Line by Line
David Edelstein writes the best sentences in all of film criticism:
The astounding classical score, by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, is redolent of bad karma—ominous low strings, discordant buzzing like locusts from outer space.
…Anderson’s fearless, bighearted filmmaking is an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny.
The rest of the review is great too.
What does it mean to be “an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny”?
Does the movie dispel a dangerous gas created during the Mexican-American War? The alternative interpretation is that it’s a metaphor hideously mixed in form and relentlessly trite in meaning.
— rd · Dec 26, 05:14 PM · #
Super
<a title=“youtube” href=“http://www.yyoutube.net”>youtube</a>
— youtube · Dec 27, 12:27 AM · #
Toxic Cloud of Manifest Destiny = “I hate America and everything about it, being a useless trendy twit devoid of anything beautiful.”
Sounds like a stupid, cliched, idiotic movie. The REAL story of the Oil Businesses birth is far more fascinating. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil saved the whales, by providing a much cheaper and widely available alternative. Standard Oil, though it grew by some fairly Microsoft-ian deals with Railroads (to exclude competitors) provided the template for national companies providing a cheap product nationwide.
Cliched anti-Americanism? Check. Cliched anti-development nostalgia (people are better off poor and dependent on animals for getting around)? Check. Worldview of anything having to do with modern America is evil and bad and only simplistic “noble savages” and their idle rich worshippers are good? Check.
Pathetic.
— Jim Rockford · Dec 27, 03:22 AM · #
Jim Rockford apparently believes that Steinbeck’s message in “The Pearl” is that pearls are bad.
— Matt Feeney · Dec 27, 04:55 AM · #
I thought it was respect the ocean. Save the oysters.
— Joules · Dec 27, 07:37 AM · #