The static cleared and I had just enough time to call this play before the clock expires:
Getting in Depp
It used to be known as the long bomb.
"‘Black Mass’ the latest example of our fascination with villains; Evil draws us in, as ‘Black Mass’ replays a Hollywood tradition" by Ty Burr Globe Staff September 13, 2015
“Black Mass” opens on Friday, and with the movie’s release, the pop-culture mythification of James “Whitey” Bulger is complete.
Look who is complaint about pop-culture myths (after they and others had so much to do with creating so many!).
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That’s what we do as a culture.
I would like to disassociate myself from the collective "we" at this point, thank you!
That’s how we explain a sociopathic little thug.
Look, W Bush did the best he could under trying circumstances.
(Just barking signals)
We build him up until he’s legendary, and then we get a movie star to play him.
Brolin.
We send our heroes to Disneyland, but the villains go to the big screen and to our memory banks, where they turn slowly into cartoon boogeymen and lose the dimensions of human evil. The specific awfulness of what they’ve done gets smoothed away, along with the names of their victims.
Heck, they are even enjoying a surge in nostalgic popularity (ugh)!!
I’ve seen “Black Mass,” but this isn’t a review of the film; that will be coming soon enough. Rather, it’s a meditation on the ways in which we reward infamy.
Apparently by letting him make six-figure speeches as he travels around. Forget the torture and all the wounded vets, the mass-murder of millions based on his lies, the environmental destruction caused by his wars, etc, etc.
It’s hardly a new thing. Actually, I’d argue that we’re hardwired as a species to tell stories around the campfire — actual or digital — about both heroes and villains.
That's right. Here in AmeriKa, our war criminals are lionized.
The heroes show us what’s possible if we’re strong enough, or smart enough, or lucky enough. The villains push more complicated buttons.
On one level, their stories tell us what we can and can’t get away with if we want to live as part of a functioning society. You can be ambitious, aggressive, even brutal, but these narratives remind us that you have to play within the laws, that greed will always bring you down, and that Thou Shalt Not Kill.
Of course, there are two sets of laws. One for the rabble, the other for the one-ten-thousandth(??) of a percent that control the $y$tem. The failed investigations (cover-ups, really) and prosecutions of elite pedophile rings that going beyond sicko scapegoats is proof enough.
The folklore of our criminals and outlaws is predicated on endings, which involve either jail or — more viscerally satisfying and better for drama — a bloody and fatal comeuppance.
And when we find that doesn't happen?
(Halftime)
The Whitey “story” didn’t wind down violently, but it couldn’t be satisfyingly told until Bulger was dragged in from the cold and put on trial for his crimes.
Speaking of that, he was half-a-mile down the road from the local FBI office. When you logically look at it, they knew where he was all the time. They were keeping an eye on him, and when public relations publicity was needed they "found" him!
During the trial he was never able to introduce the corrupt relationship with the FBI agents. Whether he was an informer or a user is immaterial; it was a collaboration, and higher-ups had to have known).
The parenthesis needed to be closed for there to be a moral, for the values of society to be reestablished. You can’t make a decent movie about the criminal equivalent of Bigfoot.
Why bring him into it???
But we’re also drawn to outlaw sagas because we dream, however subconsciously, about the power that the unrepentant have, to go where they want, grab what they want, kill anyone in the way.
Speak for yourself you sick f***!!
Talk about internalizing the 'values' of your elite payma$ters. 'We' dream of adopting Zionist Israeli 'values' and the 'values' of the Empire of AmeriKa. Wow!
I've been here for nine long years, and that's not what I've dreamed. Those are the nightmares I've screamed out against.
The murder of a fellow criminal is fine in this context, even adds to the myth; innocent passersby, by contrast, detract from it.
I don't have the time to run down all the myths we live under.
(Two minute warning)
That’s one of the many reasons “Black Mass” will go down with a sour taste to many in the Boston area who remember the names of the unlucky.
What, you don't like the grape?
A crime movie lets us fantasize about being the good guys but more often the bad guys.
It's a black and white world, huh, full of good guys and bad guys?
They’re literally our projected monsters, acting out everything we’re too decent or law-abiding or timid to try.
I used to see it that way, and will explain so briefly; however, fiction on a screen and a good story is so much different from the real-life horror that is filling my agenda-pushing, war-promoted paper.
That’s why there are more movies about Al Capone than about Elliot Ness, why people remember John Dillinger more than G-Man Melvin Purvis.
The American frontier is the great gray area where this first played out in our country’s popular imagination. Tales were swapped, newspaper stories were written, and pulp novels churned out in which sociopaths were remade into “legendary” gunslingers, and when the movies were invented, the folk antiheroes took naturally to them, too....
There is a roster of famous Hollywood gangsters that follows.
--more--"
No time outs left so I'll have to hurry up.
The quintessential villain of this generation is probably Darth Vader. He was not a real person; however, he is the pop-culture face of villainy. He was a good little boy, a hero in fact, who was manipulated by evil (the current manifestation is ISIS™) while finding that the "good guys" were a bunch of hypocritical bastards.
Clock just ran out.
NDUs:
Saudi king visits injured pilgrims in Mecca
You know, the King is allegedly sick with dementia and he is 86. He doesn't look it in that photo. All we see is a rather young looking King in a very clean hospital room with an alleged patient. Good thing the ma$$ media or governments would never present fake photos or those from some other time as current or anything like that. Good thing my agenda-pushing, war-promoting, narrative-driving propaganda pre$$ would never do anything like that.
‘Whitey’ Bulger’s ‘dog days’ while on the run
That's not in the (family?) movie.
