Change Your Image
samalden-spector
Reviews
The Weather Underground (2002)
It's as close to love letter to your granddaddy's antifa as they could get away with
I watched this when I was a teenager, and it left me very uninformed about the roots of this fashionable fad of Left Wing violence we are experiencing. As a consequnce of being so wildly uninformed, I pissed off a lot of sensible moderate, conservative people who were familiar with what happened in this era. Thank God I was never the sort ot be a True Believer. But if you go around referring to these people as "activists" uncritically a lot of sensible people will never speak to you ever again. The Weather Underground claimed to stand for things... and took credit for a lot of things. This documentary has a pretense at evenhandedness, but really presents the following choices:
1. They were the good guys.
2. They were misguided good guys.
But not:
3. They were dangerous and stupid.
4. They were legitimately bad people who had fun doing violent things.
5. They were driven by narcisism. And a cringey white savior complex.
6. What they did was terrorism; violence for the purposes of inspiring fear and creating political change outside of the consensual, democratic process. Not activism.
7. They damaged the cause of "anti-racism" by appropriating the black sturggle to push communism and anti-American sentiment.
8. They weren't very important. But they've obviously continued to weild influence: they all sought positions in academia. And their kids/protiges seek public office even today. Look at the SF DA race.
Outlander: Man of Worth (2019)
From. Whence.
God in heaven! please stop saying "from whence."
It is "whence."
Hence goes my suspension of disbelief.
Doesn't anybody proofread the script?
Nobody saw it in editing?
Nobody took an English class in college?
Not one person?
Ugh.
In a season finale!
From. Whence.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2014)
Pedantic, Annoying
I learned pretty much everything covered on this show in magazine articles ~20 years ago so the weekly feigned "omg am I blowing your mind?" is pretty obnoxious. It's also far too partisan and dishonest about who caused which problems (many were actually caused by so-called progressives as well).
True Detective: The Western Book of the Dead (2015)
Disappointing
Season one had to be the best thing I've seen on television in the last decade. Unfortunately, it was subjected to intense and very baseless critical scrutiny by the likes of do-gooder television justice warriors (e.g. at the New Yorker) who accused the show of not being a show about strong, independent, self-actualizing women (fair enough) and glorifying Rust and Cole's more pig-headed moments of hyper masculinity (which is pretty stupid since it's a royal road to regret and suffering for the both of them). And perhaps under pressure to make independent female characters, they gutted what was once an interesting plot, by depriving characters of the needs that would have driven meaningful relationships and kinetic interactions between an ensemble cast of this caliber. Perhaps under pressure to make dialogue less polished and too-perfect, they intentionally made characters say really dumb #$@ like every single line they gave Vince Vaughn in this entire season. I don't know. All I know is that I don't care about any of these characters, because they don't seem to care about anything, and they don't have interesting interactions because they don't need to do that, because they don't have needs that each other can satisfy. Maybe that's the point: that people aren't so cool, that they don't really connect, that no great supernatural force is guiding anybody in the Valley, but... then you've got the Long Goodbye... not an ensemble production. To care about a character who lacks direction and doesn't have clear relatable needs, you need to at least spend enough time with them to get to understand them a little bit.
Crash (2004)
Not Good At All
Crash is a film about society that embraces stereotypes, yet sustains the moralizing appeal of an after school special. It is an out-of-touch, moralistic parable of race fused with a bad action movie and injected with a lot of casual racism in an attempt to achieve credibility. Very much like the Green Mile, it is a picture that everyone except for hard-core bigots can get behind and feel good watching, because it fails to characterize, identify or address any meaningful race related issue on which there might be any controversy or discomfort. I can't imagine how anyone with any self-reflection could enjoy one minute of this movie.