I hadn't heard of this film, or its reviewer before, but I agree with almost every darned statement made in the review. (Except for basing the relative intelligence of Mexicans and US-Americans on the quality of conversations with each country's cab-drivers.) (Especially since a lot of US cab-drivers are immigrants themselves.)
Give it a read.
Done.
6 comments:
Looks like an excellent film, thwap. Thanks for the trip.
Owen,
The review is better.
Stuff about how the rich honestly believe that by making things better for themselves they'll somehow make things better for all of us.
How there's to be no ordinary people "taking back" the US-AMERICAN dream because it was never theirs in the first place.
That was a really interesting review. Thanks.
I could agree with a lot of it, too. My big hope for Occupy was that it would have some alternatives to capitalism.
I think he is painting all young people with too wide a brush. I see young people building collectives and getting out of the system and sharing what they are learning about getting out of the system with others.
I do think there has been a really grand failure of imagination. Some days I get a glimmer of hope that there are stirrings of imagination. And some days I wonder if this is not the final march. The real shame of that is everything we will take with us.
karen,
I think only a minority of young people are deliberately exiting the system and only a tiny minority of them are doing so in any genuinely revolutionary way.
I think too many imagine that not working, buying second-had clothes and playing video games constitutes genuine disengagement.
Something that connects with people still in the mainstream, that uses a language that the mainstream understands, and yet still promises revolutionary change is needed.
Recognizing the humanity of workers within their workplaces and giving them the equivalence of citizen rights within those workplaces would be an example of that.
That review was excellent. So many scathing points and references to great writers who, as he says, emerged from the US despite the inherent anti-intellectualism, pro-greed motivations behind the "American Dream".
Do they even read Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller et al in school anymore? (And that's just the white dudes questioning the US American Dream - let's include Shirley Jackson, Richard Wright, Harlan Ellison, Nikki Giovanni, Harper Lee and Maya Angelou). I like pop culture as much as the next person but when I was in high school, we did tackle large themes, critical ideas, works that gave us a foundation to question the world around us. Then again, I gravitated towards the arts at a time when it was more valued than it is today but still played second fiddle to the sciences. But even science is under attack these days :-(
Rob Ford is the grandson of Ronald Reagan.
It's the greedy, manipulating the stupid, and we're "elitists" if we point that out.
Well fuck that.
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