My Comments on DON'T LOOK UP

  We watched Don't Look Up, the Netflix original with a ton of excellent acting (DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep. Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Ron Perlman, Mark Ryland as a tech king--slightly autistic, totally megalomaniacal–all excellent and tiny parts for  our Shakespeare  Co. friends Annette Miller and Allyn Burrows, and apparently Tamara Hickey was in there somewhere too maybe on the cutting room floor).  Anyhow, the acting was excellent, the so-called production values fine, and the wit and sarcasm and jokes all really really funny.  And then, with Hollywood aarrogance and abandon, they just blew up the world.  There was an afterward with the wealthy survivors arriving on a perfect planet 22,000 years later, and a funny ending for the totally obnoxious president, Streep.  Apparently a nice bit after the credits too, said Andy, but I didn't wait around.

Anyway, the point is, I appreciated and enjoyed and giggled as I watched, but it left me with a bad taste.  When I first saw Dr. Strangelove all those years ago I was terrified, and this one was more obviously hokey-jokey (or I'm just more mature) but I am still critical of Hollywood's arrogance in just ending the world when they don't have any better ideas. I get it, point well taken:  Look, you jerks, it's real, we truly can see disaster coming at us and we're doing nothing. But it's going to come much slower, and they totally ignore, of course, Hollywood style, the people who are painstakingly, step by step, working on change.  I think the people who make it in Hollywood no longer or never even saw it: the people in organizations, medium level government jobs, in hospitals, labs, organizing vigils and demonstrations, installing solar panels, switching to more sustainable farming practices– so many of us out here doing more than going on media tours.  

Maybe that's what I didn't like most: that the only way to fight the Powers That Be, says  Hollywood, is to lean out a window and shout I'm mad and I'm not going to take it anymore, or, as in this one, just shout on a live t.v. show or go viral on social media, etc. Etc.  We're all going to die.  And then we all die.

There's actually so much more going on in the world.  I think Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower etc. gets it much better.  Or Cormac McCarthy's The Road.   If the world ends with a bang, it's over.  Far more likely will be the little struggles, as in Ukraine today, day by day, small decisions.

So, just to repeat, it was well done, it was funny, I'm glad the folks from Shakespeare & Company are getting some outside work.  Performances were hilarious.  Meryl Streep and her movie son Jonah Hill as a Trumpish family were really fun to watch.  But the message I don't like  is not so much It's hopeless, as the only people with any juice are the ones with media wattage– like us clear-headed movie makers.