Hacker Cinema
MacArthur Park
2001 · Film · 86 min
Directed by Billy Wirth
A portrait of a homeless park community bonded by crack cocaine addiction. In the park's drug-fixated shantytown, Cody is a kind of crackhead father figure who helps his friends when they are in trouble or in desperate need of a "blast." His girlfriend, Alicia, is a romantic who's losing her soul to the drug, and E-Max is a street hustling pimp who is trying to scoop young Linda into his motley legion of harlots. Hoover Blue, earth mother to all the addicts, attempts to pound some knowledge into the starry-eyed Linda while Cody tries to help young P-Air get his hustle on to record a hip hop track and make it big. But when Cody's real son, Terry, tracks him down to tell him his wife has passed away, Cody doesn't even recognize him at first and then can't help him with postmortem affairs. After five years of crack addiction, Cody wants to get straight and do right by Terry, but the harder he struggles to escape the park, the more it closes in on him.
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1 comment on Hacker News
Even if so, this seems like the good kind of priming to me. You were clearly actually interested in this and just needed the nudge to remember.
Preferences and desires have to be the end of some causal DAG with entrypoints from the world outside of your own mind one way or another. Whether or not we're marketers or have any financial interest in the popularity of specific cultural artifacts, we all generally do things like evangelize our favorite stuff to friends and instill values and a love of similar things to our kids. It's overly cynical to have comments like this responded to as if any and all external influences are nefarious and inauthentic. What we want is for people to share the things they actually love rather than bullshit they know is bullshit but have been paid to shill.
I think of the fact I've been listening to Donna Summer so much for the past couple months. I know why it is. I grew up loving disco music and watching Alysa Liu win the figure skating gold medal performing to Macarthur Park reminded me of that love, something I haven't given much attention to in nearly 30 years. It's not "better" than anything else I'd been listening to in the past few years, but it's a lot more fun to sing thanks to 70s idols like Donna largely coming from a gospel background.
Going back a link, I'm reasonably sure Alysa, a 20 year-old who very likely did not grow up listening to disco music, probably picked this as her song for the season because of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and I've read Tim Burton's explanation of how the song got into the movie. He has a jukebox in his house and was listening to the Richard Harris original version of this song, which is one of the more ridiculous pop songs to ever get recorded, but full of wild changes in tone and a very long runtime that lended itself well to an extended wedding sequence interrupted by a police raid. The Donna Summer version playing over the credits is largely for contrast. I don't think Tim Burton or anyone else was motivated by wanting to boost the royalty fees going to Richard Harris and Donna Summer, who have been dead for 24 and 14 years, respectively.