Since the start of the year, I have been documenting my attempts to live with less. The latest post is about how we are encouraged to buy things we don't need and why I can't get rid of my mother's last bottle of Miss Dior.
"we may get a buzz for a minute after buying these products, but this feeling doesn’t last. It would be disastrous for the advertising industry if feelings of happiness and satisfaction caused by the consumption they encourage weren’t as fleeting as they are. In fact, research has shown that the “higher a country’s ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.” As advertisers are so good at what they do, I guess that means buying things doesn’t make us happy either. Duh. Guess what, in the US, advertising spending is significantly larger than any other country. And we definitely aren’t at the top of the happiness index."
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I watched Christopher Nolan's Memento when it first came out and a number of times subsequently. While I got it on first viewing and got it more each time I saw it again, this article explains the movie in ways I had never thought of. Revisiting films over the years is always interesting, but doing so with the help of expert analysis can reveal things you would never have dreamed of. I try to make it a habit. If you love films, you should too.
The American Dream has been a staple of art and literature since the country's founding. The subject has inspired some of the greatest American works of art from The Great Gatsby to There Will be Blood. Two new entries in the canon are Minari and Nomadland.
Minari, directed by Korean-American Lee Isaac Chung, follows the travails of Korean immigrant family in the 1970s as they try to stake their claim on America's promise. Nomadland, by Chinese director Chloé Zhao, tells the story of an American woman who is kind-of forced, but really chooses, to spend her time wondering America with a bunch of people for whom the Dream has failed. Zhao's film has the heat, storming into awards season with all but a couple of critics falling over themselves to heap praise on a work that is dishonest at its core. Having gained access to film within Amazon's distribution facility, Zhao presents it as a great place to work. Is this because she doesn't understand? Or is it because Amazon is one of the main streaming venues for films these days? Either way, ball dropped. Worse, though, is that Frances McDormand is literally a tourist among real drifters, and once you realize this, it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief. Chung's movie, on the other hand, may be populated by actors, but viewers end it with a little more understanding of the real immigrant's plight. Here is a wonderful article that looks at the landscapes of both films. Saint Maud, the first feature film by Rose Glass, is a strange and unsettling but extremely good. Morfydd Clark creates a compelling and believable Maud, whose life is spiraling downwards - or upwards, depending on how you look at it. The film may well leave viewers with questions, which is where this great article comes in. Watch the film and then read the article to see if you agree about what happens in the end.
It has always interested me to see the way texts are interconnected. A education in the arts that skips periods and movements is lacking crucial pieces. You can't understand Virginia Woolf, for instance, without understanding the texts that she read. While a less cerebral work can probably do its job perfectly well for the less widely read, seeing how it refers to other texts remains an interesting exercise. Here is a great primer for anyone interesting in delving deeper into To All the Boys: Always and Forever.
Those of us who make it to adulthood are survivors of a volatile, scary time of life. While the late-teen, early-adult period has been the topic of many movies, young adults being a very lucrative market, not many have dug past the surface.
Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is a rare exception. Anna Paquin bites off the lead role with relish and her scenes with J Cameron-Smith, who plays her mother, more realistically portray the tensions of that particular relationship than any I have seen. Here is an excellent article by Aurora Amidon in Screen Queens about the film and how it manages to portray a period we all remember, but rarely get to see depicted accurately. I know 2021 got off to a rough start, what with COVID, an attempted coup, and all, but things seem on the upswing, now I am happy that two weeks into 2021 I published an article in Rabbit Hole. It's about the hidden dangers of portraying real people on the screen, especially those who are still exerting influence. Looking at you Saturday Night Live (who also made the big misstep of humanizing the real Trump by giving him a platform on the show).
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Scarcely Perceptible AttachmentsThis is my blog. Here I will share things I've written and sometimes write something new about things that interest me. Archives
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