Saturday, November 30, 2019

SS Is So Stupid That Even An Ant Kid Knows More Than He Does

It was waaaaaaaay waaaaaaaaay back, but as I recall it was a BC comic from way back before I can find any mention of it online - there was no "line" to be on back then, computers were the size of a room and people used to take "keypunch" to learn Fortran or Cobol. 

Anyway, it was a BC comic, the ants, not the cave men and women.  In my memory where the parent ants are talking about going out to see the wild new movie "Nudies Go Berserk" (at least that's what I remember) and it's hush-hush because they don't want the kid ant to know they're going to a dirty movie.  

The kid asks them why he can't go to the movies with them.

The father ant says something like,  "You wouldn't like it, it's an art film" 

And the kid says,  "Oh, you're going to "Nudies Go Berserk".   

It's hilarious when, post-facto (that means after the fact for the Eschatot and sock puppets in the audience) artsy fartsy sounding allegories get invented and floated for the cheapest and stupidest of sci-fi, horror shit, it's so stupid that even a comic ant kid could see through it.  

Yeah, right, Night of the Living Dead is an allegory of America during the Vietnam years.  I'd like to know when George A. Romero said that before the release or soon after the thing came out.  If it was not a single one of the myriads of people who saw the movie when it was first released noticed, including me and I was fairly active in the anti-war movement and politics.  Apparently some wanted to give the lead actor being Black some kind of allegorical significance, too, which was news to the "auteur" as they say in the most pretentious of places.

You often talk about the casting of your leading man [the African-American actor Duane Jones] as kind of an accident. But it's a very uncanny one! Not only because of the relevance to that exact moment in time, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, but also, given that history of zombie films, the Haitian tradition of black zombies, you have a black hero, it’s kind of an uncanny parallel.

That’s the first time anyone’s mentioned that! But it does seem an obvious connection. When John Russo and I collaborated on the final screenplay, the character was white. And we consciously, deliberately didn’t change the script when Duane agreed to play the role. He was simply the best actor from among our friends. And then, we finished the film, we were actually driving it to New York to see if anyone would want to distribute it, and that night, on the car radio, we heard that King had been assassinated. And all of a sudden, the film took on the feel of a racial statement. That was not intended at all. The same things happened to that character when he was white. The posse shot him, because they thought he was a zombie.

Notice, if you read the article, no mention of a Vietnam war tie-in. 

It's a cheap thrill.  I thought the opening scene of massive police violence in Dawn of the Dead might have been conceived in that way but it was so ridiculously over the top that I and my two brothers I saw the movie with  were laughing so hard over how ridiculous it was (people in the theater stared) that it didn't work like that. 

Making a movie to make a social criticism has to count as one of the most expensive, least effective means of doing that ever invented by the pretensions of the entertainment industry and the pathetic pseudo-intellectual tail of that, "criticism".   Critics, about 0.1% of them are worth paying attention to, the rest are just unfriendly. 

Enjoy this while it lasts, Stupes, the new year starts in about nine hours and the party's over, for good. 

Update:   And now he's claiming the absence of George Romero saying that Night of the Living Dead having anything to do with Vietnam confirms his claim that it was an allegory of America during the War in Vietnam.   He really is Trumpian in his dishonesty.    

There's no reason to continue to talk to or about the conceited, mentally deficient, lying Steve Simels or Duncan Black's blog that hosts his lies. As I said, if I could sue both of them for libel, I would, Duncan Black has become exactly what his mentor, the legendary host of the blog Media Whores Online came up with that legendary blog to document and criticize.   It's as post-truth as real media is. 

Duncan doesn't care that the content providers for his blog, the commentators, lie and libel and say the most stupid crap, what he really cares about is people clicking on his blog without Adblock so he'll get ad money, whether they click on his Amazon link so he can get a cut of that, if they'll give him money.  He is a very minor media whore but as Shaw pointed out, he's confirmed what he is, it's just a matter of how much money.   He's an aging Ivy Leaguer preppy boy.  What do you expect?  Integrity?  


Update The Last:  And now he's saying that the soi disant, "auteur" of The Night Of The Living Dead, George Romero's intentions in making HIS movie are irrelevant as to whether or not it's an allegory of America during the Vietnam War.   You could make it up but you'd have to think a lot less hard to do that.  It comes naturally to someone whose mind and absence of morals were the product of TV and crap pop kulcha. 

2 comments:

  1. Sam Goldwyn supposedly said "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."

    I used to think that was a dumb line; now I think it insightful. And having read all Wodehouse's stories, I don't see anything in movies except commerce. Then again, Shakespeare was writing to pay the rent, too.

    And I used to read "Alien" as a Vietnam War allegory. In some ways it was (not an allegory, but certainly a product of a different paranoia); but mostly it was just a horror movie.

    If you don't stick with "Moby Dick" being a whaling yarn, you can wind up with some really stupid analyses.

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    1. That's what I like about theology over fiction, it comes out and says what it's about. I think the pretentious use of fiction misunderstands how people take stuff in. A story is about the plot and the characters, if they're good or trying to be good, it will be about that. If it makes the evil doers sexy and admirable, as so much of the movies do, that's what it's about. When it's just guts and gore and slash and gash, that's what it's about. Night of the Living Dead is a garish guts and gore movie, PLAY is about three awful people in urns rapidly and incoherently talking about the awful things they've done as if they had no choice but to be awful. I'm not sure the existentialists think it's worth the effort to try, I think they wallowed in awfulness, perhaps Camus excepted. Once they found out they could get the kind of vedette treatment as only Paris can give to its soi disant intelletuals, they presented it on stage and on screen for the dull frisson of excitement that it gave for a time. Though the only one I got that from wasn't from Paris, it was Marat/Sade and it didn't take me long to see that was a load of crap. It's essentially pretentious intellectualism marketed like Paris fashion was. It's commerce, too. Arthur Miller, now, as critical as I am of him for teaching generations of Americans that John Proctor was getting it on with a 9-year-old girl there's no evidence he ever so much as talked to her, Arthur Miller has something to him.

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