Culture from the darker side

It is hard to look at this movie from a “culture” standpoint, it is after all a documentary about the ill fated EV1 from General Motors.

“Who killed the Electric Car” is half the story of a conspiracy by car companies to not “get us further” while at the same time playing a “whodunnit?” about what truly lead to the demise to the Electric Car in California, it then also goes on to look at the Hydrogene powered car, the one “solution” that the current US Administration is favoring and which is sold as the “next best thing”.

The movie is set up like an investigation. It first spends roughly a third of it’s time to show us how great the EV1 was, then it goes on to show us what happened that lead to it’s end and finally it wraps up by recounting the “real” reasons.

I put real in quotes here because I am sure there are people out there who are starting to call for tinfoil hats once the movie is over and I am not trying to tell my conclusions on this one.

The Audience Reactions where mixed, at times laughing loud at some obvious “American fallacies”, my most favourite one must have been towards the end when one of the interviewed people was basically saying:

When you tell the American consumer to be environment sensitive they think you are telling them to turn down the heat or cooling and drive a small car, you know, live like Europeans.

The movie itself is entertaining though, and it is definitely worth looking at this and maybe starting to wonder why in a hundred years we have not managed to come up with a better way to move ourselves around.

Rating: 4/5

Phillip K. Dick hasn’t really been lucky with movie adaption of his stories. The best so far must have ben Blade Runner, though it merely borrowed the general idea of the story, hence the change of the name to Blade Runner instead of “Do Androids dream of electric sheep?”.

The last adaptation “Paycheck” was just horrible to watch. Now with “A Scanner Darkly” Richard Linklater (of “Waking Life” fame) is giving it a shot and (mostly) succeeds.

The book and the movie are bizzare, what is reality? What is drug induced? In a way it is in the good old vain of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” just less funny and more “hardcore”. And of course there is a morality tale: How far can one go to take down the bad guy/

Rating: 4.5/5*

*Need to see it again, it has cult potential, much like “Waking Life”

Being on a “trip down the road” I re-read and re-watched the movie:

Movie:

Funny, Johnny Depp, clearly is an amazing actor and he nails the character well… It’s cult for a reason.

Book:

Of course it came first, and yes, it is a weird book but also hilariously funny. It makes one wonder how much of this has really happened and how much was drug induced. He drank, did drugs and wrote…. Maybe this goes in line, looking at some other funny and hilarious authors. i guess one has to go to the edge to have an appreciation for the absurdity of life and the comedy it is.

Rating (for both): 5/5

Ah, summer 2003, the first pirates movie hits the screen and it was fun.

Three years later, Jack’s back and….. He’s still funny.

Having said that though, I would like to point out that it has some serious timing issues. The story is simple: Jack has a compass, someone else wants it and won’t stop anywhere to get it. Or so it seems.

The full cast of the first movie is back and at almost two hours it is an epic. It is a funny movie, it is just too bad that most of the funny moments are being carried by Johnny Depp with the other actors just “standing around” for the most part either being the part of the joke or being the observers.

The fact that the movie ends in a cliffhanger does not really help either. Comedy lives off timing and as amazing the movie’s special effects are, the timing is off on occasion.

It’s fun, it’s for popcorn and summer, just not quite as great as the first one, despite all the amazing SFX.

Rating: 3/5

Climate Change, Global Warming. i don’t think there are many people out there who haven’t heard these words yet. But what does it mean?

“An Inconvenient Truth” shows Al Gore, the almost president of the United States” in a quest to get people to understand what the climate change means. He is eloquent, he speaks with conviction and he wants us to be convinced too.

That is the good news in the movie, the bad news is that we’re pretty much fucked. Scientist in general seem to like the movie though they point out that he seems to be a bit more optimistic that we can still prevent what will happen than is likely.

And I agree with it. I know many people who point at what has happened and claim that we can still stop it. But the way this works is like a runaway train. You don’t realize that you’re out of control until it is too late. There is a lot of redundancy in the system, but I think we are reaching the point where there is no turning back…

The movie should make one think, and my hope is that more people are going to watch it. It is well done in the way he presents the matter, but chances are he is going to preach to the choir.

After all: Carbon is life.

Rating: 4.5/5