So I saw this movie, which is not new, but I guess I wanted to share what I thought about it, and how it felt to go through the experience of being carried along watching all the strange and unbelievable things unfold because of how it is and distraction and politics. In the United States. A giant comet is coming right to the earth, odds of that are miniscule but hey, and people don’t work together to stop it? They do not. Is this why the earth is scorching? Why Cambodia gets hotter and hotter every year? Why there’s gobs of contracts out there for ‘climate change’ but these things are papers that sit on shelves collecting dust and not action items that are helping us work together to make things not apocalyptic?
The movie and the real world situation where people make memes and sort of idly grow more and more banal as we start to dodge reality, to deny what’s coming, to put things into satirical films and make jokes about it, well, it’s… kind of art mimics life stuff, isn’t it? People are trying to do things, but we’re not hearing about these things. People are trying to fight and resist, but we’re not getting angry enough yet to take action, to do something, because of… learned helplessness? Feeling overpowered, letting our agency rot, turning on our side, looking the other way? Generation X is jaded and cynical, sure. I think reading my old blog posts that used to live on this site made me understand this. Art is a way to challenge, though, and to invite new thinking. The new is where I want to go. Some people want to stay where they are, rigid and in denial and defensive and not-budging. Why? Maybe because it’s easier to stay in those places than it is to move and change, to take the reins and direct. Losing a feeling of purpose is one reason, I think, peers of mine have retreated, gone silent, become depressed, “lost the plot” as I’m hearing more people say, these days. Hard to know what the facts and details are when we’re thrown AI slop and lots of noisy things to look at all day long, distracted as we are… distraction.
Contrasting this film with Project Hail Mary, which I saw in the Legend cinema which is super fancy and lots of nice things and the sound was so great, I felt like the magic and wonder of the big universe at large that PHM showed us was even more poetic. I know anyone can say anything about any film. I went in totally blind, no idea of the story or visuals, only, something about space, and there I was. With the other few people (there are never packed houses out here in Cambodia, I think, for English language films or not-horror Khmer ones), we took it all in. Magic and wonder of cinema. Kind of like ET, but not. You know what I mean. Was PHM a fancy distraction, though? Bunch of big name people put it together at a time when the US was starting up a war in Iran.
I really liked Don’t Look Up. I liked it for its frankness and clipped nature. I think it was ‘a popcorn movie’ the way the filmmaker in the film described his total destruction of Earth movie. Maybe there’s something very American and endearing about making fun of ourselves. But maybe we’re just… stupid.
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