Melting The Candle At Both Ends

... or something like that.

I'm at Adobe MAX, their annual creativity and software applications conference, which is always a real treat for me. At today's keynote, the director of the upcoming movie, Dead Pool was interviewed, partially about his use of Adobe Premiere for editing and post production. They showed the trailer for the movie and it was pretty appalling.

Dead Pool is yet another comic book adaptation. In this case, the hero is really an anti-hero, a guy who plays by his own rules with conflicted motivations and a tragic past and blah blah blah. It looks like it will be rated R for violence as the trailer was pretty graphic. Graphic violence or no, it looked boring.

While listening to the guy talk about his hyper-violent anti-hero and watching an audience of mostly hipsters listen in rapt attention, I thought of the Russian airstrikes in Syria where the hyper-violence is real and lives are getting snuffed out in large numbers. I wondered if the surviving Syrians would make similar movies.

I also thought of the irreplaceable historical monuments and artifacts being destroyed by ISIS and others. Those monuments were products of artists and craftsmen. Chaps like the guy who directed Dead Pool claim to be artists and craftsmen, too. I wondered if they thought that the world was a better place with one end of the art timeline being destroyed in the form of carvings, temples, palaces and assorted architectural triumphs and the other end of the timeline growing in the form of cookie-cutter, violent movies.

Farewell, Palmyra. Hello, Dead Pool.

It doesn't sound like the art world is improving.