From Caribbean Riddance episode 185, this is art episode where I talk some interesting movies, but it is the eyes of March where Caesar was murdered by men who Caesar the son of Venus, the spawn of Aphrodite born from ocean foam, from castration of a divine power thrown into the ocean. He was murdered around this date by men who although acting in the best interests of what they understood to be the high and noble things and of the republican traditions of Rome against as they saw an incipient tyrant or king. In fact, they were eliminating a superior human specimen who was also the inevitable destiny of Rome and of the world because by that point the choice was between empire or complete dissolution. The pure republican form was no longer capable of managing Rome's territory.

So reorganization of Roman polity by some form was necessary and this is why Dante puts Brutus in hell because if you are Christian and you understand Roman Empire was God's providential plan for the spread of this new teaching through all mankind on the roads built by Rome and that Christ was not by accident born in the reign of Augustus, the beginning of the Roman peace, then Brutus, trying to stop this, was acting against the providence of God, besides betraying his friend. And well, I've said that case now and so much for that, but it's not the story I believe, by the way. And I think there's a lot of nobility in the man Brutus, who sacrificed his own friend then himself really for what he held dear, the freedom, that center of any aristocratic morality.

Let me read Nietzsche's beautiful passage on Brutus and Caesar, now on the Ides of March from the Gay Science of Nietzsche, such entertaining book, in honor of Shakespeare. The best thing I could say in honor of Shakespeare, the man, is that he believed in Brutus and and cast not a shadow of suspicion on the kind of virtue which Brutus represents. It is to him that Shakespeare consecrated his best tragedy. It is at present still called by a wrong name. To him, and to the most terrible essence of lofty morality, independence of soul, that is the question at issue. No sacrifice can be too great there. One must be able to sacrifice to it even one's dearest friend, although he be the grandest of men, the ornament of the world, the genius without peer.

If one really loves freedom as the freedom of great souls, and if this freedom be threatened by him, it is thus that Shakespeare must have felt. The elevation in which he places Caesar is the most exquisite honor he could confer upon Brutus. It is thus only that he lifts into vastness the inner problem of his hero, and similarly the strength of soul which could cut this knot. And was it actually political freedom that impelled the poet to sympathy with Brutus and made him the accomplice of Brutus? Or was political freedom merely a symbol for something inexpressible? Do we perhaps stand before some somber event or adventure of the poet's own soul, which has remained unknown and of which he only cared to speak symbolically?

What is all Hamlet melancholy in comparison with the melancholy of Brutus? And perhaps Shakespeare also knew this, as he knew the other by experience. Perhaps he also had his dark hour and his bad angel, just as Brutus had them. But whatever similarities and secret relationships of that kind there may have been, Shakespeare cast himself on the ground an unworthy and alien in presence of the aspect and virtue of Brutus. He has inscribed the testimony thereof in the tragedy itself. He has twice brought in a poet in it. He's talking about when Shakespeare bring a poet in play Caesar. He twice brought in poet in it and twice heaped upon him such an impatient and extreme contempt that it sounds like a cry, like the cry of self-contempt.

Even Brutus loses patience when the poet appears, self-important, pathetic and obtrusive as poets usually are, persons who seem to abound in the possibilities of greatness, even moral greatness, and nevertheless rarely attain even to ordinary uprightness in the philosophy of practice and of life. He may know the times, but I know his temper. Away with the jigging fool," shouts Brutus. We may translate this back into the soul of the poet that composed it. Well, isn't that nice? It places this tragedy well above Hamlet, and, well, what can you say about it? So much crap written now, you know, about what Nietzsche and the author and the poet and the artist and the invention of the author and all that word-chopping by academics and post-1950 so-called Nietzschean leftists.

And to what end was it all? It doesn't even scratch the surface of what I just read for you now in understanding both the grandeur and the baseness of the artist, the poet as a type. Nietzsche has always only been well-interpreted by men of the arts, whether visual or poetic. with the last novelists and you can ask why Mishima was able to write good novels after 1950 when there are basically no other. And I will try explain on this episode and I will talk movies. I hope you enjoy movie film talk. But anyway, weak news, the news of this last week or two momentous, Trump casually and And a very American, you know, what's most admirable about American character, the casual manly way, the lack of drama with which Trump undertook his Rubicon moment, and finally

told these petty-fogging Taliban judges in filthy black robes to bugger off, and he just said, okay, you will order me to bring back cartel terrorists with neck tattoos when my My approval rating is so high and when I was elected to defend the country, make me. And let's see what happens but you will not hear any praise for that from anyone but anonymous posters and yes some Trump loyalists but there's so much fake interference being run especially now by anti-Trump purists, especially now weirdly enough as Trump takes this momentous historical step, claims that he's not deporting enough, that he's not keeping his promises. You know, that's the cheapest kind of thing that you can do, the spectator as purity judge. It's very easy.

It's possible to condemn any politician who necessarily lives in an imperfect world of action and disorder, to sit as in a tribunal of them for not meeting this or that standard. This kind of nitpicking in general, the disease of the spectator sitting back as if in judgment. You see it even when Insta-thoughts, let's say girl who posts ass on TikToks or Instagram, and very often there is nitpicking, you know the phrase pointy elbows. And if you are a man and you post physique or such, the nitpicking become insane. I have a friend, Lucas. I went on his show a few weeks back. He lives in East Asia now. He, a bodybuilder, has wonderful physique. He recently talked about how men, older men, randomly come up to him in airport, at bar or such, and it's unprovoked.

It's not, he's not showing off. He's wearing a normal shirt or zest, but unprovoked starts saying, You know I was bigger than you at your age, and better enjoy it while it lasts, because you're not going to always be like this, and by the way, you are imperfect and this and that. So I think mankind exceptionally envies a wretched animal. This quality of bitter envy is maybe most universal of the human chimpanzee. But it's possible to condemn, I tell you, any politician who will always be short of a pure standard. And even Céline, you know I love Louis Ferdinand Céline, the novelist, but he was a lunatic in his real life and he went to Berlin in 1942 and then was apparently, when he came back to Paris, was raving about how the Jews still control Germany.

This was in 1942, so look, that's an inappropriate example. In many ways, you know, Celine was not being a disingenuous political chihuahua operator. He was a genuine literary genius who happened to be, let's say, his mind off-center, you know, psychotic, okay? But these others are very disingenuous, kind of doing what they think is PR, and it comes from the DNC. It is leftist talking points, Trump betraying his base because he's not doing X, Y and Z that he promised and especially inappropriate as I tell you in this week as he takes incipient Caesar-like steps but it's just too easy to say and I'll say the fact that Trump and Stephen Miller, Stephen Miller being an uncompromising rebirth of Roy Cohn, I love Stephen Miller

and Roy Cohn, but they did this just so matter-of-fact and low-key, this ignoring the judges. It doesn't mean that they should not be given so much credit by conservatives and friends for taking really historically momentous steps this week and defying the judiciary just because they did low-key. I ask you, what balance of powers is there if the judiciary always has the last word? And I will repeat myself maybe, but excuse after 185 episodes, there are sometimes going to be repetitions, but even at the Supreme Court level, unless it's within the strict letter of the law and within a purview of courts, original powers in the Constitution, I don't understand the sense in entrusting national policy to a body of nine people who

often by their own admission in their rulings they don't just consider Constitution, the and constitutional history, they consider things like the public good, with a P and a G capitalized. Now what is that? Where is that from? Because they themselves, I'm not making that up, they use that in their rulings or when they are arguing with plaintiffs and defendants, or they even look to the constitutions of other countries to interpret the American law. I believe at one point, I don't know if Elena Kagan or some other invoking the Zimbabwean or South African Constitution. I think it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who I assassinated with my sexual power, if you remember some episodes back. But I mean, what is that? What is the public good? What is that from? That's from a college classroom.

So they're acting as a statesman, of course, not a judge, and what entitles them to act like a statesman, again other than taking a political economy or an ethics course in law school or college, and if that's the standard that nine people are allowed to act not strictly as AI judges as it were, but to substitute their own judgment and their own experience of the broader world, that's no longer a judge, that is a statesman, then if you have a ruling body of nine statesmen, if that's what you want, then just say so, do away with democracy, have this oligarchy. But if you agree to do that, I think everyone will say, well, we need far higher standards than you taking a college class. If you're going to entrust a nation's day-to-day operations to nine people, if you want to

have a presidium of the Communist Party like the Soviet Union had, then I think a selection process needs to be reconsidered for what the Supreme Court is. As it is, the judiciary is a kind now of clerical oligarchy without actual vetting of who gets in except debased credentialism. Anyway, other momentous news of the week. They attacked the Houthis in Yemen, big new military operation. The Houthis, they have shut down the Red Sea traffic and commerce, they attack ships. And I think maybe the critics of this action forget that America's dollar is the reserve currency of world and it arrests other nations except this because of American military and in particular naval might and the guarantee that the United States will keep the sea safe

from piracy, and many such attacks have happened now through this thoroughfare of the Red Sea. And you can argue against the dollar's status as reserve currency if you want. There are libertarians who say it's bad, it introduces distortions into the American economy. Peter Schiff has been making this point for a long time. But do not be under any illusion, he's not, about what underlies America's living standards for the moment, and they would crash at least temporarily, by temporarily it would mean for at least a year or two, would be terrible pain without this dollar supremacy. So if that is done away with, it must be explicitly and honestly considered. But now I think it could actually be possible to negotiate with the Houthis. Why attack them? I am for negotiating with anyone.

It's also not clear to me that the Houthis though have actual concrete demands. Are they acting in a spirit of ideological desert monkey chimp-out? Could though they be bought for money? I don't know. In other words, what exactly they hope to achieve by randomly attacking various ships in that sea? They think that pressure of some kind will therefore be applied to Israel, but that's chimp-out logic. You know, if you attack Dutch or Chinese ships, then they will tell Israel what to do. It doesn't work that way. So the really interesting part of this story for me is, let's see it as a test case for new military technology, in particular drones. My friend Balaji Srinivasan has said that the Houthis have basically won this war for the sea with the novel deployment of drone tactics.

He was saying this last year. He declared this during Biden time. And I had Erik Prince on my show and he also seems to believe that something like this is possible, not in relation necessarily to the Houthis as such, but in general that small groups of highly trained soldiers, which again I don't think the Houthis are highly trained, but small groups of highly competent men could maybe now take on and defeat much larger state armies and they could do so with drone fleet, drone technology, mini drones even. Now this last in the abstract I could believe to be true, and more important, I want to believe that it's so because it's right up my, I mean, this kind of military revolution that leads to an entirely new world, if it's true, because it would overturn the model

of the modern state, the modern state, the state of quantity, which depends on the mobilization of large armies, and therefore has led to the modern democratic age in the presence of huge states of millions of people. Why? For purposes of mass conscription and self-defense. Whereas in previous eras, small groups of highly trained, heavily armed elites could subdue much larger groups, not only in the Middle Ages, but this is also the foundation of ancient Greek aristocratic states. Think of the heavily armed hoplite as a kind of infantry knight. It was undefeatable at the time. It was capable of annihilating much larger slave armies. The individual warrior, his worth above, let's say, a mass, simply the mass of numbers, and

same at the initiation of the high bronze age in, let's say, 1700 BC, with chariot warfare, same idea, small groups of warriors, able for the first time to create large territorial States because nothing could withstand that new technology, and that technology was the basis of this rule by a small group of men that came to be known in time as aristocracy. But the modern age has been the opposite. The individual soldier, you know, everybody say this, the cult made men equal. The gun, it's possible no matter how good you are, he gets shot in the head by random. So you needed numbers. And also you need huge productive economy to sustain sophisticated, heavy armaments and so on. So you can call Mr. Victor Davis Hanson a neo-Conner, whatever all you want, but his

chapter in Carnage and Culture on Venetian supremacy, it's a great insight. It was Venice's new capitalist economy. It was able both to innovate and to field, to produce industrially new types of extremely heavily armed ships, mass-produced cannon that basically annihilated all opposition at sea. So, for example, at Lepanto, four Venetian galleuses, this is in 1519, annihilated a third of the Ottoman fleet even before the fighting began. And this is sort of initiation of entirely new style of sea warfare. Numbers from this point on didn't make as much difference as if you had a big ship with with big prow, big guns, many big guns, and so that's not yet the reign of mass conscription, but modern states have had to include both a heavy industrial base and also mass levy

to be able to be competitive militarily on sea as well as land. So certainly so since the French Revolution, but let's see if drone technology changes that. are the correct test point for it, though, because as a point of objective interest, that's what I'm interested in. But let's see how they do when faced with what might be a genuine effort on the part of a state to destroy them, which again, I don't know how genuine is the new effort. I mean, I'm saying I genuinely don't know. I invite maybe military experts on this show to discuss. It may be that they are so well entrenched in Yemen foothills that you would need a large ground invasion of Yemen to actually dislodge them. It may not work to do it with sea and air bombing. It may not work.

I'd like to see genuine confrontation between two competent specimens so that a historical judgment can be reached on this crucial question. I mean, I want to see a mass state army on one hand versus a small group of men with large drone fleet on the other. And I'm not sure the Houthis, even if they lose or win, that this case would disprove or prove this, because I don't know if they're serious political actors. They might just be emotional monkeys. They might be much more limited in their – I don't know. Why would they not take over nearby regional states if they have this new power? You know, there is booty in that, there are women to capture too. I imagine taking your enemies women as the city smoldering. I imagine that's a great attraction for a pirate warrior

I have to tell you that such talk. I I've made many girls explode recently with such talk I'm sorry, is that too much information, but the soul of a woman is very dark Anyway, I I watch this movie an aura about the prostitute. It swept the Oscars I will not spend a long time talk this because not worth it And I want to talk about much better movies on this episode But, first of all, congratulations to the Red Scare girls and to their broader circle in the sense that the movie maker Sean Baker was obviously inspired at least by tidbits or symbols from their show. I know he listens to them. I would not say the movie is related to the content or the spirit of Red Scare in any fundamental sense. I think he just thinks they're kind of, oh edgy punk kids, let me borrow a song they

use or drop this or that symbolic image, let me make a nod to them or something. But to get even that from a movie that sweeps the Oscars, good for them, and I don't mean that in passive-aggressive sense, but the movie itself is actually not good at all. I think it got the prizes because of a current day fad over the complexities of the ethics around sex workers and body workers, you know what I mean? This is so, even as a movie about a hooker and let's say hooker issues, it's not interesting in any psychological, socio-sexual or moral sense when you compare it for example to movies like Belle du Jour, a much older movie, a more beautiful movie, a classic prostitution movie with Catherine Deneuve, in that case a bored housewife who becomes a prostitute

for kicks and when was it made decades ago and when you consider the age in which it was made, and it shows the emptiness of this pretense now, that this is some kind of new idea to focus on the special plight of the prostitute. That's a stock thing in Western literature, actually, the focus on the exploitation of women. I think it's just such fake claim. You take favorite cult movie of mine, the Japanese movie Tokyo Decadence by Ryu Murakami, 1992. This is the same filmmaker who also made Audition, and that too is a story about the exploitation of women, in that case in auditions, the casting couch thing and such, where the sadistic girl, the main character, Psycho, ends up kidnapping and torturing the director who's auditioning her. And so, you know, there's actually in that sense

no new ground at all in this movie in the sense of exploring these themes. And the three movies I just named so far are so much better at doing that. And also when you compare it to something recent like Inland Empire, which is also about a woman in trouble, a prostitute, and who becomes actually also involved with bizarre East Bloc characters and deals with generally similar themes in terms of the morality and the psychology of prostitution. But Inland Empire is just so superior in every sense as a spiritual creation artistically in terms of what it looks like, the picture quality, the setting, the way the background, the interior design is arranged, which Leitch is a genius at, as also the sound, the music, there's no competition.

And I remember I saw the premiere of Inland Empire in New York and I don't think it won any Oscars, maybe it certainly didn't sweep, maybe it won one or it was nominated. But instead they give it now to actually this very shallow, poorly made movie, Anora. And why? Because this is apparently the ethical concern of the day about sex workers. It's this or Holocaust porn or now it's become this or, you know, let's see, about the tranny who will be murdered, will that be next or has that already been the case? And as blatant and hand-handed in its message as possible, right? They couldn't corner inland empire because it's not hand-handed and explicit enough on these matters. So, very briefly, the plot of Anora is a strip dancer, New York meets a rich client, a young Russian, son of oligarch.

He ends up proposing marriage to her and then his parents send handlers to chase the two of them down and to annul the marriage. And she finds out her husband is, you know, kind of a frivolous child, which I don't know how this was not apparent to anyone watching the movie from the beginning, but that's the whole plot, what I just said now. And it could have been done well, but it wasn't. Apparently, the way this movie is being interpreted by feminist critical theory crowd is that Sean Baker, the filmmaker, is exploding the fairy tale of the hooker with a heart of gold, who gets rescued by a rich client, and that he's showing the emptiness of this romantic myth. But here's the thing, I've been with and around prostitutes for a long time, even when I don't do anything with them.

Sometimes, a long, long time, I go to bars and so on, where they hang out, I take my dinner with them, they tell me their stories. And he's just wrong if that's what the message is. That happens a lot more than you think. I don't know about marriage to an oligarch's son, but that happens often enough in the third world that many, especially of the more attractive prostitutes, actually have every reason to expect it might happen to them. Mary, a fat middle-aged German engineer, a lot of them do in the third world, and I've also seen some of them serially turned down relatively well-to-do men. Not oligarch, but relatively wealthy men who could have rescued them, so-called, from that life. My favorite prostitute for a while,

her only other client or so she claimed to me was a Japanese engineer who was quite wealthy and repeatedly offered her marriage and so she turned it down so I don't know what myth is supposed to be exploded here it's not a myth at all it's a actually career path for some women so quite aside from all the contortions over this nonsense point if you were to just judge Anora on its cinematic qualities it's very amateurish at the lower level than for example if you watch Polanski, Roman Polanski's first movie, Knife in the Water, and that is also kind of, I don't think it's amateurish, but it's very art student vibe, it has a kind of film school quality to it, and I love Polanski, but that film, that kind of film, it's schoolish, film schoolish vibe, and Anora is even below that.

Now regarding the image quality, I mentioned Inland Empire, that was David Lynch, his last full movie, I think it was shot in 2007 or 2009, I don't remember, I think 2007, also on digital camera, but it looks great. So Onora looks like crap, but that's not an excuse to say, oh, I only had money for digital camera. Especially technology now has gotten better than in 2007. So whoever shot this is an amateur, second problem is movie, the characters are not interesting at all. The only interesting likable character is the Russian oligarch's son, hardly a unique type, but her client Vanya, he's at least fun to watch in his antics, gets drunk and drugged and so on, he's handsome, he's called the Russian Timothy Chalamet apparently

and has a kind of carefree funny charm despite, yeah he plays frivolous idiot, but at least funny antics and watch-on-screen craziness. If you maybe have had such friends with that personality, it's fun to watch. But aside from him, the main character, Anora, is a very plain non-entity, really, quite aside from the fact that she has little to no sex appeal. I will not mention her aesthetics, her face and such, because she's hardly a beauty. But you can be kind of not a beauty as a girl, but have a lot of sex appeal, but she has no sex appeal, kind of also a plain acting girl, at least what she plays in this movie, I don't know what she is, but a kind of matter-of-fact female, Ben Affleck, if you know... Ben Affleck is actually objectively handsome as a man,

but he has no sex appeal at all as a man, he has negative sex appeal. And this I got from this movie where sex scenes left me... Nora left me a bit nauseous, you know, and she has no hierarchical allure at all. But the supposed conundrum at heart of movie, where you're supposed to ask yourself by the end of the movie where she starts crying, or was she in love with Vanya, was she taking advantage of... Was she in love with Vanya, the oligarch's son? Or is she just trying to escape her bleak life? But it's obvious from the movie, despite itself, that she's just trying to escape her bleak life, and it's all instrumental. It's a movie about a hooker on the make, and the trouble she goes through after that are then very hard to sympathise with because you get the sense

she's a retard on the make, but at the end of the movie when she cries you're expected to feel for her and it's fake. And so the movie has fundamental serious problem aside from this, which is just it's boring and badly written. For example, the two of them in the beginning, the hooker with her client and the flings they have, it's somewhat charming to watch. But then when their priest gets interrupted by the handlers, by a kind of Russian mob vibes handlers, sent by the parents of the Russian oligarch parents, that becomes tedium, it's just non-stop tedium from that point. It's unpleasant with constant screaming, repetitive physical struggles in the house, it adds nothing. nonsense then long adventure into New York or rather

Brighton Beach nightlife also doesn't make any sense by the way because guy with that kind of money would not be hanging out Brighton Beach he would be moving actually entirely different social circles, would probably have an apartment of his own rented in New York in Manhattan I think so the mansion of the house is also strangely enough on Brighton Beach but this kind of youth with unlimited resources would have, unbeknownst to his parents, rented a smaller apartment where he could hide in town. And if he didn't want them to know where he is, it's just standard. And the whole premise is absurd. It's just not how an oligarch son lives. But in this movie, Anora, the second, two-thirds, or three-fourths of the movie, One of the mobster characters, an Armenian named Toros,

he steals the show, he becomes center of the movie. And really the movie should be called Toros, not Anora. The movie is actually about him. He steals the show, I say, not in a good way though. I'm sure it's not what the filmmakers intended, but it turns out like that anyway. That's a clear sign of an artist who is real amateur, does not have control over his own product, or what he intends to say doesn't come out, something else comes out. Huge mistake. This is extremely abrasive, cartoonish character, this Armenian, kind of an elderly, middle-aged, bossy, domineering East Bloc type, a type very common from Balkans to Russia to South Caucasus. And domineering is not dominant, okay? It's not dominated by Doug, or I post now by same author story

about peace in the Middle East with main character Amir. That is not like that. Sorry to... It's very different. It's a very unpleasant type of man. Very domineering is different. So for whatever reason, I know the reason. Right-wing Americans, I guess, are tired of the office faggot liberal prototype of men. You encounter, you know, the bureaucratic type you encounter in the United States or West Europe. The kind who speaks with a lilting voice and is overly differential, this is very common among educated middle class and often upper middle class, both in America and West Europe. And I understand that the states did that, but going on a vacation then in the East block or ex-East block, and then you get along drinking with middle-aged or whatever men in a bar in Montenegro,

and you find, oh, the people here are refreshingly different, they're not like the faggots, you know, but okay, up to a point, like one drinking night but in fact it's that type is very distasteful it's a blustering idiot type you find all over the East block I hate it in this movie it's shown as a caricature in much the same way that if you watch Spanish crap movie pan there you have a caricature of a fascist here you have a caricature of a type from the East block which even if it's accurate it could be for a good two or three-minute joke, but not to watch for an entire hour. You can't base a movie or novel on the bulk of it being about the caricature. And this is a movie about this, and it relies on the exotic factor of it, I guess,

as you show kind of a borat, doofus, chimp out in New York and bully a lot of people. But for the audience, I think it's an extreme, unpleasant effect. And again, it doesn't show you anything new if you've been even in remotest contact, because you could understand this type in two minutes by going to what is it called Zankou Chicken in Los Angeles, or any kind of ex-Soviet Union types in New York or other major American cities. They are all... All the men are like this often. So it's kind of a fake exoticism. It's relied on here for, I guess, audience who has never run into them, or instead of writing a newer interesting character. And it turns out this guy is a friend in real life of the director, so then it makes sense, you know, he made a huge mistake.

The movie is really Toros, it's not Anora, it's about an abrasive Armenian mobster bully chimping out in New York. And then what they actually do, I get what the movie is trying to say in terms of descent into nightlife, that is a potentially very rich, entertaining, traditional model for a movie. But when you compare that to other movies that did this much better, you know, getting lost in the zany and often funny hell of nightlife, right? You consider the classics of this genre. You saw After Hours by Scorsese, which is Scorsese's only good movie, in fact, about an uptown yuppie gets lost and stranded in Soho in the 1980s. But that's great. It's just one striking, unusual situation and one new, unusual character after another and funny, tense, grotesque situations that he gets into

without relying on visceral reactions from the viewers like to extreme violence or screaming or gross out things. It's just the novelty of the characters who are not, even when their caricature is okay, they're bearable because they're unusual caricatures for five minutes, not for an hour. So, or irreversible movie with Monica Bellucci, where men seek revenge for what happened to pregnant fiance. So he descends into hell of Paris nightlife, find man who violated her, and it's just... There's not much humour in that story, but there is heavy mood, hell of descent into underworld, very good, sustained, intense mood. I'm just giving two counterexamples, there are others. By contrast, Anora's so-called descent into nightlife, which again is really just Brighton Beach boardwalk,

it is complete colourless, lame. It wouldn't be very different from, let's say, an uncomfortable night out. you might have already had with your friends if you were accompanied by an idiot. I mean there's not one interesting character they encountered, not one unusual or mysterious situation, it's just now they're interrogating this or that service worker in a unpleasant, you know, so relying on audience outrage, oh look at these crazy Russian types, oh they're so crazy, they don't care about nothing, you know, so they are so lawless and crazy, who will stop them? That's That's the whole movie, you know? So the Machiavellian, amoral, Russian survival machine against the good guy who's an oppressed, kind prostitute in this case, but that is the Netflix formula, you know, the Machiavellian

versus the good, the amoral Machiavellian versus the ethical, basic, decent fucking human being. You know, so I mean it's just like baby's first ethnographic observations, oh look at these gruff mobster types as if you've never seen that before. But even that would be excusable if they had shown something interesting in their night adventure. Maybe some future point, I talk eyes wide shut. I have problems with the moral message of that movie maybe being misunderstood by its audience, because it's really a spoof on the main character that Tom Cruise plays, who's just a kind of pathetic neurotic. But in his descent into night New York, here's another example that's recent. Again, he goes into costume shop and there's very unusual encounters there.

At least something like that shows something colorful instead of he's grilling like a fry cook in the kitchen and interrogating him. It's very boring, like law and order type. So it's just tedious, it's only words. So on this episode, I will talk movies I like much better, the movies of Whit Stillman, The Last Days of Disco in Barcelona, and of Edward Yang, movies A Brighter Summer Day and Yee Yee. I'm not showing them as counterexamples to Anora. These are, I think, masterpiece films of slow cinema. Both are very different styles from Anora. So, you know, you say, don't say, oh, Bap, are you comparing Apple to Orange? I know Anora is going for something very different. It's not slow cinema. It's very fast editing type, but I guess I am saying that fast edited movies

that feel like a video game or music video, I think that's a very difficult question. I like fast-paced literature, fast-paced novels and even Allegro tempo in philosophy. I like that very much, but for a movie, I'm not sure. I think it's a difficult question if you can actually have good movie in fast, super fast-paced style with many cuts because the action of cinema is time but it's space as well as time and the eye I think needs to linger and if it does not linger, if it's all very fast-paced throughout, I think there must be a reason intuitively understood by the viewer for that. For example, Memento, Chris Nolan early movie from 2000, I think that works because fast edited cuts in that correspond to the main character's

broken psyche and his broken experience of the world, and it's the sense of mystery, the detective story in which essentially he's trying to find out his own real identity that he forgot. It's tied in with the editing style, but very often when it's not something sought out like that that makes sense, I'm saying not rationally but on an intuitive perceptive level, then Then it's usually because the movie maker relies on fast editing as a gimmick, it adds nothing, it's just a cheap way to compress time, and then he skips steps of having to tell a real story or to make characters vivid because it's kind of glossy. I think true cinema has to be slow cinema, I think so, although not all slow cinema is good either of course.

I'm going to make movie, do you like, if they can make garbage and sweep Oscars, I get, I deserve funding, make real movie, and it will not be pornography. I have no doubt I can do much better. Are you mad I am saying this? You mansers. I will be right back to talk much better movies. You know that Shakespearean admonition to thine own self be true? It's premised on the idea that thine own self is something pretty good, being true to which is commendable, but what if thine own self is not so good? What if it's pretty bad? Would it be better in that case not to be true to thine own self? See? That's my situation. The one I like is A2 Brute. There are different ways of being loyal. Some may seem on the surface disloyal, but they're not. There's a higher loyalty.

And the way I see it, Brutus was a good friend to Caesar. By stabbing him in the back, Brutus was a good friend to Caesar? You know, I probably should have stayed and testified. Josh is right. Bernie is a bad guy. probably worse than I know. The films I'm about to discuss are not really at surface level about anything that can be easily described as a dramatic plot. They don't have traditional structure. It's more like cinematic reverie, a forum about social life, social mores of a world that our audience would not normally have access to. And then something does happen, but by emerging slowly and insidiously from within the movie. happening, arising somehow in the background, sneaking up on you. But the movies stand as artworks outside and beyond that dramatic happening or plot point.

So it's not about the peak or climax of movie as such, and their strength then rests on cinematography, the mood, the dialogue, the depiction of social relations, and the emotions of very vivid characters. So you can rewatch them multiple times and enjoy a movie in a different way each time. So for example, take Whit Stillman, who Steve Saylor has called the Wasp Woody Allen, and I'll talk about his two movies on this segment, Barcelona and Last Days of Disco, forming roughly a trilogy with his earlier film, Metropolitan. They would all be categorized roughly as comedy dramas, romantic comedy dramas, I call them comedy of manners, and they're all about the same social set you see on Gossip Girl, the Upper East Side debutante type crowd who become yuppies in the 1980s.

It's a more accurate rendering of them than what you see in the Gossip Girl, original Gossip Girl I mean, even though that also was written by a woman who grew up in that world. But in some ways the movies aren't about anything, it's just the lives and interlocking friendships and affairs of these characters. One is set in New York in the early 1980s, as the disco craze was ending. The other is set, I think a little bit later, in Barcelona, in what must have been the heyday of city Barcelona, which right now is a pit for tourists, whores and gypsies. And you are likely to hear Urdu spoken more than Catalan. I am not one to attack Europe gratuitously, but actually Barcelona, what it did to itself is very bad because most of the migrants in Spain are in Barcelona or Bilbao, the northern

Basque city. The rest of Spain you find much fewer, but they're all concentrated Barcelona. But I think for that reason they can be deported very fast. Anyway, the first couple of times I watched both Barcelona and last days of disco, I just enjoyed them in the moment. It's very unusual, witty, conversational style based on earnest talking, such as you would not hear this kind of talking in real life maybe. It's a unique style, it rejects method acting, so in that way it's different from Woody Allen kind dialogue which attempts to sound more natural. It's also not dramatic stage acting though, and I'll play a few clips so you get the sense because they're quite talky, witty movies, but strange affect, not everyday kind of feel.

It's hard to categorize or describe the kind of talk because it's literally deliberate kind speech, and you wouldn't think it would work in a movie, and maybe in the hands of someone else it could come off silly, but Stillman pulls it off. It's extreme charm to re-watch and I did this week with my friend Yama, I watched both movies and on the third re-watching it was very obvious to me however the conservative sensibility of Whit Stillman and by that I mean even politically conservative, but not in the sense understood now from Fox News and such with Sarah Palin or Karl Rove conservatism, but let's say conservatism, PJ O'Rourke, William F. Buckley, okay, these mens were kind of Irish play-acting wasps, and I've even mocked Buckley before as a kind of lace curtain Irish striver, but

I don't say this to attack my Irish friends, happy St. Patrick's Day, today's St. Patrick's Day, are you puking in small bathroom colored in green and orange as a kind potato face, potato-eyed girl gropes you from behind, but look, that's not so bad because a striver like Buckley acting wasp, that's good because for observer it's a reliable guide to the wasp manor. The persona for an outsider is instructive because he would be more ortho-waspy than a genuine wasp who might have the individual deviations and not be so concerned with acting out the wasp style. Yes, that's the kind of conservative broadly that with Stillman is but it comes out thankfully comes out offhand in his movies It's not like him handed a political concern Even as much as the exploitation of women thing is in an aura

That would turn his movies into into homilies if they had political lesson Excuse me. I don't mean to claim that the Nora is completely a political homily, but it does I think have a a ham-handed feminist message, but with Stillman analogous situation, no, the conservatism, his own opinions are much more, they come out just implicitly. This sensibility became very clear to me on these second, third viewings of these movies. At the center of his concern is female nature, the sexual revolution, and the change, by By the way, I apologize for background ambient noise, unfortunately, I'm in this particular, there are people upstairs, they're extremely annoying, night and day I was going to leave recording for a time when they would not do this, but they never stopped, and they're

not like sex-ores, I wouldn't mind if they had parties and sex-ores, it's this older couple I think with a dog and there is absolute never peace, night and days, a hammer into my brain, and I have not been able to sleep for two or three days, thankfully I'm leaving soon. But this, yes, the conservative sensibility became, and it became clear to me it centered on female nature, on sexual revolution, in the change in the relationship mores, the sexual mores among the upper classes in the modern world. That's all of Whit Stillman movies, at least the trilogy I'm talking about. It's centered on that. And in Barcelona, there is a funny related parody of the anti-American European snobbish leftism. Last Days of Disco is about a nightclub

manager, what looks to be very exclusive Manhattan nightclub play disco, But he's kind of playboy, layabout from this Upper East Side set and he's the type decided to have a different life working in a night club instead of Wall Street or rather at this time it was still apparently advertising agency, that was the thing to do at this time, ad agency was still the yuppie career. And the movie is simply about this nightclub manager, the girls in his social set who work as literary editors, and various others of their friends as they live in New York and work careers, get in these clubs, try to find apartments, have affairs with each other. In other words, kind of fancier friends. It's a bad way to describe it because it's much better than friends. In the field of conversation,

It's much more close to Evelyn Faux or Woodhouse type Anglo witty talk. And the two girls in this movie are played, Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale. They would be arguably main characters of Last Day of Disco. But I will play now clips so you get a sense of the type of conversations that... I was just starting law school when the first up-tempo Philadelphia international hits broke. Some people don't consider that disco because it's good, but I remember feeling absolutely electrified. You feel electrified often? No, but this was different. I loved the idea that there'd be all these great places for people to go dancing after the terrible social wasteland of our college years. Ugh. You've been to a lot of discos? No. In fact, practically none.

For me, law school wasn't easy and I haven't had much of a social life since coming to the city either, but I still consider myself a loyal adherent to the disco movement. It's a movement? Sort of. found terribly encouraging was the idea that when the time in life came to have a social life there'd be all these great places for people to go to because as you'll remember for many years there were none what I didn't realize is that it gets so impossible to get into and here as this other type dialogue you might find in with Stillman typical dialogue do you remember the conversation we had Labor Day weekend had a huge impact on me really Jennifer and I have been talking all year about either acknowledging the permanence of of our relationship in marrying or finally just breaking up.

I had no idea you were even dating anyone. I thought you knew. No, we've been together since college. But the weekend after Labor Day, we had this long talk. Jennifer proposed a trial separation, which normally I'd have considered ridiculous, but I couldn't help thinking of you and went along. Out of some sort of residual loyalty to Jennifer, I didn't call you immediately and instead started coming to the club. I'm not a very good dancer, but... No, you are. I was also curious if the sexual revolution went as far as everyone said it had, but emotionally I couldn't handle it. I got so depressed. When I saw you that night, you were a vision, not just of loveliness, but of virtue, sanity. What? I shouldn't talk about it. I just ended up sounding like an idiot. No, what?

You're very sexy and good looking and modern. But what I was craving was a sort of sentient individual who wouldn't abandon her intelligence to hop into bed with every guy she meets in a nightclub why why is it that when people have sex with strangers on their mind their IQ just drops like 40 points all that affected sexy seductress slinking around Uncle Scrooge is sexy I mean my god is there no limit oh that was to do you think I'm an idiot I'm so sick of all the lies and nonsense yes a nightclub manager playboy type also has good tactic in this film to get rid of girls he claims he's gay there are two or three humor peaks of movie were based around girls freaking out that they find out he lied to them but film again you can watch it and the first time it might

not even occur to you what is dramatic tension or peak of movie it's entertaining in a moment-to-moment level and fundamentally that's what it's about But there is a dramatic tension that develops organically behind the scenes, and it centers on a simmering rivalry between nightclub manager and his friend, who is a lawyer, a prosecutor in district attorney office. And I think the content and maybe the dramatic peak of movie is in a discussion the two of them have over the effects that the cartoon movie Lady and the Tramp, or the effects it had on the women of their time, and it's a kind of protomanosphere Insight conversation I will play for you now That's one of the great things about getting out of college and into the real world how experience changes and improves your views

During college. I remember seeing couples with crying babies and thinking how horrible lately I've been spending a lot of time with my niece and nephew Saturday I took my niece who's seven to see the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp. She loved it was so cute. I'm beginning to fall in love with the whole idea of having kids. I hate that movie. What? So tacky. Not to mention depressing. This sweet movie about cute cartoon dogs you found depressing. There is something depressing about it and it's not really about dogs except for some superficial bow-wow stuff at the start. The dogs all represent human types which is where it gets into real trouble. Lady, the ostensible protagonist, is a fluffy blonde cocker spaniel with

absolutely nothing on her brain. She's great-looking, but let's be honest, incredibly insipid. Tramp, the love interest, is a smarmy braggart of the most obnoxious kind, an oily jailbird out for a piece of tail or whatever you can get. Oh, come on. No, he's a self-infested chicken thief and all-around sleazeball. What's the function of a film of this kind? Essentially, he's a primer on love and marriage directed at very young people. Imprinting on their little psyches, the idea that smooth-talking delinquents recently escaped from the local pound under a good match for nice girls from sheltered homes. When in 10 years, the icky human version of Tramp shows up around the house, their hormones will be racing and no one will understand why. Films like this program women to adore jerks.

God, you're nuts. The only sympathetic character, the little Scotty who's so loyal and concerned about Lady, is mocked, is old fashioned and irrelevant and shunted off to the side. Isn't the whole point that Tramp changes? Okay, maybe in the past he stole chickens, ran around without a license and wasn't always sincere with members of the opposite sex, but through his love for lady and the beneficent influences of fatherhood and matrimony, he changes and becomes a valued member of that, you know, rather idyllic household. I don't think people really change that way. We can change our context, but we can't change ourselves. What does that mean? Well, you change. Come on, Des. Well, I thought it was very interesting this sensibility appears in cinema years

before erupting online with artiste. I'm sure he did not get it from Whit Stillman, by the way, but it's a natural concern of someone like Stillman, a man of very conservative temperament, who feels that his social circle of recent times, that something has changed, something has broken down, which is also the theme of his earlier movie, Metropolitan, which I'm not discussing on episode tonight, but it's very quickly that movie, Metropolitan, is also about this debutante crowd, played by same actors in Upper East Side. And the men are trying really to white knight for girls who they feel are being corrupted by a European aristocrat of predatory morals who mogs them. He's an alpha cad, you see. He overpowers them and, I mean, overpowers the males of this movie

by the force of his personality. And I think it's not understood yet extent to which modern manosphere or what you call the game community, it's not really a community, and so far as it's a community, it's worthless. It's just a few writers who had these concerns, and at their most interesting, Chateau Hartiste, Roissy, was not really a set of advice for how to pick up women, it was a reflection on the unpleasant or suppressed truths about female psychology, and it has its provenance in F. Roger Devlin, and in F. Roger Devlin's reading of Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer being in many ways the prototype for evolutionary psychology thinking in general about mankind, even though Schopenhauer is technically pre-Darwin, but really it's very close to Darwinian evolutionary psychology thinking.

And F. Roger Devlin has these concerns because he also come out of, in this case, upper-class Southern Bell debutante society from the south of the United States. I think that's F. Roger Devlin background. And that society was especially, from what I hear, it just broke down in terms of their mating rituals, their sexual morality, this high-class debutante society. In the recent decades, I think it broke apart more brutally than the New York Upper East Side one. But it's the conflict between the mores of that sort of pre-modern genteel society and the modern sexual revolution of female appetite unleashed, that is at the bottom, I think, but also of Whit Stillman's similar concerns in his most famous movies. And if you look at Barcelona, which is basically the story of...

Again, I can't make out if it's actually the same character as the nightclub manager, Cad, from Last Days of Disco, or if it's merely played by the same actor. Or maybe they act the same too, so maybe it's the same character in a variation of himself. But the movie is about a young American Navy officer visiting his businessman cousin in Barcelona and the conversations and drama also similarly centered on conflict between traditional conservative sexual morality and the sexual revolution. Here, I will play some clips. It's true that the height of the sexual revolution is over. I don't go to bed with just anyone anymore. I have to be attracted to them sexually. But I always thought that women had to have some kind of profound emotional bond with a man. A secure romantic relationship

before they became interested in a relation of that kind. Oh, no. I don't believe you. Just once, I'd like to go out with a girl not convinced I'm encased in black leather underwear. That bothers you? The exact same story over and over again? Well, it's not exactly the same. I always vary it a little. Great. Wasn't even Aurora, but this terrific friend of hers from the trade fair. She's never met you, but was still full of your stupid stories. Frankly, I don't care for your tone. You should get down on your knees and thank God that you have a cousin who makes up interesting stories about you. I'm the best PR guy you're ever going to have. Do you think any even mildly cool trade fair girl would give you the time of day if she knew the pathetic Bible-dancing goody-goody you really are?

You are far weirder than someone merely into S&M. At least they have a tradition. We have some idea what S&M is about. There's movies and books about it. But so far as I know, there is nothing to explain the way you are. And the tension here, the dramatic tension insofar as it exists at all in this movie, which is a very light movie, is between this Navy officer, the main character, and his cousin, who is a salesman earnestly, who in some of funniest moments of the movie, he quotes very earnestly this literature of sales psychology which he studied clearly so close. A literature which at one point is mocked by the Navy officer as well. Isn't everything you're saying just a complicated way of playing hard to get? Which also is the principle behind

what's generally called game or just seduction psychological tactics which of course the salesman fruitlessly then tries to apply to his pursuit of a girl. This businessman, salesman cousin, he is torn apart by feelings that he has hurt the women he's had serial affairs with and he's experiencing anguish himself over the breakups and so he decides in in this movie but it's it's understood before the movie began, he decides that he will no longer date beautiful women. He wants to entertain idea that it should be possible to love without the allure of physical attraction which gets in the way of that, in the way of pure sentimental love. But then he ends up in an affair with a pretty girl despite himself and it's a funny situation

made more funny by fact that girl is in a sexless open relationship with a very pretentious Spanish journalist and art critic, and this art critic engages in all kinds of cliched anti-American, typically European rants about the CIA and exploitative America and so on. And I found these parts some of funniest in a movie, here I will play some clips. Who's the girl? She's a girl from the fair who wants to be an actress. That's creepy. What it is about is a big country, the United States, making war on a little country. In the U.S. government's view, which I'm not in any way endorsing, the U.S. policy is, well maybe this will help, maybe like an analogy will help, take these ants. In the U.S. view, a small group or cadre of fierce red ants have taken power and are oppressing

the black ant majority. Now the stated U.S. policy is to aid those black ants opposing the red ants in hopes of destroying democracy and to impede the red ants from assisting their red ant comrades in neighboring ant colonies. That's as clear as the most disgusting description of U.S. policy I have ever heard. The third world is just a lot of ants to you. Those are people dying, not ants. No, I don't think you understand. I was reducing everything to ant scale. The U.S. included an ant White House, an ant CIA, an ant Congress, an ant Pentagon. Secrets and landing strips. A little established and foreign soil. Where are the red ants? There. That was really terrible. You were blowing it way out of proportion. Don't take it so seriously. Those red ants were bad news.

any good for anybody. I was trying to convince them to look at Americans in a new way. Then in one stupid move you confirm their worst assumptions. I did not confirm their worst assumption. I am their worst assumption. Now Ramon is certain USCAA. Where the red ants? Wonk. It was a joke. I'm not going to apologize. Little bastards got what they deserved. This again a bit of Whit Stillman's conservative American fixations. His orientation coming out in this mockery of the European, which you could dismiss as cliched, but if you lived in Europe or visited for any time, it's very accurate, I mean it sounds exactly like this, I burst out laughing at the phrase, big country attacks small country, they can't stop repeating that.

Since then they've also added bombing brown people, they've added that to their compendium of cliches. These European faggots are self-satirising people, the left I mean, I'm not attacking Europeans which I ask American friends not to do that because the real right wing is numbers very few I would say maybe 70,000 at most worldwide but the core of that is just a few thousand in West Europe and East Europe and United States and there is no reason to fight the European as European it's the left what you've just heard, they are the cause of, you know, so Barcelona movie includes also later on a terrorist bombing and assassination attempt on the main character, the Navy officer, and an assassination fueled by leftoid paranoia

about CIA ops operations in Spain, which is also satiric but I think very accurate view of the leftist psychology of paranoid angry retardation, CIA demonology. But I need to emphasize again that a central dramatic tension of Barcelona between the two cousins is not the kind movie scripts react drama. It's really a movie in its moments about the day-to-day life and mores and habits and opinions of this social set with the stories that I'm talking about arising just creeping up on you very casually so that on the first viewing it's possible even to miss it. I think Stillman unique dialogue and plot style is some of best for depicting social life in cinema in a kind of parodic but ultimately accurate way. I don't think in other words strict realism works in cinema because modern

people are mostly boring you know so there's nothing extra shown by rendering that in cinematic form which what is the point of just copying day-to-day life in It's like in Anora, there is a scene where the awfully domineering main character, Toros, leads the group. They are going in this nightlife adventure, if you can call it. They walk outside in the cold instead of taking the car while going from club to club. Toros domineeringly insists on that and it's as if, yes, that is a detail that's accurate about life. I'm sure some of you have been in that situation, someone forced you to walk for no reason, but it's simply an unpleasant detail of life that nothing is gained by just showing it on camera,

it's a waste of time. Whereas nothing in a what with Stillman is really natural or realistic, but somehow it ends up not only as accurate vision of a social set, but more moving, more dramatic in the sense that as Nabokov and other smart modernists have said, said you can't show your hand in a modern art of whatever kind, novel, movie, you have to disarm the audience in a modern world with humor. You have to present it in the context of a parody. In other words, for a deeper and more moving sense of romance can then emerge by surprise once audience is disarmed. You have to reassure them that way because in modern world, everything so jaded, if you You just jump into it and show direct emotion, direct romance, direct feelings.

It reads purely as pleb, it's cliche, it's not believable because modern man's triply fallen or ironic condition, it feels pleb, plebian to emote direct, but presented in the form of a satire, audience become more comfortable. And I think Stillman's movie for all their, I actually don't agree with the moral message of his sexual behavior fixations and so on, but he manages to draw out poignant moments of understated drama from what is obviously a parodic self-conscious exposition of earnestness, of a hyperverbal social class. And yes, Barcelona very good at the end, by the way, because it has happy ending. The American win, they defeat the Euro-poor leftists and they win the girls and they get the girls and they enjoy delicious American burgers and cookout it's a bit

of an in-joke stillman make but it's good but to draw drama slowly out of parody and to entertain viewer in every moment I think this great achievement comedy of manners I'll be right back to discuss Edward Yang Taiwan cinema not play you any clips from Edward Yang movies because it's Chinese but on I watched about a month or two ago this four hour long movie A Brighter Summer Day, made in 1992, and it's about youth gangs in Taiwan in the late 1950s to early 1960s. And you must believe, though, that four hour will go quite fast. It's not boring at all, absolute brilliant cinema, and so far from what I've seen is one of ultimate in slow cinema style. It's also a movie that absorbs you into the Taiwan of that time, which just anthropologically,

it's something exciting and new just for that time, place, and culture that very few would know about. Taiwan, 1950s, with American rock street and gang style, and yet it does not rely on just exoticism or on cues as if this were enough. Like in Anora, where it's just showing you a decontextualized type of man to make the audience say, whoa, look at that crazy Russian gruff guy. He's so gruff he doesn't act like my office friends. I mean, someone showing the culture of exile China from within and yet accessible to outside viewer and yet the movie isn't really about that. It's about the characters and the situations they're in endlessly fascinating again. I didn't get bored for a minute of any of Edward Yang movies.

In some way, the content of Brighter Summer Day was actually very nostalgic for me because although I grew up some decades later and in a communist country as opposed to what's shown in this movie, which is very anti-communist, the general social dynamic was the same in sense of it's a very political state that's very present in your life. It's not remote, it's an aggressive, intrusive state that appears in everyday life in school, on TV, radio, and so on, and it's mixed in with a kind of tiger mom type Asian culture parents and schools, but also incredible freedom compared to what's available to children and young now in the West today. I mean, despite the rather restrictive political and social big structure in day to day, I

I was not in any gangs, but like these kids in this movie, I had incredible freedom. I ran wild in the city jungle with a small friend group playing pranks, getting chased by old trunes. I remember I used to steal things I did not need from their yard so that they would then have to chase me, and many such hijinks. Not to speak of the great solidarity we all had against the state, the school's authority, To some extent even families tricking them to be free and so on, and such solidarity among children and youth I did not find in the United States where students would tell on each other and many such things. There was no unity against authority. So I think some Americans in my audience though, if they grew up in urban decay environment,

say in Upper Midwest Rust Belt or parts of New England and so maybe had similar experiences. But it's an amazing story of Yang's Brighter Summer Days, entrancing story of youth, the rush of first love. And as somebody say in my mentions, it's also, again, all of Taiwan is in this movie. The whole country, blood and guts is spelled out for you in this movie in movie form. And stylistically, it's the most interesting to me, but it's very hard to render to you in speech the cinematic style that's used. I will say it is slow cinema, transcendental, where there is no seeming plot, but story comes out naturally, emerges slowly like base relief over time. A big influence on the film is Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker Ozu, which if you've ever seen his

famous movie Tokyo Story from 1953, I think this big influence on Yang and not just the Yang, but his film movement, it was a group of young filmmakers in Taiwan in 1980s called Taiwan New Wave and it continued after that. That is most situation, most for fermenting moviemaking when they are kind of cooperating but kind of trying to outdo each other and this reference to French New Wave, so there are similarities in there being a movie about seemingly everyday life, and in this in particular, this Brighter Summer Day, you can compare it maybe to famous French, maybe the most famous French new wave movie, The 400 Blows, because both 400 Blows and Brighter Summer Day are story about kind of a delinquent alienated youth. I think Brighter Summer Day much better.

The problem, though, with so much film reviews or analysis, as you are seeing, in general you can only describe the style of something the audience hasn't seen in terms of other movies, which you may also not have seen. But yes, Yang was part of Taiwan New Wave, which include also filmmakers like Hu Xiaoshen and Tsai Ming Lian. Tsai is overseas Chinese born in Malaysia. They are still making movies. Some are recent, I haven't seen these other yet, I'm very interested in watching them. They're all art film, unlike let's say Hong Kong cinema, which is much more action police movie. By the way, famous Hong Kong police movies, some are good, but some like Infernal Affairs, the American remake of that is The Departed with Matt Damon.

I thought the American version of Infernal Affairs, in other words, The Departed, was better than the Hong Kong movie. But these, the Taiwan movies, by contrast, they're all strictly art film, again, somewhat inspired by French New Wave, which deal with urban life in East Asia. Very broadly, you can say that that's very vague, urban life in East Asia. But I think Asians are the only ones who, for reasons I'll shortly speculate on, Asians can still kind of manage to capture the feel of real love or romance in our time in art. That's very hard. It's hard to impossible in the West to have a convincing romance or love story, because very basically there aren't obstacles to overcome. And so much of romance movie telling now depends on erecting artificial obstacles that aren't convincing.

But it's not enough to leave it even just at that. It's also the case that in the West there's a kind of moral weakness. It's especially within elite culture, and artists are dishonest and they're afraid to show honestly the truly nihilistic experience of modern urban solitude. They think if they are honest and show it, that it will reflect poorly on them as being low status or something. So they always assume a kind of external, smirk aspect to their subjects. I'm not saying it's never there, but it's very rare in the West. It's never shown honestly, or when it is, it's kind of like in Fight Club or Nightcrawler, if you've seen these movies, it's filtered through some unbelievable levels of fantasies.

But anyway, I think beyond the French New Wave supposed influence on Taiwan, new cinema, and Edward Yang, the real guru of Edward Yang is someone like this Japanese filmmaker Ozu, whose most famous movie, I'm told not his best, but really the only Ozu I've seen is is Tokyo Story from 1952 or 53. And if you look at favorite movie lists, this movie, Tokyo Story, makes the top of list for famous directors in the West. So people like Coppola and such, when they are surveyed, it's always this Tokyo Story is either number one, number two, it's always in top 10 list for all time movies for critics lists and so on. And it's a Tokyo story about two Japanese grandparents from countryside Japan, go to Tokyo to visit their children who moved to the big city,

and they're hoping to see the new Japan, they're hoping to, excited to see Tokyo, they want to see their children, who they haven't seen for a long time, they believe their children are doing well, they want to see their grandchildren, but the trip does not end up the way they hoped, they end up getting subtly mistreated, neglected, treated as burdens, and they are disappointed to find out that their children, who they're not exactly doing badly, but they haven't made it either, they are not doing very well. And in general, the movie leaves you with very bad feeling about modern city life, about the new Japan in the 1950s, in general the mistreatment of family, and so forth. I enjoyed it, but I think Tokyo Story is overrated by boomer critics.

I think they say it's their favorite movie more for historical than for purely aesthetic reasons. And I say for historical because Ozu, I think, was one of the first, maybe the first, now remember this is the 1950s, so Tarkovsky, I think, was right to say that cinema doesn't really start until close to 1959 or 1960, simply because of image and sound technology quality, okay? But despite the limitations of technology, Ozu still manages to create very kind of pensive contemplative melancholy movie immersing you in an alien everyday life. For me, even I've lived in Japan for a while now, it was not that exotic, but it was still entrancing. For someone who doesn't know Japan, it would be far more exotic. But again, something casually emerging out of everyday life

is sensibility of this movie, which also I heard was a devout Buddhist. So it's very kind of, you can think of this as a popularized buddhist art sensibility, where out of the calm stream of everyday phenomena, the emptiness of existence, and in this case actually the great disappointment of desire and existence, is revealed with kind of a subtle Japanese, very subtle drama only. I thought the movie had serious weaknesses, for example in one scene the old grandfather basically turned out on the street for the night by circumstance, He meets an old friend, they drink together, they commiserate about the fate of Japan and their children in the new Tokyo, and he comes home with his drunk friend and they're both plastered, but it's kind of hokey, like you see in old movies.

It's a mistake that not even a competent, modern, popular B-movie would make because they're not convincingly drunk, they're just obviously playing drunk, you can tell. Worst of all in Tokyo's story is the music. It's kind of mid-century European-American, post-Wagnerian, popularized-Wagnerian filler music. It's used in many other movies of the time. I complained about this music. I'm not going to play it for you now. It's boring. I played you a clip of it. If you go on YouTube and you search for Olympia clips from Leni Riefenstahl, Lady Riefenstahl shot amazing Apollonian scenes of weightlessness in her movie about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Olympia. And timeless scenes of divers especially. They look weightless as if they're flying.

And she ruins it with this horrible filler music which is praised by critics because they think they're supposed to. to go on YouTube and search this. I try to put clips on X of this set to better modern electronic ambient music. I think it's more appropriate. But I have no idea why people at this time thought it was a good idea to put this kind of somewhat atonal filler music. It's just annoying. It creates no appropriate mood. It's a big problem in Tokyo story. There are other problems too. Sometimes the acting, the emotions are not, you know, it's very much acting. You can tell, you can tell, it's not. So I think something like Seven Samurai is actually a much better movie of this same time, also 1954, and it has everything in it that's good in Tokyo story,

but is also actually an exciting, engaging tale with vivid, memorable characters. You know, it's the original Entourage movie where they put together a team at the beginning. I think Seven Samurai was the first to do that, and it's amazing all of the characters are memorable. You can watch it once and remember them years later, whereas in Tokyo Story everyone pretty much a piece of garbage, except for the grandparents who are wonderful, kind people. You still see such old people in Japan from time to time. Not always the old single women in Japan are brutes. The women with short hair in Japan, they will bump into you, they'll cut in front of line. They're incredibly entitled. However, you still see such kind traditional old people

in Japan, but they're self-effacing. They're not compelling or they don't leave a mark on you for that reason. They're just very kind and mistreated. It's a bad feeling to watch and everyone else is a piece of shit in movies. So anyway, I went on tangent. I'm not attacking Tokyo Story by Ozu, by the way. I enjoy this great movie. I think it's overrated because it's more remembered by boomer film directors in the United States and Europe because babies first Japan and also the historical, it's a historical first in other words leaving it less behind many dramatic conventions and I think because of the Japanese Buddhist path it happened to embrace a kind of pure cinema of stillness and immersion in the visual while still actually not making that boring.

And I'm saying in Edward Yang, Brighter Summer Day, and also in his other movie that I talk on this segment, Yi Yi, Ozu more than French New Wave is the big obvious influence. I hear that for Edward Yang's Taiwanese New Taiwan cinema competitor slash compatriots, his fellow artists in this movement, they openly said that it was all Ozu for them and They did remembrance movies for the 50th anniversary, I think, of Tokyo Story and so on. But to quickly describe this for you, again, just watch it. You will not waste your time watching any of the movies I'm talking about. But it's a style based on static camera, actually also seems to place the camera on the floor. So you get ground level view as if you were watching sitting on the floor.

No motion, no dissolves, no close-ups, centered on day-to-day life with heavy, successfully achieved feel of languor, longing, subtle melancholy and contemplation, and this could easily be termed boring, as you can imagine, but it's not. In the case of brighter summer days, it's actually hypnotic for the whole four hours, and deep, deep melancholy feels and nostalgia. I appreciate that unlike Ozu with, again, the silly 1950s, 1930s filler music, Yang does not really use music. Music is diegetic. It occurs within the movie itself, the characters. It's from the story. The characters can hear it. And the use of music, very appropriate. They're very memorable scenes where the characters are in a dance hall, a kind of dance hall thing, where they need to sing American rock, 1950s music.

remind me of a very different situation because communist versus anti-communist, but in communist East Bloc II, everyone look up to American popular culture and kind of the appreciation of American music, American pop culture. I sympathize with that very much from this movie. But by the way, and my friend Yama talks this movie with me, high movie snob, he point out what I'm about to say now, that modern arthouse filmmaking make huge mistake often, especially in the recent years, indie filmmakers, a lot of aspiring indie filmmakers, huge big mistake. They have ambition to be auteur, which is great, but they imagine their whole lives, let's say they're 14 and they decide to become a director and they're impressed by some movies

I mentioned or by Quentin Tarantino or such, and then they start to imagine themselves as directors, and they dream for years. When I make a movie, I know just the scene I want, just the kind of lighting, exactly the slow motion I want. I know exactly how it will look. I'm going to score it with my favorite song. I'll put this music and slow... And they think it and rethink it, and then when they become a director, they do it in their first movie or second, and then this scene comes out. The problem is you can tell they've thought about it and they've planned it for years. And that doesn't work for the same reason as in sex-sores, where there's supposed to be drama and tension and staging in a way, but if it's forced, if it's deliberate and if it's sought out,

if it's not spontaneous, it falls flat, it can even be reasonable. And in art, it's the same as in sex-sores. And without the inspiration of the moment and the spontaneity, which you know is sensitive in the audience, can tell right away if it has this fresh feel of spontaneity, without that it's no good you see so in general how to avoid cliche after decades of movies and centuries of dramatic storytelling I think is big challenge for modern director or artist of any type I can only think it come from coincidence of both hard work and grace but the grace and the spontaneity is essential in this movie brighter summer day has grace and the touch you know every moment is genuine I felt and it's not documentary realism it's more

its own unusual kind of magical feel, in the same way you could say David Lynch or other such surreal director creates a special mood, a characteristic mood, in that case with mysterious demonic shades and music and kind of supernatural content. But this one I think Yang is a bit more interesting because he draws out the feel mystery of life and magic from everyday occurrences themselves, without reference to supernatural or surreal, and without having really an over-obtrusive style. It's very subdued, and there are scenes in Brighter Summer Day that will basically stay with you for good, I think. Most exciting for me was the scene on the tennis courts at night between the main character and the girl he has a crush on, a haunting, beautiful, perfect expression of the rush

of young love without, again, any over-the-top flourishes, which I've appreciated in other movies about love. Wong Kar-Wai is very much like that, over-stylized. Or Mauvaisang by Leos Carax achieves same feel, but over-stylized. This is more impressive because very elegant subdued. And there is murder in Brighter Summer Day. The story, I think, based on something that really happened in Taipei of that time, murder that shocked Taiwan, but this fatal violence is shocking to viewers because it seems playful when it happens. And the characters are very young and they're role playing really as American 1950s greasers in Taiwan. This similar bad boy James Dean movement as in Japan of that time, I keep saying, but

the unexpected violence emerges I think even to the shock of the characters themselves. It's a kind of Chinese jealousy violence. I call this movie... But like I say about the novel The Dwarf by Parlager Christ, which has not a sentence out of place, this is a movie with not one false move or scene out of place. I won't talk at length about the other Edward Yang movie I watched, Yi Yi, which is about a bourgeois middle-class Taipei engineer's family in the 1980s. You could even think it's about some of the characters from Brighter Summer Day when they grow up. But much like Toki's story, Yi Yi is about family life, modern urban East Asia. And for me, that subject matter not so compelling for many reasons. It's about the rituals that define, the signature rituals that define family life,

career, the tensions of the nuclear family, parties with extended family. And there's a wedding, a birth, and a funeral, I think, in the movie. I think it starts with a wedding and ends with a funeral, as well as two mock suicides within the movie. So, in general, is a representation, again, a Buddhist samsara stream of everyday life, a consistent mood of melancholy, and the story, again, emerges organically and slow. But for me, it was hard to empathise with the content, the characters in YiYi, because I opted out of that a long time ago. So, it's very foreign to me, the normal fag life, the normal fag concerns, and I think though that's part of Yang's point in the movie because the main character, supposedly the father, the engineer, he's a good man, a good Chinese

father, a good bourgeois man, and also a good man personally, tries to do right by his clients and by his co-workers, wants to be good, but it's generally ineffectual both in career and family, and in many ways the movie is about the normal fag lack of daring and of substance, the way that all normal fags are stuck in their ways, they cannot see outside of their own eyes and outside their own path, and fated to repeat all of their lamenesses. Whereas the true exceptions in the film are shown to be the small boy, especially the engineered son, who approaches the world with wonder. And I thought the best parts of this film were Yang phenomenologically seeing the world through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy in these scenes.

Very few movies I think can do that, can show you a child's viewpoint of wonder, but it did this successfully, that was very good. And there is also an older character in the movie, a Japanese artist who almost makes a deal with the engineer father character with his company, but ends up getting cheated out of it, but who is shown as admirable because he has maintained childlike wonder at the and is not kind of stuck in the wheel of desire that everyone else is crushed by, fated to repeat all of their mistakes. Everyone else in movie, without judgment, he doesn't mock them, he actually shows almost everyone in the movie as fundamentally good in some way, but they're all mired in the path of animal samsara, the principle of sufficient reason, right?

When you cannot see anything outside yourself because you're always guided blindly by innate motivations which arise from within you, but they're characteristic and always the same, the same to you. It leads always to the same outcome in one way or another, and this becomes clear by the end of Yi Yi, when the father who tries to rekindle an old romance, his marriage is a little bit unhappy, his wife is neurotic, goes to live in the mountain retreat with a shaman, you know, like a rehab type thing, And he tries to rekindle an old romance, but it fizzles out very fast. And the thing he says at the end, where he does not regret that this did not work out in his youth, because it turned out this meeting with an old flame turned out the same way again,

I think is maybe key to understanding kind of Yi Yi's jab at normal fag life. But the most intense parts of the movie are when the father goes on Tokyo, on a business trip and reconnects with this girl with an old flame. And there are scenes shown simultaneously his affair and at the same time his daughter's first boyfriend in Taipei, which was great and touching, but it's a kind of touching montage, but also it felt more deliberate and sought out in the spontaneity of a brighter summer day. The beautiful scene of daughter kissing her boyfriend under a traffic light and it changes colours from red to green and so on. It's very beautiful, it stays with you, but again a bit more deliberate than his other movie. I think Yang at his best in capturing the feel of young love,

but of course this can be hokey, can be done badly. He's brilliant cinema, always subtle, unforced, magically natural, both Brighter Summer Day and He, I like because they abandon Aristotle's dramatic logic scriptwriting. you know, story, three-part act, action, plot, climax and such thing, and, oh, here comes the denouement. I just think this is inappropriate for the cinematic art form, and this is why Ozu is appreciated as a Buddhist innovator of style of slow cinema without plot. But, of course, everything depends on execution. This can become in the hands of a bungling movie maker, very boring instead of hypnotic. But I agree fundamentally, cinema must escape from tyranny of 19th century novel with its interiority, which cannot be expressed well in cinema.

On the other hand, it must escape Aristotelian dramatic form. It can't be tyrannized anymore by these, that not just the inherent qualities of cinematic art form leads to something else. I've said before, excuse to repeat, it leads to the quality of the dream or the reverie. But there's one way I'm saying this as preamble to say I think still the best movies are like the novel in a different way, not in the sense of technicalities of the art form or how it affects the reader, but in the spiritual and moral orientation of the content, where, let's say, moral charge, the moral tension and spiritual polarity that arouses intellectual interest in the viewer or the reader, I think it's the same in the big famous novels of the 19th century and the best movies.

There are literary theorists who say the novel, the 19th century novel, is a fundamentally bourgeois art form. And I mean that in a good way. It's a middle class art form. At its best, what that really means, what it should mean, is that the tension within a lot of the best novels comes from confrontational sparks caused by touching of aristocratic morality against the new middle class and democratic morality. So, I don't mean just a regular sense of actual class conflict or individuals who are exemplars of their social classes in a Marxist sense, but the confrontation of two opposing moral senses that are driven by very different priorities and demands, sometimes even within the same character. I think this is what accounts for a lot of psychological complexity and savor of many

novels and maybe the novel as art form exists to explore this change from one moral and spiritual order to a different one. You can just list many major novels, they have this at their core. The most famous is The Leopard, which is precisely about this conflict between older aristocrats, the aristocrat type in one of its best form, coming to terms with a rising democratic age. And there is good movie, Burt Lancaster, and now I see there's Netflix series, I'll watch, I'm wary about what Netflix, will it ruin this like it ruined the talented Mr. Ripley story. But Stendhal's novels are about this, Red and the Black, The Adventures of the Peasant, Julien Sorel, and his rise to refinement and romance in post Napoleonic Paris, aristocratic salons, and the pursuit of love in that context.

It's a persistent theme in Balzac and Austin and even many of Chekhov's short stories. The mini-novela My Life is about exactly this. So there are exceptions, of course. My favorite, someone like Joseph Conrad, one of my favorite novelists, his adventurous novel in Far East, it would be maybe a contorted case to make about Lord Jim, or Outcast of the Islands. That's more about the white man's destiny in the tropics, and maybe not so much the the aristocratic versus democratic morality, that conflict lurking maybe only in background because the new world and the colonial world is in part about transcending that divide, but his books too are about the conflict of two very different moral codes, the European Manly Adventurer Code versus the local native ones.

So I think a strong, not just Marxist case, because the Marxist case is shallow, the material difference is right or even the social status differences, That's not what matters, not what I'm talking about, but the clash between two different types of valuing things, valuing the world, that's what matters and what causes a lot of the psychological intensity of many novels. In Dostoevsky, for example, you can make a good case that Notes from Underground, it seems to be just schizo-autist, neurotic, personal, hellish self-introspection. But I think it's really about the very explosive clash between these two different moral spiritual systems within the same man. And I was always curious about Camille Paglia's reflection that after 1950 there aren't really any good novels in the West.

Her explanation I think is bad, it's about the rise of electronic media and how that changed our attention or our relationship to our own internal life. I think not really, that's a kind of vague, hand-wavy argument. But she's right, just in the basic observation, I don't understand why is the case, I don't claim to still, but it's a fact that the novel is no longer really a vital art in our time. Who is waiting for the next novel? And Paglia is right in this case about the West. Her only favourite novel after 1950 is Auntie Mame. And that's a good novel, by the way. For literature, I prefer that kind of witty, fast-paced, kind of horse-trotting style, both for novels and philosophy. I can enjoy Conrad's convoluted, slow style too, but I recognize it's not as good as fast and witty.

That's very good for literature, what Nietzsche calls Machiavelli's allegro style. He was reacting as actually it was Schopenhauer who's the rare, very good German philosophical writer. They were reacting against the slow ponderousness of German philosophy, the typical kind of German academic world-shopping style. But anyway, I don't think Paglia, though, is right about Japan, because there you do have examples, not just Mishima, but for me especially Mishima, who wrote very moving novels after 1950. But in the scheme of what I'm talking about, it's because Japan was retarded. I don't mean that in like mentally retarded, but there was delayed modernization, in the sense specifically of a spiritual modernization, where the old aristocratic way of seeing and feeling things

lingered there longer and into World War II. Not just in someone like Mishima, who held it in himself, I think he was of samurai class, but in his more general audience they were still fixated on that, they had it in their memories, it was still somewhat still in them. And this tension within him was, I think, though, the engine of his art. Very much his tetralogy, the sea of fertility, is about this change in Japan. Spring Snow, the first novel, my favorite of his novels, maybe, is about just this, the old aristocratic order faced with the new rising bourgeois order. It's a story of uncompromising love affair in this context, and even something like Forbidden Color about urban Tokyo gay underground,

but he somehow manages to make it really and actually about this other thing, about a pre-modern type in conflict with explosive urban modernity, the main character in which a kind of retrograde samurai or even ancient Greek type transported to the modern world, where he runs a kind of spiritual rampage through the emotions and lives of women and his lovers. And in an analogous sense only, again I'm not saying these movies share with the novel the sense of interiority, psychological introspection, or the drama form in which a novel affects But I'm saying as a source of spiritual tension, the movies I've been talking about I think are also in this clash, rendered in cinematic form.

With Confrontation, it's very explicit in Whit Stillman between the old WASP world and the liberalizing new world of sexual revolution and its sexual and romantic confusion. and less explicitly so in Edward Yang I don't want to stretch this too much because yes the contrast between the old and the new between traditional China and the new modern urban life that's very much the theme of Edward Yang as well as all of new Taiwan cinema it's basically all about this the modern Chinese city and what the vestiges of traditional Chinese life are under the pressures of modernization but specifically if you are to look as as a source of, let's say, spiritual sauce, the spice of these movies, the way they titillate moral sense,

as aristocratic sensibility faced with an entirely new kind of sensibility, I think it's plausible to do that. It accounts for why movies like Wong Kar Wai is also in the mood for love, or 2046 is big movies about love, why can Asian cinema still capture the possibility of romance, Really, romance in the matter-of-fact, post-liberalized, post-sexual revolution world is impossible. Something like Romeo and Juliet seems inconceivable in the West, and yet Asians can still kind of do that. Why? Why can they do that? And I think in Yang, especially in Brighter Summer Day, it's because you see the remnants of an older, austere, hierarchical spirituality that allows for a kind of erotic tension to explode into feelings of longing and romance and jealousy.

I don't know, I get the feel that art that includes characters of any kind, human characters in action, for it to be interesting it might show you type of men and women who are different than you, different than what you're used to, who think and feel and value in ways that are fundamentally different. That's what makes for rich content possibility. And to show that difference you have to inhabit it yourself as an artist or writer, I think when you're rendering it. You can't just show it from outside or as a murky sketch or satire. It comes off as caricature, which it can be funny but can't sustain a whole book or a whole movie. Anyway, this was a cosy Kalme episode. I hope you like. I will be back in a week. I will have a special episode, unusual, in a week. Until next time, bat out!