I embraced retirement fully this year by watching a ridiculous number of movies and shows (despite actually continuing to work). These are in the order I watched them, and I highlighted my top favourites (13 of them) and runners up (21 of them) in the more current shows and films. I watched a lot so you don't have to!
There will be no significant spoilers here; this isn't about the show specifically, but about its depiction of a perfectly efficient and seemingly happy and altruistic society. Is Carol the last one left in the cave, or is she the only one who made it to the outside?
The hive all works together effortlessly as one, with a prime directive to do no harm, as they distribute food worldwide with the utmost equity. They don't step on bugs or swat flies. They will eat meat if it's already dead, but they won't kill it themselves. They also won't pluck an apple from a tree. They don't interfere with life. They can't lie overtly. It's all very pleasant. The hive won't harm a living body; however, they didn't mind obliterating the human spirit of 8 billion people without explicit consent, rendering their ethics questionable.
Steinbeck's The Moon is Down was first published in 1942, before he was sent off to fight. As a journalist, he enlisted in order to be in the thick of thing to write with authenticity. This may be a book for our times, unfortunately. It's about a town invaded by enemy forces.
Here's a nice distraction from our nutty lives: I watched this lovely film about Michael Behrens, a math prodigy who studied at MIT, then left it all at 29. Now he's 82, living in Hawaii where he can walk through the forests and swim with dolphins. He says, "I spent 13 years in the university learning how to think, and now I'm spending the rest of my life learning how not to think."
He explains that loving everything that's positive and beautiful is one strain of spirituality, but he practices perceiving everything as beautiful. It's only 38 minutes long, but I'll get to the bits I like below:
We're all separate beings, but we're also all just molecules shifting in space. Both things are true at once. While we need to work to feed and house ourselves, we don't need big goals beyond what we do today.
Most years on New Year's Day I try to remember everything I watched over the year for a round-up, but typically forget most of them. This year I kept track!! (Next year I'll track my reading, too, but I mainly do that here - although I've definitely read more than eight books this year. I think I'm in the middle of more than eight books right now!) I'll divide the into categories of shows and films, but I tend to binge watch shows in a sitting, so, honestly, I had to look up a few to see which category it fit! They're more or less in the order I watched them, but with ratings out of 4, and I highlighted my top 5 favourites:
Three -- SIX Covid resources to bookmark.
This Educational Toolkit for Long Covid has a series of videos explaining Long Covid in children, how to return to school safely, the impact on the family, and how to support kids in the classroom. There's also a 31-paged handbook with scripts for the videos and more to help walk parents through having kids with Long Covid.
A group of scientists created an interactional infographic on how Covid becomes Long Covid, who's likely to get it, and all the ways it can affect the body.
And filmmaker, a scientist, an artist, and a father got together to make this 16 minute film, The Unravelling. They discuss the problem with how we understand it and what Long Covid is really like. The Vimeo embedding isn't working worth shit here, so check it out at the link!
AND, UC Davis College of Engineering created a series of videos about Indoor Air Quality and disease prevention and control!
AND Dr. Lucky Tran wrote a really concise Covid explainer that can be easily shared: Why it's still a good idea to avoid Covid!
AND Maria Gillespie wrote a FREE book about masking in class.
The frustrating experiences that linger with me the longest are the times I was able to make a difference in my tiny corner of the world or have some kind of effect or even have the potential to have an effect, and then it was derailed, often by a well-meaning person whose perception of their abilities might have been greater than the reality.
I have a far easier time coping with my own mistakes and inane decisions than watching someone else decimate my efforts. Maybe it's because I have more faith in myself to correct my own path than I have in others who seem more willing to let things fall to the wayside.
This is just a personal rant as I try to work on disattachment from it all. I have some regrets; when someone takes over a project, from a small task to a political portfolio, it's somehow still ours to mourn or celebrate despite not having any agency to affect it.
This year was another Covid mess so a great time for watching movies and shows from a variety of streaming services. These are in no particular order, and this is just what I remember seeing this year! Some are linked to longer discussions, and I highlighted a few that are not to be missed! I was a trustee at the start of this year! How was that not years ago? But my time as a grad student required some more mindless stuff to keep me awake enough to read so many many textbooks.
Movies:
Past Lives - loved it! - excellent shots and characters - so beautiful
All the Light We Cannot See - good moral dilemma stuff in WWII
Astroid City - Wes Anderson - typical brilliant stuff -- right up my alley
The Holdovers - excellent characterizations - students and prof stuck at school for Christmas
Dream Scenario - Nick Cage in a nightmare scenario - really interesting concept
Anatomy of a Fall - trial of a mother accused of murder and how it affects her son
NYAD - enjoyable film on marathon swimming - it was inspiriting in the task and friendship
Stillwater - engaging, plot twisty
Leave the World Behind - not a fan because I didn't care about any of the characters
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - nostalgic and delightful short film
The Half of It - cute coming of age story
Oppenheimer - so compelling; went by quickly despite the length
Barbie - so close to being excellent; rocked the dance numbers, set design, and clothes
Air - about marketing Nike Air shoes, but it was actually pretty good
A Good Person - drug addiction, kinda dull
Cocaine Bear - surprisingly funny
The Policeman - lovely story
The Whale - excellent, beautiful film
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - nope - I hoped it would be nostalgic, but was just boring
Mother Night (1996) - very good Vonnegut film about a writer in WWII
Dead End (1937) - excellent - love the old ones
Point Break (1991) - finally saw it because of Hot Fuzz - light, enjoyable undercover cop stuff
Heat (1995) - excellent
The Swimmer (1968) - possibly even more disturbing now with the old school interactions
The Thing (1982) - classic horror
The Ritual - weird and scary!
I recently watched a few things, back to back, to distract me from the news.
One was openly apocalyptical, as so much is these days. Is it a trend, or is the output the same, but I just never gravitated to it so much?? I've also noticed a rise in interest in mushrooms, mosses, bones, and decay and all things dank and symbolically death-related. The trajectory feels like we moved from flower power in the 60s to a neon wave in the 80s, then all things plastic and shiny in 2000, and now we're into dark, wet rot.
The end times movie was Leave the World Behind. Some people on twitter thought it amazing and watched it a few times over, but I wasn't as impressed. I wasn't invested in whether or not any of the characters lived or died, but it was okay fare for a cold rainy afternoon.
***Spoiler Alert***
Can sitcoms save the day?
Back in the 80s, there was a very funny show about a detective agency, Moonlighting. It was a take on the classic enemies-to-lovers trope with a very prim and efficient Maddie Hayes up against the fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants David Addison. Of course the two fall in love. In one episode, before having sex - I think for the first time - they have a brief conversation about condoms!!! It was unheard of! We had been taught to use safer sex and were all told to use condoms. It was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, but other STIs were also pretty common. Yet nobody had shown us what it looked like to actually talk about condoms without killing the mood. If these two very beautiful people can make it sexy, then maybe we could too.
Imagine if sitcom characters wore a mask whenever leaving the house?
I mean, we know that the film industry is one of the most Covid-conscious industries out there, often with everyone on the set masked to protect the stars. They know the value of their well-paid employees who are essentially irreplaceable. The problem with so many other industries is that they see their staff (and clients and patients and students) as entirely replaceable.
Sitcoms are full of tropes that we can relate to, but they get less and less relatable when they're all living like it's still 2018. It's nice to watch a fantasy world from time to time, but we look to the arts to see how to live with our current situation. Since political leaders have deserted us, we need more writers guiding us through this mess!
It's a tragedy we're living through, definitely but that often makes for some of the best comedy, and we either have to laugh or cry at the state of things today.
I saw Barbie, and it was fun, particularly for those of us who love a good choreographed dance number, life-size Barbie decor, and tons of costume changes and hairstyles. The details were amazing - how she moves and how she fits in her house and opens her closet. It's very fun for those bits, and there are lots of silly jokes along the way.
It's also nice to fantasize about an ideal simple life for a while without any air pollution or illness.
But, the patriarchy-storyline didn't sit well with me. I watched writer/director Greta Gerwig in a few interviews explaining her choices, which helped understand it all a bit, but not entirely.
"It's a humanist film. The humanity around Barbie and Ken is what's paramount. Ken has no status in the world, it's a reversed world, and the person without status is in an untenable place. . . . The existence of the film is pretty incredible. It's amazing that its made the way it is. . . . It's feminist in a way that includes everyone.. . . Barbie is an icon. She exists in the both/and, not either/or, diving into complexity and not running away from it, looking into thorniness and stepping into it, negotiating what women need to be. . . . The human character of Gloria articulates what the negotiation is: allowing things to fit as one and not cutting something out because it doesn't fit."
So many thoughts on this! I know I'm way overthinking this, but here it is.
First, about it being so amazing that they were able to do this movie in this way makes it seem that she's never heard of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, in which it was made clear, back in 1963, how women feel being stuck at home, powerless, and how the gender dichotomy power structure is self-reinforced. Or maybe it just makes it feel like Friedan's work has been erased, as if she never existed. It could just be that we need a reminder, but this doesn't really do it justice.
The alternative is that things have gotten so much worse since the 1960s, so it's amazing we can say these things out loud. I don't think that's the case in our age of Handmaid's Tale, She Said, Tar, Women Talking and so many others making the gender power dynamic overt. So, as an homage to a doll that many kids loved to play with, it's great. As an homage to feminism, it falls short.
***SPOILER ALERT***
I've encountered Maté in a few courses I'm taking, and have been strongly encouraged to watch his newest film and read his book several times now; I opted for the former. One follower was excited to tell me, with great confidence, that ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) is caused by a specific trauma and that everyone is carrying unresolved trauma which, if resolved, can heal physical ailments like cancer. Okay. I have some reservations that I've kept to myself until seeing so many in academia wholeheartedly promoting some poorly substantiated claims.
While Maté has some excellent techniques in the work he does, the way he presents and explains the material provokes me to look up research studies to try to corroborate many of his ideas.
I gobbled up his books twenty years ago, and there are some useful analogies and treatments in there, but even then there were parts that gave me pause.
When I'm not ranting about Covid and climate change, I'm biking, reading, writing, and watching shows and movies. Tons of movies. Right now Monday mornings start with Yellowjackets as an appetizer, then Succession is the main course, followed by Barry for dessert (all on Crave). Next Monday will be the season finale for the latter two, and I'm on tenterhooks!!
I also love YouTube videos about shows and films, and Thomas Flight is one of my favourites. He recently posted about the change in movies over the decades, and it's staying with me.
He explains the difference between modernist, post-modernist, and "meta-modernist" films, and how they align with the periods. I've taught the first two concepts before in philosophy, but explaining it through film helps clarify the differences.
Modernism (1890 to the 1940s or so, depends who you ask)
This is the time of Levy-Bruhl who classified people and places into two categories somewhat offensively: primitive (mystical, communal, "pre-logical") and modern (objective, scientific, individual). He convinced important people that modern is best, which lent some credibility for taking over inferior areas of the world. Durkheim disagreed with him--cultures have differences but not superiority--but that didn't fit the dominant narrative as well.
The Whale is about the intersection of five people's lives over five days: Charlie, an online college English teacher, Liz, his friend, Ellie, his daughter, Mary, his ex-wife, and Tom, a random missionary that happened to knock on the door as Charlie was having a heart attack. It's about religion in a way that's being missed by the reviews I've read so far.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
Some quick one-liners (synopsis and/or reviews) on the films and shows memorable enough to remember seeing this year. These are in no particular order, and I'm missing many of them:
Good Luck to You Leo Grande - It's Sex, Lies, and Videotape 40 years later. It was okay.
Tar - it's has the feel of Whiplash but starting from the suicide - more psychological thriller than drama
The Banshees of Inisherin - lovely and touching and so unfortunate and lonely and beautiful
The Fabelmans - lovely film of Spielberg's childhood, mainly about his mom; love is heartbreaking
The Outfit - fun organized crime flick - love this kind of thing!
My social media feed is full of political scandals that I have no ability to affect, so I've immersed myself in movies and shows. Bechdel test for the win for this trio!
Film both reflects and affects society, like all forms of art but even more than most as it's a visual, auditory, and narrative medium. We sometimes see ourselves in the movies more clearly than in novels or paintings or songs. It's this reflection in the film Cuties, I suspect, that got thousands of people riled up enough to cancel their Netflix subscriptions and garner it an embarrassing 3.1/10 on IMDb. But beyond Netflix's many second rate sequels and unwatchable remakes, I'd argue that Cuties is one of the better films on the current marquee.
Cuties is about an 11-year-old girl, Amy, who's new to town and trying to fit in with the cool kids. She's successful because she takes their competitive dance moves to the next level with sexy additions that she's seen online. Those dance scenes are what's driving the outrage, but it's the most realistic part of the film (which steps into the surreal from time to time). Kids are made to imitate what they see, and this is what's out there for real.
"Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn—whose documentary Cowspiracy, about the environmental impact of the animal agriculture industry, led me to become a vegan—recently released a new film, What the Health, which looks at how highly processed animal products are largely responsible for the increase of chronic and lethal diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer in the United States and many other countries."Eating vegan is more ethical from an animal rights point of view. I believe it's healthier for the body to eat way more vegetables than meat and that it's much more efficient for people to eat grains than to feed grains to cattle and then eat the cows. From a moral, nutritional, and environmental perspective, I support the shift to veganism or at least vegetarianism, or, at the very least, reducetarianism. Absolutely.
"The documentary Cowspiracy claims that 51% of GHG emissions are from agriculture (scrutinized here). Every other report on emissions has much lower numbers, including the IPCC, which puts it at 24%.... It's still up there, and it's definitely something we should act on by eating way less meat, but that 51% number seems to be seriously questionable. Documentaries need fact-checking too....But then Chris Hedges started praising the documentary and citing that number as fact. Yes, even the great Chris Hedges doesn't have time to fact-check everything he sees, and his bullshit meter must have been subdued from all the footage of suffering animals. When facts are reported inaccurately, but they help the cause, it's harder to be motivated to correct them. But it doesn't make them any less inaccurate."Those last two lines linger.
"This is nothing but fear mongering at its best. You simply cannot say that processed meats cause as many deaths as tobacco, it's factually impossible! There are 34,000 deaths per year on average (W.H.O estimates) from processed AND red meats. There are over 8,000,000 deaths from tobacco every year. This is no way, shape, or form comparable to processed meats."Here and elsewhere people are taking to task another claim from the book and film that beef is toxic because pollution gets in the cows when they eat grass, since it's obvious that the same pollution would get into vegetables and grains that we eat. Denise Minger does a thorough take-down of claims from Dr. Garth Davis, one of the experts from the film. And the Skeptical Cardiologist questions some claims from another expert, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, as does Minger.
"People who ate 68 grams (about a cup) of broccoli sprouts significantly inhibited the bloodstream levels of an enzyme linked to cancerous tumor development (24), only three hours after eating the sprouts. The broccoli sprout snack was just as effective, or even more so, than the chemotherapy agent specifically concocted to lower that enzyme (25). Broccoli sprouts or chemo? Hard decision."Hold the phone - so broccoli can replace chemo?? I linked the studies cited to show the problem with this claim. The second study (25) found that the spouts briefly inhibited the epigenetic markers for cancer. But it makes it very clear that the study was an attempt to prevent one specific provocation, not a therapy for cancer that exists. The three (three!) participants tested were all perfectly healthy at the time. And, as Wong says elsewhere, genetic markers cause only a small percentages of cancerous tumours anyway. The first study cited (24) explains the idea, but doesn't actually discuss the broccoli sprout study specifically as one would expect given the location of the citation in the passage. If it were a student's essay, I'd call that padding. Regardless, the original study's finding is in its initial stages and, more importantly, doesn't remotely suggest broccoli sprouts could replace chemotherapy in the least. Wong conflated concepts in a very misleading way.
"A single year’s worth of current global emissions from the energy and industrial sectors have the largest contributions to warming after 100 years (see Figure 8.34a). Household fossil fuel and biofuel, biomass burning and on-road transportation are also relatively large contributors to warming over 100-year time scales. Those same sectors, along with sectors that emit large amounts of CH4 (animal husbandry, waste/ landfills and agriculture), are most important over shorter time horizons (about 20 years; see Figure 8.34b)" (p 720).This isn't quite the same thing as the first link claims, and I'm not sure how they arrived at their conclusion.
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| David Levine's Kissinger |
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| The origin of cyberspace. |
Blair and Bush set their sights on Hussein in Iraq. They believed stories about him instead of investigating reality. This is legend now, but the primary source that he had WMD was taken from the movie The Rock. |
| Strugatsky film |
