BRATS

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

Andrew McCarthy crafts an exquisitely satisfying base-touching expedition with his Generation Jones comrades, whose careers suffered as a result of a New York Magazine article, written by David Blum. The article was published on June 10, 1985.

Generation Jones got fucked, once again.

Jealousy plays a hand in the situation. Roughly seven years senior to the actors he wrote disparagingly about in his article, David Blum clearly had a personal agenda to take down a peg the six actors whose success he resented.

For the record, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Andrew McCarthy are the actors considered to populate Blum's fictional club of actors assembled by auteur filmmaker John Hughes and Joel Schumacher.

For his part, John Hughes was deeply invested in telling truthful coming-of-age stories for the time. For Schumacher, it was a lark.

Related movies to watch are: Joel Schumacher's "St. Elmo's Fire," John Hughes's "Pretty In Pink," "16 Candles," and "The Breakfast Club."

If you haven't yet seen "The Breakfast Club," you're in for a rare treat.

It ain't pretty when Andrew McCarthy interviews David Blum in Blum's NYC apartment. Unwilling to take one iota of blame for his mean-spirited attack on a group of young actors trying to succeed in the business, David Blum comes across as something less appealing than, well, pond scum.

Nevermind that Blum's editor at New York Magazine also shares blame for not doing his or her job on the "Brat Pack" hit piece. Just because something sounds like a clever play on words, does not make it suitable.

Editorial oversight, people.

David Blum's insincerity eviscerated the sincerity of young actors who deserved to be treated much better.  

I'm personally familiar with New York Magazine's proclivity for hatchet jobs.

NY Mag's "Vulture" site (how apropos) writer Hunter Harris took her best shot at me over my review of "Lady Bird." Sadly, Ms. Harris did not have the sand to address my revisited review of "Lady Bird," where I did a deep dive on Greta Gerwig's attempt to normalize unethical behavior.

Evidently, such truth was beyond he scope of Ms. Harris's "investigation."

The media is not your friend — never was, never will be.

That the OG Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop), were a bunch of wealthy show biz veterans, as opposed to a generation of young actors trying to make it, got lost in the social consciousness of the day.

One of this film's rich theme lines comes from Time Magazine's film critic Richard Schickel, speaking on stage for The Phil Donahue television show with Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, and Judd Nelson seated beside him.

"Can I apologize for my profession for that? I really thought that was a scurrilous article."

Andrew McCarthy is eight months older than me.

I had the good fortune of having this group of actors as generational touchstones to keep track of shifts in American society.

I'll never forget walking out of the cinema at the end of "The Breakfast Club" during its opening run. Here was a modern-day "400 Blows," except now we had an oddball mix of young individuals dealing directly with self-identity in the Regan era.

Dig the new breed.

So it is that I come to "Brats" with more than an ounce of "Blank Generation" ideology at hand, "I can take it or leave it each time."

Richard Hell wrote that line.

Richard Hell (of NYC's Voidoids punk band) could easily have played opposite Emilio Estevez in "Repo Man," Alex Cox's ode to L.A.'s '80s era youth culture.

There are many life lessons to be learned from this very polished documentary about a generation of actors who didn't have the proper tools at the time to deal with a cloaked attack from the media. If only the right publicist had stepped in to make lemonade from lemons.

Gen J lives!

Not Rated. 92 mins.

NIGHTCRAWLER

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

 

Vampire Culture
Jake Gyllenhaal Goes Dark

So Social satire doesn’t get much darker than it does in “Nightcrawler.”

Jake Gyllenhaal lost 30 pounds in order to play Louis Bloom, a devious social misfit who goes from scrap metal thief to self-made video journalist, selling accident and crime footage to a Los Angeles television station. Filmed primarily at night in Los Angeles, “Nightcrawler” feels like a twisted, more engaging, West Coast version of “Bringing Out the Dead.”

Gyllenhaal’s unreliable anti-hero looks like a recently recovered meth addict. He tempers his gaunt wide-eyed persona with polite speech soaked in “the self-esteem movement so popular in schools” and corporate management double-speak.

Lou is an auto-didactic monster who has risen from the sludge of America’s economic failure and its relentless culture of greed. Lou’s motto is: “if you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy a ticket.” While it’s not stated, Louis Bloom is a radical right-wing tool.

The slogan tells a lot about Lou’s warped value system, which plays out in all sorts of shocking displays of dangerous and selfish behaviors that are all the more appalling for the success that Lou achieves through them. Lou reflects America’s rampant corporate-political model for creating mayhem and profiting from its aftermath.

Screenwriter-turned-director Dan Gilroy (“The Bourne Legacy”) gets deep inside the mind of America’s poisonous organized (read racist) culture of violence-worship. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the famous fear-based ethos of the stereotypical television news station that pays Lou increasingly more for his ethically dubious footage. Lou is not above moving a body at a car crash site to get a better camera angle. He also has a knack for developing strategies on the fly to optimize the value of violent situations.

Hiring Richard (Riz Ahmed), a possibly illegal immigrant, as his assistant is the first step in Lou’s plan to corner the market on salacious news footage. Paying Richard $30 a night isn’t as good as paying him nothing as an intern, but Lou knows a sucker when he sees one.

Nina (Rene Russo) is a middle-aged news director at the local news TV station whose ratings rely on the kind of exploitation “news” coverage you see on CNN. Nina’s personally racist editorial vision cherishes “urban crime creeping into the suburbs” as the theme her viewers want to see supported. She informs Lou about her ideal content being a “screaming woman running down the street with her throat slit.”

An ostensibly romantic restaurant negotiation scene, in which Lou blackmails Nina into acting as his sex partner, captures the political climate that enables Lou to work his intimate brand of skullduggery. Witnessing how Lou gets the upper hand on Nina in a seemingly unwinnable situation is as diabolically funny as it is disturbing.  

Lou is a mercenary. He's got the sickness that most YouTubers have. Building his brand and making money are his priorities. He views people as objects he can manipulate to meet his goals. When Lou says, “today's work culture no longer caters to the job loyalty that could be promised to earlier generations,” it discloses an indisputable American viewpoint of cruel social conditioning.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s canny portrayal delivers a revelatory character study of an opportunistic sociopath working all the angles in a system built on violence-fueled propaganda. Lou Bloom is an ideal agent for the faulty structure because he can manipulate people, places, and images to support the one-percenter’s party line for the masses to absorb. You’ll feel a chill.

Rated R. 117 mins.