I recently watched ‘Annihilation’ on Netflix. I don’t think I exaggerate by calling it one of the best Horror SciFi films of the past 30 years.
Humanity is confronted with the apparition of an alien life force which settles its base inside a lighthouse on the sea shore, from there growing slowly like a cancer that will eventually swallow the entire planet. A paramilitary team is sent to investigate the area (‘the shimmer’). Contact is lost. The only survivor, Kane, returns a year later. He has internal bleeding and seems completely amnesic. A new team is sent to the shimmer, composed of women scientists, including Kane’s wife, Lena (Natalie Portman).
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The mainstream consensus in Western societies today is given by a dialectics between two ideologies of radical autonomy and natural rights. First one – Anglo-Saxon empiricism, known today as Establishment Conservatism. It can be summed up as ‘man shall rule the earth’.
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Nostalgia has a bad reputation in the contemporary zeitgeist. Mentioning it as a creative drive is likely to raise a barrage of criticisms and red flags from almost everyone. Conservative and classical liberal thinkers have given up any attempt to defend the notion, allowing it to be claimed by Frankfurt School theorists who did a great job of exploring and at the same time subverting it to their political end goals.
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“The objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the IDEAL man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures, is in truth a mirror accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing or “reflecting” implies-
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I’m running out of horror flicks to see, so last night I was happy to notice one I hadn’t watched on Amazon – ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’. There was a big warning sign – it was made in 2019. It was also produced by Guillermo del Toro, who despite his past interest in Lovecraft fiction, has been on a downward spiral of cringe and wokeness since… hard to tell.
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I’m sort of an aficionado when it comes to the sf/mystery movie genre, so when I came across “Await Further Instructions” (Director Johnny Kevorkian) during the prolonged lock down days, I gave it a shot.
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Nerds, so treasured by the middle brow denizens who occupy the cities and want to think that, well, at least they are smart and deserve RESPECT, are people who possess a type of self-destructive parody of intelligence. Their ability to entertain pointless concepts and abstractions make them believe they have
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I watched ‘Joker’ in a Parisian theatre. A few positive impressions first – the cinematography is outstanding – the camerawork, composition of the frames, the pacing of the action, the psychological evolution of the characters and the conflict development are very thoughtful. Joaquin Phoenix gave one of his all-time best performances. The fascination of the clown as a tragicomic character, the theme of the masses rioting and the inverted hero archetype, throwing a corrupt world into chaos, are excellently introduced without seeming forced or ideologised.
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‘Wild Wild Country’, the documentary focusing on the cult of Bhaghwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) and their little social experiment is an excellent example of a socially progressive ideology tested in real life, in a concrete place and time, with a concrete community.
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