The Road - (11/26/09)
If an actual, physical, American road is the most apt symbol for the trajectory of United States culture and civilization, from Lewis and Clark’s pragmatic and disciplined forging across the North American continent, to Jack Kerouac’s open road of modern bohemianism, then the film The Road symbolically plots that trajectory across a not only dead, but entirely decomposed landscape where humans are reduced to such a primordial need for survival, concepts like tragedy and cruelty are as numbingly distant as morality and kindness. And if the final destination of that metaphorical road is an equally dead and empty ocean, the paradoxical origin of this planet’s life in totality, then this film was a faithfully executed exploration of the most untrammelled nihilism, completely devoid of both the covertly narcissistic phenomenon of ennui, and any conventional cinematic representations of good and evil.
2012 (11/14/09)
Whereas watching the USS John F. Kennedy ride a tsunami and plow right through the White House might have made Malcolm X grin (in a wry, America’s chickens are coming home to roost but on a cosmic scale sort of way), I found that a limousine swerving, jumping, squeezing underneath and basically outrunning computer generated imagery is only slightly less annoying than contrived and recycled lines like “What are you waiting for, go now!” However, if Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor are going to make Africa their base camp while they repopulate the planet, you can count me first in line.
A Serious Man (11/04/09)
While the evangelical community of the United States spreads the good news of the dry-cleaned and spotless “prosperity” version of the Love of God every Sunday with live amplified music and internet video feeds, the Coen Brothers craft a pathologically disquieting examination of the existentially transmogrified despair that is modern American Judaism. And as far as viewers being attached to an emotionally and spiritually redemptive denouement, how does “F#*k off” grab you?
