Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Further evidence proving the inadequecy of Darwinism in modern society

I don't want to bother wasting space here by including the actual text of the article that's inspired me to write this post, so I'll just link to it:

www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_12110560

The fact that this Lisa Kennedy person is able to both find work and get published in today's economy fills me with hope for my future, and despair for the field of journalism. Clearly I have what it takes to succeed, being a fairly intelligent, critically minded human being with a University education, because Kennedy seems to be doing jut fine without any of those qualities. I mean really, come one, she actually takes issue with Wall-E's vision of the future and how it will influence developing minds? The whole point behind it is to give them hope that we can turn things around in the bleak reality they're faced with! Did she even finish the movie? She quotes Patty Greer at the end, saying that "We need to believe in our ability as a race that we can turn things around," and so I find it highly dubious whether or not she managed to focus her attention and sit still for the entire duration of Pixar's modern classic. Not finish the movie is a rookie mistake that has already been apologized for by the likes of Robert Ebert, so Kennedy doesn't have much wiggle room between being an idiot and a hack, if not a comfortable mix of the two.

Basically the entire piece is a thoughtless conservative puff piece about how movies are too dark, and actually spends a significant portion of the article attacking the thematic similarities of Roland Emmerich's
body of work, as though he's in any way relevant on an intellectual level. That's like calling Michael Bay highbrow, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Kennedy took issue with The Rock for providing terrorists with good ideas and motivations for attacking the American people. If this article were merely an anti-"2012" rant I would be fine with it, it wouldn't be any less stupid but at least it would have some sort of validity, if only a subjective one. As it is, though, the piece attacks all modern film making, actually referring to its own points as "pleas for the sanctity of the imagination" without the slightest hint of irony, completely misunderstanding many of the films it takes issue with that actually reflect her desires, and essentially calling for a classically insidious form of censorship under the banner of "good taste." It disgusts me.

Really though, I didn't need to write this rant to demonstrate the profound idiocy of this journalist, she did so herself many times throughout her own article. In closing I just want to call attention to the film she extols in her conclusion, Greer's "2012: We're Already in It," which won the the award for Best Feature Film — UFO or Related at the International UFO Congress Convention in Nevada. Admittedly I haven't seen this documentary, but since that apparently isn't a necessary requirement for making sweeping and possibly outright invalid claims about a film, I'm going to assume that it's probably as much of a crackpot as it sounds, and take this alone as sufficient evidence for Kennedy's fundamental inability to reflect critically. Even if the movie's good, the fact that Kennedy presents it the way she does serves to prove my point anyways.

I don't know why I bothered wasting twenty minutes writing about this stupid article, I guess I just needed to get a good rant out of my system, it's been a while. Who knows, maybe I'll use pieces like this to get myself hired one day by demonstrating my ability to, you know, think. Clearly there's a need for that in modern film criticism.

I need to get more sleep at night, clearly two hours isn't enough...

2 comments:

  1. I dislike this rant based on the usage of the term Darwinism. Natural selection is never inadequate, it just sometimes sees traits chosen as adaptive that are unexpected.


    Other than that I say good rant. Just never bash evolution!

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  2. Social Darwinism on the other hand is fair game.

    I just wish that Darwin's name wasn't used for such bullshit. It's a form of blasphemy.

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