Saturday, April 27, 2019

ENDGAME SUCKS HARD ENOUGH TO VACUUM YOUR CARPET

Image result for AVENGERS ENDGAME SUCKS
The fact of the matter is Avengers: Endgame brings the first phase of the Marvel movie saga to a close, all eleven years of overlapping superhero movies in an exhausting connected universe. The shared universe is exhausting, yet, but also exhausted, as in a tired, used up, of gas, predictable. Though the fanboy in each of us wants superhero movies, as a genre, to remain fresh and diverting and, like The Western or the Horror film, to remain a lively genre for writers and producers to delve into, Marvel products, at the second half of their decade-long run at least, have gone from fresh and spunky and reflecting lively energy to being a predictable set of plot motions, no less so, say, than later seasons of Law and Order where longtime viewers can literally count the beats of each scene, know what cues will signify a crucial piece of evidence, how long one has to wait for the Surprise Twist. 

For all the expensive gloss, impressive professionalism, an authentic sense of humor, and a surfeit of superb actors doing outstanding work while wearing spandex costumes, the movies, all 21 of them, including Endgame, seem less and less engaged with a big story, the unfolding of a saga, the moral dilemmas that arise when good vs. evil than they do with becoming more manic, chattier, glibber, frenetic to no natural effect; the present movie takes up nearly three hours cramming in as many characters as possible, from all the film, citing plot points from many films to prove, again, that these stories are connected, and, perhaps reflective of the sense as mentioned above of exhaustion that has pervaded many of Marvel's releases in the half-decade, there is much desultory discussion, digressions, and disquisitions among the characters about how tired they are, how disillusioned they are becoming, how hard it all seems. It leaves unsaid how bored the performances seem, bored to the bone. 

To spirit things along, to pick up the pace, they expected set pieces and the scheduled appearance of every MCU hero from the 11 years of movies. This makes me think of nothing less than Fibber McGee's Closet, a closet so far beyond capacity that a chance opening of the door threatens a city-wide catastrophe. There is much summing up, explaining, complaining, and large chunks of shtick. They mean us to have a teary-eyed farewell to characters we've come to love as this chapter of the Marvel Universe closes, and they pass the torch on to the next generation of costumed clods. The manipulation of audience emotion was as ham-handed as the pacing was lead-footed. 

This three-hour ordeal just made me wish everyone on the screen would die and we could all go home at last. The hard fact is that Avengers Endgame is less entertaining than watching a dog pinch a loaf on your front lawn. It is an awful movie.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

The public fool who might flog us next?

It's  a rather too -easy to exaggerate the virtues of a renegade celebrity when they finally pass on and glide into whatever ethereal after-existence one conspires to imagine, citing some usually short-lived early insights into the layers of falseness and bad faith that saps us of our virtues, and turning a blind eye and a deaf ear when our late hypothetical rebel went sour, became hackneyed, had exhausted all freshness of approach. We don't want our iconic iconoclasts to lose their reputation as relevant sayers of truth. The irony, of course, is that our collective mourning and remembrance wraps the departed with the same kind of wrap of cliche and truisms the truth teller sought to dispel; strange, wouldn't it seem, that the efforts of a Twain, a Thompson, a Richard Pryor or a Bill Hicks did nothing really to bring their generations to clarity and purpose, but only gave the old apologies a new coat of paint?

That's the dilemma when one sets themselves up as a speaker of truth to power, as it were; in print one risks the charge of seeming shrill and paranoid, effectively marginalizing any effect one might have had on the discourse,and for the comedian, the risk is that one is charged with the worst crime of all, of not being funny. The late George Carlin, of course, never had a problem of being funny. At various times a social critic, a Menckenesque student of the innate ambiguities of language, a rather superb commentator and satirist specializing in the dialectic of unrealistic expectation meeting concrete and inevitable fact, Carlin caused laughter, nervous coughing, debates, and did, to some extent, provoke discussions after his comedy albums were played or his many HBO specials were finished, disagreements above and beyond the "funny bits" and laugh lines and landing on the subject near to Carlin's lovingly cynical heart, the collective delusions Americans rely on to buffer themselves against the stressed out and crushing banality of their (our) existence. His was the spotlight where Lenny Bruce, Mencken, and Thorsten Veblen shook hands and polished the best insights into hard, fast and lacerating lines, given with delivery could, to steal a line from Norman Mailer, boil the fat from a cab driver's neck.

One can maintain, no doubt, that Carlin was straining in the last ten years or so, that he was too acerbic at last, too acidic and joyless with the sharp stick he jabbed into the side of the obese culture he was attracted to as much as repulsed by. Perhaps; what I remember is that Carlin was a consistent cynic ever since he dropped his TV-friendly routines and brought some measure of refreshing independence to the shows on which he was a guest. Yes, I know, his criticism, his act, his jibes, his jeremiads were all an act, right. Yes, but that didn't make him a phony, and one had to admire Carlin's skill at remaining effective entertaining for all the corrosive views he brought to the table. In a time when many a showbiz contrarian is soon revealed as disposable and ill-fitted for a long career, Carlin remembered what he was, at the bottom, he remembered what made his skewed disposition marketable; he was an entertainer, a comedian. He could make you laugh, and that is a gift we see too little in our lives.

Carlin's routines became more cynical and coarser as he got older, and that isn't surprising; that he abandoned the search for a definitive punchline to make all his grousing and cynicism palatable came, in fact, as a relief. One would have cringed if he maintained the zonked out Everyman that was his trademark. I'd agree with you that he pretty much ran his course by the time the 2000s started, and he couldn't gain a vantage point  in a post-9/11 world; the worst had already happened and now the seer had nothing to do once the greed, avarice, stupidity, and meanness of Western Civilization was wounded in the most horrible way. He seemed reduced to saying "I told you so". I don't think anyone has the "post-9-11" vantage yet. Bill Maher is the closest I can think of, since his anger goes the deepest of his generation and is the best articulated of the bunch. He is certainly the best on the subjects of contention he chooses to debate;if he doesn't do the research himself, he at least reads the research his staff presents him He is the cross between Twain and Mencken and has an undying, unflagging hatred of the stupidity of those in power regardless of their ostensible political philosophy and the harm they create blindly pushing their expedient ends. What separates him from the routine nihilist is his belief in social justice and an open society; this marks him differently than, say, Larry Miller, a comedian I enjoyed until I heard him on Maher's show basically declare that the terrorists are coming back to kill us again and that we'd better be prepared to kill them first. Maher, in terms of the new realism, has a harder road as a comedian; to express cynicism and outrage while being in favor of something. He certainly knows that being a critic without an articulable alternative to the way things are is as inauthentic as a blues album by a boy band. He has the political intelligence another Miller, the word drunk sarcasm specialist  Dennis,wishes he had.