Joy at the Worlds End

I've had a strange week of highs and lows. On Monday I got a chemical burn on my eyes and was blinded for three days until I got glasses. I was stuck in my apartment without the ability to see, watch TV, or write. I have exceptionally bad eye sight so for three days the world was just a bunch of blurred points and sounds. I had to put my surrounding together from context clues. I lost my freedom, couldn't drive, couldn't go to a shop and buy food, couldn't express myself online, go to work or even for a walk because who knows what I could have walked into. So that was hellish and boring.

Then there was today. Today I went to work, meh, not that great....but then I went to the Drafthouse to watch the Cornetto Trilogy. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The Worlds End. All three of these movies are great, and worth many viewing, they are funnier than even the above average comedy, smarter and most of all more joyful than any other movies. Each of them takes on the form of a genre piece, the Zombie movie, the buddy cop action film and the latest one, a science fiction end of the world alien invasion film, but none of them are actually about those things, ones a romantic comedy, ones a film where the main character discovers "whats most important in life", and this last one is about nostalgia, addiction, and choosing who you are going to be. The one thing that strings them all together though is the thing that made my night. They are Joyful films.

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE ZOMBIES GUN FIGHTS AND ROBOTS!!!!

I've often been told that I'm a joyful person. Joy is a strange term, it's overly spiritual, which is why my mom likes to use it so much. It fits me though, I have a sort of enthusiasm and sense of wonder at good things, as a girl who I like a lot once said "Like a puppy", I think she was half annoyed and have in admiration when she said that, and maybe if we are lucky she'll post in the comments about it. She wasn't wrong though, I am very much like a puppy, and that can sound immature, but seeing as I haven't pee on my carpet ever, I feel OK about it. So I'm joyful, puppy like, I'm OK with that but it has to mean something more than happy, they are different words they have to mean different things. I'm not happy, I've been stuck in the same job for too long, in a life that is stalled, though I've finally started on a way out of it, life is hard, it's lonely, I was at that movie alone tonight surrounded by others who had people to enjoy it with. None of that makes me happy, it makes me frustrated, upset, anxious, but none of that takes away from the joy of a great experience like I had tonight.
Tonight I had a night where I got to enjoy people having fun, I got to revel in humor, good food and beer. I got to be enraptured in something I wanted everyone to share in because its so much fun, and in all those things it doesn't matter if I'm happy or anxious or fearful or annoyed, because that pure enjoyment of whatever is at hand is what matters, and that feeling at least for a moment makes you happy, even if your not or have no reason to be. Joy is finding that worth while thing, that amazing thing in whatever mundane piece of life and really letting it affect you and being happy in that moment. I had that Joy tonight in sharing in the Joy of the makers of The Worlds End, and the enjoyment of the audience I saw it with. It was a good night.




THEY GOT WHO TO PLAY BATMAN? HAVE THEY SEEN DAREDEVIL?

Elysium Shrugged

I just got back from a showing of Elysium, the new Neill Blomkamp film, he did District 9 for those who don't recall. I don't know what it is about this director but whenever he releases a film I have a bad day. I watched District 9 on a day that had so many things go wrong I went to the theater as a refuge more than a source of entertainment. Today wasn't a particularly good day either, but it's more that my mood is sour and has been for about a week, I can't really tell why, and that's not the point.

When watching Elysium I couldn't help thinking of Atlas Shrugged, a story that shares the exact same plot but from the other angle. The smart and rich people of the world, the 1%, decide they are sick of dealing with all of the people they don't like, they don't like being told what to do by governments or rules who they think they know better than and so they leave. They find a place where nobody can bug them and they go away and the rest of the world suffers for it. Sort of like a kid running away from home, you'll be sorry when I'm gone and then you'll respect me type of thing. So the world falls apart, just barely able to keep everyone from killing everyone else, it's sort of a society but one in which everything is terrible, meanwhile the rich are all enjoying themselves in there little valley.

I've always thought it was a dumb idea.

If the rich were to do this than other smart people would make there way into those places of power which had been vacated, if the king decides to leave his kingdom others will rule instead and he will lose his kingdom. The whole idea also seems to discount that there are smart people with good ideas in the lower classes of society, who just don't have the resources of the rich to get noticed, sure a bunch of rich people could do that, and for the sake of the story lets say they all do, at most the chaos would last a generation before new people would rise and start doing things that would threaten the rich, and eventually remove them.  It doesn't take a super rich person to make a government run, which this world seems to lack. You can tell that the director hates the ideas of Atlas Shrugged but at the same time he does buy into it's premise that if the rich just up and left, everything would suck and there is no way that the poor could or would ever pick up the pieces and find a way to make it work instead of just settling for living in a terrible world of near anarchy and chaos. It makes no sense and it admits the central point which the movie is against, that the rich are amazing people who deserve everything they have, and that the poor are less than they are and also deserve what little they get because they are incapable of doing anything good.

The problem I have with Elysium is that the main point of the film is that the rich are just dicks. They have this tech that can cure anything, but they don't share that tech with the rest of the world....why? I have no idea. They even have ships, multiple ships full of these things, but they have no intention of ever using it to help the people they seem to be designed to help. Elysium isn't just a gated community in the sky, it's a gated community that is withholding the cure for cancer from the rest of the world, and shooting down those who would reach for it. Makes no sense, for one thing there is a lot of money to be made in a machine that can cure anything, why would they not want to make that money? Also what are they doing up there the whole time, we see the same Asian woman sunbathing a couple of times and there is a cocktail party at one point, but what is the point of these peoples lives? Elysium itself is underdeveloped as a place and the people who live there are never given a chance to be people, they are just mannequins wearing sweater vests holding cocktails, surely these people have lives and opinions on things which are worth exploring, but we never get to know any of it.

 Can the rich be dicks? Yeah, I work for them, they live in a different world most of the time, their expectations are way different from those of the rest of the world because for some of them it's rare to be told no or want something they can't have, there are also some of them who are very nice and normal. Are the Rich dickish enough to willingly let people die from cancer and every other malady? I don't know any group of people who is willingly that dickish.