“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” by Wes Ball, 2024
The plot of this film is a picture of the post-revolutionary
triumph of the Apes over Humans, led by a clever Ape named Caesar long ago.
Caesar was the intelligent leader who said ‘Ape
Not Kill Ape’ and 'Apes Together Strong' and wanted peaceful co-existence with Humans but also
resisted their depredations. Now quiet villages
of primitive communism exist where Apes go about their business away from the
exploitation, colonial rule and the cages of Humans, who they now consider
stupid and almost extinct. The Apes seem
to be the proletariat or former colonial subjects, not just animals.
A Human woman shows up dressed in rags, but she is on a
secret mission to steal a computer board from a power system to take back to
her own secret Human fortress on the grass plains. She represents the counter-revolution of the
Humans who still seek to defeat the Apes.
A group of large Apes led by violent Gorillas on horseback
attack the village, capture the Ape residents and force them to move to a fortress
on the coast. It is the site of some
kind of old Human nuclear reactor which the clever Ape King is attempting to
get into and restart. So we understand that there are various strata of Apes,
even in post-revolutionary times. Who
might this Ape be?
The Gorilla leader is an Ape dictator basing himself on
force. Noticeably red flags fly in his
compound. Eventually the peaceful Apes
led by Noa (Noah) use their Eagles to win a battle against the Ape Dictator –
who seems to be a stand-in for a Stalin-like ruler. This is similar to a brutal Ape named Koba who
fought Caesar in an earlier PotA movie, Dawn
of the Planet of the Apes. “Koba”
was Stalin’s nickname. As Noa notices,
this Gorilla dictator is no Caesar, even though he constantly invokes Caesar’s
name to justify his rule. And so the name Caesar could be a
stand-in for Lenin – or borrowed from the ‘angelic’ Caesar Chavez. Commies and Apes together!
Sorry, just a Leftie here, telling you what is under this
movie’s narrative hood.
“Broke”
by Billy Corben, 2012
Based on a Sports Illustrated story about financial problems among professional athletes, this ESPN documentary interviews former NFL, NBA, MLB and other players about what happened to them after leaving the industry. SI reported that 78% of NFL players were broke, divorced or unemployed after 2-3 years and 60% of NBA players were supposedly broke after 5 years. That is the hook, but each interviewee goes into the multiple causes of financial troubles. Young men with too much money who have no financial training and aren’t thinking ahead. Mom gets a house; relatives get cars; friends and families get cash. The players themselves buy a too-big house, a too-expensive car and everything else you can imagine – champagne, diamonds, furs, suits, yachts.
Idiotic decisions are made about investments
in bogus businesses like car washes.
Agents steal from them and lawyers need to be paid. Gambling addictions,
high taxes and moving expenses are unexpected.
They are mobbed by gold diggers and end up paying child support for lots
of children, as happened to Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, who both declared
bankruptcy. The ‘ballers’ careers last
on average 3-5 years, yet mortgages, debts and payments continue when they have
no income – even during the off-season or during strikes when paychecks stop. Medical costs from sports injuries continue too
even after ‘retirement.’
Some of the interviewees are known, some will only be familiar to those who know each sport well. Bernie Kosar, Marvin Miller and Andre Rison were those I knew but there are others. They come clean and honest on what happened – and some make it through, some plan, some anticipate. It’s a reflection of the Dough-Ray-Me economy where everyone thinks getting rich is the point, both as individuals and as corporations. The sums to play are ridiculously and criminally high, in the multiple millions of dollars. Are the statistics absolutely dead-on? They have been disputed but all of this makes perfect sense outside the exact numbers, which is why the sports leagues are trying to ‘train’ athletes about money. Whether that is actually working is another issue. After all it is a capitalist industry, not a charity or a selfless sport. Money is the point of professional sports now.
“Deadwind (S.1&2)” directed by Rike Jokela, 2018-‘19
This has all the markers of a typical detective series,
except with a Finn Nordic noir and snow twist.
Cold seems to be the sign of death so it’s appropriate, as Helsinki, Finland
and Tallinn, Estonia are the locations . We have the semi-dysfunctional female
lead detective, Sofia Karppi; the rebellious daughter, the overly-complex
plots, the dead women in Season One; gruesome
murders; drugs and more drugs; police partners that start abrasively, then get
together; police supervisors that block investigations and go for the easy conviction, lying witnesses, many red herrings and detectives going it alone in deadly situations. There are
the requisite chases through abandoned warehouses, buildings, factories and
prisons, as these locations, like the snow, evidently signal crime. SWAT squads, as in U.S. TV, show up on a
regular basis as backup.
There is always a tie to supposed political corruption and
careerism at Helsinki City Hall or in the Finnish government. In Season One it is a wind-turbine real
estate project in Helsinki; in Season 2
the ‘Pro-Change Coalition’ controls the mayoralty and is pushing for a
Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel under the Gulf of Finland. In reality the Green League mayor runs
Helsinki now, and evidently the screen-writers can’t make much of that. It seems cynicism is their main idea
regarding everything, though they show the Right to be more sinister and
manipulative. There are murderous cops,
politicians and corporate players.
Karppi is the too-cute lead detective, brilliant in her
hunches and attention to detail, but obnoxious and dead-faced to everyone she
works with and thuggish to ‘perps.’ She’s too pretty to be wrong and she knows it! At the same time she’s a negligent mother of
a 7 year old and a teenager. She doesn’t
seem to eat or sleep, works nights like a vampire, is lucky to have some poor
woman come in to take care of her youngster and drives her daughter away by
making her the constant babysitter. The
daughter resorts to lumpenism and the son becomes a bully. They frequently miss
school. She’s a careerist after all and
too pretty and pained to be bothered after her husband dies. After awhile, she becomes somewhat repulsive. This is part of the ‘complex character’ screen-writer
requirements of glorifying cops. Her
partner Nurmi also has trouble with relationships and kids but he’s not a
single parent - yet.
You’d think Finland was a hot-bed of crime from this
series, but its focus on the lumpen strata of society, like every cop show,
distorts reality. Perhaps this series is to provide a frisson of danger to the Finish middle class and beyond. Are we tired of
addicts and criminals yet – even in Finland? Why, in
fact, does so much TV focus on crime?
It’s actually a deeply conservative trend, making fear, anger and
disgust primary emotions. In reality
some neighborhoods are deluged with it, but that is not the focus here. It’s one of the hobby-horses of the ‘white’ political
Right. It’s common in the cultural
output of country after country so it’s no accident or peculiarity but part of
the cultural superstructure of capitalist society. Thanks for nothing Agatha Christie.
Prior reviews on these subjects, use blog search box, upper
left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Dawn
of the Planet of the Apes,” “War for the Planet of the Apes,” “Playing as if
the World Mattered” and
“Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety” (both by Kuhn); “Hey, How ‘Bout That
NFL?” “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,” “Selection Day” (Adiga); “And Speaking
of the Olympics;” “Trapped,” “Bordertown,” “The Cliff,” “Redbreast” (Nesbo);
“Gorky Park” (MC Smith) or
‘detective.’
The Cultural Marxist / May 22, 2024
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