- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Version:
- Language:
- Length:
- 112 minutes
- Review Format:
- DVD
- Year:
- 2012
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Music
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- Eve begins writing songs as a way to sort-out her some emotional problems.
- Themes:
- Advertising
- Alienation
- Art
- Coming-of-age
- Corporate Power
- Curative
- Destiny
- Emotional repression
- Identity
- Individualism
- Loneliness
- Materialism
- Narcissism
- Nostalgia
- Personal
- Personal change
- Political
- Political Correctness
- Redemption
- Sadomasochism
- Schizophrenia
- Solipsism
- Stereotyping
- White culture
- White privilege
- Similar to:
- Unknown
Summary: Dream of escape from an empty culture that offers everything & nothing.
Film begins with the mental retardation common among Whites; directly-resulting from their passion for emotional repression as a means of appearing superior to the common herd of humanity; that is, the most gullible.
There is a peculiar sense, here, that Whites do not let their children have a proper childhood in constantly forcing them to accept - theoretically - the responsibilities of adulthood before they have actually achieved the physical maturity to make these responsibilities make any sense. This leads White teenagers to adopt fogeyism and dilettantism as symptomatic of growing up - when it is merely evidence of the exact opposite.
The implied critique of the ethnocentric, non-empirical & somewhat-discredited Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (being used here to bully young Whites to conform to materialistic White values that make reaching the top of the hierarchy impossible) is undermined by offering nothing of expressive value, profundity or truth in its place. This suggests nothing more than a White love of the cultural prison within which they are safely-but-not-securely ensconced, as well as of the banality and blandness of the music proffered; since White Whining, self-irony & self-indulgence are never going to be substitutes for genuine passion.
Whites have let their own folk traditions die-out while only half-heartedly embracing the Black musical forms they copy and appropriate in a desperate and despairing attempt to fill their self-created esthetic void. This lack of an emotional depth to White culture explains why the Musical died as a movie genre in the West. It also explains why Whites are acting 24/7 to pretend they already are the people they want to be; leading them to write songs about how life appears rather than how it actually is.
In this way, Whites think-the-fun-out-of-life by going round in intellectual and ever-decreasing circles to evade the escape Whites claim to yearn for: The youthful rebellion here is really a desire for acceptance in writing songs-about-songs focused on the self (not others) - precisely to avoid biting the hand that pretends to feed them. Not escapism, but prisoners who have become institutionalized into accepting the only freedom the slave ever experiences: Helplessness.
The actors are good, but the characters are shallow and dull. This is a musical without real emotion; explaining the weakness of the film’s romance and the even weaker music.
Are White lives really this blighted by tedium?
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