The Light of Day

S’more stuff in my Amazon windfall

Since I don’t really want this to become a review-dominated site, I’m going to do one combined post to catch the rest of the stuff I’ve recently received from Amazon.com (I had a bunch of gift cards to use up). Ready set go.

Esther and Jerry Hicks: Ask and It Is Given (Learning to Manifest Your Desires)

I’m always slightly embarrassed to admit my closet interest in new-agey self-helpy material, but the basic idea — that we attract events, situations, and people into our life by the way we choose to think and feel — is something I’ve already come to believe on my own, and was curious as to how it would be presented by someone else. I’d wandered on to the Hicks’ website maybe about a year ago, and the book is supposedly written by a collective of non-physical spirits channeled by Mrs. Hicks. Whether that’s real or not, the freely downloadable .mp3s of “Abraham” speaking through her were so entertaining in their own right that I didn’t mind letting go of the price of a book.

Waking Life

A friend of mine brought this movie up in passing as an example of a good “eye candy” movie. It follows a young man stuck in a dream-state, who mostly wanders from scene to scene listening to other people’s semi-pretentious monologues and rants. Sometimes he doesn’t appear in the scene. What makes it visually interesting is that it is entirely computer rotoscoped from live-action. It seems to be shot almost entirely with a hand-held camera, and the individual elements (facial features, details in the background, etc.) sometimes follow the original movement rather loosely — possibly intentionally — so you may want to take your motion sickness pills before viewing. Overall, I think the scenes are more effective and less disorienting when the artists “cartoonify” the faces rather than tracing them exactly, such as in the “I don’t want to be an ant” scene.

One standout is rotoscoped footage of the actual mini-orchestra rehearsing soundtrack music for the film. (In the commentary track, we learn that a cellist’s smoking habit was “outed” to her family by the appearance of her cigarette in this scene. Another commentator jokingly suggests she should have told them it was “drawn in”.)

Idiocracy

I wouldn’t say don’t ever watch this, but don’t build a shrine for it in preparation for the next Office Space either. The problem is: how do you actually make a film entirely about incredibly stupid people, and make it interesting and funny for smart people? It seems that the only answer Mike Judge could come up with was “exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate”. I often found myself wondering who the ideal audience really would be. As willing as I was to suspend my disbelief, I could not get one thought out of my head: if people were really like this, all that automated machinery would have irreparably crapped out a long time ago. There may be some reversal or resistance to human evolution in an idiot-proofed culture/environment, but that culture/environment would have to be maintained by someone.

Roger Waters - Ça Ira (There Is Hope)

If this purchase doesn’t embody brand loyalty, I don’t know what does. I have no plans to fall in love with it. I’m happy for Waters that he has an opportunity to experience something different and work with different people. I’m also morbidly curious as to what my nouveau-operahead parents (as well as the veteran aficionados) would think of it. What I don’t get is — if you’re going to make music, why not just make music? Why try to make an entire piece that isn’t in your own style, and deliberately work it into a traditional format in order to be accepted by a community that likely doesn’t know you from Britney Spears?

(Then again, what is his style? Were you as confused as I was when the Radio Waves single first aired?)

Review: The Corporation

Any CD I listen to, any film I watch, any book I read (don’t say it, Christy!), has to find me via some pathway into my life. Usually that pathway involves another person I know, via a direct recommendation, a few mentions in passing (if two or more people make mention a film, album, or artist under separate circumstances, it becomes exponentially more “significant” in my subconscious), seeing it in a friend’s collection, hearing it mentioned in comparision to (or grouped with) something I’m already familiar with, having it handed to me to borrow, or having someone just plain put it right on and expose me to it directly. From there, other pathways involve natural connections to what I’m familiar with, such as more work by the same artists, or something those artists talk about.

For all of these paths, it’s logical that I would know at least a few other people who are familiar with it too, so that I can discuss, critique, compare notes, and generally “geek”. Subsequently, one thing that sets The Corporation apart for me is that no one I’ve talked to has ever heard of it. Surely with good reason — as sick as you are of hearing cliches like “the movie THEY don’t want you to see”, this is in fact the movie they don’t want you to see.

I found it on Wikipedia; I was reading up on corporations in general in order to come to better terms with some of the frustration and angst I cope with at my day job, as well as outside of the job as my mental space is polluted with branding and advertising, the people I interact with on a daily basis are inundated with deeply disempowering and life-trivializing messages, and my conscience is strained by the necessity to buy goods and services without knowing exactly what I’m supporting and financing. Upon finding the film, my immediate reaction was “why have I not heard of this?”

While I certainly didn’t need to see a movie to put a bad taste in my mouth about modern corporations, and while this film will certainly do little other than preach to the choir, I’m finding it to be more intense and engrossing than I expected for a documentary, and I daresay even entertaining — in an adrenaline-boosting, get-off-on-getting-pissed-off kind of way — and in the end, there is some hope.

It’s a two-disc set with tons of extras that I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of. While I can’t begin to get into detail about all the people who appear, I will mention that a certain Michael Moore appears a few times in a refreshingly soft-spoken demeanor.

I tend to lack words beyond that when it comes to reviewing films, except let me be that first person to recommend it to you. It’s an important and kind of all-encompassing issue, the basic premise being that corporations are given nearly unlimited legal rights and yet have no conscience, even if the humans running them would otherwise be perfectly decent people (which is often the case). The entity, the “legal fictional person”, exhibits the traits of a psychopath, due to its sole guiding force being the quarterly bottom line.

And now if one other person mentions the film to you in a separate circumstance…