Thought provoking

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2016)

I watched Total Recall (2012) last night. You could make a colorable argument that it is the stupidest movie ever made. So watching this today almost gave me whiplash, since it is such a thought-provoking flick.
It might not be the thoughts Woody wants. I see it as Woody trying to apologize for cynicism and negatively his whole life. Then again, maybe he went to France to meet Roman Polanski and get some 12-year-old girls. Hard to say.
I find it amusing, Woody's smugness, when he criticizes Hollywood for only caring about dinner and movies. (I do think the LA Times should be divided into those two sections, just for convenience.) It seems the only thing Woody has more contempt for than Hollywood is businessmen. What a hackneyed Marxist college professor outlook on life. Welcome to Woody's world, set your watch back 40 years. No wonder he is fixated on the past.
It was appropriate that Woody showed the Versailles, since his Marie Antoinette attitude was so prevalent. He must miss Greenwich Village, now all gentrified. Being way more provincial than he would admit, Woody can't see all the hip artists are in Branson Missouri, watching Yakov Smirnoff and being the same drunken bums artists they have been for centuries, if not millennia.
It was fun to pause the movie and look people up. I knew of Gertrude Stien, but a little Wikipedia and I can see she was a Bay Area trust fund baby, kinda like the Grateful Dead. She could afford to not have a job and buy paintings from the whole coterie of bums that swarmed around her like bees to honey. Remember, to these bums of magnificent commitment, what we call a "salon" was to them a warm room, and maybe some free booze.
Like I said, it is a thoughtful movie. So I got to thinking about this dynamic: rich idle people, who any good Marxist should hate, except they are bum magnets for a bunch of dipsomaniac artist types. And how the art is a fusion, a very capitalist fusion, of those rich patron's expectations and the kind of long-con BS that a bunch of brain-damaged dope fiends can whip up on short notice with minimal effort. Before long, voilà, Rothko. But of course, there is also a lot of good art that comes out of this patronage. It will be interesting to see what comes out of Branson and Taos and all the other cheap places where bum artistes can afford to live.
Woody would hate the analogy, but you can see Hollywood as the rich trust fund Gertrude Stein, and see the equally capitalistic exploits produced by the hordes of very good and very bad artistes it attracts.
So other than the bits of New York smug, this is a very lovely movie. It's drop-dead gorgeous, Deakins-quality cinematography. I am delighted it made so much money, since Woody needs to learn being a cynic is really no fun, and the cheapest form of smugness and condescension.