marieltrokan The spectacle of location, is the non-spectacle of non-location. The non-spectacle of non-location is the non-spectacle of nowhere.Non-spectacle is the ordinary. The ordinariness of nowhere is the ordinariness of the opposite of somewhere.Somewhere is precision. The opposite of precision is general. General is the ordinary.The ordinary of the ordinary is the spectacle of spectacle. The spectacle of spectacle is a pure spectacle.A pure spectacle is a pure explosion. An explosion is violence. A pure violence is an impure peace.An impure peace is a violent peace. A violent peace is the illusion of violence and the illusion of peace.The illusion of violence is the reality of peace. The illusion of peace is the reality of violence. The reality of peace is a history of peace. A history of peace is a non-history of violence. A non-history of violence is a non- experience of violence.The reality of violence is a history of violence. A history of violence is a non-history of peace. A non-history of peace is a non- experience of peace.The experience of non-violence is the experience of violence - in order to suppress violence, the illusion of experience has to be a history.Equal knowledge creates violence - equal talent creates violence.To avoid violence, it helps if different talents are part of a hierarchy of presentation, as opposed to an equality of presentation.To avoid violence, it helps if different physical actions take place in different physical locations

SnoopyStyle Jude (Cameron Diaz), Pete (Ron Eldard), Paulie (Annabeth Gish), Marc (Jonathan Penner) and Luke (Courtney B. Vance) are liberal grad-students having a dinner in Iowa. It's a yearly tradition that they invite someone to have an open discussion. It's a stormy night. Pete invites over Zachary Cody (Bill Paxton) whose car broke down. Soon, Zachary shows himself to be a racist, religious redneck. He's a Desert Storm vet and a Holocaust denier. The discussion turns heated with Zach holding a knife to Jewish Marc's throat. Pete tries to turn the table but Zach breaks his arm. Marc kills Zach by stabbing him in the back. The group argues. Luke convinces them to bury the body. Sheriff Alice Stanley (Nora Dunn) is investigating a missing woman. The group decides to kill more people being the judge, the jury and even the executioners.This group is too smart to not call the cops after killing Zach. At least, the two girls who had nothing to do with the killing would go to the cops. It would be a better story to not have the liberals stumble into the first killing. Let them be fully cold-blooded killers in a school project sort of way. The whole thing feels very manufactured. This is more of an exercise rather than something with real feelings and real characters. This is something made up around a warped dinner party.

Robert J. Maxwell This is a pretty amusing send up of self righteousness and political extremism on the small scale. Five liberal room mates -- Diaz, Eldard, Gish, Penner, and Vance -- at a university in Iowa share a full-course meal in their home with a young man who reveals himself to be an unashamed macho war monger. A fight breaks out and the guest easily overpowers the wimpy hosts but is stabbed in the back by one of them. The victim burps, falls to the floor and dies.For the most part, the instrument of the deliberate murders that follow is poisoned wine. Let me recount the names of some of the right-wing victims: Bill Paxton is the dedicated warrior; Charles Durning as a minister who thinks queers deserve to die of AIDS; Mark Harmon as the ne plus ultra of male chauvinism; Jason Alexander as a man devoted to despoiling the earth; Pamela Gien as a librarian who thinks that "Catcher in the Rye" is pornographic. She doesn't drink so she has to be stabbed in the back.But this is the kind of comedy that doesn't need an excess of gore to be funny, so there is no gore at all. The ludic element lies elsewhere -- partly in occasionally clever but noetic unknowables. Example: If you were alone with Hitler in 1929, knowing what you now know, would you let him live? Partly the humor lies in ancillary themes. The Gang of Five decide to bury their first victim in the back yard, resulting in a suspicious-looking mound of earth. They put a tomato plant on top to disguise its contours. Eventually they have half a dozen huge tomato plants growing on the graves and there is a super-abundance of red ripe home-grown tomatoes. At first they can the tomatoes but the cabinets are finally filled. Then they slice them and hang them up to be sun dried. The tomatoes keep coming and getting bigger. They begin skeet shooting the tomatoes. They swing at them with baseball bats. Their last supper is spaghetti with marinara sauce. Another scene has Carmen Diaz planting pansies around the borders of the graves but it simply make the place look more like a cemetery than ever. (She gets PO'd when Vance rips them out.) And one of the roomies is a painter. He recreates, in a monstrous manner, Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel. On the dining room ceiling. (It should have been Da Vinci's "The Last Supper.")They run into trouble when they manage to persuade a rabble-rousing, right-wing TV maniac, Ron Perlman, to have a good meal at their home. During the dinner, before he is served the "dessert" wine, he cheerfully admits that he only rants on television because of the ratings, that in actuality he is full of crap. He thinks both extremes are dangerous and that centrists control government and always will. And if he met Hitler alone in 1929? No, he wouldn't kill Hitler. (The hosts reach for the "dessert" wine.) Instead, he would do his best to talk Hitler out of his designs. The connivers hesitate, then scurry outside for a discussion.Left alone in the dining room, the phony right-wing nut job lights a cigar and wanders around. He's about to pour a glass of the "dessert" wine but it smells funny to him. Then he picks up a local paper and reads an item about all the missing locals. The penny drops and he stares back at the bottle of poisoned wine. Lieutenant Columbo should have such intuition.It's all kind of amusing, so why isn't it funnier than it is? Great material, nice photography and lighting, and no clunk performances, but I kept thinking what Ealing Studios might have done with this plot in the mid-1950s. There would have been less extravagance in the performances for one thing. The room mates keep arguing and shouting at one another, leading to a scene in which one is about to shoot another with a magnum. There would have been fewer victims, probably, and more comic elements attached to each murder. Some of the victims are hardly seen, getting barely enough screen time to say a few words before their demise. There is discontinuity in some of the characters too, and it stands out. Carmen Diaz is flippant about the first murder but anguished for no reason by the last. Except for Courtney Vance, Jr., who remains consistent, their positions through time are erratic. And sometimes the mood shifts violently without justification.But, these qualifications notwithstanding, I kind of enjoyed it. I still wish it had been made in the mid-50s by Ealing, but it's kind of fun, and welcome relief from most of the garbage showing up on the screen lately.

Lee Eisenberg One of the blackest comedies of the 1990s portrays a group of left-wing activists murdering right-wingers at dinner. Yes, very grim, but they know how to keep everything in good taste the whole time. Probably the funniest character in the movie is Ron Perlman as a Rush Limbaugh type on TV (he calls for a return to the Reagan era).Admittedly, "The Last Supper" isn't any kind of masterpiece. I guess that they could have improved it some by looking into how these various individuals on both sides of the political aisle arrived at their views. But otherwise, it sure pleased me. Some of the ill-fated conservative characters made my skin crawl.Also starring Cameron Diaz, Courtney B. Vance, Annabeth Gish, Bill Paxton and Charles Durning.