Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Wyatt Earp in Tibet in 2012
2012 – 2009
Some films are patchworks. This
is one. And it starts with the Mayan apocalypse prevision in 2012 of course
The apocalypse is coming. We know
that. But we have to make it realistic and use the good old Christian myths
again without saying so, at least not too obviously. So there is an explosion
at the surface of the sun bigger than what has ever been witnessed before. That
has the effect of making the core of the earth, or at least a greater
proportion of the inner mass go up in temperature at a great speed, making this
mass more fluid, hence liberating the tectonic plates and the continents.
That means earthquakes, tsunamis
and so on. Our news are full of such events. Just make them bigger, more
gigantic. Waves that are nearly 2,000 meters high and you have it.
Add to that Tibet and the
Chinese. Noah can be repeated again: a remake of the arch and there we are. There
will be three arks at the end, after the catastrophe, because we need a trinity
somewhere. Without the Chinese nothing could have been done, and what’s more
they provided the work force, probably cheap, and the security forces to build
the arks first and then to make sure only the people who have the proper passes
can go on them. The world without the Chinese could not go through the
apocalypse without any comfort.
The US president is black of course
because in 2009 it was obvious he was.
A little bit of Buddhism does not
harm but at the same time the only surviving Buddhist monk actually cheated the
system with his brother, a lay person, to save their own parents, and end up
saving a few more as stowaways.
Add to that a family situation
and you have it all: parents divorced, the ex-wife has a new boy friend. The
children of the broken marriage, a boy and a girl, are the perfect American
reconstructed or recomposed family.
The catastrophe itself is nothing
but special effects. They are funny, maybe impressive but certainly not
frightening. So banal after all. We can imagine catastrophes of this type every
day and some happen every other week.
The funny part is the end. The
arks find out that only Africa has survived, with a pun on the Cape of Good Hope . Humanity started in Africa and it will
start again in Africa . Marvelous. But rather simple
minded.
Now and then some ethical
questions are brought up, but they are so easy and the answer is so banal. In
such a catastrophe those ethical questions would certainly not be the main
questions. The main question would be to keep people from panicking or just
plain hurting if not killing one another. It is nice to think that in such an
extreme situation people would think of saving their neighbors. We can always
dream.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
KEVIN COSTNER – WYATT EARP – 1994
A true story mind you. So it has
to be good. It is well filmed, well presented, suspenseful enough. But the
general frame of the western and life on the frontier is not disrupted in any
way by any unforeseeable element. A few original points yet.
To become the sheriff of a city like
Tombstone , or
any other of the type, is banal for a horse thief who is running away from
justice and the recollection of his first wife who died of diphtheria when
pregnant. One deserves a second chance.
To have two brothers as his
deputies is a lot more original.
To get into a rivalry with a gang
of bad boys is also banal. But to get through without one wound of any sort
while one of his brothers is killed and the other one nearly loses his right
arm and will be handicapped if not crippled all his life, is rather more
interesting.
Then to swear vengeance and to
just go away and make sure the gang is destroyed one at a time after the first
confrontation that killed a few is banal, but to be married happily on the west
coast and to be seen last going to Alaska to take part in a gold rush while the
gang members are getting killed is probably less common place.
What’s left at the end? The
vision of an original character, of a man of honor in a situation where honor
is rather cheap, of a judge who is honest and of a county sheriff or marshal
who is crooked, of a second “wife” who is more a fair arrangement to be able to
go incognito in the Far West, for both the man and the woman, and finally of the
third and last wife who is brought into this western situation as a potential shady
lady by a dishonorable male character.
What’s the most important element
is the fact that the three brothers are like one and for them family, and in
fact blood is everything that counts, and we could add friendship between a
couple of men that makes them absolutely loyal to each other. That’s probably what
Walt Whitman called the “manly love of comrades.”
Entertaining though slightly long,
but a decent intensity all along.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:32 PM 
