A colleague of mine just sent me a link to your posting above. I feel honored to be critiqued in such a manner — especially given how long ago we made THE CELL. I’m going to print a copy and hang it on my wall. LOL! Maybe even send it to my mom!

I’m glad the film still holds so much passion for you. ;-)

One the issues seem to be press coverage and the disgusting hype machine – everybody is seeing it, everybody is loving, if you don’t you are worse than missing out, you are unequal. I think John Berger hit the nail on the head in 1972′s Ways of Seeing.

This is the end of the Publicity chapter:

Publicity, situated in a future continually deferred, excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it. All that happens, happens outside it. The fact that publicity is eventless would be immediately obvious if it did not use a language which makes of tangibility an event in itself. Everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition. The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses.

Publicity exerts an enormous influence and is a political phenomenon of great importance. But its offer is as narrow as its references are wide. It recognizes nothing except the power to acquire. All other human faculties or needs are made subsidiary to this power. All hopes are gathered together, made homogeneous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jsa3/hum355/readings/berger.htm

http://bigother.com/2010/02/13/innovation-in-art/

point taken…it’s important to recognize how a critic builds an argument, but I see that Yau’s overall complaint is with what he considers a faulty characterization of America.

And, by the way, there’s a typo above: “Afraid OF tonal narrative” not “on.” : )