Read an article during my "Reservoir Dogs everday" period, and it said this young guy who made Hard Eight was Tarantino and Scorsese rolled into one. That pissed me off initially, so I kinda ignored it when his new movie Boogie Nights came out. Then, one day at my friend's, I caught 10 min of Boogie on the movie channel, during the end of the 70's Party Sequence. Blew me away. I spent the next week watching Boogie over and over. Also rented Hard Eight and loved it. About that time, the dvd came out, and the same friend was the first to have a dvd player. We bought it, and I would go over there and play the commentary while he did other stuff around the house. PTA was saying shit that interested me so much on that dvd, stuff I had thought about, but never heard from filmmakers up until that point. Boogie became my new favorite film, and I watched it and the commentary religiously. Then I moved to Vancouver for film school. This guy from my class and I had to edit this other chick's (who we hated) documentary about DJ's. It was so boring, and we needed to take a break. This guy mentioned that he had got tickets to a preview of a new movie (it was late November, I believe), and it was done by that guy who did Boogie Nights, and since I always talked about it, he wanted to give me a ticket. So we headed out and saw a sneak preview of Magnolia. At each major sequence, we kept turning to each other in awe. Truly the best theatre experience I have ever had. We spent the rest of the night walking around the city, remembering each shot, just gushing over it. I saw Magnolia four more times when it finally got its full release. In my insane need to have Magnolia info in between the preview and the actual release, I went on the internet, and found the C&C site. Yay.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary: the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.
When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.
