Friday, May 13, 2016

TV Politics vs. Movie Art


"Clooney’s cheap Money Monster and Davies’s rich Sunset Song."

NRO



. . . "Lacking the currency of those Seventies Vietnam/Watergate reflexive dramas, Money Monster partakes of the fashionable thralldom to television as the ultimate communicative medium, but it sentimentalizes the intellectual and spiritual damage TV does to those — including social elites — who bow down to it. Foster directs in that HBO style people mistake for cinema, but her emphasis on close-ups and shrill emotional manipulation (as when show hijacker Jack O’Connell is publicly humiliated and then pitied by big shot Gates and his tough female studio director, played by Julia Roberts) is all for lovers of the boob tube. Foster’s low point comes when, once the crisis is resolved, she does a Family-of-Fed-Up-Man montage of average faces. Thank God for Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, or else this week’s moviegoers might have had no idea what a real movie looks like. 

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