The first thing is that I really have nothing to say any longer about these terrible mass shootings. I've written previously about my feelings on the subject, and anyone who cares to can go through the blogs and find those writings, which shouldn't be too difficult due to the fact that these events happen now with increasing regularity. I wrote about Las Vegas last month, and I'm done. Nobody is gonna do a doggone thing about it anyway, as we learned after Sandy Hook. Sorry to begin the blog on such a bum note, but it had to be acknowledged and gotten out of the way, for me at least. This is one subject I am absolutely done with.
Tonight's movie was "The Circle" (2017). After checking this movie out from the Libe, I was hesitant to actually watch it, due to it's low score on IMDB (5.3). Normally I do not let reviews stop me, but this seemed an abnormally low score for a movie with Tom Hanks, and starring Emma Watson.
I probably should have listened to the reviewers. "The Circle" was not altogether a disaster, but it just went on and on, hammering you over the head with it's point : that modern computer technology run amok is a gateway for totalitarianism. "The Circle" of the title is the World's Biggest Corporation (i.e. Microsoft or Apple). Young techies cannot wait to get a job there, and when Emma Watson does, through a hip young friend, she quickly becomes immersed within it's "company culture" of Total Participation and production.
The way it is depicted in the movie is everything I cannot stand about Corporate America : ultra peppy and overly enthusiastic office zombies attending every meeting, cheering on The Boss, hanging on his every word. Never leaving The Workplace Campus, where everything is provided for.
This is Microsoft in real life. With electronics everywhere, and even more sophisticated than what can be bought by the public. Think "ultra surveillance". It is passive/agressive, happy face Communism.
This movie takes the premise to the Nth Degree, as a science fiction parable. For it's stance against runaway, mindless technology that results in an ant-colony populace, "The Circle" gets big points in my book. The problem is that (can you hand me my Megaphone, please?........thank you.).....
The problem is that after about an hour of watching these truly awful little sheeple zip aound their slap-happy plastic workplace, WE GET IT ALREADY!
The truth is that we knew it coming in. We've been living the darned thing for 20 years.
The lesson the Internet, and iPhones, have taught us is that "an introduction of new technology is not bad", but, "a total saturation of society by unnecessary or destructive technology is very bad".
What could have been a very good movie is harmed irreparably by......drum roll please.....
The Usual Suspect : a lousy script. I was tempted to turn the movie off about 50 minutes in, when I thought I could take no more amidst the subtly enforced hive culture of The Circle's hyped-up employees. I felt like I was stuck there myself, and I just wanted out. But because of Hanks and Watson I hung in, and I was not rewarded for my efforts. The "plot", such as it is (Watson's efforts to expose The Circle's corruption) only comes into focus in the last 30 minutes of the film, and then it peters out with an ending as vague as any I have seen in this new era of "You Decide What Happened".
And I would have at least tried to decide - even though I much prefer the director and screenwriter tell me what happened (it is their movie after all, I am merely a spectator) - but I was unable to come to a conclusion because I was not given enough information.
In the 1970s, when my friends and I would go to see a B-Movie that turned out to be really bad, sometimes we would say it had a "tacked-on ending", like Pin The Tail On The Donkey. In other words, the so-called writer wrote a script, and got all the way to the ending.....and then couldn't think of an ending, so he "tacked one on" with a push pin.
That seems to be the Modus Operandi nowdays, for many movies. Bad Writing = No Problem. Shine it up with some graphics and Get It Out There, either in the theaters or at Redbox. Recoup your investment, and hopefully more.
I give "The Circle" a nod for it's depiction of Microsoft Corporate Culture. It gets that stuff exactly right, and I have never worked there but that doesn't matter because we all know it's accurate.
But as a movie, I give it a C minus to be generous, or a D if I am being realistic. I can't even believe I wrote this much about such a movie.
I should be writing about the Freedom Of Information Act, because I know it has gotta be my main project for next year, and I am gonna really have to focus on it. Can't guarantee I will be able to, given my job and all, but the point is that I Know, after my CIA letter, that I Need To Focus On Trying To Retrieve Information About 1989.
If I don't do it, who will? No one has ever stepped up to the plate thus far. I wish someone would, but in the absence of that, I am gonna be 58 next year, and that will make it half my life that I have been living with this. So I think that next year is gonna be about Freedom Of Information, and other letter writing.
It's a big deal, and I wish someone would step up to the plate besides myself.
See you in the morning.
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