"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen."

Saturday, February 18, 2012

On Intelligence

"If anyone thinks they're going to change the world by appealing to the morality of human beings, they're not going to get very far.  Human beings are not very moral." - Paul Watson

I watched Limitless and Eco-Pirate, both about reaching beyond typical human potential, then had a horrifying apocalyptical dream.  In the dream, everyone in the region had to meet in a large forested area on Tuesday.  I was curious about the purpose.  I thought it had something to do with the new food rationing system, something that made me very nervous because we were already so hungry.  But one woman, who was high up in whatever organization was running things, told me we were all going to kill ourselves at once to decrease the surplus population.  Our region had been chosen, and it was our duty to comply.  I spent the rest of the dream trying to organize my kids and their friends for an escape - and wondering how we had let everything go so wrong, how we had stopped being able to produce enough food so that mass suicide was the only option left.

I think I'm a little stressed-out about the state of the world.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Mary and Max

I fell asleep after work - something I never do - and woke up at 6:00 thinking it was morning.  When I realized it was evening, it felt like I had found an extra 12 hours of free time that I had previously lost - like finding a 20 in an old coat!  In this surreal state, I watched a delightful bit of claymation called Mary and Max.  Warning:  I'm not going to tell you how to raise your kids, but give it a watch before letting the littluns partake.  It gets dark, and not in an obscure way that they might miss - more in an awkward-questions-you-don't-want-to-answer way, like, "Why does she have a rope around her neck, mummy?"

The movie is reminiscent of Lars and the Real Girl and Elling, and it made me think of The Zoo Story as well with a few nods to Muriel's Wedding.  It's about the loneliness of difference and our profound need for connection.  A pen-pal relationship develops between a young girl and a middle-aged man with Aspergers.  They're both a bit off, and both terribly lonely, and they find a way to connect over chocolate.     It's a lovely bittersweet story.




It's weird, but in a good way. 

Sunday, February 12, 2012

A Dangerous Method

Don't watch A Dangerous Method if you want to continue believing that Keira Knightley is cute as a button.  She makes herself so hideous as a woman with hysteria in the first fifteen minutes of the film, you may never look at her the same again. It almost looks like they CGI-merged her with the alien from Alien.  



I'm not sure if it's better to see the film with a solid knowledge of Freud and Jung under your belt, or none at all.  I spent the film noticing inconsequential inaccuracies, so I may not have lost myself in it as much as I would have otherwise.  The timeline was particularly bothersome.  It's all filmed before the war when they were friends, and then the movie ends as if they both just stopped writing after that. But they both, arguably I suppose, wrote some of their most influential works after the war.  Jung didn't sit on a chair looking out to sea, pining for his mistress for the rest of eternity (a mistress whom he suddenly obsessively fell for after having a detached relationship for ages - the blubbering was jarringly out of character).  He was only in his 30s. He got a new girl and wrote twenty volumes full of theories of the mind.

I'm not sure how interesting this movie will be to anyone unfamiliar with the theories that came out of this trio.  As random characters in a film, I didn't really care about any of them.  I only cared to the extent that they represented people I've been following for years.  Maybe take a pass.