April 27th
This is a satire. This has to be a satire. I mean, really, seriously this has just got to be the most subversive, most scathing, most indescribably disturbing satire ever filmed. Ever. In the entire history of the medium. Had Robert Altman lived to see this, he would have been scared for his own life. Had Paddy Chayefsky lived to see this, he would have straight killed himself. If this had been shown to George Orwell, he would have literally disintegrated. It has that kind of ungodly, repulsive power. This was not nor could it have been made by a person whose primary intentions did not include brutally satirizing the lives of the rich and glamorous, whose lives are so dripping with copious amounts of unbelievable wealth that they find room to complain about having not one but two Manhattan skyrise apartments; that they get mad – so mad that they cry – at their kids for leaving handprints on their new silk blah-dy blahs and then pontificate about the burdens of being a mother; that, because they are so oblivious to how the real world functions, feel as though they can actually relate to the poverty-stricken townspeople of Abu Dahbi because they share similar marriage problems. This is a satire, and if somehow it isn’t, if somehow the people who made this actually thought that they were making a genuinely funny, cutesy comedy, then this is the greatest horror film I have ever seen: a massive, abysmal chasm of soul-sucking blackness into which all things good – morally, ethically, intellectually good – have disappeared. This is a consumerist’s wet dream, i.e. my nightmare, and one of the most bloated, reprehensible things I’ve encountered in my lifetime, and if there is a single, living, breathing person out there who enjoyed it on its own terms, for its own merits, for the way in which it was made, for the god damned message, then weep. Weep for civilization. Weep for mankind. Weep for two hundred and fifty years of progressing as a society. If we are capable of creating something this poisonous, this offensive, this completely unaware of its own insurmountable terribleness, then surely the end is near. We are all responsible.
Don’t ask me why or how or when or where or with whom, but I watched this. This is something that I watched, willingly. I have only myself to blame.
| Final rating: 1/2 (out of ★★★★) |
© 2014 Stephen Earnest
Earnest Reviews 