smSECTION SIX
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THE PEARLS
Although I don't claim to be a movie critic any more than I claim to be a music critic, I consider myself sufficiently experienced to have developed tastes adequately refined and sharply acute enough to comment on the flicks I see as well as the sounds I hear. Because I believe there is already too much shitty swinishness in the world on which to bother wasting words, I deem only the pearls worth talking about and so it is only the pearls which I will seek and promote and, generally, it will be only the pearls about which I will comment. However, there are some rare instances when the shit comes so overhyped and so overblown (such as the current box office hit, PRIMAL FEAR) that I feel duty-bound to point them out in order to warn you away. Some flicks, such as PRIMAL FEAR, I see on the big screen in movie houses before they are released as videos. PRIMAL FEAR, like so many other Hollywood products, are aimed at selling tickets to Hollywood's largest audience, the so-called "common denominator," otherwise known as the dumb and the dumber and also generalized as teens or just plain kids. Obviously motivated solely by greed, Hollywood thus offers the modern-day equivalent of what some historians call the lead plates of the Roman Empire, from which Romans ate their food. Polluted by the lead of those plates, the food dished out on such tableware destroyed Roman brain cells and thus, in the opinion of some historians, led to the downfall of the Roman empire. By greedily catering to its chief audience with no other purpose in mind but to stuff its pockets by selling more and more tickets, Hollywood uncaringly destroys the brain cells of its chief audience---our teens, our kids, our dumb and dumber---by feeding them a heavy diet of gratuitous, far-fetched and improbable violence (such as the way Hollywood made a joke of mass murder in the BATMAN series). Hollywood in other words is hooked on the equivalent of offering our kids entertainment on lead plates. Where else did our youths learn to play with real guns instead of cap pistols? To invite death and mayhem by lying down on the center lanes of express highways? To indulge in the practice of drive-by shootings or tossing Molotov cocktails into neighborhood bodegas or the stairwells of housing projects? And so on and so on and so on and so on? Whether Hollywood realizes it or not, movies provide the role models for the dumb and dumber just as famed writer Victor Hugo's novels provided the chief role models for a mesmerized France in those prehistoric days before the flicks were invented. Except Victor Hugo is still worth reading, isn't he? Yes, I truly believe that Hollywood, although wimpily, lamely and unabashedly claiming that movies innocently reflect true life, actually gives us films which amplify, enhance and promote the evil we are capable of visiting on ourselves. In that way, Hollywood serves us up with not the American dream but, on the lead plates of its movie reels, dishes out the American nightmare.
THE SWINE
Was it ABC-TV critic Joel Siegal who recommended ACE VENTURA; WHEN NATURE CALLS? I know I sometimes have a faulty memory, but if were you, Joel, nature calls you to go hang your head in the toilet bowl and flush it. I enjoyed Jim Carrey in MASK, but is it true that Hollywood paid him $20 million to lower himself into a bucket of Ace Ventura-type drek? I'm sure that somewhere beneath his silly pompadour there's a brain but I see no evidence of it in this boring and idiotic flick. ACE VENTURA; WHEN NATURE CALLS is purely for the stupid and stupider crowd.##
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