1/23/2024 0 Comments Netflix don t look up phone numberMcKay is so un-shy about expressing his blanket contempt that one starts to wonder who this could possibly be for. It’s all reminiscent of the noxious focus-group coda to McKay’s previous film Vice, and the implied sneer at the Trumpite blurting out “libtard” as well as the millennial who’d rather see the new Fast and Furious movie. Meryl Streep in Don’t Look Up Photograph: Niko Tavernise/AP Most damningly smug of all is McKay’s idea of reg’lar folks, from Dibiasky’s center-right parents (“We’re in favor of the jobs the comet will create,” they inform her before allowing her in the house) to the veteran tapped to pilot the hail-mary mission in space (Ron Perlman as a racist drunkard who addresses “both kinds” of Indians, “the ones with the elephants and the ones with the bow and arrows”). The big bad media proves unhelpful, more interested in salacious clickbait than honest reportage, though the script also relies on the mass communication machine as the one thing capable of turning the tide of public opinion. The easy potshots at celebrity culture and our fixation on it – mostly in the form of a bubbleheaded pop star named Riley Bina, played by good sport Ariana Grande – ring hollow in a production packed to bursting with attention-grabbing A-listers. Except that his script states the obvious as if everyone else is too stupid to realize it and does so from a position of lofty superiority that would drive away any partisans who still need to be won over.įingers point in every direction, only for the blame to boomerang back to the mindset this film embodies. As opposed to the stammering of the panic-attacked Mindy, McKay browbeats at high decibels his technique is much closer to Dibiasky’s on-the-air screaming that we’re all going to die. But the director suffers from a variant of the same problem himself, putting off even the audiences inclined to agree with his stances through an ineffective delivery. McKay evinces a clear understanding that some measure of this apathy comes from Dr Mindy’s dry approach in spite of his message’s gravity, the crucial facts and figures boring chief of staff Jonah Hill into mock-sleep. (Everyone’s blasé about global heating in part because it’s so gradual, because it isn’t a force of instant destruction with a due date in an immediate future we’ll all live to see.) Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence portray astronomers Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, flummoxed to find that no one’s all that alarmed about the “planet-killer” they’ve discovered – not the grinning daytime cable-news dummies played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, not the White House led by Trump-styled president Meryl Streep and not the American people. It’s all about the difficulty of compelling the uninterested to care, in this instance about a gargantuan comet hurtling toward the Earth on a collision course of imminent obliteration – an emphatic if rather ill-suited metaphor. Adam McKay’s new satire Don’t Look Up, a last-ditch effort to get the citizens of Earth to give a damn about the imminent end of days spurred by the climate crisis, appears to be at least somewhat aware of this defect in human nature.
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