Tag: Andrew Garfield

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Here is the thing If rich people put money back into their business and their employees, I can see giving them some kind of tax break. But a lot of their money is spent on bull shit. If they can afford the bull shit, they can also afford the additional taxes. It isn’t taking money away from investing in their business either. It is taking money from them spending it on bullshit. There is this notion out there that we can’t afford to help the poor with government programs that bring more equity to the society. The money is there it is just misallocated.

Here is another glaring example of this misallocation.

Andrew Garfield’s new girlfriend is apparently a witch. She charges $1,000 for a Tarot reading. I would rather it went to a street person buying cheap wine than it went for this bullshit. At least the homeless person would get drunk for a number of days which is certainly a much more tangible result than telling the fortunes of rich people and bilking them out of a few dollars.

Every time someone claims we just don’t have enough money, I hope you keep these waste’s of money in mind.

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I want to recommend a movie called Under the Silver Lake without steering you wrong. First, it isn’t Citizen Kane. There are some real problems with the movie particularly the bone headed treatment of woman — almost all the women are good looking eye candy scantily clad, topless or nude. They are primarily there to please the male gaze. The plot is convoluted, possibly non-existent which is weird because there seems to be a plot that is always moving but not necessarily forward and perhaps not side to side or backwards either. It is way too long. The movie is clearly aimed at young men with thwarted artistic ambitions — a very limited audience indeed. The lead character, played by Andrew Garfield, is kind of creepy even though he is, for lack of a better word, the hero of the movie.

Despite all of this, I did enjoy the movie and am thinking about days after seeing it. So there is something there. I am just not sure how to describe in such a way that anybody would understand. The movie is definitely not for everyone but I, for one, kept thinking this is an interesting enough ride for me to stay on board. There is no need for spoiler alerts because there is too much going on for anyone to connect the dots to a cohesive plot even if you have seen the movie.

It comes as close as I have ever seen of capturing the offbeat weirdness that is LA. A weirdness that is both sinister and oddly cheerful. Everyone is a performance artist and a member of a secret conspiracy whether they want to be or not. David Robert Mitchell, the director, is fan of Alfred Hitchcock and this movie is definitely a homage to him. There are hints of other old movies throughout the film.

The plot sort of is this: the hero is completely distracted from the very real possibility of being evicted from his apartment to investigate instead the disappearance of a woman he met just once. Because no one can explain where she is, he becomes enmeshed in probably unrelated conspiracies from a nut who seems completely rational at times but has an answer for the hero’s every question which makes him sound believable even though you know he is crazy. There are adolescent hooligans keying cars, gurus, nuclear fallout shelters, comic book shops, parties that absolutely anybody can walk into if they have the right cookie, secret codes that lead to maps found on the back of cereal boxes, blind folded journeys through Griffin Park lead by a homeless man wearing a paper crown, and a naked women wearing an owl mask who could be a notorious murderer. Do you get it?

It’s funny, sad and frequently unbelievably artificial while also being genuinely LA.