Two recent acquisitions, both from AA Furniture & Appliance. In the Bedroom (2001), because Sissy Spacek is a great actor, and Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014), a film whose first reviews intrigued me, but I never got around to seeing because some forty-something Creative Writing MFA in a clown suit dismissed the film on Twitter because its lead, Michael Keaton, "seems creepy to me." Not sure how this "seems" stayed with me all these years, but it did, and like syphilis, it can make you crazy.
The picture up top is Emma Stone's best scene, where she lays into Keaton (her story father) for sublimating his failures by taking her to task on her own. The picture at bottom is a video that went viral only an hour after Keaton's character got locked outside of the theatre's rear exit in his underwear while the play he wrote and was starring in was on a scene break.
Now a social media sensation (his daughter set up a Twitter account in his name that already has 80K hits), the play is no longer in financial jeopardy because the critic who vowed to "kill" it is, as the kids say today, irrelevant. "Believe it or not," says the daughter to the father, "this is power." And indeed it is. But what wasn't power by then was a newspaper critic who could kill a play. That reality was long gone. Especially a play starring a Hollywood celebrity.
Ignorance is said to be bliss. But is it a virtue, a quality? Is there such a thing as an "unexpected virtue"? Forrest Gump (1994) suggests as much, and since the release of that film, we've come to expect it. Donald Trump has made a career off the ignorance of others. The less U.S. Americans know about themselves, the more they will covet ignorance.
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