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   Abolisyonista (abolisyonista@ni.hil.ist)'s status on Sunday, 06-Oct-2024 17:27:31 JST Abolisyonista

   Check it out! My review for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis (2024) is out on FREEDOM NEWS.

   https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/10/06/searching-for-utopia-in-megalopolis/

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     Abolisyonista (abolisyonista@ni.hil.ist)'s status on Sunday, 06-Oct-2024 17:38:33 JST Abolisyonista

     in reply to

     This is my first movie review. I guess anybody can do literary criticism now.

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     燇空 jyun kong (flowrot@ni.hil.ist)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 07:59:17 JST 燇空 jyun kong

     in reply to

     @abolisyonista Something I've learned while academically and independently studying film and screenwriting is that movies, especially Hollywood movies, are a commodity and can't have their production separated from the capitalism that makes them (as well as the imperialism in the case of Hollywood—a student filmmaker once mentioned in a class on film criticism that Hollywood and the U.S. military are close bedfellows). Funding sources aside there is even a narrative formula that all Hollywood movies have to follow that structurally forces your story to follow a standard Western progression—you must have a main character, your character must be an individual, and the story must end with them transforming into the opposite of their original selves to fulfill their goal or fail to achieve their goal and transform their desires into the goal's opposite. There is very little room for communist maneuvers if you wish to stay in the industry.

     My suspicion is that scripts with any actual revolutionary politics would never be produced at least in mainstream cinema because movies only get produced of they're profitable. As 東默農 cynically writes in 週末快炒店，"the purpose of screenwriting is not to satisfy other people's dreams, and not your own"—namely the dreams of your funders. One of my film criticism professors lauded indie films for being the primary bastion of resistance to this, but even that I am skeptical of, because people who have the capital to make cinema independently may also be bourgeoisie. And you and I both are also equally critical of communist films made under so-called communist states. So much to lament!