Amsterdam
How ironic, no Dutch is spoken here, only English and French. And a Portuguese song in the background…
The cast in this is vast and bizarre, Taylor Swift being the biggest bombshell. She is quickly thrown under the bus, literally, after the flimsiest excuse for breaking out into song. That happens a lot, but there aren’t any more famous singers. Speaking of singers, Drake (of Kendrick Lamar beef fame) also gave money to fund this.
The entire film has a whiff of magical realism, even though everything is beautiful and real, the actions feel closer to a cartoon. Throwing Taylor Swift under the bus is treated as a funny skit, there’s no drama whatsoever. No drama, no weight, just a funny SNL sketch. It’s like the funny parts of Ocean’s Eleven.
Of course, the greatest irony is Arnon Milchan bribing Netanyahu with millions over years, then turning around and making a film about rich financiers joining forces with dictators, for financial gain. Every accusation is a confession.
Smedley Butler was also semi-white washed.
It’s true he left the Marine Corps to rail against war, calling it a racket, and he did get deputised into a coup against FDR, which he denounced and resulted in him being laughed at. Those fascists got another attempt a few years later with the whole Charles Lindbergh candidacy.
But we are talking about the guy who invaded Haiti, Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, participated in the Boxer rebellion, and was the chief of police in Philadelphia. He was an hardcore American empire hawk, disillusioned with the state of the machine, not some bleeding-heart liberal. He was a vocal temperance campaigner, that throwaway line about not keeping alcohol in the house is the real deal.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.