As amazing as it is that technology has allowed us all to become more connected than ever, it’s even more amazing that we’ve chosen instead to become more disconnected from what’s going on in the world.
From tonight’s Daily Show interview with Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent for CBS News (and an amazing woman in every sense of the word):
Hello world, it’s been awhile. I’ve moved to LA and started a new job, and I guess blogging has kinda fallen on the back burner. Something else that’s been neglected is the joy of cinema appreciation. But of course you can only go so long without googling new and upcoming film news, and this tidbit came up yesterday: Steven Soderbergh, director of Traffic – one of my favorites — has been working on what looks to be a pretty time-consuming project about every scruffy college student’s favorite revolutionary — Che Guevara.
If you’ve ever seen Election — the high-school movie with Reese Witherspoon as a blowhard running for class president — this mash-up made by Slate is too good. It montages Hillary Clinton clips with the scene where Tracy Flick, the uncontested candidate, learns that the school’s genial jock (guess who) is entering the race. Although I guess in this case there’s no Matthew Broderick to blame.
There will be blood. And by the end of the final scene, it is unmistakably clear what the film’s title was setting you up for. As you can probably guess, blood is one of this movie’s central themes, flowing like a stream of crude oil through the dark soul of our villain-protagonist, Daniel Plainview. Indeed, the finale scene invites you to draw parallels to scenes throughout the movie in which Plainview hacks voraciously at the earth to draw out the precious liquid. Like a drug addict, he needs his fixes of anything — oil or blood — to satisfy a compulsive thirst for victory.
In this world of ours today, we’ve learned that the only way to really figure out a political candidate is to approach his record, his platform, and his proposals and break them all down in order to get at his true motivations, his character, his convictions.
Until now. Never before in my lifetime do I remember a politician able to convey such a consistent, forceful moral vision without needing to go through the tired and cynical procedure. The more his critics and opponents try to undermine him in this way, the more it seems to backfire. As a jaded idealist, I was ready to throw up my hands and surrender to politics-as-usual, but this fascinating man’s relentless optimism is becoming a completely unexpected, radical affront to our prevailing paradigm of national division. Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, black, white … who would’ve thunk it, but we have a legitimate contender who finds these labels irrelevant.
GO OBAMA!
(I’ve been swept off my feet …)
