I'm in my quiet season of being down to one job, so I've been catching up on some shows and movies that have been building up in my queue. While I'm more of a series guy at this point, I decided to knock out the three Max movies I'd been wanting to watch.
Last night I watched Mickey 17. It's about a worker in space named Mickey, an expendable type who can continually die and then be 're-printed' as many times as needed. Mickey 17 nearly dies after a terrible fall, and since it's assumed that he died, on his way back to the ship Mickey 18 takes his place. All along the way a egomaniacal ex-congressman who is leading the space expedition/religious cult wants to destroy the mostly friendly inhabitants of the planet at which they have arrived. In the end Mickey 18 blows him and the blowhard up and everyone lives happily ever after.
Today I endured the Brutalist, a brutal 3+ hour movie about a Hungarian architect trying to rebuild his life in the United States. Actually I only made it through the first two hours before I started skipping ahead, but I got the gist, that our hero gets raped by his boss, becomes a heroin addict, and watches his wife suffer before he finds international success and is celebrated in old age by a Holocaust-surviving niece who was once mute but then kinda regains her voice.
The final movie this evening was a brand-new release, Mountainhead. Four tech bros, with real-life counterparts like Elon Musk and Jeff Zuckerburg the most obvious, go for a boys' weekend at the poorest one's new Utah ski mansion. Along the way the world is melting down because of the deepfakes made possible one of them, they have lots of bad quasi-philosophical discussions about how to creats coups to overthrow the government and push us towards a post-human life before deciding that such things are too much trouble, and the one with the slightest bit of a conscience about what they are doing is almost murdered by the other three. The four survive the weekend, the world seems to regain a sense of balance, and they go back to their crappy and self-important lives.
Whatever the quality of movies these were, I'm always a bit of a believer that movies reflect a lot about the world in which we live. Maybe it's just me and what I watch (very possible), but it seems quite possible that these movies are so dark because we live in a dark time. I'm starting to think that we have never really recovered from COVID, that maybe the final symptom of that disease was not something physical but something very social. We are paranoid, angry, and for all the talk from the pseudo-religious right, we really don't like people much at all. Maybe going into quarantine zapped out of us the social skills we'd taken generations to build. Maybe coming out of quarantine was never a great idea, that perhaps we should have simply loaded our souls into the matrix and found a way to stay there.
I think I do better with shorter shows. Maybe the White Lotus or Veep or Stranger Things has its own form of darkness, but at least 45 minutes doesn't affect me nearly as long as 2+ hours of troublesome thoughts.
