Red Right Blog |
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Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates. Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?
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Arts & Letters Daily
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Tuesday, July 29, 2003
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester: How old was Bob Hope? So old that Vincent Canby, author of his New York Times obituary, has been dead for three years. I'm not the only one having a hard time believing the byline, either. Maybe the Times can still squeeze another Woody Allen review out of the guy, only appropriate considering Allen's movies these days. [ba-dump chish] Hey how bout that Raquel Welch, isn't she something? Grrrrrrrowl.....One look at her and Ho Chi Minh changed his name to Oh Gee Pleeze...Grrrrrrrrowl. But seriously folks, I'm going to apply for a grant, so I can finally film my dream project, the Bob Hope Alternate-History 1966 Christmas Special, where he entertains GIs on Mars, makes jokes about President Philip Dick, and introduces a special guest from the audience, Marine sharpshooter and interplanetary hero Lee Harvey Oswald. Feel free to contact me directly with contributions. Speaking of great American entertainers, okay, here it is: the Cremaster cycle is a load of shit. Just Google on "Matthew Barney" and "pretentious" and see what you get. The five Cremaster movies are so shallow, so self-involved, so annoying, that official explanations actually make them seem worse: an admittedly effective sequence early on in Cremaster 3 (that is, 15-20 minutes out of a three-hour film) involving an animated female corpse is rendered null for me when I learn the corpse is that of Gary Gilmore (played by Barney in Cremaster 2) magically transformed by death into his female self. This makes even less sense than no explanation, and, folks, I sat through the films in numeric sequence. Barney's admirers will tell you that everything he does must be seen in context, the films being only one element in the entire gesamtkunstwerk which must be judged entirely, but when the "context" is little more than superficial observations about gender and the creative urge (i.e., building a skyscraper is like having an erection, creation and destruction are related, boys are biologically different from girls, etc.), I have to say you're full of bullshit. And is the audience supposed to charitably ignore the technical shabbiness of the earliest-made films: the poor photography, discontinuity, sloppy lip-synching and clumsy editing? THESE MOVIES ARE BORING AND THEY REFER TO LITTLE BUT THEMSELVES! Barney never learned why the cutting-room has a floor, and that audiences are not obligated to sit through every image that happened to pass through his mind; six-and-a-half freaking hours; at best, I see these flicks enduring as "moving wallpaper" running on widescreen monitors for those who can afford them in their homes. Remember, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali (two real artists) made Un Chien Andalou in 1928 and it was a half-hour long...in other words, those guys knew how to hit it and quit it, and allowed the viewer to draw such meaning from the surreal images as he or she might; they never pretended to have some vast personal mythology to promote and commodify. (And Bunuel went on to have an extraordinary career as a narrative film director, putting his gift for disturbing pictures to use in unforgettable, and often brilliantly funny, stories of character and society; I can't see Barney ever coming close to this.) Apologies about the ranting, but after three separate trips to the theater and an outlay of $25.50, I never felt enlightened or opened-up by Barney's work in any way, only that I had endured it. |
