A big part of reading reviews and coverage and discourse and whatever the fuck is squinting your eyes real tight and trying to divine what the actual motivation for writing something even is. There's been aggression of various kinds toward the movie from the jump, but there's some Dark River underneath the surface conversation. Even if "all" it ended up being was a hundred million dollar jobs program for a ton of weirdos on both sides of a camera, that's fine. Good, actually. It's plenty.
This movie feels like cordyceps to me. I'm not Frances Ford Coppola, legendary director and ancient coot, but I am a person who has my little ideas and likes to parade them around sometimes. This movie feels like an infection that had to run its course in him, puppeteering his body until its wicked fruit shot up out of his head. It's been growing to a dominion threshold in him for decades and he lost his fight with it. Maybe we should have sympathy.
I'm not defending the movie because I've seen it and I "really understand it" more than some other people. I'm barely even defending the movie. I just think that making a weird, even dumb movie is a better use of resources than, you know, treasury bonds or something. Anytime money like this jumps containment I celebrate. I feel like we have one button, one metric, to understand things and I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it's also the metric our masters would like us to judge everything by.
It's an incontrovertible proxy for any virtue. It can certainly tell us if an audience wants something! It's good at that, not perfect, but very good. But you could tell from the trailer, no offense, that there wasn't a mass audience for this. There might not even be a mini audience for it. I just think that we need art for the sake of it sometimes. He literally gilded a lily! It's wild shit.
Imagine having the stature and resources to see the world and say, "no, not this one," and then switch worlds. What's the opposite of selling out? When we figure out what it's called, that's what happened here.
(CW)TB out.
