The Hippopotamus

The Hippopotamusⁱ is a steaming pile of social media crap, utterly exemplary of the intellectual, social, economic and generally speaking universal bankruptcy of socialism. Failure of the most abject kind available is just a necessary correlate of the specific idiocy in both theory and practice, what.

Stephen Fry (of "I make it a point to grossly misunderstand basic anything" Fry & Laurie fameⁱⁱ) being involved in the atrocity is neither surprising nor in any sense avoidable -- there's only so many "talented" nags in the new soviets' sad old stable. If it's an Aamir Khan sorta movie it'll get the one available Aamir Khan. What else ?

Anyway, the story we are proposed is very much same old :

It would be a gross over-simplification to say that Eastwood saves the movie. He is the movie. Walt isn't played by Clint Eastwood, Walt is Clint Eastwood. The reason the movie is watchable-- the reason such an otherwise trite and predictable movie doesn't go straight to video but instead gets a review in The New Yorker is because people want to see this transformation, this "growing" happen to Eastwood. Or, more specifically, to the characters that Eastwood represents. In short, the only reason this movie got a write up in The New Yorker is because it shows how Dirty Harry learned the error of his ways:

"Walt's final acts in the neighborhood struggles come as a shock, but, in retrospect, they make perfect sense as Eastwood's personal renunciation of vengeance and also as a kind of down payment on an altered American future."

Slow down, Criss Angel, I know a mindfreak when I see one. Clint Eastwood doesn't have anything to do with this. It's not Clinton Eastwood Jr.'s personal renunciation anyone cares about, because nobody actually knows anything about Clinton Eastwood Jr. or his personal beliefs. It is all the characters that he played-- their renunciation people care about. People aren't seeing Eastwood play Walt; they are seeing The Man With No Name now aged 70 and living alone, still clinging to his horse, I mean gun, I mean car. That's the guy they want to see "grow," that's the guy they want to see admit he was wrong. Time Magazine's review doesn't have the header, "Clinton Eastwood Jr. Changes His Mind About The Use Of Weapons To Solve Problems." It says Cleansing Dirty Harry.

Except the despicable niggers that won't fucking yieldⁱⁱⁱ have learned ~nothing out of their failure to repurpose the middle class icons, so they've moved on to attempting ~same slightly higher up the pyramid.

The story, by and large, is of "that guy Hopkins cleansed in Shadowlands^iv" except a little further down the line^v. He's established through a very MP^vi-esque humiliation of the inept youth, and then encounters a whole menagerie of female society, complete with wunderkinds and magic healers. The whole thing is basically Disgrace done ass-backwards by idiot monkeys.

What a ways pop culture has fallen since Equus! Not even half a century, but apparently plenty enough for the horse to get fat.

1. 2017, by a nameless crew of idle fuckwits. [↩]
2. No, I know "you liked that show". That'd be strictly, but I mean strictly a byproduct of your being an idle idiot of no merit, capacity of consequence whatsoever.

   There's no excuse available for liking some kinds of things ; and the flippancy borne of "I expect I'm going to see a social security check in the mail in some form of another with tidal regularity and irrespective of any consideration whatever" resulting in "humor" on the level of "milk comes from the supermarket and what is a cow has been done to death by three year olds since time immemorial (~1982), but I'm a (deeply neotenic) supposed adult saying it total deadpan as if it's what I believe (not that I do, but in truth I don't believe anything for lack of having ever been arsed to consider anything for more than a half minute) is very totallies funny so please laugh" is very striclty speaking cancer.

   I get it, he uses words you didn't hear before in a non-threatening way and he's a faggot so therefore you feel like he should be some kind of representative of high culture. He isn't. He's some kind of representative of pop culture. The relationship between Fry and the sort of characters he likes to strawman is exactly of the same nature and exactly of the same substance as the relationship between male models and the "dentists" they become on TV advertising sets for half a minute at a time through the magic of doning the long white apron TV has decided embodies doctoritude. By the way, you also "liked" Scrubs or ER or w/e it was called because it made "medicine" relate to you, rite ? Fucktard.

   That you can't distinguish a penguin from your next door neighbour in a polyester suit does not speak of Antarctica, or your qualifications as a Polar explorer. I know you can't tell the difference, and I'm aware you're surrounded by a hallucinated world of purely imaginary "choices" that you supposedly have. Try and understand that these come at a cost to you, and to your sadly yet pointlessly overburneded environment, while providing absolutely no benefit whatsoever. [↩]

3. Guess why rodents don't stop rodenting about no matter what you do ? Yeah, that's right -- if they stopped they wouldn't be rodents anymore, would they. Socialists are rodents. [↩]
4. You recall, C. S. Lewis finds "the meaning of life" in the shape of a superficial but obnoxious "American" ESLtard. [↩]
5. This is how pop-digestion works, after all : as "the conversation" progresses, lifeforms finding themselves lower and lower on the hack ladder get to take a potshot. "The Intellectual" (as in the modernized Tarot card) having been "recuperated" by the high-rent machinery in the 90s is all ready for re-recuperation by the midrange set in the 2010s (and Rhonda Young is frothing and biting at the bit in the waiting lane, who knows, maybe the empire of evil still draws enough breath by 2030 to produce a "dat modafuckar's references burned off his very leg, he's now making hobbit-based comparisons!" living testament to empowerment & liberation). [↩]
6. As it happens I also stood up and boo'd a thoroughly shitty production, over at the Boston Symphony Hall. They didn't film that, however, nor added it to your bowl of morning sugarcereal, possibly for the same exact reason they don't get all that excited when faggots get stoned to death. It's not quite as useful for their purpose as the pointless excruciation of some zek that dared almost-maybe whisper under his breath something inaudible.

   It's all a show, right ? [↩]