New Rose Hotel

I've never really understood the allure of pursuing high stakes crime. Most related films make it clear that should you reach 50 having embraced such a life, you're remarkably fortunate if you're not locked up and still have a small army of troops protecting you. It's not passing before reaching old age that's disconcerting it's living while constantly worrying about outwitting your adversaries. That must grow tiresome after awhile. But I suppose the work may be more exciting.

In Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel, Fox/Christopher Walken celebrates the risk-fuelled life, and living without fear or limits, it's one of his best performances.

Perhaps there's something of the actor's lifestyle caught up with imaginative redefinition, the lucrative transference of artistic synergies inherently illuminating his authenticity. 

The film's well-cast, he's amicably joined by a less animated yet lithe Willem Dafoe (X), who works as his trusted partner engaging in lucrative industrial espionage.

Asia Argento (Sandii) luxuriously complements his smitten improvised amorous calling, the hopeless romantic having found yet another seemingly impressionable curious enthusiast.

But she may have more than one identity and may not seek the cloistered path.

So distressing these inspired freedoms.

Ethereal interconnected independence.

It's kind of like sci-fi noir although the detectives aren't what you'd expect, they're more like spies helping a science-genius move from one covetous corporation to the next.

The ominous sense of impending doom delicately blended with ebullient hope, shockingly seduces and destructively serenades as the jocose trio travels the globe.

Ah well, it doesn't seem like they're hiring poets although in the '90s we really believed, or I did anyways, that the old world stereotypes prejudicially preventing misfits from finding alternative trade routes would fade away.

Into banal feudal oblivion along with war and irritable class-bias.

Since Trump things have changed dramatically.

Not to mention the woeful pandemic.

Nevertheless, I imagined the poems I've been writing recently for several years as time progressed. 

When new rhymes seemed improbable, I rewrote the language.

For better or worse, I don't really know. 

I am still having as much fun, although I need to start transforming my film reviews too.

The future radiating indeterminate.

Just picked up some more horseradish. 

Hail, Caesar!

Film production, the magnification of dreams and ambitions, pluralizing heroism and gallantry with clear and precise occasionally ambiguous envisioned dexterity, precipices and pageants promulgating objectivity and sentiment with equally concise provocations, the contemporary and the historical rivetingly aligned, mischievously extracting, the im/pertinence of our times.

A film set.

A star.

A gathering of observers. 

Identity in flux.

Hail, Caesar! converses with Trumbo, a comedic counterpoint to its tragic pen, wherein communists have infiltrated Hollywood and are engaged in criminal activities directly undertaken to support the Soviet Union, only a hardboiled behind-the-scenes gruff steady executive and his up-and-coming Western foil standing in their way, laughs consistently produced amidst the touching absurdity, which seriously suggests it's inherently ridiculous, without failing to shrewdly present itself as a matter of unconcerned dazzle, denoted connotations covertly overted, not the Coen Brothers best comic material but it passes, Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) and his little dog, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), defender of the dialectic.

It's a compelling tool, this, dialectic, oppositions and syntheses you know, but using it to predict the future with dispassionate inevitability is where it errs, the end of history functioning like a religious utopia (a 19th century form fused with secular content) which foolishly casts out history and religion, people are never going to stop remembering the past or believing in the fantastic, and attempts to laud a future which does so is a naive waste of critical resources.

Although, I suppose, in my mediocre understanding of the concept, in an egalitarian society things are, oddly enough, much more equal, and due to the equality of opportunity and resources people would be less willing to bear grudges, and less concerned with what happened hundreds of years ago, because they aren't labouring at all times for peanuts, make things more equal, more comfortable, and such grudges could decrease in severity because it's easier to let go of a grudge when you have free time and a disposable income, things to do, goods to acquire.

It's kind of like a generational thing though, if that theory is still taken seriously (it should be), new generations rebelliously critiquing whatever happens to be the norm, movements generated by boredom, generations growing up in a culture based on equality still seeking to define themselves by rallying against the system, even if it was that system that gave them the opportunity to rally against it, its opposite having no such recourse, taking it apart so their grandchildren can rebuild it.

I don't think you can eliminate the desire to change things and stand out through change no matter how perfect a system you create unless you can somehow materialize the affects of the adversarial without promoting stagnation and decay.

Sports do this well.

But the dialectic in terms of momentary observation, observances of historical mutations, brief narrative evaluations rather than definitive prognostications, is a constructive tool, fun to play with, there are plenty of oppositions out there to note, many of which haven't been thought up to strategically condition the future.

Maybe they should have been, maybe not, doesn't change my thoughts that Hail, Caesar! is funny and worth seeing, a lighthearted yet brash take on life, a minor film in the Coen Brothers's oeuvre. 

With Clancy Brown (Gracchus), Robert Picardo (Rabbi), Wayne Knight (Lurking Extra #1), Dolph Lundgren (Submarine Commander), Patrick Fischler (Communist Writer #2), and Christopher Lambert (Arne Seslum).