During a brief introduction, the lady of the cinema told us that it used to be quite hard for Hollywood film makers to find funding for a movie about Iraq. But in that same Hollywood, it’s not that hard to finance a film that ridicules new wave and hippie culture, proves debuting director Grant Heslov.
The men who stare at goats combines the harsh nature of military discipline with dancing, flowers and sun ceremonies. It’s about a special unit within the American army, that is granted permission to try out alternative ways to fight the enemy. Colonel Bill Jango (played by Jeff “The Dude” Bridges) trains his people to ‘fight the mind’.
The film features great actors, including George Clooney and Ewan McGregor, there’s a good laugh now and then, yet I cannot recommend watching it if you haven’t yet.
‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ That’s what Michael Pollan starts his ‘eater’s manifesto’ with. According to Pollan, to eat properly means to avoid processed foods and eat whole foods instead. He takes us to civilizations such as the Aborigines in Australia and the Indians in Peru, showing that they do not eat foods with ‘low-fat’, ‘added vitamins’ or ‘extra omega-3’, yet they do not suffer from western diseases such as obesity and diabetes. The book does not only address several problems that emerged with the industrialization of food, it also makes clear what and how to eat.
Up in the air is a film about a guy who spends most of his time in hotels, airports and on planes. It tells the story of Ryan Bingham, who has a tough occupation. He fires people for a living. This job requires him to fly 320 days a year, which is in itself an interesting fact to make a film about.
Jason Reitman, who previously made ‘Juno’ and ‘Thank you for smoking’ made another quite enjoyable film. It looks gorgeous, and George Clooney —who plays Bingham— does a reasonably good job. Having said that, I think the story goes up to a point where it is just way too sentimental. The tough guy appears to be romantic after all. Or is that inevitable for a film that is pretty much about loyalty?
An interesting story from last week’s New York Times caught my eye today. It is about fashion chains destroying new, unsold clothing for efficiency reasons. The article quotes a woman who apparently found hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart. They had holes punched through it by a machine. She also quite regularly found H&M clothing: ‘gloves with the fingers cut off’ and ‘men’s jackets, slashed across the body and arms’.
Marco Arment comments on the article on his blog:
Many stores have arrangements to return any unsold or outdated merchandise to their suppliers for credit. With this arrangement, the stores take little risk, so suppliers can convince them to stock new or short-lived items. For items of significant value, like electronics, it works as you’d expect: the stores just ship them back.
But many items aren’t worth shipping back, so the stores and suppliers have a wasteful but effective arrangement: the stores simply tell the suppliers how many of each item didn’t sell, the suppliers give the stores credit for them, and the stores must destroy them.
Yes, that is indeed what he’s saying: ‘must destroy them’. He further tells that he himself used to work at a store where they ‘had to cut (perfectly good) USB cables in half’ and ‘scratch the software CDs with a box cutter’. I’m glad Marco blogged this, because I could not really regard the NYT story as true. But seemingly it is.
According to Marco, ‘it’s hard to come up with a better solution that’s realistic, practical, and economical for the involved parties’. Because in the end, it is all about profit. Oh, oh, what a bad, bad world we’re in.
It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job, made even harder by a broken satellite that allows no live communications home. Taped messages are all Sam can send and receive.
His time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their daughter Eve, in only a few short weeks. Finally, he will leave the isolation of “Sarang”, the moon base that has been his home for so long. He will finally have someone to talk. While on the moon, he can only talk to Gerty, the base’s all-knowing AI (“I’m here to keep you safe, Sam. I want to help you.”).
This is roughly the story line of Moon, Duncan Jones’ first feature film. I watched it in the cinema a week ago and I can highly recommend it. Moon is well-written, surprising and thought-provoking. Sam Rockwell, who plays Sam, does an outstanding job. It’s lonely out there in space.
Jones puts the question forward what corporations can get away with, without locals or human rights groups to keep an eye on things. “What would they do to a lone, blue-collar caretaker on a base on the far side of the Moon?”, he asks. It’s an interesting perspective.
Moon stills screens at a couple of Dutch cinemas.
