The Shape of Water
A charming fairy tale, well told. Not extraordinary, or exceptional, the Oscar Nominations told you that, but sometimes you just need a break from "Film as Art" and this was it.
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- Category: Film
The Life Coach
About 12 or 14 years ago, when I worked at the HP building in downtown Calgary - Tech Support, I had a manager. She was a big woman, maybe 400 pounds big, she was dating a thin, small bearded guy, they had met on the job a week before I started, he was already moved in. Her desk was covered in pictures of her kids, she had a few, various exes, she would start to explain but then taper off after a minute or so, it was confusing even for her. They were fucking weird. But that whole job was weird, and people that work in Tech Support - well, they're pretty fucking weird too, so all in all with all the weirdness she only stood out for a moment or two then fell into the background noise that was the idiocy of the blind and the stupid trying to lead the disinterested through the rudiments of troubleshooting and fixing their own computers.
Anyways, the company was shit, and every 6 months or so we'd find ourselves taken over by another company, new handbooks and rules, new staff, and on one of the later takeovers the manager and her lover found themselves redundant. They had a couple of weeks left to work - and so my manager, she let out her little plan. She wasn't going to do IT or tech support anymore, no, she was going to follow her passion and become a "Life Coach". She went around the cubicles of all the employees ("Team Members") and handed out her business card. It said "Life Coach" on it, and if you visited her website you were treated to daily inspirational quotes and ways that she thought that you - as a human being - could be more productive.
It was completely fucked up. I mean, really really fucked up. I mean, you'd look at this person for a minute and hire a life coach just to change the dire circumstances that had somehow landed you in a room with her, the thought of going to her to in any way try and gain life skills or motivation was preposterous.
When finally she was made redundant she'd drop 'round the call center every few weeks to check on us, she was a lousy manager but since leaving she'd decided to take us all under her wing, give us the benefit of her life skills and mentorship, and you'd look up from the desk with that "WTF" glint in your eye and you'd catch somebody else's eye that got it as well - nobody would speak it out loud, we were all very corporate, and a lot of them plain and simple didn't get how fucked up it was, they probably checked her website every day, they probably thought she had her shit together and wanted to be like her. It was that fucked up a work environment. And it makes me laugh now, 'cause out here, well, there's a big market for "Life Coaches" and they're always the same sort of people, it'd be like choosing a Schizophrenic Psychiatrist or Terminally Ill nutritionist who balanced their diet at McDonald's...
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- Category: People
Oldboy, Holy Motors, The Killing of a Sacred Deer
I've been using my time off to catch up on a few movies. I'd like to say "wisely", but the movies, they've been all of them, every one, the stuff of nightmares.
The first, Oldboy, Korean, dark, I mean way-dark, black-dark, pitch-dark...Good, well acted, some great ideas, but - fucking hell, was it ever dark.
The second, Holy Motors, a variety of Tableaux set in and around Paris. Moments of brilliance, and - of course - of bleak and unrelenting darkness. And a curious - Theme? - if that's the word, brilliantly acted, the fuel of nightmares. I'm still not well, coughing, waking up in the night, I don't need this...
And finally The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Brilliant, savage - and - hey, do I gotta say it? Dark. Fucking bloody hell. In this instance, however, I forgive the darkness, the movie - the most linear and understandable of anything I've watched for a while, but still not even a ray of sunshine - that said, admirable in it's cinematography, execution, in the darkest of personal moments, clipped dialogue ...
...but at the moment I need to find something a bit lighter, a bit more cheery, not necessarily mindless - do the two always have to be mutually exclusive? But I'd like something that rather lifts my spirits for a change, I'm open to recommendations...
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- Category: Film
Yoann Bourgeois "La mécanique de l'histoire"
The Mechanics of History...
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- Category: Ideas & Questions
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