Moronic Inferno

With the culture’s fixation on blond stars who got lost in the world of fame, and the oncoming headlights of the Oscar 18 wheeler there’s a Romanesque spiritual decadence and mental lassitude afoot in the land, a feeding frenzy of distraction, high-life antics transformed into local gossip. Every person on the bikes and stairmasters at my gym is reading US Weekly, In Touch or People Magazine as they burn calories and tighten buns. That they use what are essentially really really good looking fitness models as inspiration for their workouts makes some sense; that they look to the opulence and frivolity of their lives for meaning is disaster. It’s the celebrity apocalypse. One almost feels that the moronic inferno is tempting fate; in just five years we’ve regressed to late 90s-grade collective fatuousness, and the nagging fear that haters of Western godlessness may soon fly a plane into a building is back. If such a thing had to be, I’d propose this little adjustment: try a dirgible (unmanned) for a visual flourish, and target the E! Tower on Wilshire in Los Angeles. Alright, I guess you could even evacuate the building. That would slow down the 24 hour celeb news cycle a little, right?

Far from the maddening mainstream, Harmony Korrine’s new movie sounds hella wacky and refreshingly un-In Touch. "Shot in the jungles of Panama, Scotland and Paris, Mr. Lonely is about a Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Diego Luna, who runs into a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton). He winds up in a Scottish-based commune of impersonators, including Marilyn's husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple, [as well as] the Queen of England (Anita Pallenberg), the Pope (James Fox)... and Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange)."