Meryl Streep’s speech, as entertaining as it was, amounts to howling in the dark, for all the effect it will have on those who don’t already agree with her.
I applaud her, but I don’t think it amounts to anything.
What is interesting, and remains interesting, is that Donald Trump remains compelled to judge the talent level of the celebrated by whether they criticize him, or not. If they appeared on his show or on some stage supporting him, they are “great, great stars.” But… let even the same people ever say anything negative about him, and they become “overrated” and “untalented,” as if the state is binary and the only means of measurement is whether they ever said anything bad about him, personally.
This is the same tactic I have personally experienced from Trumpian minds throughout the political spectrum, whenever I say something they don’t like. The response is a simple declaration that I’m a shitty writer and everybody knows it. I don’t need to concede that people have had negative reactions to my work before and that I am capable of being hurt by that — but I must say that when somebody says so for this reason, it lands with a gnat’s impact because I always know in context that they have read precisely zero of my output. It is simply something to say, to fling in the face of the bad man. “You’re untalented anyway!” Um, okay. Thank you.
It’s a transparent tactic when used on someone marginal, like me.
It becomes more and more ludicrous, though, the more profoundly celebrated the artist.
Say this about President Obama: criticized and even libeled by the likes of James Woods and Stephen Baldwin, not to mention Ted Nugent, he said precisely nothing. He never saw the need to tweet nonsense about James Woods’s significant talent level, or Ted Nugent’s crappier achievements. It would never have occurred to him that this would be a thing to do. He had class. He was above that shit.
Whereas, I promise you, if William Shakespeare came back from the dead tomorrow and composed a brilliant couplet about Trump — just long enough for a tweet, come to think of it — Trump would waste no time telling us all that Shakespeare was never any good, that people don’t go to Shakespeare plays anymore, and that “everybody knows” the man was never more than an untalented hack.
He can’t help himself.
Today’s less than satisfying B movie recorded off cable: THE HYPNOTIC EYE, with Jacques Bergerac (1960). The cops are baffled by a series of tragic events in which various beautiful women disfigure themselves by doing things like sticking their faces in spinning fans, or washing their faces with sulfuric acid, or trying to take off their makeup with the stove.
Meanwhile, there happens to be a popular stage hypnotist in town. Gee, can this have something to do with all these previously sane women doing horrible things to themselves?
The detective investigating the case is rather slow to pick up on anything, including when his much smarter girlfriend who says that this hypnotist really needs to be investigate announces her intent to go in and question him. Sure, the cop agrees to wait outside in the car — and a heroic act this is, letting his civilian girlfriend go and question a guy she believes capable of sustained mind control — but then when she comes out on the hypnotist’s arm, glowing like a woman in love, he doesn’t make the simple bloody leap that maybe she’s right and in trouble, he just glowers and figures that she’s actually fallen for the hypnotist, not even caring that her boyfriend is parked right there and watching. Honestly, that’s what a dullard he is. He really does need his confidante, a doctor, to hand-walk him through all the connections, even in these circumstances that would be absolutely obvious to any eight year old who has ever read a comic book.
And his slowness persists throughout the whole story. He just never gets it, ever. Not without being walked through it, ever. Literally: he sees his girl making out with this guy, afterward goes to his girlfriend’s department to demand to know what’s going on, and finds her dull-eyed, robotic, and introducing a female total stranger as her college roommate when he knows she never went to college, and honestly, somebody ELSE has to point out to him, afterward, that, duh, maybe she’s not in control of herself. He can’t draw a line between A and B, this guy. He can figure out nothing. I wonder how he decided to become a detective when he grew up.
Among the events during our bland hero’s clueless and shitty investigation is a visit to a beatnik coffee house, which is downright friggin’ hilarious, especially when one guy gets up to read a poem which manages the surprising and rather significant trick of being worse than any other poem ever read in a beatnik coffee house.
The hypnotist gets to ply his act at length, a couple of times, because the movie is so short on incident that it needs the padding. At the very end we see ten minutes or so of him making a large audience touch their fingertips together, or struggle with the weight of a balloon, before our hero shows up to rescue his girl. Honestly, at the very point in the story where the tension level should be rising, we see the guy’s act, at length. Somebody honestly couldn’t think of any more suspenseful developments to dramatize.
It’s actually the hypnotist’s beautiful female assistant who’s driving the mayhem, because she hates pretty women. She does. The film does eventually see to it that this gets paid off, in a moment that is simultaneously terrific and awful.
After the final confrontation, It all wraps up with the doctor coming out on stage at the performance venue and addressing us the audience, directly, about being very very careful with exposures to hypnotism. So this is a safety video.
This is not a good movie, obviously, but neither does it manage the attribute of being an entertainingly bad one; it’s just flat and uninspired, its sole strength — significant and worth mentioning –is a day’s investigation in which the detective visits some of the past victims, and we see what’s become of them. One poor lady is now a shut-in, living behind curtains in a dark house after her husband took the kids. That’s chilling, even if the gruesome makeup is really fake-looking. So it kinda works for the ten minutes or so we see this kind of thing happening. There are similar short patches of effectiveness, here and there. But basically what this movie needed was to either wind up in the hands of a superior horror filmmaker, or a comically bad one. In short, it would have been great in the hands of David Cronenberg or Brian De Palma on one side, or Ed Wood or Tommy Wiseau on the other, but the guy they got here is smack in the middle of the spectrum and, honestly, what the hell good is that?