Get Shorty

Schoenberg never got a Guggenheim Fellowship to finish Moses und Aron, nevertheless we have the dry wit of this version.

Hollywood is the City of God not builded with slaves, it has its Aaron (the title figure) but you part the waters to get there between the slave labor of drug money and usurious Pharaoh.

Wild Wild West

Wild Wild West is a very desperate movie, and that’s the difficulty. “No violent salvation options,” as Rimbaud says.

If the critics who took Men in Black at face value and acclaimed it had stayed to see the last shot of this film, the purport would have been revealed to them. It is not a mistake that West and Gordon ride Dr. Loveless’s giant mechanical spider through Ford Country into the sunset, rather than East back to Washington, D.C. Sonnenfeld is not content to expose The New World Order, which is one of those crackpot schemes Dr. Loveless was always coming up with, he also wants to drive its weapon of mass instruction (the Hollywood computer movie) into its inevitable oblivion.

Springtime for Hitler wasn’t written by a Maquis. The film is neither a forthright rebuke of the blockheads whose remarks it greatly resembles, nor did it put TimeWarner out of business, even at a cost of $170,000,000. Still, as an advertising executive once said, it doesn’t matter whether a commercial is memorably good or memorably bad, so long as it’s memorable.

Sonnenfeld’s desperation reveals his original artistic instinct in the very opposing tendencies that nullify his film instead of fructifying it, in a way. As Borges says, imagining the words of a minor poet, “The end is oblivion. / I’ve arrived early.”