by ·Comments Off on How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022, Daniel Goldhaber)

It’s Wednesday, so I checked the theater site to see what’s playing this weekend, or more specifically if Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is opening here, but nope. Hey the new Paul Schrader, that’s something. Pipeline‘s final showtime is this afternoon, after holding on for nearly a month – I’m very proud of it and Blackberry for their long theatrical lives, even though the only time I’ve personally been out since True/False was to see those city symphony shorts. Anyway, time to watch Pipeline on video like a chump (and later to chump-watch Blackberry and the Schrader and, alas, Showing Up).

And hey, it’s good! Speaking of Reichardt, I expected to be reminded of Night Moves, but this is more procedural, less psychological, with less murder and guilt, but still some heavy repercussions to the (successful) titular operation. Really good fakeout about a member of the group who’s spying for the cops – true, but she’s feeding them misinformation so half the group will stay anonymous.

I only knew Sasha Lane – also feat. Leo’s son from The Revenant, the Idaho girl from The Assistant, a Marvel kid, a White Lotus dude, a Woman King warrior, a Pixar dinosaur, Disney’s Pocahontas, and the bad boyfriend from the beginning of It Follows.

Based on a manifesto and adapted a la Fast Food Nation into a narrative, a level-up from Goldhaber’s Cam. In the excellent Filmmaker interview he says it was 19 months from conception to premiere, and calls it a heist film:

Nobody watches a bank robbery movie from the ’40s and says, “These people are trying to get people to go rob banks.” They see that movie and say, “This is a movie that’s talking about structural inequality and getting me to empathize with characters who feel like they have no other option than to rob a bank.” This movie follows eight young people who feel like they have no option but to blow up a pipeline. I don’t think of the movie as propagandistic, because there’s no cause and effect. They don’t blow up a pipeline and solve climate change. The doing of it is the narrative catharsis in the same way that it is in a heist movie. I want this movie to be given the same dramatic permission that genre is given.

by ·Comments Off on All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011, Adam Curtis)

The Trap and The Power of Nightmares felt like they presented central points (clearly expressed in the open of each episode), then assembled evidence in an orderly fashion, supporting their points in a complex, sometimes roundabout way. This one presents a number of points with related themes. Each episode opens with different titles and explores different events which don’t directly relate back to each other. During episode 2 I was wondering when the Ayn Rand story would come back, but during #3 I realized it had been there all along, that this time Curtis is drawing the connections without explicitly calling back to previous subjects all the time. The movies are starting to link together in interesting ways. At this point, you could fill an “art and world politics” course just by running all his movies and assigning his blog as the textbook.

Episode 1 “begins with a strange woman in the 1950’s in New York,” connects Ayn Rand with Alan Greenspan and Silicon Valley, tracing the failures of her personal life and lack of acceptance in her philosphies, comparing to their massive influence decades later among people in power over the global economy. Rand rejected altruism and supported rational egoism, so surprisingly there’s no relation to the RAND Corporation discussed in The Trap, which worked on game theory, positing human behavior as perfectly selfish.

Part 2 is about natural ecosystems, and the myth that they remain perfectly in balance – Curtis says more recent, complex models show them to be in constant flux. Loved the ecology discussions, the scientific project that attempted to precisely measure every detail of a particular field. This is shown alongside early communes (humans trying to live in perfect balance without power structures) and recent national revolts (glorious-looking uprisings by “the people” against authoritarian power, only to see it replaced by new authoritarian power a year later).

Part 3 discusses the social tendency to view people as individually unimportant parts of a large, self-balancing system. We get stories of a game-theory biologist and his colleagues who theorised that all behavior of living creatures is a result of the needs of their genes – more depowering thoughts. We close in Africa where another animal behaviorist, Dian Fossey, was working, showing how false theories on human behavior and evolution combined with the desires of technology companies led to disaster for the people of Congo/Zaire and Rwanda.

So the movie’s often-mentioned “rise of the machines” isn’t literal so much as a social-control concept, caused by simplifying models of natural behavior. It seems perfect that I finished watching this the day before seeing The World’s End, which is about the rise of actual machines that aim to simplify human behavior.

I also read a bunch of articles from Adam Curtis’s amazing blog – sadly without the video segments since I was sitting at the airport sans wifi. Essay called “You think you are a consumer but maybe you have been consumed” about Texas oilman HL Hunt, caricatured in Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain. “The roots of so much of the distrust of the media today lie back with him and his ideas.” One called “Paradiabolical” on Somalia and Algeria, one on England’s history of bumbling spies, and one on animal shows before the rise of David Attenberg Attenborough.