Here in my new, prematurely air-conditioned office, as I realized that it's two o'clock already, and that I was planning on leaving early today, and that I was also planning on actually writing an article this week, I also realized that if I'm not careful, I might end up writing about poetry, like, all the time on these things. Which maybe wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but still, no one wants to read about poetry on a blog about comics and movies.
Why would I only write about poetry? Well, because of the continually-cultivated cultural ambivalence that I was writing about last post, whereby I no longer pretend to care about stuff that I don't care about (this also includes not following the Pittsburgh baseball Pirates this summer (though, let's face it, that's pathetically easy, since their one of the worst teams in the majors yet again this year)). And I ran out of the kind of play-time money good for going to a lot of movies in the theater a year ago (and it's also been a rather abysmal year for movies).
So maybe that's the question that I'm getting at, between Hollywood and the Pirates: maybe I'm not really taking any kind of cultural-critical action via this so-called ambivalence, but merely acting as an unsatisfied consumer. So then, do I either a) recognize that I'm just an unhappy customer and get back to complaining about crappy shit, or b) figure out a way to genuinely ignore the entire set of machinations of the culture industry?
How to genuinely ignore the culture industry? Maybe by writing about poetry all the time instead. Of course, there's also a whole list of complications on why poetry sucks too, and I don't really want to bother with those arguments either. Gah. It's like I'm becoming negative-beyond-negative here. Maybe I just need a good book recommendation?
(And also, to end (if only parenthetically) on a positive note: Gentlemen Broncos just gets better and better in my mind the more that I think about it. So does Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.)
it's nick. i'm just too lazy to change my login thingy. anyway, i agree that GB just gets better and better. but damn that BL:PoCNO continues to piss me off. it's like a crappier version of Until Death to me. but at least Until Death had some fairly hokey production value to it so i could enjoy it ironically when i wasn't enjoying it literally. but BL:PoCNO was fairly slick and yielded no ironic enjoyment for me (unless the irony there was Nic Cage's continued slide into the abyss of awful acting, or, possibly, that artistic lizard closeup).
i have the original Bad Lieutenant sitting around my apartment right now. in fact, it's been there longer than any other unwatched Netflix movie thus far. why? because i don't really care! i mean, yes, Justique was in the hospital and i was at conventions last weekend, but still. i don't care about it! i wanted to see what would have possessed the filmmakers to attempt a reinterpretation of a naughty cop movie made some 30 years or so ago. i mean, i'm really damn curious. but the new one sucked for me, thus zapping most of my motivation for actually watching the original.
so GB, yes amazing. but BL:PoCNO... in my opinion, it's a confusing mess of ideas that were under-executed. the violence is just mild enough to be meh. his drug use is just recreational enough to be "seen it before." and his near-lack of morality isn't extreme enough to make for a good boundary tester like Ichi the Killer or even Kill Bill.