Kunstler: Christmas Present.

Late-breaking news: Trifling presidential candidate and inveterate interventionist Lindsey Graham is giving us a present by dropping out of the race. Expect more of the grade Z GOP contestants to take down their stockings in the next few months. Now, here's Kunstler:

Kunstler: Christmas Present.

Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday.

Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies, as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology.

It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of “chicken” with oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don’t know it. A lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed “pulled the trigger” on interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies — e.g. Brazil, Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.

As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud? Capital is supposedly plentiful these days — look how much has rushed into the dollar from the nervous former go-go nations with their wobbling ziggurats of bad loans and surfeit of production capacity — but what actually constitutes that capital? Answer: the dwindling faith anyone will pay you back next Tuesday for a hamburger today.

We now enter the “discovery” phase of financial collapse, where things labeled “capital” and “credit” turn out to be mere holograms. Fed Chair Janet Yellen herself had a sort of hologramatic look last Wednesday when she stepped onto her Delphic platform to reveal the long-heralded interest rate news. Perhaps Mrs. Yellen is a figment conjured by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic shop (now owned by Disney). What could be more fitting in a smoke-and-mirrors culture? Anyway, the rude discovery that capital is not what it has appeared to be is now underway, with the power to derail political systems and societies.

Is there anyone who thinks the Presidential election campaign is not completely deranged? Well, it is the analog for America’s deranged financial polity. The graceless Mr. Trump necessarily reflects the just grievances of the great public wad, but has anyone noticed that he is incapable of stringing together two coherent thoughts? I suppose one thought at a time — or maybe a percentage of one thought — is enough to satisfy the sputtering masses, faced as they are by the arrant theft of both their patrimony and their future. But it adds up to something like flying blind through a shitstorm with your pilot in the throes of cerebral infarction. I don’t want to be on that plane.

Then there’s the giant flying reptile known simply as Hillary. She will blow up the sad and noisome remains of the Democratic party and then she will preside over the blow-up of the USA as an advanced techno-industrial society. That final outcome may be inevitable one way or another, but the journey there need not be so harsh. America needs a vision of something other than itself as a permanent demolition derby, which, by the way, will not be “solved” by pushing everyone into a Tesla instead of a Ford F-150.

It’s not just the Federal Reserve; everything around us is backed into a corner. Come January, when the dazzle of Star Wars fades away, [The movie will carry on well into the New Year, as Avatar and Titanic did--P.Z.] you will hear instead through the long dark nights a howl of raging animals. Merry Christmas to all.

Star Wars Was Never My Bag.

On Wednesday afternoon, we saw Creed, which I recommend. It was the last showing, as the theater had to make room for the new Star Wars movie. (Yet it's still running The Good Dinosaur.) As we left, we saw dozens of people in a line stretching from the entrance to Maui Tacos, all waiting for the first Star Wars showing.

Armond White isn't a fan of the new Star Wars nor of the franchise in general.

22 December update:

read and discuss https://t.co/z6lj8LQ2xW

— armond white (@3xchair) December 21, 2015

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John Simon, once one of the country's major movie critics, infamously dissed Star Wars when it was released. New York republished his original review with some new comments of his. (Simon, still living, is retired, but maintains a blog here.)

Here, Simon jousts with Siskel & Ebert on Nightline in 1983, when Return of the Jedi was released.


They all have their points. I do like science fiction, but Star Wars was never my thing. (The Family Guy parodies/tributes are enjoyable, and one can get the gist of Star Wars from them.) I'd much rather see Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip (currently 14% at RottenTomatoes) than Star Wars (an astounding 95% at RottenTomatoes, where the critics' consensus is headlined "Believe the Hype.")

Never believe the hype:

"The Worst Year EVER for American Film"?

Dinner with a filmmaker/cinephile last night and we both agreed: 2015 is the worst year EVER for American film. An infection has arrived...

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) October 22, 2015

I don't think so. Not with Straight Outta Compton, The Intern, Minions, et al. But stinkers like Mad Max: Fury Road, American Ultra, and Hitman: Agent 47 do cause worry about the state of the movies.

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26 October update:
Armond White:

With the dreadful #Suffragette, 2015 movies hit bottom--for now. https://t.co/kw9EXKTWqf pic.twitter.com/TrJsL9oIla

— armond white (@3xchair) October 26, 2015

The Wall Steet Journal: "Huge Flops Hit the Box Office."

Kunstler: Yesterday's Tomorrowland

Kunstler looks at two movies. Stylistically, they couldn't be more different from each other, but both offer visions of the future that are way off the mark. It should be noted that both movies are likely flops: Mad Max has a $150M budget but earned only $135M worldwide (26 May update: now it's $227.7M). Tomorrowland was made for $190M, but this opening weekend it took in $9.7M $42.7M.

(26 May update): Louis Proyect's great review of Mad Max: Fury Road.


Kunstler: Yesterday's Tomorrowland


Yesterday’s Tomorrowland


America takes pause on a big holiday weekend requiring little in the way of real devotions beyond the barbeque deck with two profoundly stupid movie entertainments that epitomize our estrangement from the troubles of the present day.

First there’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which depicts the collapse of civilization as a monster car rally. They managed to get it exactly wrong. The present is the monster car show. Houston. Los Angeles. New Jersey, Beijing, Mumbai, etc. In the future, there will be no cars, gasoline-powered, electric, driverless, or otherwise. Mad Max: Fury Road is actually a perverse exercise in nostalgia, as if we’re going to miss being a nation of savages in the driver’s seat, acting out an endless and pointless competition for our little place on the highway.

The other holiday blockbuster is Disney’s Tomorrowland, another exercise in nostalgia for the present, where the idealized human life is a matrix of phone apps, robots, and holograms. Of course, anybody who had been to Disneyland back in the day remembers the old Tomorrowland installation, which eventually had to be dismantled because its vision of the future had become such a joke — starting with the idea that the human project’s most pressing task was space travel. Now, at this late date, the monster Disney corporation — a truly evil empire — sees that more money can be winkled out of the sore-beset public by persuading them that techno-utopia is at hand, if only we click our heels hard enough.

Another theme running through both films is the idea that girls can be what boys used to be, that it’s “their turn” to be masters-of-the-universe, that men are past their sell-by date and only exist to defile and humiliate females. That this message is really only a mendacious effort to rake in more money by enlarging the teen “audience share” for the reigning wishful fantasy du jour is surely lost on the culture commentators, who are so busy these days celebrating the triumph and wonder of transgender life.

The reviewers are weighing these two movies on the popular pessimism / optimism scale. These are the only choices for the masses: whether to be a “doomer” or a “wisher.” Both positions are cartoon world-views that don’t provide much guidance for continuing the project of civilization, in case anyone is actually interested in that. It’s either rampaging id or the illusion of supernatural control, take your pick. I find both stances revolting.

Anyway, it’s interesting that the real Fury Road of the rightnow runs from Syria into Iraq starring ISIS. There is a growing sentiment in the news media (including the web, of course) of a sickening déjà vu with these developments. The old familiar talk of air strikes and ground troops infects the wifi transmissions. Maybe we should think about sending Charlize Theron over there with a few vestigial male sidekicks to load her assault rifle. How else to git’er done? Nobody knows.

Memorial Day is a dreary moment to have to face this onrushing calamity of rocket-propelled medievalism rampant — all those poor American soldiers blown up and mangled the past twelve years. It’s also interesting that the news media is totally out-of-touch with the biggest prize on the great gameboard: Saudi Arabia. You think ISIS overrunning Iraq is bad news? Wait until the ordnance starts flying around Riyadh. Notice, too, that there’s no news coming out of Yemen on the base of the Arabian peninsula, a failed state with a population nearly equal to its neighbor. If we have any idea what’s going on there — and surely the Pentagon and NSA do — then it’s not for popular consumption.

This is ironic because if the trouble happens to spread into Saudi Arabia — and I don’t see how it will not — then we’ll find out in a New York minute how America’s future is not about monster trucks, cars, dirt bikes, holograms, phone apps, and all the other ridiculous preoccupations of the moment.

Maximum Madness

From the preview I've seen of Mad Max: Fury Road, I don't plan to see it. The near-unanimous critical acclaim (98 or 99 per cent at RottenTomatoes.com) for this movie is strange.

Then there's Armond White, who never believes the hype.

"Director-writer Miller capitulates to the low instincts he originally pandered to more than 30 years ago. He’s gotten better at it — demonstrating lotsa panache — but the problem is that popular taste has degraded into an appetite for outlandish destruction and fantastic cruelty. The pop audience (and not just youth) has become like the crazed yahoos Miller depicts on screen without exactly satirizing them."

17 May update: Box Office Mojo reports that Pitch Perfect 2 beat Mad Max for the top earning spot this weekend.

Fifty Shades Box Office Plummets

Fifty Shades of Grey Box Office Plummets. Presumably as word gets around that the movie was lousy.

All In With Chris Hayes may be cancelled. But MSNBC denies it.

Hollywood

Oy, Bay!

Sci-fi movies not doing well, including the tremendously overrated Edge of Tomorrow.

Snowpiercer doesn't interest me either, but I'm intrigued by the gulf between its domestic and foreign box office receipts ($162,100 vs. $80,220,079!).

And compare the slate of movies atop this weekend's box office with those of thirty years ago. (I'll take Ghostbusters or even Ghostbusters 2 (1989) over Transformers 4 anytime.)