Three Rejected Post Ideas (Patreon)

I had some momentary plans, and then I thought better of it. Here's a sampling of what I chose not to subject you to.

1. An Open Letter to Lights Camera Jackson

After his Booksmart stunt (which, please tell me someone has called him out for ripping off Leonard Maltin's two near-silent non-reviews), I considered writing a heartfelt post in which I challenged the still-young man to think hard about whether he wanted to be human clickbait, or construct meaningful discourse that might actually stand the test of time. I decided not to get involved.

2. Rewriting the Screenplay of Booksmart in Verse

This was an idea spawned in part by watching Straub / Huillet's Othon film (based on Corneille's French iambic pentameter), and partly by frequently encountering the not-incorrect criticism that Booksmart is not a realistic depiction of contemporary high school life. I thought, yes, but maybe the problem is that it is not unrealistic enough, and that stylizing the text would bring out what is, in its way, the comedic Shakespearean element in the film's premise. I didn't get very far, but I had some notes:

NICK:

Though left behind you thought I'd be

A place has been secured for me.

I journey, though I had much fun,

To Georgetown, where the trains don't run.

HOPE:

Amy, panda masturbator,

Your hand's a deft investigator.

Though you doth probe like Interpol,

I believe you seek a different hole.

Etc. You can see why I soon abandoned the "project."

3. A Discussion of "Generational Whining" Films

This was partly occasioned by my recent 20-minute attempt to watch Donal Foreman's The Image You Missed, and the inexplicable demand by some folks on Mike's Patreon that he eventually watch Kurt Kuenne's awful film Dear Zachary. Although these are different in kind, there is a common thread here, and the big granddaddy of all these films is probably Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect. What they share is a myopic fixation on personal issues to the virtual exclusion of a wider social or historical context. Or, to put it more precisely, these are films by people who feel that they (and their fee-fees) are "victims" of history or politics, and so they insist on dragging everything back down to the level of the personal. Who cares whether my dad was a great so-and-so who accomplished this-and-that for the larger world? He wasn't there when I needed him!

Dear Zachary is, like I said, a bit different, in that, in fixating on the personal affront of a very particular murder case (which is admittedly fucked up), the film goes on a crusade against an entire nation's legal system, never taking into account whether someone exploited a loophole in what is basically an arrangement to protect women from male aggression. It's like the "Willie Horton" argument against Michael Dukakis's furlough program, except levied on gender instead of race. 

So yeah, I decided this would take a massive effort to really explain why it's a problem, and it would piss a lot of people off, and I have other shit to do. Like the Family Learning Channel, REJECTED.