Art,Books and Movies Review: 2019–01–05
This is a bunch of personal notes about what I read or saw since start of the year. This is not aimed to be particularly interesting for anyone else than me, but if you want, read on :)
Ocean’s 8
I had not seen this movie in 2018, and watched it while traveling by plane. It was interesting, but definitely put a doubt in me on we society achieved in terms of security in the last few years. It seems really easy for a bunch of thieves to go on and steal a supposedly hyper-protected necklace. When I watched it, I thought the security was actually really bad, but then thought that people don’t always particularly pay attention to security in the first place, and what I thought to be bad security was actually perhaps standard security. If it is the case, we are not safe. It made me rethink how I was handling security on my day to day activities. In 2019, I will take steps to improve it.
The coddling of the American mind
I finished that book in the same plane I watched Ocean’s 8. Where the arguments are really convincing is that I actually have family members belonging to the iGen and I can find some traits in them described in the book. I also found that the universities changed, and even workplaces are now different with regards to exchanging ideas. In a way though, I believe the solution of the observed problem is quite weak. In particular, it seems that parents raising their kids today are actually making the best personal choice by “coddling” them, and it is hard to see easily an alternative to it, despite what the book describes as means for an alternative education.
Black mirror: Bandersnatch
*Spoiler alert*: I am going to talk about the movie… If you don’t want to know anything about it, skip this part.
There is quite a lot of buzz around this movie, the first interactive one from Netflix. I watched the movie, and what is interesting is that the movie itself is about a programmer coding a game of which the principle is essentially the same as the interactive movie. We are then in the middle ground between movie and video game here. The movie also goes towards the question of the freedom of choice: are we making our own choice? And I had the feeling going towards the end of the movie that indeed I had very little choices in the direction of the movie. Many choices I made ended up badly, but somehow didn’t end the movie, as the main character kept waking up from a bad dream where he was making that decisions. So after a while I just needed to make other choices to keep going. Somehow I didn’t feel like the movie could become vastly different if I made different choices. Maybe I am wrong, that is the good part about it, I cannot be sure unless I watch the movie a lot of times that basically the same main events happen. Overall, I was a bit disappointed by that lack of choice, but the movie in itself was fun to watch.
Et tu trouveras le trésor qui dort en toi (Laurent Gounelle)
I haven’t finished this fiction yet (I am about 2/3 done). The story is about an atheist that becomes more in touch with the messages from different religions, especially Christianism, and experiences what it means via different small adventures and interviews of religious people, as well as a lot of reading and citing the Bible. It is good so far, I would say it is aimed at explaining religion to non religious people, as some of the points looked painfully obvious to me, I thought maybe it was because I was a little bit familiar with the Bible in the first place.
There are a few interesting ideas that are worth digging deeper into and that I should experience myself. I like how a lot of links (implicitly or explicitly) are made with other religions and even self help books and motivational speakers. Additionally, it shows that some ideas could look obvious or common, but are actually deeper and can’t be expressed easily.
A weak point is that many secondary characters are really depicted as not-so-smart and as if they couldn’t develop any thought on their own. In a way it is not challenging enough for the main character, but that could always change in the last 100 pages that are left to read.
Harvard Business Review on solitude
Not necessarily what one would call art, but I read a series of articles in HBR regarding solitude (in the work place in particular). This was not only interesting, but made me realize of a few anti-social patterns I follow in my own workplace, such as looking at my phone instead of talking to people, or even keep headphones at all time so no one can even attempt to enter in communication with me. I will take some steps to be more sociable at work. As I see it, it can only be beneficial.
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