Idiot Abroad (2010)

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	DVD

(http://www.futuregamez.net)

Caucasian Idiot Abroad

Like everyone with a limited grasp of reality, this tourist assumes his nature is human nature; refusing to experience anything other than self-regard. This explains his fear of travel, in case travel proves him wrong about his assumptions about others.

Fairly-amusing satire of slack-mouthed White supremacy; explaining why UK Whites tend to be Little Englanders and also why - given how widespread they are - other Whites tend to affectionately refer to White supremacists as lovable.

The White affection for xenophobes exists to avoid the label: Race Traitor. Yet this conflicts with the White desire to avoid being labeled: Racist. The rampant schizophrenic guilt of the humor here consists of Whites trying to have their cake and eat it; benefiting from White supremacism while pretending to criticize it. The weak attempt at ironic degradation does not help the comedy nor distract us from what is really going on here.

(http://www.futuregamez.net)

A show like this allows Whites to attack other cultures as inferior, while appearing not to do so in appearing to attack bigots. Ethnocentrics will laugh with the Idiot; multi-culturalists, at him; thereby having it both ways - as intended. This is why the show is not called A White Idiot Abroad, despite the fact that no Black (nor any other ethnic group) ever behave in this way.

By not analyzing the benefits that accrue to Whites from the belief in their genetic superiority (&, thereby, implying racism only benefits racists), the racist import of such White media products as this becomes all too clear.

Simply saying, “Racists are stupid” is insincere, unless backed-up by an answer to the question: “Why?” Because there are obvious economic and psychological advantages to phenotypism, any true criticism of it must admit that any White critic is involved in the very political activity being criticized - otherwise the criticism is both hypocritical and lacking in credibility.

Trying to combine Sacha Baron Cohen with Alan Whicker does not really work since, unlike Till Death Us Do Part, there is no explanation as to why an idiot would be an idiot. People are only stupid if there is a benefit to being so: An all-important truth that this show completely evades. Moreover, no-one bites the hand that feeds them without experiencing the fear of losing unearned privileges.

Whites have political problems negotiating the minefield of multi-culture and one certainly hopes this Idiot does not reproduce too often or there will be even more useless eaters in the world.

By making Karl PILKINGTON look more foolish than the Whites who made this program, they hope to look clever - or at the very least cleverer. Yet they never, themselves, say anything clever with which to prove how smart they really are: Like the Plain Jane associating with an ugly girl to make herself look beautiful. In this way, many Whites hope to avoid being reviled as inferior by occulting their stupidity in comparing-&-contrasting themselves with those stupid others. Pointing-out the stupidity of others is a way of hiding your own, but only really works when there are plenty of stupid people around - if not, then they must be created by the very snobbery being denied here.

In the end, An Idiot Abroad is the story of depressed White males yearning for a return to the simple certainties of the womb when confronted by the exceeding variety of everyday life.

---

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Look Back in Anger (1958)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	Cinema

(Image: http://andreirublev.wordpress.com/)

The British equivalent of Streetcar Named Desire with Britain’s answer to Marlon Brando: Richard BURTON.

Because class interests are inherently inimical, meaningful relationships between (& within) social classes are essentially impossible. The eternal tension between the various parties makes conflict inevitable; while helping to sustain the very system that the anger rails against. Yet, the struggle is internecine since each group needs the other - in the absence of mutual respect - to determine itself; each class defining itself by what it is not rather than what it is.

Mary URE is peculiarly effective as the masochistic wife of the archetypal Angry Young Man - the intense BURTON; making them an exceptionally realistic couple who have transgressed social norms by crossing class boundaries to self-nullifying affect. Yet, they clearly do love one another.

The only uneasiness in the movie is an unholy dramatic strain between the gritty realism of the mise en scène and the often overblown language. This can grate on ones nerves in a film, when it would be perfectly acceptable on the stage.

The film itself is successfully opened-out beyond the screenplay's theatrical origins to make it a movie in its own right. Yet, the emotional claustrophobia of the original is still necessarily present to suggest a culture at war with itself in a physically crowded, emotionally uptight England. Burton’s state-of-the-nation rants are perfectly valid despite being expressed amid a stream of personal invective and self-loathing. The class consciousness of those who have no other way to identify whom they are, the inherent retrospection of a declining imperial power and the emotional & sexual sterility of English life are unmistakably gotten out of his system - until the next tirade. A man who is easy to love but hard to live with.

Along with The Servant, this is a febrile exploration of the negative effects of the British class system.

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

We Need to Talk about Kevin

(2010)

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.aceshowbiz.com/)

we need to talk about something, but this is not it!

Not a warning against poor potty-training, but one against potty training as such.

Trying to make children fit an ideological niche rather than one for which they are more naturally suited increases the tension between parent and offspring - as if raising children were the same as house-training dogs. Dramatized here by a mother who really did not want children and who, thus, offers her son no parental means of achieving self-hood through useful guidance from her. The desire to control her son rather than accept him ends disastrously when the child-raising-a-child produces the inevitable, mass-murdering monster.

(Image: http://www.pajiba.com/)

Despite the narrative and psychological insight on show here, there is also profound cultural and political cowardice.

Most of such people are White - globally - produced by a culture obsessed with repressing its emotions as a vain means of demonstrating genetic superiority over non-Whites. Physical adults behave like emotional children - with little good being done to, by or for anyone.

The drama, like its antagonists, is locked deep inside the prison of a culture frightened of its own nature, structure and underlying purpose. Reducing any empathy we might like to feel for the central characters plight in both mother and son being victims of their choices and their environment, respectively: Tied to one's oppressor; living an empty life through one's children because of failure in one's own life.

Making familial parasitism seem universal and natural rather than merely specific and cultural emphasizes the vampire quality of a polity bereft of an objective and consistent ethical code. Unable to raise their children in a tactile manner; offering a performance of humanity rather than the real thing. A house, but not a home, in a culture that has begun to eschew the supreme value of the extended family for the emotional poverty of the hermetically-sealed world of the nuclear - the latter lacking good experience to pass on to the next generation.

(One is reminded of the fatuity of the advice Dr Spock gave his readers, advice that eventually made his children hate him for using them as objects in a scientific experiment, instead of subjects of parental love.)

This film describes brilliantly but does not explain; hence, the quintessential failure of this drama to involve us in the unemotional - a whole lot of hand-wringing to a problem but no solutions.

The real lesson to be learned here is that if you cannot love; do not have kids - only suffering will ever result. More troublingly, there is an anti-Feminist implication that women cannot juggle careers and motherhood. Is the nuclear family eating itself because it was never tenable?

Just as good or as bad - depending on your point-of-view - as Elephant, but not an improvement on it.

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.