Monday, September 10, 2012

The Passion of the Better off Hunger Games

Finally consumed the Hunger Games on DVD.  There is some localist back story to my interest, but, to go a different angle, I am a fan of the lead actress, Jennifer Lawrence, who got her debut in District 12, rather, the Ozarks of Missouri.


She appeared in Winter’s Bone, which my Missourah friend put in the class of a Harriet Beecher Stowe example of fiction—a decent piece of crap, unconnected to any reality, with solid punctuation and a nice font—that ever present danger of localism fogging my mind. While reactionary against Stowe as a contrarian, however, as a Yankee, I was inclined to take to Winter’s Bone, book and film.

There has been much talk in the MSM, and in the counter-culture, the depiction of the elite…and anyway, the late Jonathan Bowden’s review of the Passion of the Christ gives some interesting suggestion: 


Several scenes are especially striking: the ravens attacking the thieves who are exposed with Christ on the Cross and Simon being made to carry the Cross on behalf of the Savior. But most assuredly the depiction of the Devil or Satan as a shaven-headed and androgynous Supermodel has to go down as one of the most startling innovations in cinema history.

Needless to say, Bowden provides an insight so striking to Gibson’s film, but also, one that saw life in the Hunger Games, books and film(s.) 

Beyond Left and Right…albeit teen fiction, the Hunger Games presents elite that look absurd and evil; push androgyny even into its ‘gladiator’ spectacle, if comes up short with a predictable old, gray bearded man as Der Leader (advantage, Gibson of course.)

The movie's climax, with the last two standing about to go all Romeo and Juliet--teen suicide, again--on the television screen (with the gal, Eve perhaps, saying 'I know what I am doing') calling the bluff of the tee-vee director who declares the final players joint-victors.

My wife read the book over three nights prior to watching the film.  A brief summary would suggest the book was more about what ‘she’ was thinking, leading me to conclude the movie was forced to go ‘populist’ (the movie includes riot scenes from the ‘Districts’ that are not in the book) in order to maximize its relevance and dollar take.  Anti-populists, Right and Left will not care for this—hence the post-modern take.

A solid post-modern analysis might conclude that the subject of the Hunger Games moved from the book to visual (the media is the message, folks)—which is the emotionally involved “tee-vee” audience—will force the hand of the coming sequels to play to the audience that hates the elite.

Stay tuned; the elite usually win this battle, even if it costs a box office success…

Monday, September 3, 2012

Better off Pearl Jam



After Cold War psy-ops fizzled out, those in the public school system were next hit with a “teen suicide” epidemic that was popular on Left (depression, need for more monitoring) and Right (Satan, Heavy Metal, Dungeons and Dragons and so on.)  Maybe the goal was eugenic, but in my class of ~140, I recall 9 rumored attempts before high school was through, two successful.  After Cold War apathy, just more crap to contemplate.

It was in this climate that a quite unique “slapstick” comedy, starring John Cusack, was released.  “Better off Dead”, in that sense, was particularly subversive—an antidote of absurdist dark humor to the never ending campaign against teenage suicide.  Cusack, it is noted, hated the movie, never really grasping the well timed brilliance, at least to chaps like myself who needed to find the humor in the topic.

So while Cusack, an Irish Catholic with a Hard Left Jesuit streak, never gets that the script has been rearranged, it was good to read a recent editorial of his castigating Obama for carrying on Endless War.


The always politically confused Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) goes Buchananite, and rips into high school loner killer anthem, “Jeremy”, and their solid Neil Young cover, “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World.”



For the song "Unemployable," Vedder told the crowd it was about a hard-working family man who did all the right things in life, but became the victim of job cuts. He said sometimes the so-called job creators are creating jobs outside the United States.
"I want to see more things made in America" Vedder said, to thunderous applause.