Tag Archives: Boogie Nights

Boogie Nights [1997)

Something big is going down.

A country is getting taken down.

And that country is the USA.

It is getting taken down using methods suspiciously-similar to those used by the CIA in their regime change activities around the world.

Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile…

You know their work.

But this time it’s different.

Just as the American intelligence community was weaponized by President Barack Obama against Presidential candidate (and President-Elect) Donald Trump, so is the Deep State (chockfull of former CIA officers) now attempting to bring down the United States to save their asses.

Does China have any reason to attempt to totally destroy the United States AT THIS TIME?

No.  [but they are a part of (willing accomplice to) the takedown]

Does Russia have any reason to attempt to totally destroy the United States AT THIS TIME?

No.

Is there any intelligence organization in the world capable of orchestrating the total war to which the United States has been subjected over the past three months?

Only China and Russia.

And perhaps Israel.

But Israel has absolutely no reason to attempt to depose their greatest ally (Donald Trump).

Iran does not have the capability or sophistication.

Nor does North Korea.

[and North Korea, even if they had the capability (which they do not), has no reason to run a regime change campaign against the most formidable counterintelligence apparatus in the world AT THIS TIME]

And so that leaves us but one “country”:  a country within a country.

The American (Globalist) Deep State.

It is almost synonymous with the CIA.

And the CIA’s methods and signatures are all over the multi-pronged onslaught we have witnessed these past months.

It’s not necessary at this time to point out the biggest players.

Soros?  Yes.

The Clintons?  Yes.

Obama?  Yes.

Bill Gates?  Yes.

What is most important is to locate the quarterback.

And that man is (in my opinion) none other than former Director of the CIA John Brennan.

There are other traitors involved.

But let’s outline the structure of what we have endured:

  1.  Biological Warfare–Here, China sacrificed one of its own cities [Wuhan] to create plausible deniability that they were in any way waging offensive BIOWAR.  As China miraculously shielded the rest of ITS country from COVID-19, they made sure the virus made it (in droves) to the homeland of their arch nemesis:  the USA
  2. Economic Warfare–Here, the Deep State (with a giddy China looking on) watched as the U.S. economy ground to a halt because of COVID-19.  Record unemployment.  All economic activity ceased.  The greatest economy on Earth was ruined (for the time being).  Each U.S. citizen received a pittance of $1,200 which has not been enough to really sustain anyone.
  3. Psychological Warfare–The masses of Americans were told to stay home.  They were cooped up in their houses for two months.  They had nothing to do.  No place to go.  Underlying depressions and anxieties were exponentially amplified.  The populace grew frustrated.  Most of all, the PANIC was conveyed daily by news organizations with heavy connections to the CIA and Democratic Party.  This propaganda terrorized the populace into being afraid to leave their homes–being afraid even to breathe.
  4. Divide and Conquer–Whether the death of George Floyd was a real or synthetic (staged) event, the news coverage would have been the same.  In terms of planning, it is likely that the event never took place at all.  But for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that a man named George Floyd actually did die as a result of an incompetent and cruel police officer.  Magically, the big bogeyman (COVID-19) WAS COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN.  All of a sudden, the pent-up rage and frustration and poverty (see #3 and #2) were activated.  This is the “match in a tinderbox” scenario.  After two months of wall-to-wall coverage of the coronavirus (which ostensibly killed 100,000 Americans by Memorial Day), ALL OF A SUDDEN…THE LIFE OF ONE MAN (george floyd) has become more important than the lives of the 100,000 coronavirus victims (assuming that death toll is accurate [which it is not…it is grossly-inflated]).

So what we have here is a VERY SOPHISTICATED campaign designed to remove Donald Trump from the Presidency.  Worst case scenario (for the Deep State), it is supposed to prevent him from being reelected.

It is also a last-ditch effort to save the asses of those Deep State members whose treason has been pinpointed and for whom justice may not be far off:

-Loretta Lynch

-Sally Yates

-John Brennan*

-James Clapper

-James Comey

-Andrew McCabe

-Bruce Ohr

-James Baker [FBI]

-Peter Strzok

-Lisa Page

-Rod Rosenstein

-Susan Rice

It is my guess that these will be the first pawns to fall.

John Brennan is very important.

More than a pawn (in some ways).

But still a pawn.

How deep will this go?

Barack Obama?

Hillary Clinton?

Bill Gates?

George Soros?

So much depends on each move in this chess game.

Which brings us to Boogie Nights.

There’s a riot goin’ on.

Each of us has a gift.

Heather Graham is great here.

Mark Wahlberg does a really nice job.

We get the Corvette.

Symbol of summer.

Porn with “plots”.

An admirable pursuit.

Burt Reynolds is really phenomenal in this film.

But like Lovelace, this tale of sexual freedom gets darker and darker as it goes along.

You got the touch.

Feel, feel, feel, feel my heat.

Darker and darker.

But very real.

There is a great realism to certain scenes here.

Paul Thomas Anderson really does an amazing job with this one.

Even the usually-vapid Julianne Moore has some actual moments of artful acting herein.

They’re taking her children away.

Black people can like country music.

Definitely a bit of Tarantino in the donut shop scene.

But Anderson is a far superior director to QT.

QT is very talented, but very overrated.

Lots of hype…very little timeless filmmaking.

Anderson is a much more solid auteur.

There is something of Aronofsky here too.

Funny thing is, Anderson got there first.

But Requiem for a Dream goes MUCH DEEPER into drug darkness.

And yet, Anderson paints a portrait of a period of time.

So vividly.

And the colors are washed out.

The soul-eating burn of cocaine is depicted as it really is:  torrid.

Desperate.

Exciting.

Elusive.

Utterly destructive.

Psychosis-inducing.

How many more nights will the “divide and conquer” boogie?

Military police.

82nd Airborne.

101st Airborne.

1st Infantry.

10th Mountain Division.

The United States is under attack…mainly from within.

China played a small (though not insignificant) role.

The main culprits are liberal globalists.

4B.

A second wave of coronavirus will hit the U.S.

This will happen as a result of the fake-news media pushing the narrative that one man’s death (george floyd) is more important than 100,000 ostensible fatalities.

The CIA/liberal media is distracting the country from being vigilant about hand washing, social distancing, etc.

And when will this second wave hit?

Right before November 3rd, perhaps?

 

-PD

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Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me [1999)

This one is painful.  No getting around it.

Mike Myers is a very talented guy, but this film is seriously lacking in creativity.

I get it…  The James Bond series is very formulaic, but a spoof franchise can’t afford to be so predictable.

And thus it is little wonder that Austin Powers only lasted three installments.

But to be fair, let’s give this film a chance.

Austin starts out learning that his luck was too good to be true.

Elizabeth Hurley.  Not a professional model until age 29.

Speaks of a certain beauty.  Timeless.

Perhaps.

Daughter of Angela Mary Titt (!)…you can’t make this stuff up.

Bruce Beresford cast Hurley in Aria (1987) [a compilation film which happened to feature a vignette by my idol Jean-Luc Godard].

Aria was her debut.

Ok, enough about Hurley. She’s not in much of this film, but I really did her a disservice by completely failing to mention her performance in the first Austin Powers movie.  Really, she is a fine actress and her contribution to that movie was significant and impressive.

By now you may be noticing that the current film under consideration (installment two) must be quite a clunker for me to be going on about an actress who appears in about ten minutes of this feature.

If you have surmised thusly, you have surmised correctly.

Moving on…

There are moments in this movie when things briefly coalesce.  Dr. Evil’s headquarters atop The Space Needle hosts one such moment.  The schadenfreude I felt as a patron of a particularly lackluster Starbucks (watch the movie) was, in this scene, among the highlights of a rather limp film.

There is, of course, the addition of the 2′ 8″ Verne Troyer in this installment.  Troyer does a fine job as Mini-Me.

Even the Fat Bastard character is entertaining (up to a point).

I suppose that is the M.O. of the Austin Powers franchise: to go beyond the limits of ridiculousness and good taste.

When it works, it’s quite special.  When it doesn’t (as in most of this film), it’s a rather tragic affair.

Unfortunately, Rob Lowe is not really allowed to shine in this film.  His comedic gifts deserved better.

One player who makes the most of her small role is Kristen Johnston.  Kudos to her for making the sport of chess as exciting and bizarre as Marcel Duchamp and Henry Miller would have done had they wound up in this shambles of a film.

And now on to the bright spot of the film:  Heather Graham.

Yes, I know…I know.

Though it’s not as powerful as her breathtaking performance in Boogie Nights, it’s not a bad performance.

No…far from it.

Graham takes the charm of Elizabeth Hurley and ratchets it up a few notches.

But the story…oy vey, the story.  Really, there is no story.  The same story.

It’s pretty sad when a spy spoof is less entertaining than a Bond clunker such as Moonraker.

Back to Graham…anyone who’s dated Adam Ant is alright in my book.

Pushing onwards…

Dr. Evil at least happens upon the perfect name for his doomsday laser:  The Alan Parsons Project.

Like the evil Starbucks Space Needle, it is one of few highlights.

One of the few storyline threads to come through intact is the one involving Powers’ mojo.

Unfortunately, the naïvete of enlightenment which somehow alighted upon the first Austin Powers film is not present here to sustain the promising premise of mojo lost and found.

Strangely, the series itself seemingly lost its mojo in this its sophomore slump.

There’s one final twist at the end involving Fat Bastard.  For a moment the film threatens to redeem itself.

But alas, as they say…

-PD

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Winter of Frozen Dreams [2009)

What a beautiful title…like Bashō, Li Po, or even François Villon.  In this age of over-medication, we hear of new disorders every day (accompanied by ridiculous commercials we have to endure with relatives at Christmastime).  Of special note in these cold days is seasonal affective disorder.  It’s legend as something independent of general depression lives on as most people do not have the DSM-IV or DSM-5 by their bedside.

And so, “with seasonal pattern” there are many of us who struggle especially in the wintery days of the year…especially if we feel our dreams have been suspended.  Ah, suspended animation…it can be beautiful…like insects caught in amber (that Greek touchstone which lends our word “electricity” an etymology).  Static electricity and ēlektron (the classical name for amber)…  Such irony that flies and gnats would meet their demise drowned in the same substance…and countless days later we wonder at the beauty of their death.  It is one of the few times death can be generally agreed on as beautiful.  In the spider frozen in amber, we marvel at the beauty of the creature.  Their life is preserved.  While they have ceased to exist as a living creature, their form lives on through the sepia light which attests to them having existed.  Grammar becomes difficult in such a state of was/is/will be.

But alas, as they say, this film is not really a poetic tour de force.  It is, however, a time capsule which presents a haunting portrait of the northern U.S. in the late-’70s.  One wonders whether the props department of Boogie Nights was lifted whole-cloth (!) as the action unfolds during this strange movie.  Indeed, it is more strange than haunting.  It is not frightening or repulsive like a Silence of the Lambs, but rather disjunct like a lesser cousin of Mulholland Dr.

I do not want to disparage this film because it is actually quite good, but I must admit that my sole reason for watching was to see Thora Birch act.  Thora was the first actress I ever fell in love with.  We all have our celebrity crushes.  She was/is mine.  Her trio of films American Beauty, Ghost World, and Homeless to Harvard (a Lifetime “joint”) was really an acting triumph which I can only compare to Bob Dylan’s trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  I know it sounds ridiculous to say so, but Birch directed those three films as much as did their auteurs/metteurs en scène.  Call it la politique…in reverse…unlike King Midas…

This film presents a problem in its representation on Wikipedia.  After viewing a film, I like to recall what I’ve just seen.  Wikipedia is good for that, but not in this case.  It’s as if this film was a Falconetti one-reeler from 1916 and not an American feature from 2009.  In this dearth of information, one begins to suspect that Thora’s claims of having been forgotten and overlooked after Ghost World might just be right on the money.  That’s where film critics step in.  Though it be five years late and $991,679 short, I can (with my little voice) once again assert that Thora is an acting genius.

Poor Eric Mandelbaum…his name isn’t even a hypertext link on Wiki, but he did a fine job here painting a snow-drift picture of the not-so-old, weird America.  Dan Moran at least has a dead link (empty page).  The trouble with Harry, that!

All jokes aside, Brandon Sexton III is very convincing as the bearded, lonely Jerry.  His stoic visage becomes as much a motif as Birch’s radiant beauty over the film’s course.  Poor Jerry gets duped into some accessory to murder business…we think.  None of it is very clear.  Based on the true story of Barbara Hoffman, this tale plays with time and the facts like Lynch directing Pynchon.  I can’t help but wonder if PTA’s Inherent Vice might converge with this film in some way…no doubt at a locale with an angry cropduster.

Keith Carradine is good here (resembling Burt Lancaster in Field of Dreams).  Also good is Colleen Camp in the small role as Jerry’s mother.  There are scenes of unspeakable sadness and ennui at the dinner table and near the end as she takes the phone call.  We sense a connection to Ellen Burstyn’s performance in Requiem for a Dream (with the mise-en-scène of a Harmony Korine).

One thing is certain: my little piece of shit website shall always sing the praises of one Miss Thora Birch.

-PD

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