mjfleck.bsky.social
Writing, filmmaking. Climate + art. Views my own.
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To be clear I know next to zilch about Tupac, just stumbled across this and was zapped by the density of truth bombs in a mere four minutes
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P.S. of course there are people in America renewing English right now and who have been since 1940. This movie was just a good jolt to do it and go looking for it.
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But this movie did remind me that English can be renewed! With energy and wit and speed, not just with acronyms and clever names for unhealthy online behaviors. Thank you, Hepburn and Stewart and co.
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Dialogue alone can be catchy like a pop song and reverberate like poetry. This script, and the way the actors savor the words or shoot them, demonstrate an understanding of the capability of language to be renewed.
This is not a call to return to good old American English from any past era.
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Words are more than tools for communication. Strung together just so, as Donald Ogden Stewart has demonstrated with this script, words achieve a cumulative effect greater than their meanings.
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Walking out of a theater, with this English knocking around your head like a pinball, it's hard to go back to the dull, corporate jargon of the office, or the like-like-like self-centered conversation you hear in any bar or coffee shop.
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These lines come fast, almost relentlessly, at an unrealistic and thrilling clip. They remind you -- in the gut, where laughter originates -- of what language is capable.
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Here are carefully chosen and arranged words matched to mouths that appreciate their potential. Here Jimmy Stewart is given the opportunity to say, sincerely, that a woman's heart is full of "hearth fires and holocausts," and Cary Grant can dryly offer greetings with "Hello, friends and enemies."
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So, Dylan's kinda right, Seeger's kinda right. Everyone's motives seem fair. In other words, good movie. So many good cheekbones.
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Last note is that my favorite part of Timmy's performance + the script was showing again and again that Dylan despised categorization. He couldn't consider himself a traitor to folk, because he never identified as a folk musician. He just wanted to make the best music he could.
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On the other hand, Dylan's rock music is really, really good. And it's impossible to argue that great art shouldn't exist, I think.
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The extra spicy layer of this film, to me, is that I sympathize the impulse to stop Dylan from going electric and leaving folk. Maybe a folk movement WITH Dylan or a folk movement that wasn't partially hijacked by Dylan's move to rock and roll would have influenced politics for the better.
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Well, what's the duty of an artist in times of upheaval? This is the interesting and pressing question that the movie asks (and everyone should talk about it).
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When Dylan left "pure folk" and Seeger behind, he left behind chances to bring social justice messages to a mass audience. Instead, Dylan's actions communicate: "Do whatever the hell YOU want, damn the crowd, the critics, and the people who expect you to be responsible for your platform."
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It's also a blow to the consciousness of social movements in pop culture. Dylan reeks of cool; Seeger is noble, but stale.
A great illustrative cut goes from Dylan recording "Like a Rolling Stone" with a full band in the studio to Seeger playing solo on public TV. Cool-->uncool, hard stop.
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Seeger is an artist, too, and he watches the news with concern like everyone else. Seeger is of the people, Dylan is apart from the people. Artist's aren't necessarily islands.
The climax, when Dylan plays rock and roll at the Newport Folk Festival to Seeger's chagrin, is more than a blow to folk.
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Almost every scene in the movie where a political event is happening -- Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy assassination -- Dylan is hardly paying attention. (Nice directing)
We could call this classic artist self-involvement, but Pete Seeger puts a politicized lens over Dylan's behavior.
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Reframing the phaseout as a positive for energy affordability seems like the big problem.
"The energy transition will cost you (the average American) more than business as usual" is a politically damaging argument against the transition. Do any surveys show the % of Americans who agree/disagree?
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Plus, love a long title: "Should the Widow be spoken to, she'll place the watering can on the grave with the head facing forward."
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In one autofictional story, Stanišić narrates himself being narrated by an "author" figure. And is critical of the narration!
"The author lets me be moved by singing a song that means nothing to me and by memories that don't belong to me."
The layers to this immediately invite a reread.
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... setting up the idea of a kind of time machine in the first story, which, we find out, one character actually invents. The characters in most of the stories then show up again in a section at the end of the book to in their own futures and pasts and engage with the events of their short stories.