Category / Film
Yippie Kayee
Andy Warhol Film as Political Campaign Commercial?
RELATED: IMDB User Comments for “Empire” “Empire has got to be considered one of the most suspenseful movies ever made. 485 minutes, with every one of them keeping you on the edge of your seat, seemingly impossible for an eight-hour movie to accomplish. The scene changes are so subtle and quick, they barely seem to happen, making you feel as if the story hasn’t changed, all setting up each individual shock. The acting is fantastic, each character so stoic and emotionless, as if they aren’t in the scenes in the first place. Warhol does a fantastic job at threading each scene together, to make it appear as if it is just one ongoing one. Absolutely ridiculous that the AFI refused to include it in its 100 thrills list. See it, and prepare to have your imagination and sense of reality warped.”
Apocalyptic Sunday
Some YouTube links from Metafilter and casual Googling:
The War Game (1965): [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]
When the Wind Blows (1986): [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8]
Miracle Mile (1988) [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10]
The Survivors: Start here.
And if you really want to be depressed:
Threads (full movie). Ten times bleaker than The Day After.
Self-Absorbed Monsters
I made it through fifteen minutes of this film and I had enough. There wasn’t one moment of humility. Not one moment of self-deprecation. Not one moment where the “artistic” worth of the two main subjects was questioned. In fact, the damn thing was a selfish and humorless affair. I felt like I was stuck in a DUMBO hipster hellhole.
The level of self-absorption, narcissism, and self-entitlement contained in Four Eyed Monsters appalled me. Do these two kids not know anything of humility? I understand that this film was a hit at Slamdance. But is this the best that the emerging generation of Internet filmmakers can offer us? Begging for money for their precious pretentious nonsense as if they are entitled to it? Fawning in such a self-absorbed show for the cameras and failing to give us one goddam whit of humanity about the growing development of online relationships? Jean-Luc Godard did this kind of documentary many times before and, compared to these kids, he’s the humblest filmmaker now working in cinema. That’s saying something.
Maybe I’m becoming that grumpy old bastard shouting at the kids to get off my lawn, but, as much as I look out and try to support work by new artists, Four Eyed Monsters is about the most solipsistic cinema I’ve had the misfortune to sit a quarter of the way through. Imagine 70 minutes of lolcats in cinematic form. Sure, it’s cute for the first minute. But can you really sit there and take it for 70 minutes?
Nobody’s going to say it. Because these kids have amassed a tremendous credit card debt. Nobody’s going to say it. Because it’s the dream that everybody wants: to be a self-sufficient artist.
It’s impossible to create after working a nine-to-five job? What a bunch of bullshit.
Glam rock is back, boys and girls. But it’s worse than it was in the 1970s. Because where the glam rock artists realized that their stage presence was a pretense and that there was compartmentalization between this presence and the real life, these new glam rock amateurs, in the form of Arin and Susan, do not.
And the hell of it is that they will be rewarded for their crass irresponsibilities, both fiscal and artistic.