Do look up now ... the new year approaches ...

 

 

So the pond is done with travelling for the moment, but still hasn't plucked up the courage to return to the reptiles and its herpetological studies.

The pond did think of becoming a PhD candidate at the University of Facebook, formerly known as Trump University (see Twitter on how to join the study program).

Instead the pond decided to continue the alternative thread of movie reviewing with a Netflix show the pond actually liked - a novelty so rare and exciting that for only the second time ever did the pond give a Netflix show an uptick (the first was for the Coen brothers' Ballad of Buster Scruggs).

The plot for Don't Look Up is very very Brad "we're all going to catch it, we're all going to die" Hazzard …

 

 

What a first class nihilist anarchist gherkin he is, a real waste hazard ... but on with the main feature ...

There's more than a whiff of Dr Strangelove about it, a hint of Mars Attacks!, and a few other Brad haphazard satires.

Speaking of Kubrick, Bernard Keane reached for him when scribbling about Scotty from marketing and saying Australia in 2021 was worthy of Stanley … featuring Iron Pyrites' standard Dom ...the "personal responsibility" man, disinclined to resign though personally responsible for sundry and several disasters ...

...With a prime minister unable to lead when he has no corporate donors to dictate policy, the burden of leadership has fallen on the states — on vaccination, on public health, on climate and energy, on tax reform, even fiscally, with NSW and Queensland heading back to surplus and Victoria to minimal deficit by the middle of the decade, while the Commonwealth balance sheet remains awash in red.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet now talks of a states-led reform agenda in which the Commonwealth is a bit-player, a prominent “wasn’t that X from that show?” cameo. What was once a mostly arcane debate about federalism, centralisation and states’ powers has transformed into a very real shift of power, driven by the principle that nature abhors a vacuum, and particularly a grinning, babbling nullity like Morrison, presiding over a new era of big but pointless government, all cashed up but unable to lead.
Like the good Jungian he was, Kubrick was obsessed with the shadow self, and his films are littered with them, always men, stalked by the parts of themselves they deny and fear, sometimes triumphing over them, though never without compromise and ambivalence, and sometimes succumbing to them, like Jack Torrance, always the caretaker at the Overlook, eternally beaming from the photo on the wall.
Australia ended up governed by our shadow self, with Scott Morrison embodying the laziness, emptiness and small-mindedness we like to pretend we’ve left behind. In this movie, the final, trademark Kubrickian stare is of Morrison smirking out at us forever from our screens, the shadow self triumphant. He’s always been prime minister. No need for a coup when our worst impulses occupy the highest offices in the land.

To back up his Kubrickian despair, the keen Keane went on an extended rant:

…Let’s reel off the greatest hits — led inevitably by a badly botched vaccination rollout predicated on stuffing up both the sourcing and the rollout (privatised, natch) such that state governments had to step in and do the Commonwealth’s work for it.
JobKeeper — a triumph of government waste that added several zeros to the much-heralded “debacle” of the Rudd stimulus program.
The toxic work environment of Parliament — particularly that of the ministerial wing, where an alleged rape victim is a “lying cow” and the cesspit that is the prime minister’s own office badmouths her partner, where anonymous donors are welcome to hand you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and staffers are for kicking out of bed in a rage.
Such was the decline in basic governing skills that Morrison couldn’t even mount his own culture war — the sort of thing John Howard could do in his green-and-gold tracksuited sleep — with a religious discrimination bill grinding to a halt in his own partyroom (rather like how Morrison claimed electric vehicles work?).
For that matter, by the end of the year even legislating the simplest measures became an unachievable feat for Morrison.
There’s only one facet of governing that Morrison can do well, and it’s the easiest one of all — spending money. If the fiscal faucets need opening, plumbers Scott ‘n’ Josh will be there in a trice to get the dollars gushing — usually in the direction of business rather than voters.
In another of those moments that make you double-check what you’re reading because what you’re reading is so absurd, we now have the biggest government since John Curtin was in the Lodge, to the blithe indifference of most of the commentariat. The party that continues to insist it’s all about small government and low taxes is running the biggest operation in three-quarters of a century, and will be for years to come.
Admittedly, even here, the standard level of competence applies — most of the rorted car park money from 2019 remains unspent years later, with a strong chance many of the projects won’t start before Alan Tudge’s ministerial career is over. When you can’t even spend money, you might need to find a different job than pork-barrelling.
As for complex policy issues, well, you don’t even need to ask, do you? Any energy or climate policy not written by the fossil fuel industry was a debacle — witness CoalKeeper, the Angus Taylor jape in which every household would pay an electricity tax to prop up coal-fired power stations to keep burning coal even when no one needed their power. That got a decidedly frosty reception from the states, and the “triumph” (thank you, press gallery) of Morrison’s net zero commitment, which magically needed no policy changes of any kind, just a sunny (though not solar-powered, please) optimism that some techy thing would show up.
Or there was the truly inspired moment of madcap military manoeuvres, when Morrison hit upon the one solitary way to make the Coalition’s own Naval Group submarine contract even worse — cancel it, lying to the French along the way, and vaguely commit to look at nuclear submarines from the Brits or the Americans. One can only imagine the bright spark in the PMO checking off the list of requirements for this exercise: later — check. More expensive — check. Less local content — check. Can’t be serviced here — check. You don’t need to think it’s a terrible decision — you know.

Okay, okay, it's lazy blogging, but the pond couldn't be stuffed doing a survey of 2021. 

Here, have a cartoon showing a keen spirit ...

 

Enough of the keen Keane and SloMo and back to the main feature, and inevitably the show has produced mixed reactions, amidst heaps of coverage of the kind to be expected when the dentist gives exposed nerves a prod ...

 

 

 

 

The pond can't possibly cover all that, and will settle for a response of the fuckwitted kind, as delivered by Charles Bramesco, wherein a deep lack of a sensa huma is on display …

...Fingers point in every direction, only for the blame to boomerang back to the mindset this film embodies. The easy potshots at celebrity culture and our fixation on it – mostly in the form of a bubbleheaded pop star named Riley Bina, played by good sport Ariana Grande – ring hollow in a production packed to bursting with attention-grabbing A-listers. The big bad media proves unhelpful, more interested in salacious clickbait than honest reportage, though the script also relies on the mass communication machine as the one thing capable of turning the tide of public opinion. Most damningly smug of all is McKay’s idea of reg’lar folks, from Dibiasky’s center-right parents (“We’re in favor of the jobs the comet will create,” they inform her before allowing her in the house) to the veteran tapped to pilot the hail-mary mission in space (Ron Perlman as a racist drunkard who addresses “both kinds” of Indians, “the ones with the elephants and the ones with the bow and arrows”).

And so on and on, though the pond can't be bothered to quote more.

Ouch. Clearly that portrait of fuckwitted reporters tracking their clicks clearly hurt …but ain't it grand to know that Bramesco cares deeply for your average Trumpist and their hurt feelings?

Of course the header "Why star-studded comet satire Don't Look Up is a disaster" header shows the sort of monstrous black and white carry on you expect in the age of Twitter, all the more remarkable for appearing in the Graudian. It's the sort of response that invites a snappy Twitter critique: "why the pimple-faced stupidity of Charles Bramesco is a disaster."

Meanwhile, in the Graudian, an actual climate scientist appeared to share a few thoughts, though really the comet satire could just as easily be applied to the Brads and Karens of the world, and their reaction to the virus and masks and ... oh fuck it, the pond just remembered that soon it will be back to reading Killer Creighton … 

The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.
The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.
The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Diabasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.
The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).
By now, the imminent collision with comet Diabasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine’s cover asks, “The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?”

And so on … proving that one loon's disaster is another person's rich anarchic satire. 

Writer/director McKay even manages to work in an evangelical Xian who enjoins the doomed family in a prayer, as if that would put the pond off, but it didn't, though it did rescue Chalamet from the doom of Dune and the pond did catch up on the thinking in Variety:

...Randall calls for a prayerful moment, despite their not being religious. Which is when Yule takes over, delivering a blessing, and asking for God to soothe them.
McKay, whose mother was a born-again Christian, said it was that scene that hooked Chalamet.
“I was talking to Chalamet about maybe doing this little part, because we’ve wanted to work together,” he said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if there’s enough there.’” McKay didn’t disagree. But then, McKay said, “Don’t Look Up” co-producer (and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) Ron Suskind, asked him “Where’s faith in this movie?
“And I was like, ‘Oh, you’re right. You’re right!’” McKay said. “I think we’re so used to thinking of religion as denominations, and now it’s become a political cudgel in this country. I forgot about real faith. And it was just a lightbulb moment where it’s like, ‘I know who Timothée’s character is.’” With the addition of Chalamet’s Yule, McKay said, “the team was complete.”
“And that might be my single favorite moment in the entire movie,” McKay added.

As for the rest, the pond is content to note that in terms of movie-making the film has some richly funny moments. 

Meryl Streep is over the top in her usual way, but then she is playing Donald Trump … and she meets a most satisfying end. So does her chief of staff son (Jonah Hill in fine form), a combination of Don Jr and the emotionally needy Eric, bleating for a hug from his dad … 

Cate Blanchett does a fine impression of a voracious Fox and Friends host, the only implausible element being her racially diverse TV partner. (Perhaps that's why Den of Geeks thinks she and Tyler Perry's Jack Bremmer really belong on MSNBC, and Blanchett took her cues from Morning Joe's Mika).

There's more than a hint of Network here, though this time social media and the University of Facebook also come in for a pummeling. 

There are some tidy cameos - the pond never thought it would enjoy a moment in the company of Ariana Grande-Butera but Don't Look Up shows that it's possible.

No doubt there will be some who get an anxiety attack about Leonardo DiCaprio being in the show - the pond would usually share the anxiety - but he and Jennifer Lawrence are fine, and provide a nice centre for the absurdities that explode around them. 

The pond particularly enjoyed the work of Mark Rylance, sending up the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shitless (yes there are penis-shaped rockets to see), and his character shares the same happy ending as Meryl Streep's.

As usual, the pond is late to the controversy, and doesn't suggest you take out a Netflix subscription to see two movies, but does note that David Vetter got it about right in Why Sneering Critics Dislike Netflix's 'Don't Look Up,' But Climate Scientists Love It:

Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, which released on Christmas Eve, is not a subtle movie. It is a brash, absurdist satire about the incapability of our political and media classes to respond appropriately to impending, world-ending disaster. Throughout its 2 hour, 25 minute runtime, writers Adam McKay and David Sirota repeatedly and angrily skewer the personalities and the structures that help prevent our status-infatuated, profit-obsessed society from taking climate change seriously. It does this whilst being extremely funny.
You would be forgiven for thinking that a snarky, star-studded comedy about a real-world, manmade crisis would be gobbled up by mainstream movie critics. But you’d be wrong. At the time of writing, Don’t Look Up had a decidedly mixed score of 55% on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
Why?
Criticisms of Don’t Look Up seem to boil down to two main themes: Firstly, it makes for uncomfortable viewing. The film is “blunt” (according to David Fear in Rolling Stone), “shrill” (Samuel R. Murrian, Parade Magazine) and “self-conscious and unrelaxed” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian). Luke Goodsell of ABC News Australia believes the director, Adam McKay, “just doesn't know how to let people enjoy things—even if it is their own destruction.” In these critics’ views, it’s fine to make movies about the climate crisis—just as long as you do so in a way that soothes and placates the viewer. You must under no account employ “bombastic, shake-you-by-the-shoulders direction” (Simran Hans, The Observer).
Secondly, critics appear to be worried that the film is making fun of people—and that perhaps they might be among the targets.
“McKay has made it inescapably clear that, no matter who you are ... he is serenely confident that he is much smarter than you are,” opines Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending. “Yelling ‘Look at all the dumb-dumbs’ cannot be the basis for successful satire,” cries a pearl-clutching Fletcher Powell of KMUW Wichita Public Radio. Tim Grierson at Screen International says the director takes “a smug, self-satisfied approach [that] proves insufficient at addressing the legitimate woes at the core of this picture.”
It’s unclear which characters these offended writers are identifying with, or which audiences they are being offended on behalf of, but the film has clearly hurt some feelings. Why do the critics—a community famously never given to snobbery or condescension—feel condescended to? Perhaps they believe they would be better climate communicators than the filmmakers. Indeed, Matthew Lucas, on his blog From the Front Row, says, “This isn't just a noble failure, it’s a flat out bad film, an attempt to address a very real planetary crisis in the simplest and most misguided terms.” Don’t Look Up is guilty of “lofty superiority that would drive away any partisans who still need to be won over,” writes Charles Bramesco in The Guardian, with an air of lofty superiority.
The haughty reception for Don’t Look Up from the showbiz media contrasts starkly with the reaction from the community on which the film’s heroes are based: the climate scientists. And if Don’t Look Up is infuriating to watch, it is because it does a pitch-perfect job of channeling climate experts’ weary frustration at being ignored…

Well yes, that damned air of lofty superiority and the inordinately stupid Charles Bramesco scoring yet another mention ...

Let us not speak of Luke Goodsell, who is clearly a totally unique twit, and has copped a pounding from those who enjoyed the movie.

Instead if you want more in the same vein, you can head off to Current Affairs, including this (the original has the typographical lack of subtlety devotees of the movie expect):

...I almost didn’t see Netflix’s satirical asteroid-bound-for-earth movie Don’t Look Up, because the reviews were mixed, and many said it was a heavy-handed political satire that made obvious points and was not clever. Since I find nothing more painful to sit through than bad political comedy, I thought I should give Don’t Look Up a miss. I decided to watch it when I saw that leftist investigative journalist David Sirota (a former Current Affairs podcast guest) had co-written the story. I know that Sirota is not stupid. (His 2006 book Hostile Takeover remains the single best one-volume debunking of pro-corporate talking points that I have found.) If he was involved with writing a Netflix comedy, I thought it would at least be not completely terrible.
In fact, I really enjoyed Don’t Look Up. More importantly, I came away thinking that its critics were not only missing the point of the film in important ways, but that the very way they discussed the film exemplified the problem that the film was trying to draw attention to. Some of the responses to the movie could have appeared in the movie itself.

Well yes, Goodsell and Bramesco could easily have made the cut if McKay hadn't had more interesting things to crack jokes about ...

And so on, and on, and back in the day, the pond can remember being cast into the outer circles of Dante's hell by assorted film buffs for daring to like shows of the Starship Troopers and Mars Attacks! kind.

All the raw nerves on display suggest that that dentist McKay knew how to set a few off.

Even if you're not a climate scientist, at the least it's a great guilty pleasure and a splendid way to enter into the new year with Brad "we're all going to get it and die" Hazard. 

Yes, the pond thinks this is the correct spelling, quite unique* in its own way ...  and takes personal responsibility for it (*ABC24 licensed - they did it again this very bloody morning, in their totally unique way).

Take it away SloMo, give us a quote, and maybe we can have a graph:

 

 

Ah, we're not seeing it in the Covid hospitalisations routine.

If only McKay could see his way to doing a satirical comedy down under. 

Back on topic, Vetter could probably have just said that movie reviewers in general are a bunch of needy wankers and tossers, always scribbling away in the dark, deeply aware of the futility of their meaningless lives, knowing they'll never get to make a movie … and even if they do, the pointlessness of their attempt at a movie satire will underwhelm bitter, resentful, envious reviewers sitting in the dark, keen to pounce and dismiss the efforts of their one-time companions as a waste of screen space. (Okay, okay, confession time, the pond once reviewed movies).

And with that the pond ends its vacation posting, and will take a few days off, before daring to look up, resuming its herpetological studies in the new year, if only to see the Murdochian comet getting closer by the day …

All the best for that new year, and here's a few jolly cartoons to usher it in, beginning with a last seasonal reference …