Wednesday, August 28, 2002
The Fast Runner is an extraordinary cinematic narrative that takes us where Hollywood refuses to go: to society. No film in recent memory has so carefully presented life in a social context, with all the joys and troubles that accompany the simple fact of living with other people. I have no idea what it's like to be an Inuit a thousand years ago, but from The Fast Runner I got more of a sense of life actually lived than from any other non-documentary film in years.
Decades of screenwriting seminars have drilled the formula into American writers' heads: the protagonist has to want something and there has to be a conflict. This message has been received not only by screenwriters but by studio executives, with the result that Ben Affleck wants the girl and, oh yes, there's a thing called Pearl Harbor in the background. The world is just the background for the hero, in spite of the fact that the world is infinitely more interesting and dramatic than the hero. Still, the formula occasionally works, especially with fantasy and romance stories, and not every film needs to represent life as it's actually lived. But the media juggernaut is becoming increasingly jaded, with ever more simplistic iterations that are less about human life and more about emotional manipulation and product placement. "Branded content," as it being called when you see a strategically placed Diet Coke in a movie scene, is one step away from "no content."
To watch The Fast Runner is to look at life in a time before media, when news was immediate and personal and no one you didn't know told you what to think. The act of persuasion was performed on a one-to-one and not corporation-to-customer or politician-to-constituency scale. In a leap of logic, this leads me to the popularity of blogs: we feel lied to and manipulated, and we need to share our responses to the unbelievably pervasive but shallow media universe that blankets us.
When I see a movie, I like knowing as little as possible about it other than that it's good. So that's about all I want to say: it's really, really good, and you should see it. The movie has an official website, called Atanarjuat, its Inuit title. Go.
.
Greatest Hits
· Alternatives to First Command Financial Planning
· First Command, last resort, Part 3
· Part 2
· Part 1
· Stealing $50K from a widow: Wells Real Estate
· Leo Wells, REITs and divine wealth
· Sex-crazed Red State teenagers
· What I hate: a manifesto
· Spawn of Darleen Druyun
· All-American high school sex party
· Why is Ken Lay smiling?
· Poppy's Enron birthday party
· The Saudi money laundry and the president's uncle
· The sentence of Enron's John Forney
· The holiness of Neil Bush's marriage
· The Silence of Cheney: a poem
· South Park Christians
· Capitalist against Bush: Warren Buffett
· Fastow childen vs. Enron children
· Give your prescription money to your old boss
· Neil Bush, hard-working matchmaker
· Republicans against fetuses and pregnant women
· Emboldened Ken Lay
· Faith-based jails
· Please die for me so I can skip your funeral
· A brief illustrated history of the Republican Party
· Nancy Victory
· Soldiers become accountants
· Beware the Merrill Lynch mob
· Darleen Druyun's $5.7 billion surprise
· First responder funding
· Hoovering the country
· First Command fifty percent load
· Ken Lay and the Atkins diet
· Halliburton WMD
· Leave no CEO behind
· August in Crawford
· Elaine Pagels
· Profitable slave labor at Halliburton
· Tom Hanks + Mujahideen
· Sharon & Neilsie Bush
· One weekend a month, or eternity
· Is the US pumping Iraqi oil to Kuwait?
· Cheney's war
· Seth Glickenhaus: Capitalist against Bush
· Martha's blow job
· Mark Belnick: Tyco Catholic nut
· Cheney's deferred Halliburton compensation
· Jeb sucks sugar cane
· Poindexter & LifeLog
· American Family Association panic
· Riley Bechtel and the crony economy
· The Book of Sharon (Bush)
· The Art of Enron
· Plunder convention
· Waiting in Kuwait: Jay Garner
· What's an Army private worth?
· Barbara Bodine, Queen of Baghdad
· Sneaky bastards at Halliburton
· Golf course and barbecue military strategy
· Enron at large
· Recent astroturf
· Cracker Chic 2
· No business like war business
· Big Brother
· Martha Stewart vs. Thomas White
· Roger Kimball, disappointed Republican poetry fan
· Cheney, Lay, Afghanistan
· Terry Lynn Barton, crimes of burning
· Feasting at the Cheney trough
· Who would Jesus indict?
· Return of the Carlyle Group
· Duct tape is for little people
· GOP and bad medicine
· Sears Tower vs Mt Rushmore
· Scared Christians
· Crooked playing field
· John O'Neill: The man who knew
· Back to the top
 
|
. . .
Page content
Copyright
2002, 2003,
2004, 2005,
2006, 2007,
2008, 2009
Skimble
All rights reserved
Times of posting
are US Central
{GMT-6}
Emphasis is
usually added
to quotations by
the proprietor.
Categorization
of links is highly
subjective, and
subject to change
without notice.
Avoid operating
heavy machinery or
motor vehicles
while reading.
Void where
prohibited by law
or executive fiat.
Links are subject
to change whenever
originators dictate.
|
