"That Makes It Official"
The Oscar awards were on the other night and while a long time ago when I was a starry-eyed kid enjoying the movies and actually getting into those awards, now I don't pay any attention to any of it at all. I actually looked and I could only find four decent movies that won the best picture award over the past 20 years or so. The rest were either garbage or, if I didn't see them, they were about a theme that was garbage.
For instance a film I did not see, 12 Years a Slave, may have been a wonderful story about a courageous man seeking his freedom in a world of injustice -- I get all that, that's fine. But the only reason that film got as much acclaim as it did was it was merely another way for the entertainment virtue-signaling hegemony to lambast white people for being so evil, and to augment the continuing modern-day witch hunt of anyone who doesn't buy into the Frankfurt School Critical Theory dogma that is destroying everything. Most of the films have that increasingly twisted politically correct thread that even if spectacularly made make them unwatchable.
A film like No Country for Old Men, which I did see, was also garbage because it was a contemptibly violent mess featuring a psycho who randomly shot dead people getting in the way of his getting his money. That was it. It was extraordinarily well-acted and well-directed and did have some compelling moments, but really, on the whole, it was garbage. And I'm not even complaining about the ending, which many shared they didn't get but I actually liked. I can also be moderately okay with violence and language and those things that merit an "R" rating, but when it is so pointless and turgid as it was here, why watch this?
What about all those other Oscar winners? They're garbage too? How can you say that?
Well, this is all up for discussion, I get that, but frankly the ones I have seen -- or better writhed in pain watching -- are certainly garbage, particularly The Artist, Chicago, Birdman or (Some Other Pretentious Stuff Parenthetically Put In The Title), The Departed, and especially the recent winner Everything Everywhere All At Once. All complete and thorough garbage. I admit some were not horribly garbage, mildly okay, like A Beautiful Mind and Slumdog Millionaire.
And if you think I'm being melodramatically averse just for the sake of it, I could list dozens of films from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s that were excellent, truly Oscar-worthy. (I could add dozens of the nominees as well.) Some of my top picks (in chronological order just looking at the list): The Sound of Music, In the Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy, Patton, both Godfathers, The Sting, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Annie Hall, Ordinary People, Gandhi, Amadeus, Rain Man, Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, and American Beauty.
A few of those films have excessive violence or deal with very adult themes and difficult -- indeed controversial -- circumstances, some earning a well-deserved "R" rating. I get that. But please -- most films in this century too many think are anything are actually, truly, objectively, transcendently garbage.
Those four actually very good films are, by the way -- and just as a start point from the year 2000, so, among all the 21st century films let's just say -- these are the only four films worth anything that rise to the level of Oscar-worthy: Gladiator, Argo, Spotlight, and The King's Speech.
It is The King's Speech that has one of the greatest lines from a phenomenal exchange between King George VI of England, played by Colin Firth, and his speech coach named Lionel, played by Geoffrey Rush. The king must give a speech to stir the people into action at the break of World War II, but he stutters and stammers terribly. He hires this expert speech coach to help him work through it and prepare properly.
In one of their first meetings together the king lights a cigarette. Then:
Lionel: "Please don't do that, it is a filthy habit."
George: "But all my doctors say it is healthy."
Lionel: "They're idiots."
George: "They've all been knighted."
Lionel: "That makes it official."
Truly, truly, truly one of the classically wonderful exchanges in all of cinema history, truly.
One of the reasons this exchange is one of the best is it doesn't pull punches about the stupidity of very smart, celebrated, "qualified" people. It isn't hard to not be stupid, just ask Christ to make you so. He'll do it -- He's promised that if you ask for wisdom He'll give it to you. The word for actually employing the skill of not-being-stupid is discernment.
This is why so many of those recent Oscar winners are such garbage, it is because the people making them are living and working and breathing by the precepts of the World: that leftist postmodernist materialist Epicureanist "Critical Theory" plap part of which insists if you're a certain kind of person you are evil for being an oppressor simply by your association with other people like you and you must be censured or marginalized or something else very bad as your due punishment.
And they make movies from that entrenched perspective.
Back to the exchange from The King's Speech. What if instead of smoking it was some other idiotic thing people do, or ever say or think? Oh how many of those there are (look at all the Oscar best picture winners!)
"I'm going to get this Covid vaxx and keep getting it as long as they tell me to."
"Please don't do that."
"All the doctors and public health people say it's good!'
"They're idiots."
"But they're licensed and authorized in high-level positions."
"That makes it official."
Here's a good one: "I'm going to have my child's 'gender dysphoria' addressed by a doctor who'll surgically switch up his/her genitals."
"Please don't do that."
"The journalists and psychologists and television pundits tell me I should do that."
"They're idiots."
"They are all college-educated and fully certified!"
"That makes it official."
How about this one? "We're going to go long-term assets and short-term liabilities in our portfolio."
"Please don't do that."
"The Fed, the Treasury, the Congress, the big banks, and the government examiners are really okay with it."
"They're idiots"
"But they are highly qualified PhDs and duly elected public servants."
"That makes it official."
Can we think of any others? I can, dozens of them.
I also think of another film, one related to this example of the interminable economic malfeasance featuring one of the most searing images of a character's reaction than there is in any motion picture in cinematic history. Sorry, but this is indeed one of the most striking, not as well known as those classic ones some of the other great films, but still.
After he makes this find he tells the people just above him who can't believe it themselves because, yes, they too consider there is no way a bank with the reputation it has can be caught in a scam like this.
But the numbers don't lie. Or really, better, in the real world Margin Call depicts, the numbers show how much the powerful who worship Mammon have been lying and reveal how painfully they're going to get found out.
What a crack-up when all the major players show up in that 2:00 AM meeting of all the big shots in the firm, at the head of the table the Richard Fuld character played by Jeremy Irons. He flails about trying to sound really smart and eloquent about things but can't spew anything but idiocy. Everyone else is looking gobsmacked because their own livelihoods are on the chopping block for doing things that -- you can see it in their eyes -- they knew were questionable but, yep...
They trusted the authoritative stature of the idiots.
Of course you know what those head honchos do. The only thing they can do.
Make the lie better.
They resolve to try really really really hard to convince those who have their stake in their massive value extraction to keep believing that the great big humongous wickedly fetid rotten gigantic pile of shit they're holding is, well, not that.
See, this isn't just lying, or cheating, or fraud, or theft of stratospheric proportions, or the worst criminal financial hoodwinking imaginable.
This is death.
... And why the film ends with the Kevin Spacey character really really really late at night burying his dog that just died at the side of the house there. The perfectly appropriate way to end a movie like this.
These people are all just that. Very dead, just waiting to be buried. They're wearing $1,000 outfits with the smiliest faces dining at the swankiest places for hours on end -- listening all the while to the World Ops who incessantly tell them they are AYE-OKAY kind of people no matter WHAT --
And they're still more dead than the most worthless rusty doornail at the bottom of the county dump.
I saw a story the other day that relates but a bit more in that desecration of family, marriage, and sexual identity vein. The two do relate quite profoundly, much because these financial institutions are so into the ESG trend -- a dead giveaway to their commitment to the rank dissipation through the smarmiest virtue-signaling.
In Vermont a girls' basketball team refused to play against another girls' basketball team because that team had one player who was a male dressed up as a female claiming he was actually a female and thus qualified to compete in the basketball game that was arranged only for girls.
Not only did the team forfeit the game but it was kicked out of the league.
Sure enough the people running the organization running things put out a statement that blithered the typical ugliness: "We respect trans this and that and we want to affirm the trans this and that and we're the ones who are virtuous in all of this because we are kind and caring and all the rest of it especially to the downtrodden oppressed trans this and that."
Easy to fit into The King's Speech discursive exchange, isn't it?
What this ultimately means is that the culture war will indeed get worse and worse as long as hifalutin people out there continue to lie and too many others continue to buy into the lies about the reality of sexual integrity and value assessments, especially when it so horrifically impacts the characters of not only individuals but whole families and communities.
Those things have already revealed themselves to be on the cutting edge of contemporary human sacrifice practices, with people losing huge amounts of their savings, purchasing power, and wage-earning capacity, as well as young people in particular being ravaged by the sexual confusion virtue-signaling they feel they must enter into only to find the product of that activity is depression, loneliness, drug overdoses, self-harm, and suicides.
And this means that secessionist movements are going to ramp up, and I so get it. I myself can't deny that I want me and my family to be physically a thousand miles away from the abject wickedness of it all. The idea the "red" states will break away from those states that unabashedly perpetuate the worst evil? It is being more widely considered by more people.
Just today I saw the governor of my state, California, promised to send abortion items to those in other states that don't allow abortion. Just the harrowing moral filth of that idea is really hard to comprehend, but there you go. California is a beautiful state that has millions of principled people living in it, but its political insanity comes straight from Hell.
So while moving away to be amongst people who do a bit fewer demonic things with their public policy initiatives is really appealing, I also realize that as a committed follower of Christ I am asked to be right in the middle of it all to minister His mercy and grace and forgiveness and healing and charity and deep abiding joy and riveting peace and true liberation to those who are consumed by the gruesome dissipation.
And that's just it.
It really is just spiritual warfare.
In my webzine work I just add the part that is not addressed as much, and that is the spiritual secession -- that it'd be nice to see worship assemblies ungrafted to the World System that provokes much of this and be real Kingdom bringers seeking that apocalyptic revival. They can do that by forming worship communities that truly use the wealth of their God-given talents to bring great prosperity and with that prosperity administer the only thing necessary to thrive: a debt of love to those desperate to find life and meaning.
I keep praying. Would you join me?
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