Tag: Film

Film: Killers of the Flower Moon. Directed by Martin Scorsese. 2023

I will call this: Eight problems I have with this film:

  1. It is too long. It could have been at least 3o minutes shorter.
  2. It is predictable because the villains are clear from the start, and the victims are helpless till the end.
  3. It is a straightforward illustration of the intrinsic nature of white men’s capitalism/imperialism as crime. As an illustration of a thesis, it is less of a work of art than a piece of propaganda.
  4. Leonardo De Caprio’s character – it is not clear whether he is an evil conniver or an idiot because the actor switches between these two interpreations of his character’s personality sometimes especially indulging in portraying the physical mannerisms of the “dimwit” aspect.
  5. Lily Gladstone’s character – her behavior seems inconsistent. After realizing that a massive crime is being perpetrated against the Osage Indians, and going to Washington to seek help, she still trusts her husband’s caring for her and administering her insulin injections. This type of “devotion” seems to defy credibility.
  6. The Osage Indians are denied any agency. They are depicted as prone to alcoholism, submissive, and naive. Their reaction to the murders is expressed through tribal superstition and dreams (e.g. the sequences involving Molly’s mother). They are described as big children who are helpless and easy to be taken advantage of, thus promoting a stereotype instead of undermining it.
  7. Robert De Niro plays the sociopath that he has played many times before.
  8. The script in general does not have a solid dramatic structure – that is, it does not obey the rules of drama, rather – it illustrates time and again the greed and evil nature of white men conspiring to commit murder after murder and never quite getting the just retribution for their crimes.

Film: Don’t Look Up. 2021. Directed by Adam McKay

This film, supposedly a satire of America, is like a film made in the Soviet Union in the 50s. It employs the devices of anti-Americanism of a now-defunct socialist aesthetics.

Its problem is not that it compares the inevitable catastrophe of a meteorite about to hit the earth to the problem of climate change (a problem of immense complexity) as one serious critic of the film pointed out. Its real problem is that it portrays the “villains” of the US government as complete idiots and then claims that this is a satire. You can’t make the object of your satire a complete idiot in an attempt to prove that they are an idiot. It reminds me of the manipulative aesthetics of anti-semitic German films before the Second World War.

And what a pity that some great actors obliged.

Satire is a very difficult genre!