Postsecret review 4

This week there are a good amount of interesting secrets, so here is my review of them.

"Why oh why do we have to be cousins? What do we do now?" over a picture of two people holding hands. From Arrested Development: this

"I'm afraid I'm smoking away my future." with a drawing of a marijuana leaf. If you're worried about it, you probably are indeed smoking away your future. 

"In attempts of getting her youth back, my mom wears thongs. It grosses me out!" Well, I assume you aren't actually looking at your mother when she's just wearing thongs and no pants? So it's more the idea that grosses this person out. But you can't control other people's underwear choices, so it's probably best to just let this go. 

"I feel like a failure as a parent because I can't afford to bring my daughter to Disney. (other side) Forever stuck in Pennsylvania" I think more context is needed to accurately judge this - if the daughter has strongly expressed interest in going to Disney then it makes more sense, but if this parent just feels like taking their kid to Disney is some kind of goal they think would make them a better parent, then it's sort of silly. There are plenty of ways to be a good parent that don't involve Disney. I'm not so sure about there being particularly interesting things in Pennsylvania (Hershey Park, maybe??), but I do know that there are interesting things in Maryland and DC, which is not as far away as Disney.

"I've always wanted to find a dead body" Now this one I can get behind. I also somewhat have the desire to find a dead body. I think it could be interesting if that happened to me. Although depending on the state of the dead body it could also be some degreee of  disturbing.

"People always talk about how college was the best time of their lives but it kind of sucks." Fair enough. Especially when being 

"I've been losing things recently...... in my tiny apartment..." Maybe someone is breaking in and taking the things, or maybe it's dementia or something.

"Almost everyone in my office reminds me of someone famous. It makes me wonder who I remind them of." This one is a nice secret (although it doesn't exactly scream "secret" material - as in, this doesn't seem like something you'd necessarily need to keep secret. Maybe from the coworkers in this scenario so as not to seem possibly weird, but certainly you could tell your friends and stuff) because I also look at people sometimes and think they look like other people, which sometimes only I can see the resemblance to. 

"a fear: what if my art never means anything to anyone but myself?" I think that if a person happens to see an artwork, they can ascribe their own meaning to it. I guess not necessarily every artwork will cause someone to see meaning in it, but if you display/share your art to other people, the chance is higher that someone who sees it will decide that it means something to them. Like Andy Warhol. Imagine all the different things that people think the soup can paintings mean! And they're just ordinary soup cans!

"None of the artwork made sense, but being there with you did." I would like to think that I can at least attempt to make sense of any artwork that I see, unlike this person. Try me. 

That's it for this week's secrets, and look at me, getting this post done in a timely manner in relation to when the secrets were posted!

Documentary aggragate

I've watched a couple of ducmentaries over the last few days so here are my thoughts on those. Tomorrow I'll hope to do a new installation of my postsecret review feature; I skipped last week's because they were all Father's day related secrets which was sort of boring - no variety. Anyways, onto the documentaries.

They were about subject matters that I find particularly interesting: drug addiction and nuclear weapons. The first documentary was about nuclear weapons and it was titled Command and Control. It was about something I hadn't known about previously, which was an accident about 35 years ago (approximately; I don't remember the exact date) with a nuclear weapon. The nuclear weapon was in a facility, an error occurred, and it nearly exploded. So the documentary was about the dangers of having nuclear weapons because things can go wrong and there is a risk of them accidentally exploding where they're stored instead of being dropped on an enemy. It made me ponder about the idea of nuclear war with [take your pick of hostile nations].

The second documentary was titled Dr. Feelgood and it was about a doctor who overprescribed painkillers and was convicted basically of being a drug dealer.  He doesn't really seem to think that what he had done was particularly wrong - he wasn't worried that there were people getting pills from him which they later sold instead of using them legitimately. I think that doctors do have some responsibility to NOT recklessly prescribe painkillers because it certainly can lead to problems - addiction and all that.

I liked both of these documentaries so it's nice that they were on Netflix even though Netflix doesn't necessarily have a particularly good selection of the things I want to watch.

Children

I was having some thoughts (did I mention this in the past?? I don't remember) about the idea of having children, which is something that I don't want to do. Not now or in the future. I'm proud that I have managed to not get knocked up unintentionally, something that not everyone can say. If theoretically I were to have children, I think they would be an absolute pain and a hassle. The most having children (not the physical act of having them - conceiving, being pregnant and giving birth: no way) I think I could manage would be a situation like the kind that happens when people get divorced and end up with shared custody of the child(ren). You have the kid(s) for awhile, maybe a few days a week or something, and then back off to the ex-hubby's house they go. I think maybe, just maybe, I could deal with a situation like that. But it's not exactly accepted to marry someone, acquire a child somehow along the way, then divorce them so that you only have to deal with the child for a fraction of the time. In order to avoid me actually having to physically have children, I guess the way to acquire a child would be that the person I theoretically (in this scenario) marry already has a kid from a previous relationship, or to adopt a kid. Both of which aren't completely simple and straightforward matters. Having a kid the normal way is more straightforward but that's absolutely not something I want to do. 

I think a cat, or possibly multiple cats, is the right level of maintenance for me. They provide some companionship but are not particularly needy and can take care of themselves for the most part. A cat is nowhere near as high maintenance as an actual human child. 

Ooh, I thought of another theoretical scenario where I wouldn't have to deal too much with having a kid. It would be that I am rich and have a surrogate mother carry the baby, and then hire a nanny to raise the child most of the time. And I guess my spouse could get involved with the kid if they wanted to. But I would only have to get involved with it on my terms, because everything else the nanny would take care of. I don't necessarily condone this as a good way to raise children, but it's a theoretical scenario that I'm sure has happened with other people. 

Or yet another theoretical scenario: if I were a man, it would be much easier to have a kid but not have to deal with it that much. Plenty of men abandon their children or just aren't that involved with taking care of them. And if you're a man you don't have to be pregnant for 9 months. Or I could be in a lesbian relationship where my wife is the one who carries the pregnancy. 

Realistically, I think the most children having I'll do is possibly being an aunt, or maybe a godmother or something. That's kind of odd to think about. It's probably not going to happen anytime soon, unless [redacted]. 

Assorted topics

One thing that came to mind the other evening while I was watching a movie was the similarity between a scene in Requiem for a Dream and the poster for the movie An Education: 

Note the posing. Interesting, right? If I were to make a movie or something, it would be interesting to incorporate a pose like this as an allusion/homage to these movies/scenes. 

Also, I read a news today about a new record set by a Canadian sniper in Iraq, who shot and killed a terrorist from a distance of over 2 miles. Something else, eh? It made me think of some movies that I've seen recently that involved snipers. One was a Jason Bourne movie with Matt Damon in which a sniper is attempting to kill Bourne. Every so often there would be a scene of the sniper training his rifle on Jason Bourne. The other one was that war movie with Peter Sarsgaard, which was interesting. So, my thoughts began to go to the thought of what if I got killed by a sniper? I have no idea why that would happen, but I thought about that prospect. It made me want to close my blinds and get away from the windows so that theoretically a sniper would not be able to see me and kill me. I imagined a bullet ripping through my bedroom window and killing me as I sat/laid in bed. Eek! As of now, there is no plausible reason for a sniper to kill me, but here are some possible theoretical reasons: a) a sniper serial killer b) the democratic government of the US has been overthrown and is now a totalitarian regime, and I am a wanted political criminal. Thus, the regime decides to send a sniper to kill me. I do wonder how I come up with these ideas sometimes. Let's hope that neither of those theoretical scenarios come to pass and my experience with snipers stays relegated to watching them in movies or reading news about them. 

While we're on this topic, I guess I should mention again how it theoretically could be interesting to be a sniper. If I had to be in a war, I think I would want to be a sniper because I like the precision of it, I guess. I would not want to be a translator like the poor guy in Saving Private Ryan, even though in other situations I might not mind being a translator. Regardless, I'd rather not be in a war at all, or if I weren't a sniper, it would be interesting to be a journalist covering a war although I could still get killed doing that. Anderson has done a bit of covering wars. It's too bad he hasn't done more of that recently, I think. They've got him covering politics all the time. That's pretty much all anyone's covering these days. 

Movie review: The Shining

(alternatively titled: No More Stanley Kubrick)

Yet another movie watched to add to the list. This one was mediocre. It wasn't horribly bad, but it also wasn't particularly good or spectacular or anything. I officially don't understand what the deal with Stanley Kubrick is; this is the second movie of his that I've seen. Good movies make you think "My life is better/more enriched/etc for having seen that movie" and mediocre ones make you think "I could've spent those [length of movie] minutes doing something else" and not regretted it. This one was certainly in the mediocre category to me.

Apparently it was based off of a Stephen King novel, and he's a famous author. Maybe the book was better but the movie doesn't really inspire me to go read it. This movie reminded me of the book In Cold Blood in some ways: in that book, when I read it, I was so impatient for the murders to actually happen since you know they're going to happen, but it takes awhile for the book to get to that part. I think I enjoyed In Cold Blood somewhat more than I enjoyed this movie though.

The movie is about a man, who is a writer, and who goes off with his wife and young son to an isolated hotel to take care of it for the winter. One of my questions is why wasn't the son in school? He seemed like he was maybe school aged. Naturally, unfortunate events come to pass. Apparently, this movie is considered to be a horror movie which I was not aware of prior to watching it. I don't really want to say it was a complete waste of time, but it kind of was. I was not particularly horrified/scared by this movie, for the record. It takes place when they still used typewriters, so there are some scenes of the writer man working on his book or whatever and the typewriter clacking along. It reminded me of All The President's Men, which also had a good deal of typewriting noises in it.

In the course of staying at the hotel, the man's nastier side begins to come out and it culminates in him trying to murder his family with an ax. Fun (not). This is all mentioned in the summary of the movie on Netflix/in the little thing that Google shows when you look up a movie. So really you don't exactly even need to watch the movie because there's not really much more to it than that. The actress who played the wife was kind of funky looking; she had really large eyelids and long teeth. It wasn't exactly conventionally attractive.

All in all, I don't really have a ton to say about this movie because it was quite mediocre and not particularly good/impressive. I wouldn't really recommend it. From what I've seen, I think I can safely conclude that Stanley Kubrick is overrated. And I'm not going to be watching any more movies by him, probably. I think I ought to get back to watching movies with actors that I like in them since I think I'd probably enjoy that more. On that note, theoretically, if a remake of this movie were to be done, I think Peter Sarsgaard and Chloe Sevigny would be interesting in the main roles. Theoretically.

Movie review: Devil's Knot

Like I have said in the past, I am on a roll with watching movies. I am still kind of cinematically cheating on my other favorite actors in favor of another movie with Colin Firth in it. This one, in addition to having a number of actors that I know of in it, was about a true crime/unresolved mystery, which is another subject matter that particularly interests me.

The crime dramatized in this movie is known as the West Memphis Three, and I've seen it mentioned on r/unresolvedmysteries although it's not one that I'm familiar with. I read a quick summary of the case prior to watching the movie, although it would be interesting to now go back and read more in depth about the actual case.

The case has to do with 3 young boys who were found murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas in the 1990s. The movie was released in 2013, so it's fairly recent. According to the credits, it was filmed entirely in Georgia. This is the second true crime movie I can recall watching; the other one was Zodiac which was underwhelming. I have watched other movies about fictional crimes, and the mobster movie which is technically a true crime, but I personally categorize mobsters in a different section than general murderers/serial killers.

This movie reminded me of the other movies To Kill a Mockingbird and Jagten (The Hunt, a Danish movie) in that one of the themes was the prosecution of (possibly) innocent people for crimes. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus defends a black man accused of a crime, in Jagten, a man is accused and shunned by his neighbors for supposedly committing a sex crime against a child. In Devil's Knot, three teenaged boys are tried for the murders of the young children although they may not be guilty. Colin Firth plays a character somewhat akin to Atticus in that he's trying to prevent the boys from getting convicted and sentenced to death. The movie was categorized as a courtroom drama in Netflix, which is an apt description and one that sits nicely with me due to my affinity for Law and Order.

Aside from Colin Firth, Dane DeHaan and Mirielle Enos were in this movie. I don't think I've really watched anything else with Dane DeHaan in it (he was in one episode years ago of Law and Order SVU as a suspect, I think) but I don't mind seeing him since he's fairly nice looking and reminiscent of Leonardo DiCaprio a little bit. Mirielle Enos was in the show The Killing as one of the detectives; this role of hers was quite different in a number of ways. As the detective, her character was always wearing sweaters, no/minimal makeup, and wore her hair in a low ponytail. Her character in this movie was all made up, wore tank tops, and hair in an updo. Plus she had a southern accent in this movie, as did Colin Firth a little bit. I don't think his American accent is particularly bad; it was perfectly decent but I feel like it sounded maybe a little deeper than his regular voice. I haven't highly familiarized myself with his voice though, so I can't say for sure. Probably if I were more familiar with/used to him speaking in a British accent, I'd find the American accent in this movie to be a little distracting, perhaps.

As far as on my list to next watch, I've got a few things. Most/some are Peter Sarsgaard related things, one of which is Boys Don't Cry, which is also a true crime movie, actually. Peter plays the murderer. I still would not mind watching more Colin Firth movies, so I'll look through the other 6 on Netflix and see if anything strikes my fancy. I had wanted to watch The Stanford Prison Experiment movie and just got to doing that today, so that's no longer on my to-watch list. Oh. Inception is another one; I have it recorded on the DVR but since it was on TV I'm pretty sure it's probably been edited a little bit at least. And The Wolf of Wall Street, and a rewatch on the big tv of Shattered Glass, which I now own on DVD. Fun, right?

Movie review: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Currently, there is a fun set of movies on Netflix. One of them just was added today, the one I'm reviewing here. The other one that goes nicely with it is Experimenter; they are both about psychological experiments that are now considered to be unethical.

I had been waiting awhile for this movie to be on Netflix as I remembered reading that it was being added in June, and apparently today was the specific day. So I got to watching it. The only actor that I recognized in this movie was Ezra Miller; he played Prisoner 8612. I don't know how closely the movie reflects what actually happened in the experiment, but regardless it was interesting. However, I think that I liked Experimenter somewhat better because it was... I don't know, somewhat broader in scope? It was mostly about Milgram's obedience experiments, but it also went into things past that. Plus, it has to be mentioned that I enjoyed Peter Sarsgaard's performance in it. That's where it all began for me. I would say that The Stanford Prison Experiment was a bit duller of a movie than Experimenter. 

Speaking of Peter's performance as Milgram, I felt that the actor who played the pyschology professor conducing the experiment in The Stanford Prison experiment portrayed the man (Philip Zimbardo) in a more nefarious way than Milgram was portrayed in Experimenter. He seemed to almost relish, in a way, the sadism that the guards began to enact on the prisoners. Milgram, on the other hand, seemed to take a more objective perspective towards his obedience experiments and did not seem to overtly enjoy the way that the teachers shocked the learners when they were ordered to. Although of course this might just be chalked up to personal bias in that Peter Sarsgaard is one of my favorite actors now. But at the time I first watched the movie, I had never heard of him before, so I can't really say. I would be curious to know if other people without my bias towards Peter Sarsgaard would come to the same conclusion about these two people as they were portrayed in the movies.

As far as the experiments go, I think the Stanford Prison Experiment was more unethical because the guards were actually inflicting various unpleasant acts towards the prisoners, as opposed to the teacher in the Milgram experiment only being made to think he was shocking the learner, who was actually left unharmed. However, they both have similarities in that they involved the question of how far will people go (the guards, the teachers) when put in certain positions. They both have to do with authority, although in somewhat different ways. The Milgram experiment was focused on obedience to authority, whereas the prison experiment was focused on how people would abuse authority when given it. I am kind of curious about how far the prison experiment would have gone had they played it out for the intended 2 weeks, instead of stopping it after only 6 days. I belive that it took place a number of years after Milgram did his experiment, which is kind of interesting because they both are considered to be unethical. If Milgram's experiment was unethical, why/how did Philip Zimbardo come to do his experiment, which I think was more unethical?

I think it would be interesting if obedience experiments were done today, but with the task being different: what different things would people obey or refuse to obey doing?  I'm currently reading the report about the obedience experiments, so it might be interesting to read the report about the prison experiment as well..