I might be booming out over here, but the last movie I can recall with interesting music was The Force Awakens, and that was just Rey's little ditty because John Williams was horny for her. And that melody, lasting just a few seconds, wouldn't stand up at all to any of the more famous music John Williams has made. (I'm remembering now: Sorry to Bother You (2018) has a great soundtrack, it's no surprise the director is a musician and a Marxist, even though he said recently that Israel created Hamas.)

The slop was always there, but the slopification of everything is in full swing. There is so much content out there, and nearly all of it is hardly better than rushing static. But we need more slop. It's cheaper to just pump out a shitload of nothing than to take a risk with something that might actually be memorable.

Also been thinking that we'll soon be entering the age of art that clearly states that it's AI-free, no AI was involved in its production, similar to organic food labels. The choice is going to be AI-free slop or AI-ridden (written) slop, just as we have the choice to buy cheaper food that is basically packed with cancer. A day or two ago youtube's algorithm fed me a complete film version of Heir to the Empire, with amateur voice actors, animated using what seemed to be a game engine, and the title stated that AI was not involved in its production. And although it obviously wasn't great—I skipped around here and there and just watched a few minutes—I respected the hustle and definitely think that it wasn't a 0/10. Also Thrawn uses space phrenology to win battles.

Anyway, I'm an amateur musician. It's not difficult to belt out a catchy tune on a guitar, as long as you practice and put some emotion into it. I love movies, used to make them and act in them, and always loved setting music to whatever we had managed to put together. When I listen to music now, a lot of the time I'm thinking about how great it would go with stories I've written. I have an unpublished, 99%-finished novel based on the first Starcraft game (yes, very nerdy, with a Marxist vibe and everything changed except the core vibe), and I wrote the Protoss section while listening to a couple of Dimi Mint Abba albums, over and over again. God damn, do I wish I could make a blockbuster science fiction movie with some of that music!

Lawrence of Arabia is colonial apologia packed with racism and lies, but the cinematography and music alone—what do we have that compares to that? (Admittedly, it might just be a movie that has never been equaled.) I swear it also has to do with the move to digital (Walter Benjamin). Watching Uncut Gems is shocking for all kinds of reasons, but it still looks awesome now because they used actual film to film it. Independence Day (reactionary guilty pleasure) has, honestly, incredible special effects and a not entirely worthless soundtrack. I randomly watched the trailer for Armageddon, an awful movie, and I was still impressed with the effects, the juiciness of explosions that involve actual models. Some of this is toxic millennial nostalgia, but not all of it.

In some ways Wagner (yes, I know) was the inventor of cinema, even though he never used cameras. His idea of gesamtkunstwerk, total art, applies even more to cinema than to his operas. So many different art forms come together in cinema: writing, acting, makeup, painting, architecture, weaving, photography, music. Is there any art form not involved in cinema? And so much of it is just outsourced to computers now. The thrill is gone, baby. Big movies usually have good actors now, but the writing is almost always so amazingly substandard—it's just filler—and the effects have gone down the drain even though they're more expensive than ever, sets are no longer built, and now even music is just a variation on a variation on a variation of a theme, cut to previous blockbusters. Same as it ever was but also just notably worse. Like...what films are you excited to see, coming this year? What upcoming shows actually look interesting?

I know this also has to do with Zionism in Hollywood, too. To be a zionist is to be totally out of touch with reality, and if you're working in film you're saying "fuck the story" and replacing it with ever more spectacular fireworks. It makes me think of William Shatner coming out of that Blue Origin rocket and complaining about how humanity is ruining the Earth, with Jeff Bezos standing right beside him and basically spraying him with champagne to shut him up. Capitalist art is just fucking exhausted, it's sprinting faster and faster on the treadmill that it built, and yet there are so many great stories that haven't been told, so many great artists out there just waiting for a chance to make something truly great, to say something unforgettable that matters.

Currently listening to Hunters of Heaven on the album Harumi, which I discovered thanks to twitter today, and...like...any bad or mediocre film that threw in this song for any scene would suddenly become a lot better.

Old man shakes fist at cloud rant over.