It is, demonstrably, possible to be this cool. I mean, we’re looking at it. Marcello Mastroianni is right there in front of you, being this cool. But since it’s not possible for anyone else to be this cool, it’s certainly impossible for anyone to be any cooler. It’s science, or math, or something.
I mean, Marcello is in La Dolce Vita, being so cool that even he can’t stand himself. Then he stands in front of a giant billboard image of himself being himself, which is like cool squared, or cubed. I never was good with those numbers you had to type by grabbing the roller on the typewriter by the knurled knob on the end of the carriage and setting it halfway between two lines. I’m not that cool.
Marcello is no doubt exuding his own hair gel. Nothing that comes from the store could possibly match it. Cool sunglasses, natch. I’ll bet he was wearing sunglasses when he was born. That must have hurt Mama Mastroianni, but sacrifices must be made for people this cool.
He’s not cold, however. An ex-wife’s lawyer is cold. He is also occasionally slicker than a greased weasel, as well as being cool. How else do you explain this?
You’re not going to understand CEO snuff merchants and their ilk unless you understand TPOT. TPOT stands for “this part of twitter.” The acronym really doesn’t fit anymore, because its devotees have moved to Yells at Clouds.com after Obergruppenfuhrer Musk bought Twitter. They’re all PostRats. That’s means they’re post rationalists. I don’t have the time, the familiarity, or the energy to explain the post rationalist worldview. It’s not really coherent, so any analysis quickly leads to a popsicle headache for anyone with a library card instead of a Twitter account. Their worldview is that they’re smart and you’re not, so there. Okey dokey, then.
What you’re seeing is the logical extension of internauts who have been wearing trilbys and neckbeards on both their chins in their online icon photos, deriding people for believing in invisible sky wizards, and similar infantile glosses on many profound metaphysical thoughts. They, as they say in the local parlance, fucking love science, because they’ve mistaken a potty mouth for edginess, among other silliness. They became so open minded that their brains fell out. They started out by rejecting any form of religion because it wasn’t rational. They thought they could figure out the world like a million Mr. Spocks. They slowly learned they were wrong. Bill Nye is not a scientician, no matter how many times he appears on the teevee, and he’s certainly not an appropriate stand-in for John the Baptist.
So they all decided to believe in an incredibly silly and diverse stew of foolishness that couldn’t be proven rationally, but appealed to the very large rational vacuum between their ears. Space aliens, witchcraft, invisible cabals, the wonders of pornography, that sort of thing. You could boil it down to changing out Thomas Aquinas for Steven King. We recently had a neighbor whose wifi name, visible on our router, was !!HAILSATAN666!!. They have a pet sematary in their front yard. My wife and I used to joke that those weren’t their Halloween plastic skeletons hanging in the trees. Those were their everyday skeletons. The woman of the house dressed all in black and was convinced that her devil worship was somehow anti-war, and had flags displayed to that effect. In reality, she is as edgy as a marble, but all the flummery makes her feel interesting, I gather. The ridiculous elephantine year-long fascination with Halloween is a tell for the mindset.
Any religion, even primitive ones, basically boils down to an arbitrary set of rules that everyone agrees to follow, or get a smack on the nose if they don’t. PostRats think they’re very wise, but vocabulary isn’t their strong suit. They think “arbitrary’ can only mean “bad.” The original Latin means “relating to or depending on the discretion of an arbiter.” So if you’re religious, the arbiter is that invisible sky wizard I mentioned. If you’re not, you’re your own invisible sky wizard, and the rules are decided daily online.
Say what you want about the Ten Commandments, but as the wag once noted, at least there’s only ten of them. Keeping up with the rules in the PostRat world must be exhausting. Because it’s just claiming your rationality entitles you to dream up a voodoo religion on the spot for any occasion, based solely on your feelz. Of course your feelz are delivered to you via a social media drip, and the adumbration of them is obscure.
So I’m sure the CEO snuff merchant thought we was the love child of Jacques Derrida and Jason Bourne, but in reality, I’ve seen his ilk before. And remember, don’t call him stupid. PostRats hate that.
That’s amusing, isn’t it? The AI script kiddies are getting better by leaps and bounds. They’re making short glosses on their favorite dreck right now. It’s only a matter of time before they can produce the whole thing, instead of just coming attractions.
Of course animation entertainment is about a century old at this point. It’s easy to forget just how popular Disney’s animated features were back in the 1950s, for example. Disney animated movies were the highest grossing films in 1950, 1953, and 1955. Their live action stuff, which were as phantasmagorical as the cartoons, came in first, second, or third a few times, too.
The Jetsons was just a futuristic version of the Flintstones. Cartoons like that are beloved by people who watched them as re-runs in their childhood, but if you look at them again without your nostalgia glasses on, they’re pretty weak sauce. Cartoons suffered badly from the shift to assembly line work from the original artist’s easel quality.
So where will the AI revolution end up? Pretty soon, people with next to no computer skills and precious little artistic ability and writers with an inability to spell the word “lose” are going to be able to make a whole movie on their desktop computer. And they probably will. And it will be just like this video. A derivative of a derivative of a derivative. But then again, have you seen the latest Spiderman movie? No, not that one. The other one. No, the other, other one. No, not that one either. You’re thinking of the other, other, other Batman movie…
Please observe that we’re discussing why it’s a masterpiece. If you’re still wondering if it’s a masterpiece, you’re obviously lost and need to hit the back button on your browser a few times to get back to safety. It is. We’re only here to analyze the why.
We have to put aside the fact that it’s funny. It was obviously supposed to be funny. They put Don Rickles in it, for instance. I’ve seen a short list of the scenes that were edited out of the movie. It’s pretty obvious that KH was intended to be the Animal House of Hohenzollern. The out-edits mostly involved girls with their shirts off and assorted other 70s bilge. The Ingrid Pitt Breast Delivery System was hired to bring some sort of incongruous feminine presence, but she was laid off before they even started filming. Like many good movies, its sounds like the producers tried to ruin the venture as hard as they could, but couldn’t manage it.
Clint Eastwood leads the cast. He’s always been a replacement for John Wayne in the firmament of Hollywood. He just plays himself, over and over, just like the Duke did. It doesn’t matter whether he’s driving around with an orangutan in a pickup truck, or with Donald Sutherland barking like a dog in a Sherman tank, Clint the Squint is just Clint. Complaining about Clint’s acting style is like getting up a petition to put Franklin Pierce on Mount Rushmore instead of one of the Borglund four. Clint might not know a Strasberg from a Starbucks, but he knows what he’s about. Try imagining anyone else as Kelly in this role. Kelly has to appear stoic, stolid, fearless, formidable, a man to be followed. Actors who can project that are always in short supply. And he wasn’t afraid to sort of poke fun at his carefully cultivated image, if the moment called for it. Here’s the spaghetti western meeting the German deli:
Telly Savalas has a big part in the show. He was supposed to be George Kennedy. George wanted too much money to be in the movie, so they got Kojak. He turned out to be perfect for the job. Once again, the producers won by losing. The movie would have been diminished some if you replaced Telly’s bald pate with Kennedy’s combover, but it’s not like they were trying to hire Don Knotts. It wouldn’t have been a trainwreck. Without Clint, the premiere would have been held at a drive-in.
Hollywood has always been full of actors that don’t, ahem, know their limitations. Another giant slab of beef, Charlton Heston, never knew enough to stick to his knitting, and embarrassed himself numerous times by trying to act in things, instead of standing in the right spot, remembering his lines, and avoiding knocking over the furniture. Clint has never made that mistake.
Donald Sutherland steals the picture, of course, with his oddball Oddball character. It was completely misunderstood at the time, and even moreso now. Everyone describes him and his crew as hippies, which they find incongruous in a story that includes a mention of Omaha Beach not once, but twice. It’s the result of two errors. First, they assumed that everyone came home from the war, kept their crewcuts, got a job making cars with fins, and had 2.3 children and a dog to kick. But just like after WWI, lots of WWII vets had trouble fitting in after the war, and were quite bohemian, if not downright criminal. The Wild One is one example of that sort of man. Oddball and his ilk are another. He isn’t a hippie. He’s not even a proto-hippie if you ask me. He’s a Beat Generation free spirit all the way. Hell, what hippie ever listened to country music, whether he’s flattening a railroad crossing in a tank, or not? The Beat Generation worshiped idiosyncrasy for its own sake, just like Oddball’s crew. There has never been a more lockstep bunch than the hippies.
That’s the second error. To the modern eye, hippies were a new phenomenon, peculiar to the late sixties and pre-disco seventies. Nonsense. It was a warmed over fad. Hell, Germany had hippies wandering around the Black Forest, who called themselves wandervogel. They liked to commune with nature in the woods while singing folk songs, and had been doing it since the 19th century. After Charlie Chaplin’s accession to Fuhrer, they were either invited to become Hitler jugend or were directed to commune with nature more closely, as mulch. At any rate, the Greatest Generation had a lot more variation than how they’re usually portrayed, and the generations who followed had a lot less.
So the movie doesn’t really rely on comic relief. Comedy is a strand woven right through it. It’s not a series of rest areas on the usual highway to shooting other people, and blowing stuff up. It’s funny, but the premise of the movie, a bank robbery that’s quasi-legal because the bank is behind a shifting dotted line on a military map, sounds more outrageous than any number of more staid WWII movies. The problem is, it’s a true story. Some soldiers from various armies robbed a NAZI bank and made off with lots of gold, almost none of which was subsequently recovered. Kelly’s Heroes, which is supposed to be a romp, might have more truth in it than one of those slavish war movies with the Germans floating on a cushion of subtitles.
The miracles in the movie’s production are legion. The director was Brian G. Hutton, who wasn’t exactly David Lean. He was a bit actor for a while, before he decided it was easier to sit in a sling chair with his name on it. He’d just got finished making Where Eagles Dare in ’68, so he was a natural to put an x in gaffer’s tape on the floor and point Clint towards it.
It’s fun to compare WED to KH, since they share so many details in their productions and cast. Where Eagles Dare made a small fortune, but it’s a really dumb movie. It’s dumb fun, but admit it, it’s really dumb. There isn’t any comedy in it, but it’s very funny accidentally. Richard Burton is completely miscast, yelling his lines like drunken Hamlet, while stolid Clint just sort of glares at him and wonders why he doesn’t just say the lines. The plot is like fourteen war/spy movies put in a Cuisinart and put back together as a papier-mache movie. All the German soldiers are basically NPCs who throw their arms straight up and fall over a second or two before one of the heroes shoots them. It’s a hoot.
So Brian tried again, and got it exactly right this time. He left Burton at the happy hour drink rail, took Clint to Yugoslavia, and blew up more of the country than the Allies and the Wehrmacht ever did. The second-rate actors were all first-rate. The battle scenes are better than Saving Private Ryan by a long shot. The campfire scenes mostly show guys as they are, believably pensive, tired, and tongue-tied, instead of exposition factories. Their dumbfounded, silent expressions when their fellows are killed have more pathos in them than any ten anti-war movies. And their motivations are completely believable, instead of the usual supermen charging at machine guns to die for freedom words.
It’s a masterpiece. So watch it again. Don’t worry about being bored because you know how it turns out. Have a little faith, baby.
That’s Eumir Deodato tickling the plastic horse teeth. He’s from Brazil. He’s been around for what seems like forever, doing his thing. He was mostly an arranger and producer of records. He made records with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Kool and the Gang.
He eventually got around to making his own records in a serious way. In 1973, his first album sold five million copies and won a Grammy. It had his very funky version of Also Sprach Zarathustra on it, which was notably featured in Being There. If you thought using Also Sprach in 2001: A Space Odyssey was brilliant, well, using this version of it in Being There was genius.
The TooYube clip is just the song laid over a truncated clip from the movie, but in the original, it weaves in and out of the dialog and street noise, and lasts a lot longer. It’s the most effective melding of music and film footage I’ve ever seen.
The first video is a performance of Super Strut. It’s much less recognizable than ASZ, but it was a modest hit in the US, too. It’s on Deodato’s second album, which is delightfully odd, with jazz covers of Knights in White Satin, Rhapsody in Blue, and a Ravel piece.
I gather that Eumir tours like a lot of old Blues musicians used to. He travels on his own, and expects whoever puts on the show to assemble a band for him to play with. Chuck Berry used to do that, too. In the first video, Deodato is playing with the Euro Groove Department, who are definitely up to the job. There are many videos of Deodato performing the song online with less capable musicians.
The drummer is terrific, but one can’t help but notice that Deodato gets up and goes to the john or something until the drum solo is over. I cast no aspersions. The audience mostly does the same thing during drum solos, so why can’t the other musicians?
Tag: movies
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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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