Hudsucker Proxy was written, directed and produced by the Coen brothers with Sam Raimi. The dialogue and style of delivery were wonderful and worth the price of entry. The film is set in the late 1950s and stars Tim Robbins as a wide-eyed young go-getter who gets suckered into leading Hudsucker Industries by a conniving Paul Newman who’s deliberately tanking the firm to perform stock manipulation. It was perfect to watch in juxtaposition with Network, which also had absolutely majestic dialogue and long-form soliloquies. Jennifer Jason Leigh is fantastic as Amy Archer and Bruce Campbell was a pleasant surprise in a small role as Smitty the reporter. John Mahoney (Martin Crane on Frasier) was also good as a fast-talking city editor which J.K. Simmons must have seen before inventing his J. Jonah Jameson for the Spiderman movies.
“Only a numbskull thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about.”
The writing in Network is phenomenal—what other film delivers lines like “intractible and adamantine”—and it’s famous for the second “mad-as-hell” speech by Howard Beale (the first one is not the famous one). However, there are other, more interesting soliloquies in the film and if you’re a fan of well-written, philosophically and socially interesting dialogue, this is the movie for you. It’s 35 years old and the problems documented in the film have only intensified. We are treading water and going backwards toward the cataract. As an example, here’s the speech Max Blumenthal gives to Diana Christensen when he finally leaves her[1]:
“It’s too late, Diana. There’s nothing left in you that I can live with. You’re one of Howard’s humanoids. If I stay with you, I’ll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You’re television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain… and love.”
Another unfortunately timeless speech is that delivered by capitalism incarnate, Arthur Jensen, to Howard Beale, which occurs at the end of the film and is much more interesting than any of Howard’s (and also delivered with fire):
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU… WILL… ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”
A 260-minute documentary about New Orleans and the aftermath of the Katrina hurricane, the “lego” levees, the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers, the storm surge, the flooding, the failure of the federal government to help immediately after the flooding, and further failure in the medium- and long-term. Why is Louisiana so poor? Louisiana is poor because they suffer from all the ill effects of having 25% of America’s oil and natural gas come from just off their coasts…but just far enough away that they get nothing for their suffering (it all goes to the federal government, unlike Alaska, Texas and others).
It depicts the scattering of families to all corners of the nation just to get them out of New Orleans, but not delivering them to family members, but pretty much anywhere, to live in hotels, and deriding them as refugees. These poor people lost everything they had—which wasn’t much—only to discover that they had even fewer rights in America than they thought they had. Federal aid to New Orleans residents is considered charity instead of the least we can do.
Whole districts were still not even cleaned up nine months later, with rapacious developers keeping it that way so they can scoop up property deeds from people who can’t live in areas with no electricity, no sewer, no water and no schools, and who got no insurance money on technicalities despite having paid premiums for decades.[3] And these people were still living in tents because the FEMA trailers still hadn’t showed up. It would be interesting to see how things stand now, but gentrification is almost guaranteed.
Most of the film is interviews and musical interludes with a very interesting cast, including but not limited to Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, Garland Robinette, John Barry, Judith Morgan and Michael Eric Dyson. Highly recommended.