The pond re-watched Paul Thomas Anderson's classic Boogie Nights last night ...
Does a rich evocation of the glory days of the LA porn industry in the late 1970s and 1980s offer any guidance to a film-maker already researching their masterpiece about Donald Trump's reign as president?
You betcha. Some might be thinking Citizen Kane or All the President's Men or a solemn Stanley Kramer approach, but don't forget the vulgar tone, the absolutely tasteless sense of style, the hints of shameless desperation ... think Anderson and remember to throw in a bit of Bob Guccione doing Caligula ... (hire the newest Gore Vidal on the block if you like, but don't forget to do extensive re-writing).
Of course Anderson was hot shit when he made Boogie Nights, and he had a dream cast of hot young contenders, along with a couple of top old guns, and he had a great DOP (Robert Elswit, still doing it much later on shows like Nightcrawler), and a gobsmacking Steadicam operator ...
Tge pond realises there will be others urging on David O. Russell's American Hustle as a better model ... and it's true that whenever the pond speaks of the magic science oven, it thinks of the Donald brooding and tweeting in the wee hours ...
Whatever. There's a great movie in the making here - in the American way, life only exists for the fifteen minutes of fame a movie offers - but the pond only began to pitch these ideas as a way to explain why it ended up grooving the morning away again with the disco Donald ...
It wasn't as if there were other temptations ... the reptiles reliably deliver a cornucopia of crazy fun ...
Actually the funny thing there is that the reptiles themselves were laughing about the fridges, and in the process ended up joking about the Spectator ...
Now there's something truly PT Anderson weird going on when the reptiles think that the Speccie mob is barking mad right wing ...
The pond will leave John Elsegood to others ... though if it means we can soon look forward to articles in the Speccie explaining that Hitler wasn't all bad, he was a vegetarian, loved dogs, and was a keen student of architecture - or perhaps that Mussolini made the trains run on time - then Boogie Nights will seem like a work of prophesy ...
As expected, there were also reliable old hands at work, beavering away on the usual causes, offering the pond the siren song of clean coal ...
Ah yes, and copper's the future for the NBN...
And there was another Labor party stalwart was blazing away ... well, there's only so many times it's possible to write a tourist pamphlet about the fun to be had on the Gold Coast ...
But the pond wanted to stay in its Boogie Nights dreaming, and trembling little Johnny was pointing the way, and happily the reptiles decided that the time was right to break the WSJ paywall ...
Now this is audacity itself, American dreaming at its finest, though for a moment, the notion that the Donald is teaching Xi a lesson, and perhaps also shirtfronting Vlad the impaler, and the pond almost lost the link amongst much google jocularity ...
Sadly, writing up Trump giving Xi a lesson in deals turned out to be agonisingly short - unlike Boogie Nights, which clocked in over two and a half hours - but at least give Michael Auslin credit for trying ...
Now you have to be profoundly stupid to try to see patterns in tea leaves, or in the shifting sands blowing in the desolate Death Valley, or the policies of the White House, and the pond had an urgent desire to discover where Auslin was located ...
Another dummy from the Hoover Institution, the very same useless organisation that employs that prime goose Niall Ferguson?
The very same Niall who only a short time ago was cheerfully contemplating a military strike against North Korea on the basis that not very much damage would be done to South Korea ...
What the heck do they put in the water cooler at the Hoover Institution that makes them all so barking mad?
There you go. Anyone who thought the pond was way off in evoking Boogie Nights should remember there needs to be a scene offering awards to reptile scribblers ...
And now, since in any comedy there should be a scene offering a little gravitas, weight and heft, and a little bulk, and Dirk Digglerish length, the pond needs to do a whip pan across oceans to land on the lizard Oz letters page ...
Say what?
The pond is slowly catching up with the Hooverites, but who is this wretch blathering from the heights of the Big History Institute, and incidentally using the name of his employer in a way that genuine conservatives would once have been appalled and shocked to see ...
It turned out that Big History was a bit like "clean coal" and the smooth smoke of a pure tobacco and other idiocies, and anyone curious about this bizarre branding can find heaps of nonsense online, as here ...
They'll discover it's history for the Twitter/YouTube generation, a mindless bit of nonsense flinging together 13.8 billion years of blather about everything ... yet apparently without a clue that when signing your name to personal opinions of a right wing kind, there should be a disclaimer that runs, "these particular asinine viewpoints and idiocies in relation to the politics of Australia do not represent the Big History Institute, or for that matter, Macquarie University NSW" ...
Hello, is there anyone awake at Macquarie University? Or is it the university's view that Malware is an impotent hand-wringing appeaser of the left?
Never mind, the pond has developed quite a taste for the letter-writers of Oz, and this one was an exceptional winner ...
Indeed, indeed. Until they bring back chemical castration, imprisonment and possibly hanging of gays, let no one claim to be properly liberal in the Ming the Merciless manner ...
Oh and they mocked the pond for talking of Boogie Nights ... though the pond will admit that maybe David Rowe is on to something by invoking Tolstoy ... provided it's Tolstoy as written by the Three Stooges ... so that there can be a lot of slapstick comedy in the retreat from Moscow in the winter and special laughs in the coming war with North Korea, whereby the Donald will really teach Xi a lesson in the art of the deal ... (and with more Tolstoyian Rowe to be found here).
The letter quoted in the Oz opinion piece fits nicely with yesterday's comment "a "safe space" where white conservative superannuants can howl at the moon without ever having their bigotry challenged. Check out the names that keep appearing - you'd swear it was a club you can only join if your name is Don - - -"
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