Well, I started a new job yesterday, and totally missed my post (I'm still trying to keep up a daily Mon-Fri schedule on this). I'm looking at a lot of long days from here on out, we'll see how I can keep up.
In any case, as the new job involves way too much time spent driving around New Jersey, I just wanted to make an observation on the nature of road rage.
Why do people do stupid things in or around cars? I've read a lot of talk about how cars give people a delusional sense of power, or the isolation of all that steel and glass depersonalizes everything, etc, but I'd like to offer another hypothesis: people react the way they do because they feel powerless in a car.
Think about it from the perspective of your caveman brain now. You're driving along, minding your own business when some fool in an overpriced SUV swerves from the right lane, cutting you off and making you slam on the brakes, all because he's trying to get a car length or two ahead. The guy's obviously an antisocial jerk, and yelling and flipping him off gets no reaction, or at least nothing you can see through his tinted back window, he just ignores you and swerves around the next couple cars, making the guy who's now in front of you slam on his brakes, and almost causing you to rear end that one.
OK, annoyed yet? Now, what can you do about it? This guy just shoved you around like a playground bully. He made a bunch of folks miserable and almost caused them to get hurt for no good reason other than the fact he thinks his need to get home is more important than anyone else's.
So what can you do about it? This is where the anger kicks in, and the caveman brain rebels, because in civilized society, you can't do a damn thing. You're strapped down in a single position, cut off from everybody else by a big, clumsy hunk of steel, and bound by a mountain of restriction and regulation. SUV guy could've killed you by running you off the road, and you can't even say "hey" to his face. It's infuriating.
That is, unless you give into the caveman brain, which says, "I'll show him" and charge ahead to ram him, or follow him home and whack him with your tire iron. Deprived of even the basic human ability to make faces at the guy, our frustration only builds. THAT is why we get so angry on the road, not because our motorized conveyance gives us the powers of the gods, but because when we're locked into them, we don't even have the chance to be human.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
Family Movies: Legend of the Guardians
After a late summer drought of family-friendly movies we're in the back-to-school season again with a few new releases. With Harry Potter nearing the end of his tenure (by the way, the trailer for The Deathly Hallows Part 1 is pretty awesome) studios and viewers alike are searching for that next big epic.
Enter Legends of the Guardians, based on the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series of books by Kathryn Lasky. It follows the adventures of Soren, a young barn owl, in his quest to join the legendary Guardian owls that are supposed to watch over the land, etc, etc.
It's always tricky to make a decent movie with talking animals, especially considering the painful CGI and live-action hybrids like Cats and Dogs or any of the comic-strip-based disasters that have been inflicted on the public in the last several years. Thankfully, Guardians avoids some of the worse cognitive dissonance by not having any human characters, or indeed signs of mankind at all.
The movie gets right down to the Epic Fantasy business, with the protagonist, Soren, being torn from his cozy family life and ending up (literally) in the clutches of some nasty, nasty Nazi-ish birds who think their particular breed (Barn Owls, like Soren and his brother) should be ruling the land (which is apparently Mythical Tasmania, based on some of the critters that show up). Daring escapes and a drastically compressed epic journey, complete with the requisite companions, ensue, and we move on to all the typical Hero's Journey stuff. The plot is pretty typical of the genre, and is no better or worse than anything else of the sort.
The movie has it's flaws, including some issues with pacing (the usual problem of trying to compress an Epic Storyline into a marketable movie applies, some parts seem far too rushed and superficial, while some seemingly unimportant bits seem to drag on a bit) and occasionally cliched Fantasy Adventure dialogue, but makes up for them with some outright stunning visuals. The flight scenes don't quite achieve the sense of motion and scale of How To Train Your Dragon, but they have some beautiful sequences. You get the feeling the animators worked very hard to on rain and feathers. The use of color and lighting is also exceptionally well done. The battle scenes were dramatic and conveyed some of the brutality of the fighting without the blood and gore.
The tone of the movie was a bit dark, with betrayals abounding and some creepy bad guys, but is probably fine for kids over, say, 7 or so. It also did a pretty admirable job of not getting too caught up on the comic relief. There were a few corny moments and several of Soren's companions have their humorous side, but the film stops short of letting it get annoying, and they all get a chance to show some heroism as well.
Overall, Guardians was well done, if not exceptional, and a good choice for a rainy day. I can only hope that if the studio decides to make any sequels they'll leave a bit more room for plot development.
Enter Legends of the Guardians, based on the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series of books by Kathryn Lasky. It follows the adventures of Soren, a young barn owl, in his quest to join the legendary Guardian owls that are supposed to watch over the land, etc, etc.
It's always tricky to make a decent movie with talking animals, especially considering the painful CGI and live-action hybrids like Cats and Dogs or any of the comic-strip-based disasters that have been inflicted on the public in the last several years. Thankfully, Guardians avoids some of the worse cognitive dissonance by not having any human characters, or indeed signs of mankind at all.
The movie gets right down to the Epic Fantasy business, with the protagonist, Soren, being torn from his cozy family life and ending up (literally) in the clutches of some nasty, nasty Nazi-ish birds who think their particular breed (Barn Owls, like Soren and his brother) should be ruling the land (which is apparently Mythical Tasmania, based on some of the critters that show up). Daring escapes and a drastically compressed epic journey, complete with the requisite companions, ensue, and we move on to all the typical Hero's Journey stuff. The plot is pretty typical of the genre, and is no better or worse than anything else of the sort.
The movie has it's flaws, including some issues with pacing (the usual problem of trying to compress an Epic Storyline into a marketable movie applies, some parts seem far too rushed and superficial, while some seemingly unimportant bits seem to drag on a bit) and occasionally cliched Fantasy Adventure dialogue, but makes up for them with some outright stunning visuals. The flight scenes don't quite achieve the sense of motion and scale of How To Train Your Dragon, but they have some beautiful sequences. You get the feeling the animators worked very hard to on rain and feathers. The use of color and lighting is also exceptionally well done. The battle scenes were dramatic and conveyed some of the brutality of the fighting without the blood and gore.
The tone of the movie was a bit dark, with betrayals abounding and some creepy bad guys, but is probably fine for kids over, say, 7 or so. It also did a pretty admirable job of not getting too caught up on the comic relief. There were a few corny moments and several of Soren's companions have their humorous side, but the film stops short of letting it get annoying, and they all get a chance to show some heroism as well.
Overall, Guardians was well done, if not exceptional, and a good choice for a rainy day. I can only hope that if the studio decides to make any sequels they'll leave a bit more room for plot development.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
