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February 02, 2006
How in the name of Pauline Kael's haunted panties?: John Rogers inquires
John Rogers, screenwriter, blogger and newly anointed rantmeister, goes all divinely manly upside an anti-Oscar political diatribe that's been flecking the internets, and the read is lively and lovely. Samples: "Sweet God. Sweet. God. Are you honestly, shamelessly a.) claiming to know how to write a film and b.) can't see the enormous structural and thematic parallels between Lawrence of Arabia and Syriana? Are you actually claiming to be a filmmaker but you don't realize... that you picked the two most similar films in your rant list to set up your dichotomy? How in the name of Pauline Kael's Haunted Panties do you critically analyze cinema? By film stock? By the number of tracking shots? By counting the number of words in the script without the letter "e"?! HOW? Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. He's got to pull it out somehow. For chrissake, the man's got a PhD from Stanford and a philosophy degree from Yale. It cannot get worse. Sure, [this writer, name at the link] has shown he is ignorant of how Hollywood business works; completely clueless on recent film and Oscar history; either an idiot or a hypocrite when it comes to the purpose of the very foundation he has set up; and revealed with, I must admit, breathtaking efficiency, he has no critical film analysis skills whatsoever. There is no way this can get any uglier." Rogers quotes the blogger: "Star Wars Episode III got one nomination this morning, for Best Makeup. Lucas wasn’t nominated for Best Director, although George Clooney was for Good Night, and Good Luck. Star Wars’ Ian McDiarmid, playing the deliciously wicked Chancellor Palpatine, wasn’t even nominated for Best Supporting Actor... We’re now in the era of film as social activism, The New Triviality." Rogers notes, "It's ... sublime. It's like looking into the solar corona of hackery, eclipsed only by the lunar body of cluelessness. Even when you go into the comments on his own right-wing site, you read things like: "I too believe Hollywood is filled with perverts and socialists. But an Oscar for Episode III? Are you high?" [More riotous tough-love at the link.]
Posted by pride at February 2, 2006 07:10 PM
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