💸Review - "Generation Zero (2010)" - dir. Stephen k. Bannon🇺🇸

When Bannon was occupy

This film is better than "the Undefeated". I didn't hate it. It still isn't good. Bannon's style of of putting vaguely related stock footage under audio of interviews is used here. This time it is about the 2008 financial crisis. 

Adopting Generation Theory, the idea that the culture of generations travels in cycles  from complacent to crisis, the film offers a conservative explanation of why the market crashed. A gaggle of baby boomer politicians/academics/pundits etc. explain that young people in the 60s (their own youth in that period is left undiscussed) radical changed the moral centre to focus on the individual. This allowed for the great capitalist era of the 80s followed by the financial crisis. 

I don't think I have much more to say about this film.

⛪️Review - "Sunday Teasing" by John Updike🎇

Great Updike story about a pseudo-intellectual who spends Sunday winding up his wife and ultimately reflecting on the hollowness of life.  

It has one of my favourite opening lines; "Sunday morning: waking, he felt long as a galaxy, and just lacked the will to get up, to unfurl the great sleepy length beneath the covers and go be disillusioned in the ministry by some servile, peace-of-mind peddling preacher."

I'm not sure why I like this line so much. Parts of it are simple, the use of 'he' for an unintroduced character both sticks us right in the middle of the story, and helps us to see from, Arthur's, the protagonist, point of view.  

There is something else I like about this line. Possibly because it has the entire conflict of the story in this first sentence. The use of Galaxy to describe Arthur's early morning state, also links to the cosmological perspective which Arthur takes in his life. Through the story Arthur is focused on theology, but seems unrestrained when it comes it winding up his wife. This last bit is preconsideredIn this opening lines; he is avoiding is church, the practical, and intra-human application of his beliefs.

🇺🇸Review - The coming war on China: dir. John Pilger🏝

It is disappointing that this movie doesn't work. It was almost a good movie about how American imperialism has, and is continuing to, damage small-island communities in Asian and the Pacific. But instead the film tries limply to make the argument about US aggression against China by spending it's time focusing on the wrong evidence. 

The film is Made after the victory of Donald Trump and touches on the increased likelihood that his victory has meant for war. But here the proportion is all wrong; while spending Forty minutes about nuclear testing during the Cold War, the film only briefly mentions the Donald. No mention is made of, for example, the Lunatic Michael Flynn who had seemed to believe China has worked with Al Qaeda and Isis. (Unless Pilger somehow had predicted Flynn's rapid fall and knows that he would be gone for good.)  

While parts of this film elsewhere could have been good, a bizarrely sycophantic section in the centre of the film focuses on modern China. This brief section of the film parrots the mainstream Chinese media line. While a film about US aggression does not need to explore every abuse and atrocity that China has been involved in, The Coming War on China engages in full-blown red-washing. That is unforgivable.