Thread

WOW!

I'm a huge fan of The Critical Drinker @TheCriticalDri2.

He made this video about a movie, but it applies to the Democrats' 2020 presidential campaign.

Perfectly.

Keep In mind that I'm NOT implying anything about Drinker's politics.

"The Island of Dr. Moreau is a perfect illustration of what happens when every negative aspect of Hollywood filmmaking somehow congeals together into a festering pool of absolute failure."

I worked in Hollywood for ten years.

At that time, publicists invited anyone and everyone to parties, and all big dogs went to all parties to be seen.

I met tons of current blue-check Twitter users.

In ten years, I met ONE nice director.

He was just starting out, and now he's a big dog.

I'm happy to say that I influenced his career with a single conversation.

We were in the Sunset Strip House of Blues VIP lounge. Hugh Hefner came in and displayed his black teeth.

Never seen anything like it.

That particular House of Blue shut down in August of 2015, long after I'd stopped working in Hollywood.

But on that night, I was sitting at a small table, talking movies to a commercial photographer.

The conversation was about the Angel of Death.

I can't tell you the best Angel of Death ever put on the screen, but the photographer and I agreed:

This actor nailed it.

The young director asked if he could join us.

We said sure.

He asked why the performance was so great.

The answer was simple:

Ambiguity.

This is really hard to explain, so if you don't understand, it's my fault for not doing a good job putting into words what I mean.

My favorite concept for figures such as the Angel of Death is "dispassionate compassion."

James Fox captured it perfectly.

In the 1991 British miniseries A Perfect Hero, Nigel Havers plays a handsome playboy RAF fighter pilots who is severed burned facially.

James Fox is his doctor.

Fox cares DEEPLY about Havers, but he won't waste his time.

It's up to Havers to accept his fate, which he initially doesn't.

Fox has tons of patients to worry about. If a patient refuses to cooperate, Fox will simply move on.

HE'S NOT COLD.

But he won't indulge Havers.

There's an ambiguity about Fox.

It's a brilliant performance because you're left on the edge of your seat.

How far will Fox go to save Havers?

When will he walk away?

WILL HE walk away?

And the Angel of Death portrayal I'm talking about captured that dispassionate compassion.

That ambiguity.

You're going to die anyway. It's up to you how you'll face it.

The Angel of Death could simply take you at any time.

But he wants you to understand what he's all about.

The reason I can't tell you the role is that it would be a major spoiler.

But if you understand the concept of dispassionate compassion, you'll see it in movies.

The BEST movies.

I talked to the young director for several hours.

Without prompting, he told me that he hated Hollywood and everyone in it.

He HAD to make movies, and he wanted them seen, so he had to do things Hollywood's way.

But his breakthrough film centered around dispassionate compassion.

And ambiguity.

Ambiguous characters create tension.

When you don't know what the character is going to do, it's totally compelling.

My favorite type of character is one who you keep expecting to somehow reveal a horrible side, AND THEY NEVER DO.

They're actually benign.

There's no great reveal.

No confession of love or weakness or whatever.

The character remains the same throughout the movie.

As the Critical Drinker will tell you, characters must go on a journey in a film.

They grow or fail or change in some way.

But there's a really great trick a skilled director can play on the audience.

The director can make the AUDIENCE go on the journey.

By the end of the movie, you realize that you TOTALLY misread the character.

You were expecting something terrible, but it never happened.

A co-star has the actual journey, and the character turns out to not have been malicious after all.

There's no "exposition":

Longwinded verbal explanations.

"I did this because I was afraid because I was raised in a soup can at the bottom of a lake, so I don't trust people without gills. BUT I LOVE YOU!"

Creating this kind of character is HARD.

But it's definitely worth it.

I'm not going to make any movie recommendations because I always get people telling me they didn't like the film.

SO SCREW YOU.

But back to movies and leftism.

Pathology makes it impossible to create great art.

The more pathological people get, the less able they are to comprehend normality.

Political ideologies are normal. EXTREMISM is abnormal.

Right now, we're seeing a Category 5 crapstorm of abnormality.

What makes it so incomprehensible is how self-defeating it is.

Mob rule, politicians barking at the moon, academics spouting infantile overstatement...and a senile presidential nominee.

"TRUMP IS THE GREATEST CRIMINAL IN HUMAN HISTORY!"

You know how the Democrats could've had a fighting chance?

By being sane and calm.

But they blew it. I'm going to paraphrase:

"The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign is a perfect illustration of what happens when every negative aspect of politics and human nature somehow congeal together into a festering pool of absolute failure."

Since @sethmoulton of MASSACHUSETTS (which I tried to write in the last thread but wrote "Maine" instead) calls Trump Hitler, let's look at Hitler.

One of the main reasons the Nazis lost the war was that Hitler made military decisions.

Like Moulton, Hitler was a brave, decorated combat soldier before he entered politics.

And like Moulton, Hitler liked to rave and make hilariously self-destructive decisions.

When the Nazis invaded Russia, Hitler ordered that they not be given winter clothing.

This would force them to win before the winter.

They didn't, of course, and they froze solid.

The Russian winter was so cold that that steel shattered.

Tanks had to be started up every hour, which burned fuel.

But Hitler knew best!

"No retreat! Fight to the last man!"

Of the 200,000 Germans sent to Stalingrad, only 90,000 lived to surrender.

Of 90,000, only 5000 made it home alive after the war.

Hitler was off his rocker because he was out of his element.

German tanks were marvels of engineering, designed to last decades in a period when the lifespan of a tank was measured in weeks.

"SHUT UP! DO AS I ORDER! NOW!"

The Russians had tank crews ready at the factories.

When the tank was completed, the crew got in and took it unpainted into battle.

The Germans built behemoth tanks with massively thick frontal armor.

The armor on the tops and undersides were paper thin.

American fighter aircraft could destroy the armored behemoths WITH MACHINE GUNS by strafing the ground right in front of the tank, bouncing the bullets up into the underside.

I could go on forever.

Every single idea Hitler had was stupid and crazy.

When his world was crashing down around his head, he would spend hours gazing at Albert Speer's architectural model of New Berlin.

Hitler had no plan to win the war.

The Democrats have no plan to win the election.

@parscale says that he never stopped working after election night of 2016.

And OH, the things he talks about!

Trump projects steely confidence.

The Democrats project TRIVIAL madness.

I never watched The Island of Dr. Moreau. I've had my fill of insanity.

My last girlfriend's parents refused to ever meet me, even thought they lived an hour away, and I was with her for five years.

I was the wrong race.

One year I came home, and there was a message on the answering machine.

Her parents were singing her Happy Birthday.

Appi bafteh tee ya
Appi bafteh tee ya
Appi bafteh dih Yeki
Appi bafteh tee ya

When she came home, I said, "You got a message from the Manimal Chorus."

Boy, was she pissed!

Too bad.

When people disrespect me, I disrespect THEM much harder.

I can out-crazy, out-toxic anybody.

But I generally don't.

The Democrats will turn up the Insanity Dial to 11 before November.

This is their Stalingrad, and they have no winter clothing.

Sit back and laugh.

Your grandkids will love to hear about it.

END