on a Netflix jag.  the algorithms know that i like kung fu movies.  from cheapjack HK early '70s fare on forward.  so there is a documentary about kung fu flicks.  the docu is from australia.  well done & informative with many very good film scholars, makers, actors, choreographers etc etc.  my only beef with the filmmakers is the style they used to present their material.  super fast quick edits.  even the names of the talking heads & their credentials blitzed past.  i had to rewind & pause to read them.  i know that quick editing is a contemporary style suited to our short attention span age.  but is it?  back in the early '90s, when my generation was still called the MTV Generation, & our attention spans seemed to get shorter & shorter with each newly generated movie & music video, an english professor published a piece that touted the new generation's ability to get the great modernist poets like eliot for their use of collage & imagery.  perhaps.  i don't know.  but goddamn what about the pleasures of being slow.  like slow down your movies.  let the viewers luxuriate in their images & sounds.  let the experts you sought out have enough screen time so that we can learn their names.  shit.  am i asking too much?  sure it still seems hip to hit the viewer firing all cylinders on high octane.  but it's not like contemporary movie makers can't slow the hell down too.  werner herzog is such a master.  so is denis villeneuve.  slow down!  christ i was getting a headache watching this docu on the history of kung fu cinema.  even the movies they detailed were not so quickly edited.  futhermore, i don't know if eliot's poetry is any faster than robert browning or tennyson.  kinda a big conceit really to say that the 20th century modernists were so advanced as to anticipate the attention spans of music video viewers.  eliot was writing in the era of his one lifetime.  i don't know if the venerable poet would dig HK action cinema.  but if he did i suspect he'd admonish the makers of this kung fu docu to read the very big books of 18th & 19th centuries & remind us to slow the hell down.