1:22:25

The other night I rewatched Erin Brockovich, a great Hollywood film, because I wanted to hear a line about surviving heartbreak from the movie that has been rattling around in my head lately (I’ll post the screenshot in a separate entry). In general, and in my opinion, Steven Soderbergh made some of the best late-Hollywood movies in the 90s and 2000s. Out of Sight is amazing. Sex Lies and Videotape (1989) is still one of my favorite movies ever made. I hate Traffic and that whole genre of films (Babel, Mommoth) that came after. I loved the pace and rhythm of Logan Lucky. Unlike many other directors now, Soderbergh still knows how to cast a film properly, and can bring out the best in the actors he works with, dumb dumb Channing Tatum being a prime example, and the insufferable, now-ubiquitous Adam Driver, who gets treated like Lawrence Olivier royalty, or some great post-war character actor like Gene Hackman or Richard Dreyfus, when he’s really just a monotone hick with very little range, and is only good in a few types of roles (I wrote a long post last month about Driver’s acting and Michael Mann casting him in Ferrari. I haven’t uploaded it yet. I didn’t post the majority of the long essays I wrote in December due to Mars retrograding through my 12th house).

Driver is constantly put in period films when he’s best at playing contemporary men, like Adam in Girls or Lev in Frances Ha. But Driver’s biggest problem, and something no one comments on (not critics, not fans) because the degradation of real culture and taste has become a systemic problem, is his total lack of sophistication. Even if Driver is in so-called “sophisticated” movies (which I’d argue he’s not. These “sophisticated” movies are all fake-sophisticated and kitsch by worn-out old Auteurs who lost their talent and artistic integrity decades ago. Hello Scorsese, Coppola, Almodóvar, Todd Haynes), he himself is not sophisticated. Driver doesn’t understand art or being human, which warm quirky brilliant actors like Richard Dreyfus excelled at, no matter the role. And why would he? Who the hell was Driver all his life before he became one of the most, if not the most (after Di Caprio), celebrated post-millennial American actor of our time, dicking around with Lena Dunham, literally? Where do these people even come from, is always my question?

Driver is a dumb jock with a character actor’s face. He doesn’t have any real humanity or depth of perception, so nothing surprising comes through his performances, other than the precision of the role that he obsessively studies and fulfills, like a checklist, nothing more. Character as stranglehold. Driver’s performances are rigid, air tight, and bone dry. Cold. But not cold because the character is cold. Cold because he is cold. And yet, all these dinosaur “Auteurs,” or fake new Auteurs, put Driver in their movies, as though its some guarantee of greatness, or the secret weapon for the success of small character-driven films (Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson or The Dead Don’t Die), when he is a redneck (no offense to rednecks. I like many redneck actors and some of them were actually great actors without the pretension of Driver, who considers himself an artiste. Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Duvall, James Garner, Matthew McConaughey are a few great Southern actors to name a few) merely simulating talent and real people. I don’t like Glen Powell either, plus he’s so dumb-looking. Unlike Powell, Miles Teller was great in the Top Gun sequel, which was not focused on character at all, and yet he came through. He’s always good. If we were living in another era, when human beings were not algorithms raised by iPhones and computers, he could probably be great.

As I’ve always said, the only American actor (there are so many great European, British, Irish, and Scottish actors. Too many to count) who could do anything and everything and always did it well—always—was Jeff Bridges. He’s now an idiot, a living breathing “Dude” Woke idiot, but he was a superb actor all through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and mid-2000s. There was never a false moment onscreen with him. Bridges was so effortlessly and varyingly good, in fact, it’s hard to believe what a dufus he is in real life. He doesn’t exude any of the smoldering interiority, intelligence, mystery, and sex appeal he always had onscreen, which is weird, to say the least. Where the hell does it come from?

These fake-great movies rely on people (audiences, critics) having no real discernment and no memory of what true greatness really looks like.

It almost seems like Adam Driver’s punishment (and ours) is being acted to death. It’s impossible for him to star in more movies in a single year. Which brings us back to my perpetual question about actors, doubles, masks, and clones. Maybe that is why Driver went from being cute and charismatic in his younger years (Girls, Frances, While You’re Young) to a giant (pun intended) bore. He’s such an ogre. Speaking of clones, do you believe that geriatric zombie queen, Madonna (who got deathly ill last year with some bacterial infection that landed her in the hospital, had to cancel her tour, and then went on tour anyway in a knee brace while performing all her concerts either barely able to walk—let alone dance—or sitting a chair, where she received lap dances) is really still the old Madonna, as in the original Madonna? Is she even still alive? If Madonna was anything, she was a powerful and incredibly physical performer. So maybe it’s not the same Driver every time, in every movie. Maybe the real Driver is gone too. Maybe we’re looking at Driver 2.0. Maybe there are multiple Drivers. The easiest thing to clone is an actor, who is a professional mask-wearer (metaphoric and literal). Last winter, an awake friend and I were talking on the phone about the many lies our society told us about celebrities: the main one being how hard they all work, how they can just go on and on and on, without ever breaking down, without ever running out of steam or ideas or talent. Everything was just “hard work,” “merit,” and solo “ambition.” No one was helping, it was all just them. Madonna being the prime example of this celebrity machinery. We never considered that maybe one single person was not in fact behind all those performances, albums, novels, tours, dance numbers, public appearances, “brilliant” styles, whatever. That one person was not inexhaustible and could not do all of these things for years on end, without dying or breaking down or being replaced.

I had a very strong sense of this again (one I’d be willing to bet on) watching the recent documentary that came out about the composer John Williams, whose movie scores hold a dear place in my heart, along with many people my generation. In the documentary, Williams’ success story came across as utterly engineered, Faustian, sacrificial, and apocryphal to me. There is simply no way he could have written that many celebrated film scores year after year after year, while also simultaneously conducting orchestras, composing his own music, making albums, teaching, writing theme music for television, and raising a family after his young wife died “suddenly” in a hotel room one day (I won’t get into what I think about that here). It’s just not physically possible or creatively sustainable. I don’t care how “talented” you are. Williams was not a young man, after all, when he met Spielberg and his career took off (I think he was around 50). His biography reeks of “genius” mythology and orchestrated fame. So can we really say for sure Williams (or any person of such great prominence and success) composed every single one of those famous soundtracks on his own, especially by hand, in the pre-digital age, which was even more precise and labor intensive, as even the film points out? According to the documentary, Williams composed up to 5 famous film scores a year, often wining Oscars or Golden Globes for all of them. How many hours in a day does one have? Who took care of his children while he was working and traveling nonstop for decades? When did he sleep? Did he ever tire or run out of ideas? No. He was just a perfect creative machine that never stopped or tired, even at 90 something. This is not how a real artist—or person—functions. Maybe this can happen one year—you get lucky—but not for decades. This is how an engineered artist-as-psyop works; an artist who makes a deal with the Devil, who is personally selected and carefully handled by the cabal (who is more cabal than Spielberg, who hand-picked Williams as his right hand man?) functions. To top it off, the documentary presents Williams as the nicest man who ever lived, a perfect human being, a perfect husband, a perfect father, a perfect collaborator, a total mensch. God, hit the jackpot with Williams. Sorry, but people who do nothing but work, and in such an extreme mythical way, neglecting their children, especially after their young mother dies suddenly, is not a perfect father or a perfect husband or perfect man. In fact, Williams does not sound like a human being at all.

Sorry, I’ve completely drifted away from what this post was originally supposed to be about—Erin Brockovich! To return to my intended topic:

The problem with movies like Erin Brockovich (As with Mystic Pizza and Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts is the most beautiful creature in this movie. The only woman who could dress in a way that I absolutely hate and look utterly divine. Roberts is now the worst Hollywood ideologue, and was reportedly always awful behind the scenes), The Insider, or even Pain Hustlers (with Emily Blunt, who completely ruined her face) is the way they make us think this level of evil and corruption is a one-off rather than the bedrock of our entire world/economy, most especially the dark economy of Hollywood.

The scene below from Erin Brockovich epitomizes the lie of the medical masks protecting us from nothing. The horrific absurdity of a mask soaked in blood due to the carcinogenic poison of hexavalent chromium that was being pumped into Southern CA’s water and air.

He covers his face when he says this to mimic a mask on a face. But also because the emotion of grief overtakes him and hides it behind his hand.

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