd as an indicator of what's in store for those who survive depopulation, chemtrails and a long list of wickedness the power elite have lined up for us. It's for those with the audacity to survive whatever extinction level event we don't have tickets to loiter with the VIP's in Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBS) while the cataclysm takes place overhead.
I don't actually buy all of the above but it's worth knowing why it caught my eye. I have a feeling the breakdown of society could be longer and messier than expected or completely unexpected if at all.
Someone I care about loves this movie so I watched it to show solidarity and it was good and thought provoking entertainment. I understand it's based on a trilogy of books which were inspired by an earlier Japanese book called Battle Royale which was made into a movie.
The authenticity of the movie worked well. It rarely goes over the top and if so only in tiny details that most Americans would never ever notice. In fact most people but I'm super sensitive to the cliches of Hollywood production more than most and this film doesn't take liberties.
The film explores the Society of the Spectacle whereby what is viewed becomes more important than what actually is. Guy Debord's work on this subject is as important now as ever as we hurtle into the Truman Show of them watching us watching them watching us in a recursive loop of fear and privacy intrusion that may imprison humanity in that special way that only 5% or so apparently fully comprehend.
Interestingly for Hollywood, the celebrities are the creeps in this movie with cartoonesque qualities that draw on archetypes as deep as one can find in the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. Celebrities portrayed as creeps is so rare these days that is must be applauded. Actors are by their nature good at lying. That's what they do.
I can only throw in one morsel of observation which is that the top of the control pyramid in this movie is played by an amiably-possesed white haired gentleman who is clipping his roses in a garden while debating life and death for entertainment. I wanted to share where I've seen this before. It's the Spielberg film Munich where the shadowy transnational figures who run the world are headed by a similar white haired gentleman clipping his roses.
Same character clipping roses in The Hunger Games
And hopefully you'll appreciate the resonance of a Mr Rothschild's recorded below at Exbury Gardens in Hampshire, England cutting his roses as a conspiracy researcher asks him questions. I'm not asking you to draw conclusions. I'm just pointing out the synchronicity.
I've been wanting to watch Munich again for a long time because of the mysterious French family that assisted Mossad in their revenge killings across Europe after the Munich massacre at the 72 Olympics by a Palestinian terrorist group. It's an excellent movie with solid reviews elsewhere so this is more about my relationship with it.
I forgot how well cast it is with lovely Jewish performances by Geoffrey Rush who played in The King And I not so long back. Avner the protagonist is also flawlessly acted.
All of the Israeli, Beirut, Cypress, Athens, Rome scenes were filmed in my Malta where my mother was born and I have citizenship. I miss those blue Mediterranean waters.
I'm not a James Bond fan but Daniel Craig is the only modern incarnation I rate and his performance as a cocky South African Jew is impeccable. I love the scene where the safe house has been double booked with an enemy terrorist group on unrelated missions and they quarrel over the radio music between Arabic and Jewish short wave stations settling on Western soul music. It reminded me of a political disagreement I had with a Jewish planner in Bangkok who responded to my political stance by playing Jewish music online unaware I like all music. I didn't like her describing Palestinians in Gaza like rats though. Two wrongs don't make a right.
The German meetup pictured above is with a shadowy left wing group in Frankfurt who smoke joints and deal in violence reminded me of a small hours meeting I once had with a hippy in the deepest Hessen countryside who I later learned was a former Rote Armee Fraktion member where instead of being paid in cash we were dumped with contraband instead. So out of the frying pan, into the fire and we headed more or less immediately to Amsterdam. Early 90's madness.
Since learning about the ancient bloodlines who run much of the power structures that dominate our times, I've always wanted to go back to the scene where Avner lunches with his French information supplier and continent fixer to dig a little deeper. Their code of not working with governments or intelligence agencies sparked my curiousity, but I'm not sure there is anything more to it than family groups who deal in death and dangerous information.
There's two or three scenes including one at the end on the phone where the head of the French family expresses a paternal interest in Avner who lost his father at an early age in an Israeli war. Avner never quite understands that the affection is genuine. A broken childhood spent on a Kibbutz I think.
The film is all about revenge and living with oneself after. About an eye for an eye leaving people blind or blinded to the consequences of their actions. It closes on the twin towers though that's an ironic terminating scene given the likely French and Israeli intelligence agency cooperation in the 911 attacks.
I'm increasingly impressed with John Le Carre. I've been going back and downloading everything he wrote that was put on film including the TV series from the 80's. The Constant Gardener is a very savvy telling of how Big Pharma uses Africa as a testbed for drug testing or as the strap line for KDH Pharmaceutical puts it "The world is our clinic"
Conspiracy theorists might be interested in watching this movie because there are more than a few nods to Big Pharma creating global illness such as a new form of Tuberculosis and then providing the only drug that will work. I think the potential for this is far more realistic than the global depopulation ideas that I often come across though there is a room for both ideas to work together I guess.
The cast of The Constant Gardener were so moved by Africa when filming there that they set up a charity fund for the area it was filmed in. John Le Carre also wrote the following:
"Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world, but I can tell you this, as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard".
