You can call this bragging and don’t have to believe it. I got my start sorting the sublime from the repulsive at the tender age of seven. Hanging out at a slightly older boy’s house, let’s call him Mike, is when and where my standards erupted. It was the day that bloodthirsty intolerance for ugly expressions first got stoked.
The Herman’s Hermits song “Mrs. Brown You’ve got a Lovely Daughter” came on the radio. Our host felt that the Hermit’s needed accompaniment. He also seemed to believe his guests would be keen on it. My first impulse was to bolt. But the adult capacity to grin while enraged strangely came over me. The delectable snacks the mother of that house was known to lay out stopped a hasty exit from happening. It is absolutely degrading what a preteen will go through for a first-class pastry.
It’d be too cruel describing Mike’s stab at matching Scouse, Mancunian or whatever you call Peter Noone’s dialect crooning that sappy goo. Hearing “Daw-tuh” from the kid only once would bring violent emotions out of a baby-cuddly golden retriever. Dramatizing his noises busting moves extinguished any lingering traces of pity in an instant. There was a Tonka toy dump truck on the floor nearby; it looked perfect for the purpose of justifiable homicide. My brain already had a bit of a legal turn. One snag stood in the way of permanently silencing Michael. Without hearing from him themselves, could a jury be convinced of how justifiable, humane and necessary his elimination actually was? It was chicken, but I kept on grinning instead.
As years have passed, both my rationality and self-restraint have seriously eroded from those innocent days. Distance from the objects of my disgust is all that has kept me this side of the penitentiary. Society pays the price when the sensate among us cower in the face of artistic atrocity. The depravity has gone so far that aesthetic crimes against humanity are funded by governments in the name of enlightenment.
During the postwar renaissance somewhere between half and a full day’s pay – in a menial job – could place a teenybopper within fifty feet of a performing musical genius. Now, they fork out 6, 7 or 8 days pay for sounds resembling the kind Mike inflicted. And the people calling themselves critics keep cheering them on.
In 1975 a kid working an 8-hour shift at McDonald’s earned $16.80. For no more labor he could see Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones or Jethro Tull with money left for hot dogs and soda. Today, people with college degrees put in a full week, or more, for acts that may merit less than Tonka toy treatment but should certainly not go unpunished. When perv-formers go to jail for statutory, extortion or shooting each other, it is not necessarily their worst crimes being penalized.
As this is written the top five Spotified artists are Bruno Mars, Lady Gag-Gag, The Weaknd, Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish. Bruno will playing in Vegas. You can see him, from the next county, for $329. The Lady is on at Madison Square Garden at rates ranging from $456 to $5500. With those price ranges you can envision how far out of range the peasantry will reside – a good ear might not mind. In 1975 you could almost touch the amps for ten bucks. Presently, with extra fees and taxes accounted for, it takes more than two days for even Californians toiling the trenches to be skied. Make that more than four in most other states. The conciliation is that amp static is only somewhat distinguishable from the “music.” In a decade, will anybody be streaming command performers from the reeking 20s of the early 21st century? People still crank up Patsy Cline six decades later.
If only the purge of pulchritude was restricted to the audio-sphere. It is easier today for a physically handicapped person to traverse a Japanese TV game show obstacle course successfully, than it is for an unconnected peon to get his script before a Hollywood producer or director. What do all these hoops and hurdles do for the cause of decent drama getting screened?
After falling asleep in the first one, going to John Wick: Chapter 4 was an act of time-to-kill desperation goaded by reviews like this from Collider:
It’s official – John Wick: Chapter 4 has taken the Keanu Reeves action franchise to new heights. At the time of writing, the film has become the top-rated film of the entire franchise as far as Rotten Tomatoes critics scores go – it’s also become the first in the series to crack the 90% barrier, currently sitting at 93% after a love-bombing from film critics.
Numerous other reviewers called it “unpredictable.” How many times do you have to head butt a sports arena wall without a helmet, like Gus Ferotte did in Jack Kent Coke stadium in 1997 with one, to find a guy doing cartwheels while making impossible pistol shots not moronic? We also hear of “plot twists.” Like what? Being found inexplicably while on the lam at every turn? Or surviving getting shot more times than both Bonnie and Clyde? Meanwhile, Wick’s foes run the gamut of occupations from desert sheiks to sushi slicers. How many chapters before a knitting grandma goes at him with her needles?
Elsewhere Denzel Washington intersperses actual acting, like in Roman J. Israel, Esq., with playing an unarmed codger crushing half-a-dozen athletic 25-year-olds training ordnance on him in multiple Equalizer inflictions. Screenwriters must spend all afternoon assembly lining these schlock-fests. For every time Robert McCall looks at his watch, watchers in theaters with functioning gray matter have look at theirs 3 more.
Of course, not all action flickery follows the same unpredictable routine. We are inundated with others where it’s family hit men trying to retire. Alas, those who live by the sword. Fortunately, they never lose their edges. It comes in handy as beleaguered heroes unpredictably vanquish forces the size of army divisions in finales. Imagine the frustration of script readers spiking treatments that so unoriginally fail to include this mandatory parting shot.
You might find the latest from Tom Cruise hard, if not an impossible mission, to sit through too. The first hour of the latest one features Ethan Hunt fawned over as the savior of mankind by everyone from the president on down. It’s like the slobbering of an Operating Thetan in the presence of L. Ron himself. Who needs supernatural superheroes when we’ve got Ethan Hunt? If he hasn’t matched every super-human deed of immortals yet, wait a few more sequels.
But what about serious drama? That’ll get us closer to brutal reality. The latest blockbuster in ’thinking man’s film,’ The Brutalist, has done a double layout with a full twist over the orca. It’s more of a ‘what were they thinking’ film.
Only a nincompoop asks why a world renowned architect leaves New York City to sweep floors in a Podunk furniture store. What fascist forces keep the land of the free from knowing who this junkie genius is? Pliant viewers are expected to walk in already aggrieved for wounded prodigies who might have to slug it out like those hideous common Americans. The film’s model, Marcel Breuer, never endured anything close. The filmmakers rely on the general dearth of erudition evident in themselves – and expected from audiences — doing this 180.
Deep in Penn’s Woods Lazlo Toth, the protagonist, works for Cousin Attila who has been Christianized by a shrill shiksa wife. She’s a catty Catholic whose Hitlerian Hebrew-phobia is soon revealed. What kind of woman, other than a nascent Nazi, has a problem when a guy misses the toilet by three feet? Put her name up there next to Irma Grese.
In the meantime, our hero is cheated out of his fee for remodeling a library by Harrison Lee Van Buren. The gauche tycoon is later peer pressured by the smart set into liking the new space. He tracks down the man he stiffed for what turns out to be new, improved exploitation. After rescuing Laz from penury Van Buren introduces the architectural genius to society. What else could be next but a commission to design a multi-million dollar contract?
Then, true to form, the gentile town council pulls a fast one on a Holocaust survivor. The community center they’ve commissioned him to draw up must also fill the role of defining local faith. Lazlo brilliantly positions a skylight to shine a crucifix on the altar at noon. That’s a plot untwist necessary for anyone slow enough to have missed the message of exclusion viewers were hosed down with for the first 60 minutes.
The uncircumcised, who were often circumcised in the era, weren’t done with him yet. If Harrison junior can’t have Lazlo’s taciturnly traumatized niece … wasn’t there other prey in the family? When Sr. takes Toth to Tuscany pursuing marble comes the TMI moment from hell. The master builder succumbs to local revelry. Once all liquored up and staggering into the tunneled quarry is when old Harry makes his move. Like Simon Legree with Cassy, Van Buren will have his way with the servants. The next morning the sodomizee looks none the worse for wear and tear. He says “yes boss” quicker than Paul Newman blackjacked by Strother Martin. It comes as a surprise when Toth’s wife turns out to know hubby was raped. The audience didn’t even know Lazlo did. Going by the narrative depicted, did he really mind?
Aint’ that the West writ large? First they Holocaust him, then strong-arm his genius for callous Christianity and finally let him have it like a bitch-boy in the prison shower. Don’t commit the hate crime of thinking that doesn’t summarize US welcome of Holocaust survivors to a T. The only safe question is why Hollywood hasn’t confronted America with their collective guilt before now.
It is during the picnic where Harry Jr. can’t get his grimy paws on Toth niece Zsofia, when the brutal “truth” comes out. Putting Lazlo and family up and back in business, including him in Van Buren outings while providing opportunity no one else does … is really begrudgingly ”tolerating” the despised immigrant. Why, they’ve turned the Statue of Liberty upside down! Persecuted wunderkind’s only respite is a spike of euphoric horse in the arm.
It’s time to incorporate didactic messages from the enlightened. If you can’t find a way to be gay, black, trans, Jewish, Muslim, handicapped and female simultaneously … when’s the next Nuremberg Tribunal? It’ll be womanned by Joy Reid, Randi Weingarten and Al Sharpton. Calling out The Brutalist for being as inanely silly as it is, is quite verboten. We are expected to stand in awe …cuz finally we see what we really are.
Saying that there isn’t the vaguest resemblance in this tall tale to anyone’s experience ever misses the point. The audio-visual branch of the victim industry’s role eradicating hate entails manufacture of an ersatz reality coining more villains to hate. The notion that Lazlo Toth would be an object of homoerotic allure to a Daddy Warbucks like Harrison Van Buren is a shock to the senses. Whatever your taste or persuasion, that genuine plot twist would have kept Lot’s wife from looking back.
We’ve reached the point where you have to get really high to get high art. The pretentiousness of professional critics has weaseled its way into commerce. It can be costly telling clients that what they’ve been told about The Brutalist – and better believe to qualify as culturally hip — makes no sense. When prospects say otherwise it’s necessary to grin like I did at seven. Nobody wants to miss out on the treats.
