Michael Lee Palmer

A joyous celebration of being alive and surviving adversity. Taylor Swift is an indefatigable artist with astonishing imaginative powers. An antidote to the horrors of what is going on in parts of the world.

I just saw "Don't Worry Darling" and was blown away. It is the most disturbing film I've seen since "Joker" but a far more complex movie that's far richer in implication. Only a woman could depict the subtle and not so subtle machinations of patriarchy and Olivia Wilde does a fantastic job. There are obvious parallels to the hermetic universes of high tech corporations that promise everyone a better life if they only submit to the world they have to offer. Florence Pugh's amazing performance deserves an Oscar. IMHO, if the movie was directed by a man there wouldn't be all this "controversy" about what was going on during the production. ---------------------------------------------- Saw "Don't Worry Darling" for the second time last night and appreciate it even more. It's a brilliant idea to have an old Walt Disney cartoon, "The Dance of the Skeletons" showing on the TV the first time we see Alice enter the house to prepare a meal. It's obvious that Olivia Wilde and Katie Silberman were critiquing patriarchy. This is a work about patriarchal domination and its kin, corporate culture, if anything. While exiting the theater a friend of mine and I engaged in conversation with someone who said the character of Frank is like Elon Musk. I wonder if Elon Musks's numerous public appearances, his beaming smile and self- assured bravado, were indeed the role model for the character of Frank. My only quibbles, and they're minor, are when Alice interrogates the guests at the dinner party that ends in disaster, she says (and this is from memory) "... you stooped down to pick up a ticket like she did too?" And there's something about them all originally being from Philadelphia or an East Coast city that wasn't developed. Maybe that was cut from the script as being gratuitous? There may be no logical reason for the lamp posts to explode as Alice stands in the middle of the street in a panic but it works so well, seems so appropriate, that it doesn't matter. The choice of Palm Springs as the location was brilliant. I'm from the "Inland Empire" where the landscape isn't exactly like the Sierras. Palm Springs is a community that does it best to deny that it's in a rock strewn desert. ---Some have commented, maybe Olivia Wilde herself?, that Jack's dance after being promoted to "Head of Security" is supposed to suggest that he's a marionette whose strings are being manipulated by a gleefully smiling Frank. I don't see that but what it seems to me, on a second viewing, is that Jack is doing a minstrel dance for his master: the tap dancing, the arms flailing about with the fingers extended, going back and forth on the spotlit stage in front of Frank.

I think it was one of the most important films of 2019. At times it reminded me of Robert Bresson at his best or Frederick Wiseman. An honest view of what daily life in a corporate office is like is long overdue, especially about how patriarchal power dynamics work within it. I eagerly await the next film from Kitty Green.