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It's very late, so I'm not going to go into detail, but I had to take Gloria to the movies today. Summer is not my movie season. It's full of car chases, explosions, and dumb cartoons. We ended up watching "Cars.' This movie is really well done. For once the cg is luminous and colorful, not weirdly grey and muted. It's also visually and kinetically very complex and rich and layered.
But it's corrupt at the core. It's essentially a pandering movie. The teamwork and true love gloss is just a surface polish. What the movie is really about is celebrating all the ick of the 20th century -- the monstrous petroleum gluttony, the insane drive to pave everything (yes, I know, the movie champions the old Route 66 over and against Highway 40, but look what we're supposed to be nostalgic for! Pavement and neon and what amounts to vast swathes of desecration of the desert).
At this point someexasperation can be heard and somebody says "It's just a movie for dog's dake. You're over analyzing and politicizing something that's really only innocent cartooning."
There's no such thing as an innocent Disney movie, okay? There's something to this movie, with its establishing shots of the huge Southern Nascar race track, and the opening dialog heavily emphasizing the Southernness of it all (dang, I don't want to cvome out against the ideas of a "southern culture," but why do they keep piling dreck on the the feast? Do I have to accept this crud in return for The Oxford Magazine and good music? What if I don't want to accept it?). There's something to it, with innocent, cute automobiles guzzling their oil and gas. There's something to it, with the racial stereotypes -- racial stereotypes? on cars? Can't they give these cars personality without racial stereotypes?
So, corrupt at the core. And, after all that, it still has a lot of car crashes and car chases.
On another front, Frank tickled the printer settings so I can print from Word Perfect again, so the ms of The Conduit is printed out and ready to go to its new destination. I have a cover letter almost finished.
And last: I have what Frank assures me is a mosquito bite most likely begind my right ear. It's so painful I can't describe it. It's just a hard place right under the skin, at about where the skull and the neck join, and just an inch or so behind the right ear. Did I say it hurts a lot? And, finally, to bed.
But it's corrupt at the core. It's essentially a pandering movie. The teamwork and true love gloss is just a surface polish. What the movie is really about is celebrating all the ick of the 20th century -- the monstrous petroleum gluttony, the insane drive to pave everything (yes, I know, the movie champions the old Route 66 over and against Highway 40, but look what we're supposed to be nostalgic for! Pavement and neon and what amounts to vast swathes of desecration of the desert).
At this point someexasperation can be heard and somebody says "It's just a movie for dog's dake. You're over analyzing and politicizing something that's really only innocent cartooning."
There's no such thing as an innocent Disney movie, okay? There's something to this movie, with its establishing shots of the huge Southern Nascar race track, and the opening dialog heavily emphasizing the Southernness of it all (dang, I don't want to cvome out against the ideas of a "southern culture," but why do they keep piling dreck on the the feast? Do I have to accept this crud in return for The Oxford Magazine and good music? What if I don't want to accept it?). There's something to it, with innocent, cute automobiles guzzling their oil and gas. There's something to it, with the racial stereotypes -- racial stereotypes? on cars? Can't they give these cars personality without racial stereotypes?
So, corrupt at the core. And, after all that, it still has a lot of car crashes and car chases.
On another front, Frank tickled the printer settings so I can print from Word Perfect again, so the ms of The Conduit is printed out and ready to go to its new destination. I have a cover letter almost finished.
And last: I have what Frank assures me is a mosquito bite most likely begind my right ear. It's so painful I can't describe it. It's just a hard place right under the skin, at about where the skull and the neck join, and just an inch or so behind the right ear. Did I say it hurts a lot? And, finally, to bed.
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Speed is fun. Racing around and making noise is fun. The whole thing could have been done so differently, with only a little effort, and could even have pandered to the stupid car culture, and still have been not so thoroughly corrupt.
The thing that really puzzles me is that a few years ago Nascar was dying as it ought to. But there's been a concerted effort on all sides to shore it up and convince the nation that we care about it, that we identify as working-class people with the (outrageously wealthy) top stars of this stupid sport, and that it's somehow patriotic and anti-terrorist to buy Nascar souvenirs.
It's all about the oil, again, right? Like George W Bush telling an audience that the war in Afghanistan (at the time) was about securing them the right to have jet skis.