Micro Men
Every few years I get the urge to watch this. It’s a BBC drama – a television movie of sorts – that focuses on the early days of the computer revolution in the UK. It features great performances from Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair, and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry. It’s a lovely piece of nostalgia about the often pointed competition between Acorn Computers and Sinclair Research as they battled to have their computers dominate the British high streets. I have no idea how accurate it is. Clive Sinclair has said it’s a travesty of the truth, but given he’s not given a particularly sympathetic portrayal I’m not sure he’s an unbiased reviewer. In terms of sheer entertainment though, I give it some pretty hefty props. It’s one of the few movies I have ever used in place of an actual lecture because I think it captures a lot of semi-fictive professional and ethical issues in computing. It’s worth checking out, especially because the whole thing is available on Youtube. Probably not legitimately.
Given how it’s from 2009 and the BBC show no signs of wanting to make it more widely available though, I think you can morally give yourself a pass. Comments suggest that the sticking point is the soundtrack, particularly Vangelis, so I wouldn’t let some corporate infighting keep you from enjoying one of the most absorbing one-offs that the BBC ever did.
My Cousin Vinny
I’m sure I watched My Cousin Vinny a few months ago and I undoubtedly talked about it in a newsletter at the time. Well, Mrs Meeple revealed to me that when she kept saying ‘Yes, I’ve seen that’ she meant ‘I saw it once twenty years ago and don’t remember anything about it’. Man, what a treat it must be to see this movie with (relatively) fresh eyes. It’s such a gem – six out of five stars, at least. Seriously, if you haven’t seen it before please check it out. I’d consider it a personal favour if you did your part in giving this movie the attention it deserves. It’s a bit like with A Knight’s Tale, I harshly judge anyone that says they don’t like it, so maybe don’t tell me if that’s the case.
Now You See Me
This is some hot nonsense, but enjoyable with it. This is whaty would happen if David Copperfield had written the script for Ocean’s 11, and he was a little hazy on the way the world worked. That’s what you get here – a movie that requires more suspension of disbelief than is reasonable, but you forgive it because of its cheerful energy. It puts a lot of emphasis on ‘ooooo, magic’ and in the process expects it to be sufficient to paper over some genuinely egregious plot holes. It relies on the fact most people have no idea how most magic tricks work and have never watched enough of Penn and Teller’s ‘Fool Us’ to convince themselves they know better. Imagine if mentalism wasn’t a stage trick but was actually a borderline psychic power that could be used to control the minds of the unwary. Imagine if stage illusions had the benefit of time-delayed smash cuts to deliver their payload. Imagine if you could do with camera angles what you couldn’t reasonably do with misdirection. It’s a movie about magicians then that requires acts of trickery that are indistinguishable from actual acts of sorcery – if you stop and think about them. If you can bypass the awkward realities of the limitations of physics and spatiality, then yeah – you could do all of this stuff. You have to want to be fooled here, and you have to want to be fooled in unimpressive ways.
It’s also riddled with plot contrivances that extend your complicity. You also have to believe the world and the people within it work in a dramatically simpler way than they do.
Nonetheless, I did like it. I just wish in all its stylish presentation it had been appropriately respectful of the craft, as opposed to the presentation, of actual stage magic. It’s like a child’s sketch of a piece of art.
Palm Springs
Palm Springs is a modern, disaffected take on Groundhog Day that suffers because it tries to create a reason for the time looping. It also suffers because Andy Samberg lacks the pathos of Bill Murray. And it also suffers because it doesn’t say anything new. At best its contribution is ‘eternity is unbearable even if other people are trapped along with you’, but it builds an unconvincing thesis around that idea. It’s worth watching – it’s fun, it’s funny in places, and Andy Samberg is always entertaining to watch. But also, if you’ve never seen Groundhog Day I’d say ‘Watch that instead’. And if you have, I’d suggest maybe rewatching it. It’s been so long, hasn’t it?
Point Break
By virtue of the way we decide on a movie for the evening, our viewing tends to be ‘all over the place’. And that’s fitting because that’s about as good a description of Point Break as I can possibly give. It is two hours of the most ludicrous nonsense, made vaguely sad by the passage of time. I’m sure, back in the early nineties, it was totally bodacious. Nowadays it is just… a baffling artefact from an obviously simpler age. A surfer gang that masquerades as bank robbers. Seasoned professionals that commit Federal crimes to steal what is effectively pocket change. A criminal investigation that sends someone undercover in a dangerous situation on evidence no stronger than ‘Surfers use this sex wax on their boards’. It is an absolute train-wreck of a movie, utter mind-emptying madness from the first moment of conception to the last moment of execution.
I didn’t hate it but I had to keep reminding myself that ‘it’s a product of its time’. It’s like a racist grandparent at the Christmas dinner table. ‘They didn’t know better back then’. Imagine if someone took every Pepsi Max advertisement that had ever been on the television, put them in a blender, and then smeared the results over a sheet of paper. There’s your script. It actually reminded me a bit of the Stallone movie Over The Top in which he arm-wrestles his way back to reconciliation with his son. They really did, at one point, seem to be scraping every splinter out of the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps the constant craze for endless reboots is a good thing, because otherwise Hollywood will be left throwing darts at a word-of-the-day calendar for their next big breakout hit. Either that or roll a randomizer that sticks random settings on random nouns.
‘Hotel… samurai? Is that a thing? What about a samurai hotel?’
‘Write it down buddy, that’s a billion-dollar franchise right there’
There is a part of the movie that exemplifies the ‘subtle as a sledgehammer’ touch taken with the storytelling and the dialog. Keanu Reeves is sitting on a bed, trying to phone his girlfriend to explain why he lied to her about being a cop. ‘Uh, like, I know I screwed this up and I’m sorry but’, and then he slams the phone on the bed and says, ‘Urgh, why can’t I ever say what I mean?’. Hey, thanks for joining up those dots for me buddy. You really captured the inner turmoil by making it external dialog.
Still, it’s good to see Keanu Reeves getting a chance to put all his undercover training as Theodore ‘Ted’ Logan to good use in his role as an FBI agent. I couldn’t think of a more ‘on the nose’ assignment for him than ‘airhead surfer jock’. The way he consistently, and egregiously, screws up every part of his job is exactly how I would imagine his Excellent Adventure during work experience with the LAPD.
Suffice to say that this film I have had endlessly quoted to me over the past thirty or so years hasn’t held up well in the interim. There are, to be fair, some stunningly technically accomplished scenes and a certain ‘James Bondishness’ to some of the ridiculous high-octane sequences. But overall, a film that’s more comedic than it could possibly have achieved had humour been its intention. Somewhat endearing in its honest earnestness, but ultimately a movie that just left me more baffled than enlightened. Bodhi, you’re riding damp ironing boards – you’re not a freelance Buddah.
Raya and the Last Dragon
Another lovely movie here, although it is weirdly dissonant in its visual direction. It has the growing technical competence that underlies a lot of Disney movies in that the 3D models are stunning. And it weaves a compelling mythology around evil, mindless creatures that turn all living matter into stone. It draws from Asian traditions regarding the power and role of dragons in human society and then it gives it all a bit of side-spin to create a context of a post-apocalyptic hellscape. And all of that is great. It’s got hope, betrayal, beautifully choreographed fighting, and more.
And then when the eponymous Last Dragon appears, she looks like she was modelled from an entirely different aesthetic template. She looks like a 3D rendering of the toys they were intending to sell off the back of the movie. I guess they were worried about a Sonic style backlash where a major character didn’t look cuddly enough for the screen… but I found it really off-putting. I liked the movie, I liked the characters. I even liked the dragon. But I really didn’t like the combination of them all because it felt like one team was coming to the project from Toy Story and the other arrived via Monsters Inc. The visual styles just don’t mesh.
I got over it – I watched the movie to the end – and I was actually surprised I had because the tempo of the story felt like it maybe had another thirty minutes left to go. The narrative beats here are like the visual style – they feel off. Scenes that seem like they should be substantial end up being over in a matter of seconds. Villains that are built up to be horrors turn out to get the same amount of screen-time that you’d expect for, say, a contractually obligated cameo from Kevin Spacey. It feels like it’s being relayed to you by someone with an urgent appointment they absolutely cannot miss.
I guess what I’m saying there is that I wanted more from the movie than it gave me, and it had the buy-in for a longer ride than I got. What I got was nice. There just wasn’t as much of it as it seemed to imply from its world-building.
Rebecca
It’s actually a little weird that I hadn’t seen this one before because I consider myself something of a Hitchcock fan. One of the first DVD sets I ever bought was his collected works and I definitely remember happily working my way through the lot of them. Yet I’ve never seen his take on the Daphne Du Murier novel. Perhaps I have seen it before though and just remember fragments but it’s hard to tell. It’s a movie that’s so commonly referenced in other media that it’s difficult to separate my own memories from the cultural zeitgeist.
There are bits of the film that have aged very poorly – certain character tropes that are, through the mere passage of time, comedic rather than dramatic. The overwrought melodrama and occasionally truncated character development though don’t take away much from Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense. Laurence Oliver is at his poised, charming best here – even managing to make his casual dismissive misogyny more of a personality quirk rather than a fundamental flaw. Joan Fontaine is… well, she chews up the scenery a fair bit but that’s largely to be expected in movies of the period. But goodness gracious, Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers is an absolute tour de force. She is so effectively sinister that it elicited in me a kind of nervous, uncomfortable laughter. Not because her portrayal merited that response, but because the tension has to find a way to come out somehow. She glides around the imposing mansion of Manderley like a revenant, forever exuding an aura of chilly disapproval without ever letting it modulate into impertinence. She gaslights the poor second Mrs. De Winter through nothing more than simple presence and an impassive expression. It’s genuinely a masterful performance and the absolute highlight of the movie.
Cinematically it has everything we expect from Hitchcock. Effective use of darkness and strong contrasts. Claustrophobic close-up cropping and a strong emphasis on dynamic camera movement to express inner character turmoil. High angles intercut with cross-cutting to create suspense from momentum. It’s a masterful movie really. Even the passivity of the second Mrs De Winter doesn’t grate because it is obviously supposed to be an intentional part of her character arc. She exhibits right at the very start the lack of confidence that is the crack into which the story gets crowbarred, and far from being aggravating it just made me feel sorry for her. Maxime is, in all his dealings with her, an utter bellend and she doesn’t have enough of a sense of herself to understand how abusive his courtship is. It’s not bad characterisation like I complained about in the Graduate. It’s just characterisation and indispensable to the plot.
I’ve yet to see a Hitchcock movie I don’t like, and Rebecca certainly isn’t going to be the first entry on that list.
Recorder
This was one of the documentaries I listed in my Depth Year that I wanted to watch, and it’s taken me a good thirteen months to get around to it. I have complicated feelings. The pitch of the premise (a woman recorded thirty years of news history) and the actual detail of the story (the constant enabling of someone with obvious mental health issues and money to burn) are too far apart. It’s a video essay on the way in which the rich get to be eccentric while the poor have to be crazy.
It’s an odd blend of elements here. It’s not a hagiography, because it’s pretty clear from the interviews that Marion Stokes wasn’t a very nice person. It is though profoundly respectful of ‘her work’, which was to hit record on thirty video recorders when the current tapes ran out. I don’t say that to diminish the archive she created, but to point out… that’s not work. The recording is the easy bit. The work is in curation, and it’s clear she did none of that. At best, each tape got a date, a channel and a time. Sure, she captured thirty years of racially charged incidents – as one of the documentary participants put it. Now, can you get me that footage?
If the answer is ‘no’, then the archive has little value as an archive. If you put things in, you need to be able to take them out in a more specialised form. That never happened, because Marion Stokes was a victim of an impulse towards ‘digital hoarding’, and in the worst possible way – digital hoarding that required warehouses of storage. She accumulated thirty years of data. The poor team at the Internet Archive who are responsible for digitising it and labeling it with metadata are the actual heroes here, and they get a footnote at the end.
Really this was an episode of Hoarders, but about someone rich enough that the poor-baiting tendences of reality TV could be held at bay. It’s a hagiography about a clearly unpleasant and controlling person, and that at least made it novel even in its most exploitative moments.
Shane
I was kind of tricked into watching Shane. Mainly by Bill Hicks, who quotes the movie in one of his routines. Or rather, he quotes a memory he has of the movie because nothing he talks about is in it at all. Hicks talks of Jack Palance (superbly menacing in the movie) throwing a gun at a goatherd’s feet.
‘Pick it up’
‘I can’t pick it up mister, you’ll shoot me’
‘Pick it up.’
‘I don’t want any trouble mister. I’m just in town to buy some hard rock candy for my kids, and some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about four or five rolls of that stuff a week’
‘Pick up the gun’.
So the guy picks up the gun, Palance shoots him, and then says ‘You all saw him. He had a gun’
It’s a great scene that absolutely doesn’t exist in the movie. And that’s a shame, because the movie Shane by itself is a bit of a drip of cinema. Its main sin is that it has an ‘adorable’ kid in it who hero worships Shane to the point of driving him to self-destruction. It’s a relatively typical tale of mean people menacing good people – classic white hat versus black hat stuff. But honestly I found the carping of the kid so irredeemably irritating that I couldn’t find any joy in the whole thing. Especially since it doesn’t have the scene I was waiting for. I do like a good western, I just don’t think this is one.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
I can’t say that this is my favourite Marvel movie because Guardians of the Galaxy holds that title safely thanks to its banging soundtrack. But it’s a close second. Shang-Chi manages to feel very different to the ten-thousand other Marvel movies out there. It has its own atmosphere, its own mythology, and that’s enough to give it room to stand without it being on the foundation of a hundred other interchangeable superheroes.
That’s not to say it doesn’t cleave very tightly to the well-established Marvel template. This is a franchise that has found a formula that works and exploits it with all the zealous enthusiasm of the Coca-Cola company. It’s just that the specific flavourings they’ve done here gives it a charm all of its own. It’s visually striking, funny while being poignant, and mesmerising to watch.
I think what I like about it the most is that instead of drawing from the Western tradition of Heroes hitting Heroes until one falls down at some arbitrary point, Shang-Chi is different. Many of the Marvel movies to me feel like watching professional wrestling – a lot of effort goes into making a fight look painfully kinetic, and it doesn’t really correlate with the outcome much. The Hulk throws Iron-Man through a building and it collapses on him before bursting into flames and exploding. And then he just gets up through the rubble, seemingly undamaged in any meaningful sense. Back in the eighties, another Hulk – Hogan this time – used to enter a ‘trance’ state where audience applause made him immune to damage and energised him to the point he’d win the fight. It wasn’t believable in professional wrestling and it’s not believable in western superhero movies.
It’s like every attack in a Marvel movie does one HP of damage, no matter how spectacular it is. It’s only the plot that can deal a killing blow. Shang-Chi though feels like an old fashioned martial arts movie from the hey-day of Hong-Kong cinema. It feels like a Bruce Lee movie in that the fights are more balletic than they are brutal. It feels more respectful of the performance.
Someone once said that martial arts movies are dance movies for men, and I’ve always liked that comparison. Some men (not me, obviously) would be afraid to admit they love a movie like Dirty Dancing which is about the beauty of movement. Those same men would be happy to admit they love Enter the Dragon, even though it’s exactly the same thing at its core. It’s no coincidence that actors like Bruce Lee were champion dancers before they became internationally known as martial artists.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is the Dirty Dancing of Marvel movies and it is unquestionably the better for it.
Terminator: Dark Fate
Terminator: Dark Fate is that rarest of things – an actually enjoyable Terminator movie. It’s easily the most enjoyable Terminator anything since the excellent Sarah Connor Chronicles. A lot of people don’t like Dark Fate, but I did – I thought it was great. But predictably, I thought it was great for all the ‘wrong’ reasons. Spoilers ahead, so maybe skip past if you want to avoid them.
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One of the main criticisms of the movie is that it basically rewrites the ‘lore’ of Terminator. There’s no Skynet, John Connor doesn’t lead the human resistance, and yet there are still apocalypses (apocalypi?) ahead and still Terminators. So they basically rebooted the whole franchise, right?
No, I don’t think they did. I think Dark Fate actually reinforces the original franchise by following through its logic to a sensible conclusion. Sure, Sarah Connor averted an apocalypse but she didn’t fundamentally change human nature. She stopped one version of a humanity-destroying artificial intelligence but all that does is delay things. At the core of the first couple of movies is an idea of exceptionalism, both in John and in the geniuses that create Skynet itself. But what Dark Fate does is outline a future in which there are many critical paths to our own self annihilation and it’s impossible to cut them all off. Just look at the climate – you could remove the largest polluter from the equation and all that happens is you change the ‘curve’ of our own destruction. Sarah Connor achieved her goal. She prevented the rise of Skynet. She didn’t prevent the rise of the machine intelligence that replaced it. You can never stop the end of the world. You can just stop an end of the world. Until humanity abandons its own hubris, you can’t do anything else.
And then the movie dials down on this by having John Connor – the Luke Skywalker of the Terminator franchise – straight up executed in the first few minutes. But there’s still a human resistance in the future, and it’s still led by an exceptional person that gels together the fragmentary factions of post-apocalypse humanity. John wasn’t the only hope for humanity – he was just the person with the skill, will and charisma that stepped in to the role of saviour. If John isn’t there, another exceptional person will take his place. Dark Fate rejects the kind of unique exceptionalism that has driven so much of the rest of the franchise and takes it to a more believable place. There isn’t a John Connor shaped role in the future. There’s an exceptional leader shaped role, and John Connor just happened to fit it. In the end, a leader will rise. If not John, someone else. It’s actually a very compelling interpretation of Terminator lore – a way of being hopeful while also being fatalistic.
So no, I don’t think Dark Fate does attempt to reboot the franchise (although God knows it could do with it). I think it’s just more sophisticated in the conclusion it reaches about the arc of progress. I think it’s a vastly more interesting movie as a result.
Another feature I very much enjoyed here is how all the main characters, save for Arnie, are women. Arnie is great in this in his role as a Terminator that evolved a conscience, but the spotlight is always on the other characters and they’re all interesting in their flaws and weaknesses as much as their strengths. They work well as individual characters and as a ensemble.
The story is… fine. I mean, it’s a Terminator movie so the story is ‘Scary robot pursues terrified human(s) until someone sacrifices themselves heroically in what seems like a futile last stand’. It’s that movie, again. There’s only so far the story can go. But I enjoyed it for what it was.
That said, there are some weirdnesses. I didn’t like how fast and athletic the new terminator model is – it feels a bit like how the Star Wars prequels felt they had to live up to the legend of Yoda as a masters swordsman and made him behave like a pinball with a lightsaber. It looked ridiculous there, and I think it’s faintly ridiculous here too. The menace of a Terminator has never been their speed or agility. It’s always been in their relentless resilience. They don’t need to be ninjas, it’s enough to know they can’t be stopped. That’s what makes them terrifying, they don’t need to be more. Sure, the action scenes are occasionally spectacular but I don’t think they needed to be and I think they detract from the movie somewhat by being what they are.
But coming back to what I said above, really the thing I like the most is that the movie has the courage of its own convictions. One of the most disappointing things about the Rise of the Skywalker (or whatever it was called – I hate it so much I won’t even look it up) was the abject cowardice of the writers. At the end of the Force Awakens there is a wonderful moment that suggests the democratization of the Force is finally happening. It’s just a little thing but so heavy in its implication that it brings a lump to my throat. Last Jedi follows through with that with Luke rejecting the religious zealotry of the Jedi, noting that it has failed again and again and again. Rey comes from ‘unremarkable stock’. She’s a normal person without any noble bloodline. And all of that comes together in a way that seems to be making a powerful statement. ‘We all have the potential for greatness within us’. But no, ‘fan’ reaction means that they then reverse course on all of that. Rey was Palpatine’s granddaughter all along. Luke was wrong about the Jedi. The force-awakened children don’t even get a mention. ‘To be a great Jedi in the Star Wars universe, you must come from an exceptional lineage’. How… pedestrian. How utterly conservative. Even the prequels were more progressive.
But Dark Fate doesn’t do that. There’s a reason I made the Luke Skywalker comparison earlier. If Star Wars had approached the universe with the same philosophy as Dark Fate, Rey’s role would have been to step in for Luke Skywalker despite her lack of exceptionalism. She would have brought a balanced approach to the Force that the Jedi have long rejected – Luke’s teaching would have been more in line with an internal personal balance of light versus dark. She would have stepped into a role because she was needed, not because she was destined. And she would have been amazing in it because exceptional ability is not genetic.
This is the first instalment in the Terminator franchise since the Sarah Connor Chronicles that actually says something genuinely new and it deserves your attention.
Shame it underperformed at the box office, because my worry is that if they ever do make a sequel it’ll end up being the same pandering bullshit that ruined the last Star Wars trilogy.
Tombstone
I always think of Tombstone as one of the premier examples of why nobody should take critics too seriously. While it wasn’t critically panned on release it exhibited little more than a disinterested shrug in a lot of reviews. And yet, it has had a staying power that is far in excess of many of the contemporary movies that did receive an approving nod from the commentariat. I watch it every few years, and every time I’m remember anew just how good it is. Perhaps, I will concede, it’s not an outstanding example of a classic western, but certainly a great action movie with a western veneer.
I’ve always though felt a bit sorry for Kurt Russell, because despite being the lead and putting in a good performance he is always upstaged by the coiled rattlesnake intensity of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. Even when Kilmer is reclining in the background he’s a magnet for the attention. He’s got almost all the great moments, all the really memetic lines, and the movie’s greatest crowning moment of awesome is saved for him as he drawls ‘I’m your huckleberry’ at a startled and uneasy Johnny Ringo. Kilmer has been very generous with his praise for Kurt Russell with regards to the movie, saying that its success is entirely down to the fact Russell worked above and beyond his contract to make sure the movie was a success. I don’t know though. Maybe Russell put in the hours, but I think it was Kilmer that was responsible for the magic. The palpable tension he puts into every psychological confrontation is a thing of beauty.
It’s too unabashedly ‘Hollywood’ a film to really rank up alongside the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leonne, or even semi-modern classics like Unforgiven, and True Grit. It’s more ‘Rambo with revolvers’ than anything in the traditional mould of the genre. It is though a treat of a movie and if you’ve never seen it – or avoided it because of the lacklustre reviews it garnered upon a release – I think you’d be pleasantly surprised if you checked it out.
Also, according to Rotten Tomatoes, Treasures of the Sierra Madre is a ‘western’ movie and that is the first time that possibility has ever even been remotely suggested my way. Is that a common opinion? I’m fairly baffled by it.
Treasure Planet
Disney’s take on treasure Island didn’t quite hit the mark with me even though it’s about pirates. I just spent the entire runtime thinking ‘Instead of a futuristic take on the story, man I would have loved to have seen them simply adapt Treasure Island directly’. All the weird sailing spaceships and cyborg pirates just don’t feel like they’re adding much. It’s like someone wrote in a treatment pitch ‘Give a new and interesting spin to a beloved classic’ and assumed that setting it in space was all they needed to do.
As such, it’s a missed opportunity. I can visualise the animated Treasure Island in my mind and it’s a hundred times better. Treasure Island is already an amazing story. One that has resonated through the centuries. This isn’t a bad movie at all – technically it’s perfectly competent in all the major areas in which it needs to be. I get that it was a passion project and they had to fight hard to make it happen… but I just wonder what that energy could have done if it was spent in other directions. It flopped at the cinema, and I’m not really surprised. For a story so full of energy, Treasure Planet just feels… listless.
Trumbo
I knew nothing about Dalton Trumbo before watching this movie, and now I am low-key obsessed. Bryan Cranston, as usual, is a damn chameleon – every one of his performances is genuinely so different that I often forget who I’m watching. He just melts into the roles and he really is one of the finest actors of the modern world. He’s reliable enough in his profession for his mere presence to be reason for me to check something out. That’s what happened here.
Trumbo is a biography, ostensibly, but what it’s really about is the destructive power of cliques. In the 40s and 50s, the ‘reds under the beds’ scare was so widespread that even being suspected of communist sympathies was enough to end with creatives being placed on ‘the blacklist’. They’d be prevented from working in their chosen fields and hounded by ‘right-thinking Americans’ to the point that their mere existence was a trial. Note that there was nothing illegal about being a communist, but certain people made themselves very powerful by controlling the contents of the blacklist. People that lacked the talent to make themselves distinctive in their own right. They gained fame as a result of their power as gatekeepers – as a result of their ability to choose who was, and wasn’t, ‘right thinking’.
Yeah, if that sounds like modern Twitter you’re not wrong.
The movie Trumbo is about the consequences of that for one particularly notable writer. It can be an uncomfortable experience at times as you see the pressure this kind of communal disapprobation inflicts on him and his family, and how it turns him from an affable blowhard into a bullying, overbearing and bitter domestic tyrant. Unable to find honest work to which he is allowed to put his name, he turns to ghost-writing and script-doctoring in bulk. He works long, endless hours on projects for which he will never be able to publicly claim association. He drafts in his family to handle the workload and then eventually sends out a life-boat to the friends he has in similar circumstances. Much of the lower-end of Hollywood ends up benefiting from the skill and expertise of those exiled from the industry. But none are creatively satisfied and some feel the pressure to repent and rejoin the collective because in their hopelessness they see it as the only way to escape the bullying. As the blacklist gradually loses its censorious power over the decades, the balance of power shifts to the point that the gatekeepers of the industry find themselves fading into irrelevance as their outrage no longer has any cachet.
It’s a good movie. And it’s a relevant movie for our modern times. Ironically it’s easier to feel sympathy for those that put together the blacklist than those who put together Twitter’s various blocklists. At least the blacklist was rigorous in its application – if you were a communist, you were on it. If you were suspected of being a communist, you were on it. It had – at least to some extent – the courage of conviction. There’s an intellectual honesty there that’s lacking in modern blocklisting, in which the criteria is largely ‘Are you someone we like? If so, we’ll find excuses for your behaviour. Are you someone we don’t? Then nothing you do will ever excuse you’.
Don’t mistake what I’m saying here – the blacklist was reprehensible and it inflicted vast amounts of real misery on innocent people. Blocklists are comical and have no real effect other than to identify their makers as chumps. But I much prefer exclusion that is ideological but consistent over exclusion that is just yet another manifestation of the tiresomely self-serving question ‘Are you in our tribe or not?’.
Bit of a ramble there – but Trumbo is a movie you should check out!