chaos-rampant

Sly presents superbly in old age. Someone who has come to realizations and made peace, but also enjoyed the ride, accepted inevitals, grounded about what it all meant. You can hardly ask for more at nearly age 80 and from formerly a mega-star on the level of Tom Cruise. He looks fulfilled, and what better narrator for us than someone fulfilled?

The most interesting point for me was a young inexperienced Stallone in New York, hungry to make it and won't give up. Anonymous and struggling actor while guys like DeNiro and Pacino were just breaking out in the same city. His Italian American childhood hardship in Hell's Kitchen, which is briefly touched on.

And how all that seeps into and informs Rocky, not just his breakout role but also his one real lasting legacy. We have Tarantino in the film helpfully pointing out parallels; Rocky as young and hungry Stallone trying to make it, making it but uncomfortable with celebrity and so on.

There's self-conscious return to what became an image he embodied in later Rocky installlments and the Expendables, dealing with age and loss, but those formative years gearng up for that first Rocky were the most interesting window.

This is without real value in my opinion. I'll explain why.

Fine, let's have a portrait of the Firsts Lady during one of the most important times in US history. In her own voice too, comprised from voice recordings she made from '63 onwards. By all means let's have it.

Up on screen we get Lady Bird as gently and quietly steadying presence, witness and support. There through all the legislative fights, achievements and Vietnam mishandling. The backdrop is familiar, too much so from inumerable films and TV.

The tone is more as if penning a letter of pleasantries rather than an intimate diary. There are no strong opinions on anything, except of course unfailing support for LBJ, ever the courteous Southern woman. No real soul baring. But that is how she chooses to present herself in recordings which at the very worst she knew would be made public one day.

The real Lady Bird was indeed a courteous Washington host, and unfailingly steadfast in her support of LBJ.

So much so, she would famously turn a blind eye to his constant insults, abrasive temper and being yelled and barked orders in their own home in front of stunned guests. To LBJ's numerous infidelities, even in front of her own presence. So devoted to LBJ she would neglect their two young daughters, always putting their needs last to whatever LBJ's day required.

Robert Caro is my source for all this, probably the biggest LBJ researcher who will ever live. All this was well known in Washington circles, and she was viewed as "that poor woman".

Would Lady Bird confide her feelings about LBJ's womanizing on tape? Of course not. Jackie had to put up with much the same before her, minus the Texas hillbilly manners.

But now another picture emerges. Ambiguously human, fragile, maybe even more heroic. Being able to somehow interpolate the two Ladies, now that would have been something to see. This by itself is vacuous, airbrushed, saying nothing.

I didn't like this when it came out. It seems even smaller now. These lives were too uninteresting, ultimately unimportant then. They feel even more so after everything that's intervened. Not the social media phenomenon. These lives.

This was premature then when Facebook was viewed as benign, simply on its way to a vast fortune. But even now it would be uncinematic to show the damages they have caused, the erosion of democracy and truth, the hoovering of our data (that we daily provide them). It would be an illustrated article, so much better to read a few articles.

Of all the tech barons, Zuckerberg may be the most uninteresting. But who cares if what started it all was a geeky guy who wanted control of a Harvard world where he had no clout? It was perhaps something to see ruthless back-stabbing then, because we thought them as fresh and benign, different from the old. That they would somehow improve mankind.

The damages are structural, turbulent; they show up years later when we go to vote, or gather at family tables. We have been made complicit by now, our worst impulses amplified. None of that is here of course. It's not here that over this digital town hall, we have little to no oversight. We're paying to be there. The film prefigures nothing. It's even smaller, wholly irrelevant.

If even partly it admires a geeky jerk who maybe is a kind of visionary too so has earned the right, it dumbs us down. Just as much as it dumbs us down to look up to their billionaire status.

Long before Zuck, there were people like Rockefeller. When the film came out we were only just about realizing the enormity of the '08 crash. If there's one line that goes through them all, it's not some 'entrepreneurial' vision, but that they swindled government and the public.