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Loudermilk (2017)
A Musical Critical Review Louder than Words
This review of Loudermilk is basically a up to date review of IMDb. As you can see by the chronological order on here, reviewers seem to need to trash great things in order to feel like they are being heard/respected. In reality, quick to the punch reviewers have dropped the critical level of IMDb down to barrel scrapping. What they need here, just like everywhere else, is a block button to fully block some people and their garble.
Yes, the music tracks on Loudermik are greatly on-point. The comedy is brilliantly gritty, the timing is cutting edge. The actors are mostly unknown but very skilled. Its real-time, street-level Vancouver camera work is taken to a whole new level a la Louie. There are many, many levels to the humor and to the story-line. Some might go over your head and if you like prime-time you will hate Loudermilk. In fact, its safe to say that private production has risen head and shoulders above Hollywood sitcoms and its about time. The 12 step scenes make "Mom" look like a Mexican soap opera. And its not coincidental that Ron Livingston's appearance transgresses Search Party's timing. I love that Canada is joining the ranks of the new, high quality, independent production movement. I also love the location choice of Vancouver.
The only thing I can say to sum up is "I am surprised Hollywood/Networks/Lorre have fallen so far so fast and not attempted to counter its quick demise"... Rest in peace Prime Time. You had a great run. Hard to believe sponsors are still buying that crap.
The Thin Red Line (1998)
Over Shadowed By Another WWII Movie
There are already so many great reviews of the Thin Red Line here, I am not going to write another routine review. Instead, I am going to write about the events that led up to this movie and why it is often over-looked and under-rated in reviews. The movie was made by Terrence Malick, without question one of the best directors in the history of Hollywood. He came on the Hollywood scene quickly. His very first movie was a brilliant success. It takes most other great Hollywood directors three and sometimes four films before a masterpiece is created. But sadly, his background was not the "right one" for such amazing talent in Hollywood, so he was quickly undermined by the establishment there. After his first masterpiece, he followed with another masterpiece movie and his talent began to be realized as "miles ahead" of the then (mid-1970s) established directors such as Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Lucas, Woody Allen, Altman, Polansky, Friedkin etc. Not only was Malick the brilliant director he was also a Harvard scholar, a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, a brilliant philosophy scholar and a professor at MIT. Again, he is light years ahead of any Hollywood director to be compared to except possibly Kubrick and Hitchcock.
Following Malick's second film, many strange events took place that eventually drove Malick to move to and live in France. The first took place after Malick finished Days of Heaven. Paramount offered him complete creative freedom on his next project named Q, but immediately began to rescind this freedom. At this time Hollywood had discovered that, like Steve Jobs, he had a Syrian heritage. It all went down hill from there. After his second movie (Thin Red Line is his third) he proposed working on a movie adaptation of The Boom Boom Room. His Hollywood production turned it down and instead pushed The Elephant Man on him. He worked on this movie for an extended time period and then it was revealed that another director had also been given a screenplay and was finishing ahead of Malick's time-line, which force Malick to cancel the movie.
He was then working on his new masterpiece called Q when Paramount abruptly began to pull his creative freedom away causing the film to be shelved after another extended period of working on it. He finally abandoned Hollywood and began doing French projects with Louis Malle involving screen writing. He began working on a French inspired New Orleans film The Moviegoer, but hurricane Katrina hit the area in mid production and halted the film. Malick was given another film, the biography of Jerry Lee Lewis and again, after much work, it was discovered that another director had been given a screenplay and was due to finish before Malick's projected time-line forcing him again to cancel it. A final film project was given Malick (The English Speaker) and yet again another director was leaked a concurrent screenplay which became A Dangerous Method.
So indeed, Hollywood went out of its way to make sure Malick was kept away from the screen, as jealously went berserk. He was indeed a threat to the current Hollywood tribe. Malick finally ignored Hollywood and just created this movie The Thin Red Line with own his own budget, staff and resources. But it proved impossible to keep secret. Word got out of his WWII story-line and Spielberg began to immediately copy the movie as best he could without actually reading the screen play. Because Malick had been off the screen for so long, Spielberg's movie received higher billing and better marketing support. The two movies were released simultaneously in the box office. But after seeing both, one can see that Malick's is the brilliant masterpiece. Thin Red Line portrays war in a very realistic, harsh, destructive sense, where Saving Prvt Ryan gives a nationalist, patriotic recruitment effort. Malick interweaves scenes of nature, beauty and innocents against the war backdrop where Spielberg interweaves hatred, psychological aggression and blind faith in US led warring. Malick's troops question the feeble US military story-line and eventually discover that on the other side are just young scared men like themselves. This movie has become even more important in light of the US destruction of Malick's homeland of Syria. I would like to see Malick do his next movie about the great Assyrian Empire and particularly focused on King Sargon II on his conquest of King Hoshea. It would bring our knowledge of history into a very new light.
Taboo (2017)
Finally a History Not White Washed
Thomas Hardy is our brilliant hero...haunted by the demons of his own sins which pull against his passion for penance. The show must be studied more than watched. Your English/US 1800s history must be brushed up. You must be a patient viewer, as the plot and its supporting structure builds slowly at first and uses flash back and flash over techniques. But the show delves most brilliantly into the dark evils that encompassed the British East India Trading Company which, for so long, have been denied. And not only are the evils revealed, but revealed in a most dramatic and authentic way...almost as if they had been bottled up for centuries waiting to burst out. The answers to why the tea party in Boston was so grievous to British monopolistic commerce, answers to how and why the British were expelled from China, answers as to who incorporated a good amount of the Atlantic Triangle slave trade and a piercing look into the faces of the men who sat at her board. And yes, we get details my friends, many sorted, long denied details. Pay close attention especially to Delaney's cryptic quotes such as: "When my reds are red, my whites are white, and my blues are blue, then I will clear out". You will find much of the show is in shades of gray, but bright colors pop out at the most opportune times. As the above quote lingers in the mind we hear murmurs of blue powder, and white sails and that, yes, Red will be spilled. In fact, the red of the English rose runs through the plot like brush strokes of a Master on a Black and Grey canvas.
The period costume, locations, day to day life are captured exceptionally well. The acting is first rate. The violence is hard but needed to capture the seriousness of the subject. The show vividly shows the very top of life in 1814 London, the middle and the very bottom, all in great detail. We see the many gray areas between right and wrong and good and bad. Even our hero has many short comings. But more than anything, it brutally captures events in history which have been long over due. Now if only they would move some of the plot to 1814 Rhode Island and reveal some of the actions and activities which were happening there. British importation of slaves, tea and gunpowder into the US had already been banned around this time, which allowed the trade to flourish out of Newport and this group took over many of the activities which the British East India Company lost around this period of history.
The French Connection (1971)
Seedy Town Blues
The movie has gotten rave reviews since it came out and I never understood why. The 1970s were an amazing movie period, especially for big city, real life dramas and cop movies. But this does not hold up to the 1970s brilliance. The camera work is pedestrian and assembly line. The music is awkward. Ninety minutes of watching Hackman follow Sal around a very seedy NYC. I am suspicious that the movie was an elbow reaction to Blaxploitation movies of the time and particularly to Shaft. It has only white main characters and is brutally racist. This itself is odd being that the French were very ethnically progressive in the 1970s. Doyle seems indeed to be an anti-Shaft creation and all of the academy awards reinforce my belief that Hollywood was very threatened by Blaxploitation and by African Americans in general. The amazing acclaim it received from the academy seems to be overly eager in its praise and extremely over-rated to a suspicious degree. The car chase was just a marketing gimmick to validate the acclaim to mainstream audiences.
But the plot is generally very weak. The racism is rampant and except for Hackman and Scheider, the acting is very limited. Just like the ridiculous nickname and the poorly worked bully act, the main character leads the viewers down several dead ends. I was genuinely rooting against Doyle the whole movie. Especially after the scene where his partner comes to his apartment to pick him up and finds that he had sleep with an underage girl.
In fact, this movie reminds me of the many hundreds of weak NYC 1980s TV cop shows and I believe it probably was a template for them. The ending was just unbearably weak and unbelievable. It really should have been filmed in France and included some French actors, script and camera personnel. They also could have scored better music and utilized it more dramatically. There was some great music being made at this time. They probably didn't do this because, again, I believe it was only a Hollywood racist response to Blaxploitation and the mainstream success of Shaft. Cops employing obvious tails and staring into windows, bumbling, beating up minorities and living out of unmarked cop cars. It really just doesn't hold up anywhere. Unless you are looking for 1970s scenes of seedy Brooklyn, stay away from this one and watch Shaft instead.
The Birds (1963)
The Birds Explained
Of course Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is a classic and a great movie for many reasons. The camera angles, panning and tracking, the suspenseful plot, the emotion in the story-line and actors, and of course the great actors and actresses Hitchcock used.
But there always seems to be a very interesting underlying "symbolic message in the bottle" in Hitchcock's plot and sometimes it is not easy to decipher. Of all the reviews here about The Birds, the underlying message has escaped the other writers. Not sure why. Might be that people don't read many actual paper books anymore and spend long hours online where everything is "told to them". Maybe its because films are not really studied or analyzed anymore as much as they are consumed in a "entertain me now" kind of way.
Anyway...the name of the movie itself should be a great hint of the underlying symbolic ideas. "The Birds" and thus the birds and the bees. The Birds and the Bees refer to the old ideology of the natural order of things which were changing at the time this movie was made. This idea of natural order encompassed the idea that only "men and women" were allowed to be in love, married and making love and that only men were supposed to be the pursuer in this natural order of human love.
Hitchcock's plot opens in San Francisco, which at the time was just becoming known as a gay friendly city and was opening the doors for the gay liberation movement. This gay embrace was very shocking to conservative USA. This shock value was not lost on Hitchcock. Northern California was also the first to embrace women's equality and liberation. The first major impact of women's liberation was the sometimes reversal of pursuer roles and women becoming assertive in their pursuit of men if they so choose. Hitchcock utilized both of these ground breaking social changes in this movie, filmed in and near San Francisco, the center of both the gay liberation movement and the women's liberation movement.
There were actually two symbolic messages that were carried together to Bodega Bay and none were in a bottle. One was in a cage and draws great symbolism captured in other famous stories such a La Cage aux Folles and the other broke the cage of women's conservative norms which eventually sweep the US and allowed women to finally spread their wings and fly. The first message was the love birds bringing their unnatural love to the quiet little village of Bodega Bay. Even to expert ornithologist, determining the love bird's sex is very difficult. So it could often happen that two love birds paired and affectionate could both be male or both female living life together monogamously. Here I believe that Hitchcock insinuated the Love Birds were of the same sex. This little message carried the notion of two gay partners coming into a small town and disrupting the existing conservative values.
As the love birds were brought into Bodega Bay, their arrival rocked the natural order of things and the existing birds of the community rebelled, first attacking Melanie Daniels who brought them there in an open boat coming slowing across the central bay for all the local birds to see. They then eventually attacked the home which they resided and humans who were harboring them. This story could be easily paralleled with the La Cage story, abet much more suspenseful and horrific, of a gay couple coming into a small town and moving into a home and having the conservative townsfolk rebel. And rebel they did in the most horrific way imaginable. This rebellion was where Hitchcock came into his element and utilized his famous horror and suspense.
And just as the love birds came into Bodega Bay and changed the natural order of things, so did their carrier in Melanie Daniels. Melanie broke all the normal rules and customs of the East Coast conservative male/female dynamic when she immediately began to seek, prey and chase her suitor Mitch Brenner. Racing her high performance sports car around the narrow curves of the Pacific Coast Highway, renting and manning a boat by herself to find his home, entering his property without permission or invitation, leaving a love letter on his desk and spying her prey from the bay on her skiff. All of these actions in the course of a few minutes broke the natural order of Victorian women's protocol wide open forever. She was a hungry tiger and very much upset the natural order of things which was most evident in Mitch's mother and the layers of emotional depth that involve a man and his conservative mother as the natural order is challenged or broken.
Once the attacks began Melanie quickly took back her already antiquated role as a damsel in distress, which Hitchcock may have needed to enhance his dramatic suspense. But even in her damsel role, Hitchcock allowed Melanie much bravery and an equal level of courage to her co-star Mitch Brenner in the face of a brutal bird rebellion. Here Mitch's mother began to over come the shock of Melanie's aggressiveness and see the brave woman in a more human and accepting way. I think suspense and dramatic distress can be a wonderful instrument in which to allow the viewing of a character in a new and sympathetic light. Hitchcock clearly wanted to show the disruption in our presupposed notion of the natural order of the birds and the bees and also to show the effect of this disruption upon conservative small town societal values again a la Cage aux Folles.
Yes, Hitchcock's symbolic message in a bottle. Yet another added dimension to an already brilliant film. Look for more of Hitchcock's underlying symbolic messages in his other great films Vertigo, Psych and North by Northwest.