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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nathan Rabin
Read between
January 14 - January 20, 2022
It had to be a critical and commercial failure upon its release (domestically, at least). It had to have, at best, a marginal cult following. And it had to facilitate an endless procession of facile observations and labored one-liners.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors, who use them to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl serves as a means to an end, not a flesh-and-blood human being. Once life lessons have been imparted, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl might as well disappear in a poof! for her life’s work is done. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing proposition. Audiences either want to marry her, or commit grievous bodily harm upon her and her immediate family.
All cinephiles reach a moment in their intellectual development when they realize that Oliver Stone is full of shit.
came to realize that great art doesn’t tell you what to think—that’s propaganda’s job.
So as far as I’m concerned, you can lead this story off by saying, “Richard Dreyfuss still thinks Oliver is an asshole.”
Todd doesn’t have interests; he has obsessions that consume him body and soul.
suburban Arizona, where new money goes to die a pampered spiritual death among jackrabbits, javelinas, and scorpions, I
It’s bad enough that Canadians pass as Americans, have barbed penises to aid in their fiendish sexual proclivities, and plot covertly against their unsuspecting neighbors to the south.
People don’t come to Diceman shows to laugh or be entertained. No, people come to Clay’s shows to have their fear and hatred of women and minorities validated.
This opening-exposition orgy obfuscates rather than edifies.
Ho-ification occurs when an actress or singer stops being judged on her body of work and begins getting judged by the work she had done to her body.
Incidents like these speak to the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of our culture’s attitude toward sex and exhibitionism: We leer and ogle with impunity, then, once some vague, invisible line has been crossed, turn into disapproving prudes concerned only with protecting the innocence of children.
Incidentally, there’s a name for casual, ramshackle portraits of friends and neighbors shot on the fly: home movies. Last I checked, they’re considered something to show bubbie and zayde when they visit, not art.
consequently feels like a Disneyland stage show about those nutty Gen Xers, with their bicuriosity and crazy drug addictions and shameless love of hoofing and crooning.
“There’s no vanity in comedy.”
previous Case Files, I have proposed what I call the Great Gazoo Theory: that sometime in the mid-’70s, Marlon Brando began taking marching orders from the Great Gazoo, the tiny, effeminate green alien only Fred Flintstone could see.
Politics and good intentions have ruined more filmmakers than drugs and money combined. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially in tandem with too much ambition and too little self-discipline.
In the parlance of Hit And Run, it’s a “feathered fish” that doesn’t quite belong in the action or comedy realm.
The scandalously erotic possibilities of film terrified the Man, so he sent a joyless scold named Will Hays to keep movies from devolving, or rather evolving, into a sticky, sweaty mass of writhing bodies pummeling every orifice in an omnisexual fuckfest of historic dimensions.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is one of those unimpeachable masterpieces that scare impressionable high school students off reading forever.
It’s the kind of symbolism-heavy, portentous tome that makes “reading for pleasure” seem like an oxymoron.
“You know, this movie isn’t anywhere near as much fun as a film with an orgy involving Isabella Rossellini, Ryan O’Neal, and Penn Jillette as a group-sex-loving, fantastically well-endowed Southern preacher named Big Stoop should be.”
You know your life has spun out of control when Pauly Shore is lecturing you about responsibility.
Swearing is an art form. The more profanity a film uses, the less impact it has.
can’t believe I somehow made it 66 entries into a feature about historic failures without writing about John Travolta, an actor who makes so many flops that when other actors fail, they have to pay him royalties.
Then again, has great art ever been produced that didn’t involve staging cockfights, decapitating chickens, blowing up horses, and bleeding cows? I’m pretty sure all those things happened during the filming of the first three Muppet movies.
As part of the settlement, Howard was forced to wear pants. For reasons I can’t get into, a lawsuit by Disney also forced me to wear pants. Fucking Disney.
For example, I no longer consider joy and happiness my enemies. So I’m a much more receptive audience for Cameron Crowe when he evangelizes for community, kindness, and common decency.
Any fool can accomplish failure. It takes a special kind of dreamer to lose a company a billion dollars.
Claire decides she’s going to fill his soul with sunshine even if she has to kill him in the process.
Like Frank Capra, Crowe wants to show us what life could be like if we were all just kinder, more hopeful, and had better taste in music.
As a troubled youth, movies provided me with a means of escaping the world. As an adult, they’re a way of engaging with the world.
