Spring Breakers [2012)

Every American film is a cautionary tale.

David Lynch was the new path forward.

But then something happened.

Jarmusch is good.

But no one on our landscape is important as Harmony Korine.

No one could have made this film but him.

I was mistaken.

I had them wrong all along.

Ashley Benson seemed like the mom.

But she’s just 26.

[Don’t trust entertainment ages.]

I had her for Harmony’s wife the whole time.

Making Faith feel comfortable.

December 18.  Close.

Vanessa Hudgens.

Bingo.  Shares my birthday.

Doesn’t act 27.  But this was four years ago.

Rachel Korine is a real actress.

I can’t find the artist for the shower scene.

Ingres?

It is also Casino Royale.  Eva Green.

But Daniel Craig is behind the camera.

Maybe Rachel is the only one with an honest age.

But I have to give mad props to Selena Gomez for doing this film.

[Did I just say that?]

It’s true.  You have to excuse my thuggee language.

Selena Gomez is brilliant in this film.

Why?  Because she ostensibly survived it.

Is she a great actress?

I don’t know.

Is she even acting at all?

Hard to say.

Hanging with the Korine posse would seemingly drive anyone to tears.

But let’s define.

This milieu…these trappings.  Were/are genius.  Needed to happen.

It’s like Mercury Rev’s second album Boces.

Not something most people will want to revisit often.  [including the band]

Unless you’re bent.

Like me.

So Selena’s an artist.

She’s done one thing in life which will never disappear.

This film.

Chocolate syrup in the squirt gun.

Try it out.  Try it out.

Lots of Pussy Riot.

If you can’t handle the chicken shack, then you’re doomed.

Kinda like me years ago when Uma got stabbed in the heart.

St. Petersburg.

The one in Florida.

Far from Pussy Riot.

A lesser filmmaker (Oliver Stone) would have made Natural Born Killers.

Spring Breakers obliterates that poseur film.

[And Oli’s made a couple great ones.  But that’s not one.]

Let me just add this.

James Franco is all-world in this movie.

It must be seen to be believed.

Come in with no preconceptions.

Because Hollywood makes all actors into crap.

Only a Harmony Korine can save their acting souls.

And there’s only one of him.

So we have Godard.  Korine.  Lynch slumbering.  And the Romanians.

Gotta give some more props to Gucci Mane.

[What?]

That’s some damn good acting.

You wanna know black lives matter?

Even white kids get desperate.

From shitty small towns.

And so the uniquely American version of EXCESS.

It’s cinematic.

All the detritus from the MTV vaults.

So many disposable summers.

Finally put into perspective by a true humanist.  Harmony Korine.

You gotta get real deep to see the layers of meaning from the inside out.

Remember four girls in a pool.

Finally free.

Breathing their own air.

It’s an extreme version.

Of the American dream.

 

-PD

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [1986)

Must admit, I tried watching this a few weeks back.

And it didn’t seem to have aged well.

But I gave it another shot.

This time I made it all the way through.

Because it is, generally, an enjoyable movie.

It was a staple of my youth.

It spoke to me in my niche.

But now certain parts of it seem too sweet.

The kitsch of watching now.

This film has fared less well than some of its rivals.

But let’s talk about the damn thing, shall we?

It’s a John Hughes picture.  He’s the director.

I’ve previously written about him in regards to the finely-aged Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Notice something…

Hughes when he directed our film?  36

Hughes when he directed PT&A?  37

It’s only a year, but it’s a year of prime, working experience.

How about Matthew Broderick?  24

To go from directing a 24-year-old star to directing two stars who were 42 and 27 respectively (Steve Martin and John Candy) is quite a jump.

Plus, Candy looked older than 27…  And Broderick was intended to look younger than 24.

So we can say that the two films were meant for different audiences.

Ferris Bueller was sort of a Rebel Without a Cause for my generation (Generation X).

There are ingenious, Rube Goldberg contraptions employed in Ferris’ skipping school.

I enjoyed Broderick much more in WarGames and so I would like to highlight the talents of some other players here.

Alan Ruck really portrayed a wider range of emotions in our film.  There’s something touching about the crisis through which he is going.

I know it well.  In my own way.

And so in real life, a Ferris Bueller is an indispensable friend.

We can see how quiet personalities need louder ones and vice versa.

Other than the cameo by Charlie Sheen (which is quite good), Mia Sara really carries a large part of the drama.  Most of it is, incidentally, in her facial expressions.

Broderick relies on these nonverbal methods as well, but Sara’s reactions progress the drama in a unique way.

By 1986 (in the midst of the MTV onslaught) most kids had no idea who The Beatles were.  Broderick’s lip-syncing rendition of “Twist and Shout” (Beatles’ version) was also, I imagine, a moment for many young people in the 80s.

I should also mention that Jennifer Grey’s mood improves considerably after she makes out with Charlie Sheen.  Her contribution is indeed special!

Honorable mentions:

-Edie McClurg (who’s also in Trains, Planes and Automobiles…gobble gobble)

-Ben Stein (who gets to deliver the timeless, “Bueller…Bueller…Bueller…Bueller”)

In all, this is a pretty indispensable film.

We all want to break free and do something crazy.  And fun.

That’s the spirit of youth which this film conveys pretty well.

It’s a very unique bit of cinema from a very formulaic time.

If you can make it past the first part with Broderick baby-talking to his parents, then you’re home-free 🙂

 

-PD

 

We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook [2014)

From a group called Independent Media Solidarity comes this excellent exposé concerning what was almost certainly a false flag:  the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting of 2012.

I had researched the topic rather extensively for the simple reason that it happened on my birthday.  There I was headed over the frozen highways of Utah and Colorado and this pall hung over what should have been a more-or-less festive time for me.

The event pulled me in.  It seemed incredible.  And as I followed all of the false leads which came out about the case (espoused by all of the major American media outlets), I began to see that something was terribly amiss.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Back to the film at hand.

What we are talking about here is essentially a YouTube phenomenon.

The Independent Media Solidarity group have produced quite a professional piece of work.

The documentary’s setting is Newtown, Connecticut.

Ah, Newtown…

It’s sort of like Scrabble.  James Brunot.

And it’s definitely like the phantasmic “Woodchipper Murder” (the basis for the Coen Brothers’ Fargo).

Charles Ives might have called it the Housatonic at Stockbridge.

Robert Underwood Johnson.

Sandy Hook is a community within Newtown.

Newtown counts among its progeny the “Father of Robotics” Joseph Engelberger.

So too Renata Adler (who famously ripped Pauline Kael).

Perhaps most notably (as Dr. Steve Pieczenik has pointed out), the town counts among its residents Suzanne Collins (author of The Hunger Games trilogy).

Collins even lives in the Sandy Hook portion of Newtown (where our massacre ostensibly occurred).

Yet Collins has given no statement.

If this had been a real event (the “school shooting”), then Collins would have been among the first likely to be interviewed.  This seems to be the point Pieczenik made some weeks back on the esteemed Dr. James Tracy’s radio show Real Politik.

But we push on through the parade:

-Charles Goodyear (rubber vulcanization)

-Caitlyn Jenner (actually, quite an interesting angle given the media blitz surrounding her and Sandy Hook)

-Elia Kazan (the genius sell-out…and most germane to my subject)

-Mead Treadwell (very interesting angle, but he’s a Republican).

What we mostly find is a lot of power.

Newtown.

About 27,000 residents.

U.S. Congressmen.  Connecticut governors.  Dept. of Justice.  U.S. Treasury.

A well-heeled community.  A bedroom community for New York City.

Then there’s Sherman…three-time mayor of Chicago.

And, perhaps most of all, an inordinate number of children’s authors.

But the pithy name we need to understand the film under consideration is that of graffiti artist Emit.

Yes, we have to take a different logic to understand this new brand of filmmaking.

These are filmmakers who dig deep.

They seek to understand Robert Crafts and how he could put his wife Helle Crafts through a woodchipper at Lake Zoar.

Maybe hoaxing goes all the way back to Luther Meade Blackman in the town of Sandy Hook.  Blackman was accused of forging the Bat Creek inscription (an engraving on a dubious Native American artifact unearthed by the Smithsonian [actually, Bureau of American Ethnology] in Tennessee in 1889).

Our auteurs first focus on the Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown.  It was the setting for the Hollywood film Sleepers in 1996 (a mere one year after the facility [of 1930s vintage] was closed).

Our auteurs further flesh out the tale of Fairfield Hills by relating the story of MTV’s Fear television show (which filmed at the abandoned mental hospital in the tunnels beneath the facility).

The point is that, for all of Fairfield Hills’ psychiatric crypticism, Sandy Hook suddenly replaced the sanatorium as the town’s defining mystery.

It is at this point which we meet the protagonist (who may or may not have actually existed):  Adam Lanza.

Dr. Steve Pieczenik asserts (elsewhere) that Lanza indeed did not exist.

Nevertheless, we are presented with the mainstream cover story (a bit like Lee Harvey Oswald’s or that of the 19 hijackers).

Adam Lanza.  Autistic.

Vs. equally dubious characters like Natalie Hammond (celebrated at a Boston Bruins’ game).

Nancy Lanza.  Dead in bed.

I will admit that the footage of Robbie Parker really started to make me suspicious.

Our auteurs point out that all of the parents (who got copious primetime news coverage) display characteristics at odds with truly grieving parents.

In other words, none of them are very good (crisis) actors.

That is the realization we are faced with:  these are crisis actors.

Valley girl reactions.

The laughing coroner.

All of these personages seem nervous.  Not comfortable in their own skin.

Is it perhaps because they are playing the roles of their lives?

They would, therefore, be breaking the law to a significant extent by helping to foist this false narrative on the American public.

Is this real world or exercise?

Ah, now we are getting somewhere.

Because once you get to the bottom of one of these false events, you are able to chop through the BS of other similar events with a metaphorical machete.

Why should you watch this film?

Because one of the parents (Lenny Pozner) has apparently been harassing Independent Media Solidarity [going so far as to hack or have hacked their Google Drive].  Oops…

https://memoryholeblog.com/2016/03/13/public-service-announcement-from-ims-unauthorized-access/

Dr. James Tracy lost his tenured position at Florida Atlantic University for standing up to the media barrage of senselessness which narrowly-framed the Sandy Hook debate.  Tracy has made it very clear that Pozner and his HONR Network (think Jewish Defense League…terrorizing the targets of their opprobrium) are a stalking Internet gang inconsistent with grieving parents.  The dialogue between HONR Network group members (which has been exposed at Tracy’s Memory Hole Blog, the ostensible reason for his termination from FAU) can be characterized as being more like a band of hired thugs than true vigilantes.  In other words, their essence is the real terror of a fake terror event.  They are the clean-up crew.

https://memoryholeblog.com/2016/01/08/lenny-pozners-honr-network-the-fine-art-of-online-stalking-and-harassment/

The mastermind of Independent Media Solidarity appears to be a YouTube user named “mrstosh314”.  “MrStosh” pops up again as one of three credited producers of the follow-up to We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook (that being The Life of Adam [another great documentary which I hope to review soon enough]).

Other excellent contributors to We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook include:

-Sherrie QuestioningAll

-Swan Song (editor of insanemedia.net) [whose voice sounds a lot like that of David Knight from infowars.com]

-TyrannyNewsNetwork

-Odinrok

-FreeRadioRevolution

-Sandy Hook Research

-Professor Doom1

-QKUltra

-UpNorthOfThe49th

[keep in mind that these are all YouTube “handles”]

To clarify, the end credits list MrStosh314 as writer and director of this film (which is slightly at odds with the ad hoc structure presented).  Regardless, his efforts are much appreciated.  I wasn’t sure (until I checked further) whether he was the same person as Peter Klein (another of the listed producers for The Life of Adam).  [It seems he is not.]  As even Lenny Pozner acknowledged in a pilfered series of messages, Klein “has skills”.  Of course, Pozner doesn’t entirely break character.  Talented but “evil”.

That’s the pot kettle black.

 

-PD