Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Lady Ghostbusters. Some comments from you tube:

-I check back here every so often so I can laugh at the amount of dislikes.

-Drinking bleach is funnier than this trailer

-Society isn’t making Gay Man more attractive, just Straight Woman less attractive

-i do not know why this trailer has so many dislikes. im defiantly watching this when it comes out in theaters

-when feminists are trying to take over, we get this movie.

-Who actually believes a bunch of women would come together & start their own company instead leeching off an already male established one because they got quotas to fulfill?

-This movie looks like it should go straight to dvd/blu-ray

* Ghostbusters was bottled lightening, it can’t be repeated. The originals had a chemistry that made the file one of a kind. Not to mention the guy who came up with it Ivan Rietman was talented as heck.

Even as a cartoon series, it was popular – some 600 episodes were made IIRC.

This though has stinker written all over it. They basically had to bully or bribe the originals to endorse this dud. Really a all female team with no chemistry? Excellent way to give the middle-finger to the original fans and keep the younger males away from seeing what they will rightly view as chick flick made for the watchers of The View.

The other problem is Hollywood doesn’t do comedy very well anymore. They’ve become so PC/MC they’ve been reduced to potty style humor as found in Adam Sandler movies or serious unfunny and annoying garbage like the Fokkers. Ben Stiller is not funny and neither are the writers.

Give me the Rockford Files any day.

* Hollywood has turned into a Soviet Propaganda mill. The entire selling point of the original was these guys were losers who wanted to play it safe by staying in college their whole lives and got kicked out for bogus research. The Ghostbusters was their desperate attempt to cash in on their weird esoteric research in college because they didn’t want to get real jobs and be working slubs. They ended up accidental heroes because of Zool and an ancient cult trying to take over the world when at the beginning they were just in it for money.
These Pravda card carrying commies are so heavy into politics and feminist grrrl power, that they missed the entire point of the original film and made this into a girl superhero team. Yeah, no. The idea that people with careers and other options would purposely try to form a superhero team to fight ghosts is something you would expect to hear from people involuntarily confined to an insane asylum. No one in their right minds would leave a career to be a ghostbuster. These idiots are so politically motivated they don’t even see how dumb this plot really is…

* Last night we watched “Love Story” (man were the 70s ever dirty and drab, must be all the leaded gasoline and pollution in the air) and then reading about it on Wikipedia I see that they filmed a sequel, “Oliver’s Story.” Oliver’s female interest is Candace Bergen, playing an heir to the Bonwit Teller fortune. I wondered whatever happened to Bonwit Teller, so I read the Wikipedia entry and low and behold, Donald Trump bought their flagship store on 5th Avenue, tore it down and built Trump Tower in it’s place. When I started reading about “Love story” I did not expect that I’d end up on Donald Trump.

It’s kind of like when you buy a car and then you see that model of car everywhere on the street but had never really noticed it before you bought one for yourself. Trump is Everywhere sung to the tune of Elvis is Everywhere.

* That’s worth watching. On one level, it just cashes in on the original hit. The story is anticlimactic and has nowhere to go. After all, LOVE STORY worked as a romantic tear-jerker. With Jenny gone, where can OLIVER’S STORY go? The plot about Oliver’s ‘good work’ is pretty weak.

Still, it’s watchable enough, but then suddenly, it has the the only moment in either movie that has the ring of truth.
I like LOVE STORY — saw it as kid when impressionable — , but it’s all formula. Even the scenes of raw hurt are exactly what you’d expect and arrive on schedule. Of course the couple must have a fight and reconcile in some special way. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I don’t know what it means but it sounds good.

Everything is contrived — rich wasp boy and poor dago girl — , and even the arty moments are like symbolism 101, like the last walk in the snow together against the backdrop of pure white. It is shameless hokum but works(like the stuff in Dr. Zhivago), and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

LOVE STORY copped some of the New Hollywood style of the late 60s and early 70s. It has an element of grit and realism, but it is really just formula.

But the formula begins to unravel in OLIVER’S STORY because the leftover material is so thin. After all, the only reason we cared in the first place was because Oliver fell in love and then lost the girl. So OS has nowhere to go. But then, this is precisely why OS is more interesting. Since the formula has grown weak, there’s need to flesh out the character, and the result is like a mid-level Woody Allen or Paul Mazursky film. (Or a kinder version of Nichols’ CARNAL KNOWLEDGE.)

But then, bang, Oliver’s outburst at Candace Bergen in the following scene(don’t see it if you don’t want spoilers) really rings true. It feels like genuine pain of life than part of the plan, the formula. For that moment alone, OS is worth seeing. Another good thing about OS is the handling of father-son relationship.

The movie ends on a more hopeful note than the novel though. I prefer the novel’s closing sentiment. “Sometimes I ask myself what would I be if Jenny were alive.And then I answer: I would also be alive.”

Erich Segal was pretty good schlock writer. His novel THE CLASS is a shameless piece of drivel but I ate it up.

>>It’s a romantic tear-jerker. It hits all the right notes, pushes all the right buttons.

You’re right. Ali McGraw was no actress, and the notion of her as a Radcliffe girl studying classical music is hilarious.

But it has all the right ingredients about love, class, father and son, etc.

True, it’s hackwork, but it’s pleasant hackwork, like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, a kind of populist version of both WILD BUNCH and MIDNIGHT COWBOY.
LOVE STORY is a crowd-pleaser. Just listen to the music.

Does it look ‘ugly’? I love the 70s look and missed it in the 80s when everything looked so slick and shiny. The MIAMI VICE look? Never liked it thought I got used to it.

A much better Harvard movie is PAPER CHASE. I can understand how even Harvardites can see that one and feel sort of like ‘home’!
But I doubt if any Harvardite took LOVE STORY seriously. It is a fantasy about rich folks for the hoi polloi. We need some fantasy too.

Another thing… given the total degradation of culture with stuff like GILRS and JESSE AND CELESTE(this trash has to be seen to believed), LOVE STORY now does feel ‘classic’-like.

You gotta admit the ‘I care’ scene is nicely done, and it’s too bad we don’t have scenes like that anymore. We have millennials with their casual attitude sending texts to each other like ‘fuc* me in the butt’.

* Yeah, pretty much everyone who’s reviewed the film has noted it was propaganda. The left went ape-crazy praising the PC-propaganda of Star Wars: The Feminist Awakens. In fact, that was supposed to be a selling point in the reviews: see the latest Star Wars, because it’s all grrrl powered and diverse now!

It made money because of it’s franchise tag and because the studio/director went all out promising the hardcore fanbase that it wouldn’t be the prequels. But there’s only so much yoou can milk a franchise with if the sequel gives you diminishing returns.

The fact that the latest Star Wars made no cultural impact—no quotes being bandied about, no internet memes, no chatter after it was out of theaters—shows that the next sequel will have “disappointing” and “unexpectedly lower” returns than anticipated.

I mean, the most talked about parts of the movie is the references to the old franchise and return of a character from the original trilogy—Han, Leia, and, at the end, the mysterious Luke. That’s a bad thing for Disney; when your movie can only cosplay with the originals, and people are most interested in talking about, not your movie’s new characters or plot, but about old characters you shoehorned into your new movie—well, that means your movie wasn’t that memorable. Which means there isn’t much impetus outside of hardcore fans to go see the next one.

The director also remade the Star Trek films, and suffered the same fate: the first one was a glossy, cosplay remake with literal cultural impact where the most talked about parts were the appearance of a character from the original franchise (Nimoy’s Spock) and the references to the old series. No one remembered the first reboot after it was out of theaters, despite being an ostensible hit. The result? The second Star Trek reboot sequel (Star Trek Into Darkness) “unexpectedly” had “less than predicted” returns. Why? Simple: the movies were no longer Star Trek, but PC-addled action movies with the words Star Trek pasted on them.

* I actually do know one female commercial airline pilot. But she’s a lesbian type who degrades women more than males do. When she’s encountered other female pilots, she invariably tells people how bad they are at flying and how they only got their jobs because of PC. When she gets drunk she actually starts ranting about how women are too stupid to vote (except her). She’s very red pilly and basically will tell you that she’s an outlier in life and knows it. She’s also very pissed off at this Girlbusters movie (she’s a huge Bill Murray fan).

* Jenny does NOT despise Oliver for what he is. She admits part of what attracts her to him is his money and privilege. She is honest in that sense. And that’s what he likes about her. She is forthright. And she holds no grudge against his father and sort of understands the old man who, by the way, isn’t really a bigot(by his standards).

On the drive back, she says, “I love not only you, but also your name and your numeral. After all, it’s part of what you are.”

If anything, Oliver despises himself and for conflicted reasons. Being part of the 60s generation, he feels uneasy about his wasp privilege. He is the creation of Liberal Jewish Erich Segal. He feels his place in Harvard is so unearned. He wants to break free of the world he came from. But he is also worried that he is under-performing and failing to live up the standards of his grandfather and father. So, his reasons are both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. He sees himself as failure by standards of both egalitarianism and meritocracy.
Also, he has problems with his father because the old man’s ways are passive/aggressive. He’s not a meanie like Mr. Potter of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. He’s a kindly person, but there’s no doubt he’s been nudging Oliver to excel since cradle and live up to the family name. If his father was a true meanie, Oliver could just hate him and that’d be that. But his father is difficult to hate. He’s no Darth Vader, though sort of like Vader after the mask comes off and he’s a good guy again.

I think there’s a similar dynamics in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. The son is partly angry with his pa because the old man is too ‘weak’. It’s not so much a rebellion against tyranny as against weakness.
Oliver’s father is no doubt an ever-present figure of authority, but because of ‘gentle’ demeanor, Oliver has a difficult time going against it. And there’s that famous genteel wasp restraint which makes it bad form for family members to lay it all on the table and talk honestly. Oliver’s father isn’t Ralph Kramden or Archie Bunker. In a way, Meathead gets along better with Archie because they lay everything on the table. They despise each other but fully understand one another. And that’s why Jenny gets along with her father much better, though I find it rather unreal that an Italian Catholic girl would be calling her father by his first name.

LOVE STORY belongs to one of the several key films of the late 60s and early 70s about parent-child relationships. The younger generation was beginning to make a difference but Hollywood was still controlled by old folks.
Also, there was no clear break between old and new in movie culture.
In pop music culture, the young rockers didn’t care about most of older music. Sure, they had some respect for old blues men and country singers, and etc. But youth culture of 60s was a rejection of much that had come before.

In contrast, even the young turks of cinema were steeped in reverence for the old masters like Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Griffith, Keaton, Lean, and foreign greats like Renoir, Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, etc. One of the key features of THE SEARCHERS is the parent/child-like relation between Ethan and Marty, and that was one of the key films of the ‘movie brat’ generation. This is why movie culture is richer(with its deep sense of history and foreign cultures) than pop music culture that is generally amnesiac and narrowly Anglo-Afro-centric.
Even in the key rebel film COOL HAND LUKE, the finest moment is when Luke meets his mother and then later sings a song in her honor after she dies. And the most powerful scene in IN COLD BLOOD is when Robert Blake’s character talks about his father. And the sad thing about MIDNIGHT COWBOY is the two grown men are like orphans. They connect mostly deeply when Ratso talks about his pa and then Joe Buck mentions how his grandma died without him knowing; she was like his only family.

Though Harold’s mother is cast as something of a ‘villainess’, I love her. She’s the kookiest thing I ever did see. She is a great mother. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reJAzTE980s

FIVE EASY PIECES is about some drifter-rebel, but the story leads to his meeting with his incapacitated pa. And GODFATHER, the maybe the most important film of 70s, is essentially about father and son. The darkest parent-child film of the 70s is maybe CHINATOWN. And then you got EXORCIST where a Liberal modern woman hires religious folks to save her daughter from possession by porn-devil.
And even in cases where without parent figures, one of the characters comes under pressure to play the parental role. Like Nicholson in CUCKOO’S NEST and LAST DETAIL where he wants to be the life of the party but finds himself in the role of mentor. BAD NEWS BEARS works in similar vein. And Lucas’ STAR WARS saga is held together by father-son thing. Though SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION the movie was overlooked by critics and audience, it is a pretty solid family drama.

I think the parent-child dynamic became less important in yrs to come cuz the boomers were more understanding of their kids. There was less culture clash since both parents and children grew up under permissive culture of TV and youth pop music. Also, so many kids grew up without fathers in single family homes, so the father-son dynamic has become less of a reality.
It’s incredible how Lena Dunham became the way she is with the full blessing of her parents. And when Sulkowicz made that atrocious video, she got full support from her mother.

We need more Don Corleones.

Look how people are dressed in the final scene of GODFATHER II. Men are dressed like men, no one has tattoos or piercings. Connie isn’t dressed like a whore.
Was it really progress for Italian-Americans to end up like the freaks on JERSEY SHORE?

Btw, that scene says so much about America. How Sonny says, “your country aint your blood” and Michael says “I don’t feel that way”.
Even today, maybe more than ever even, we have this competing or simultaneous themes of ethno-America and credo-America. Since credo-America is supposed to trump ethno-America, the theme of ‘justice’ is invoked to rationalize certain ethnic interests. “Since we were wronged as a group in the past, we need to work together as a people in the present and near future.” So, tribalism is supposed to be bad, but paradoxically it is good and necessary to undo the dominant tribalism of the past. But how long can this go on? If tribalism is ONLY justified on grounds of victimization, does this mean that once a group gains power and privilege, it should drop its tribalism? Jews are coming under this pressure with growth of BDS movement, and some Jews, like Philip Weiss and Glenn Greenwald, are beginning to sound like reform-liberal wasps who became critical of their own group.

One of the surprising things in the Trump moment is the support he got from Palin, Giuliani, and Gingrich. Palin was like a Zionist whore, even going so far as to wear a Star of David bling. Gingrich pandered to Jews at a Republican debate in 2012, saying that the first thing he would do as president is recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel.
Giuliani was like a dog of New York Jews. But they are either supporting or strongly defending Trump when he has pissed off so many Neocon Jews. Palin was Kristol’s brainchild: get dumb shikse whore with boobs to run with McCain to win over the sucker vote. So, why is she going with Trump who has pissed off so many Jews?
Did she realize she’s been used as a whore and that no matter how much she groveled at their feet, the Jewish community just mocked her and laughed at her?
Something interesting is happening.

* LS was partly autobio as Segal lost someone he loved when young.