Michael
Almereyla does more than draw the viewer’s attention to what acting
approximates in the 2017 Majorie Prime. One of his major themes is the price of
the burdens we carry, encased in a rather skeptical presentation of what we
leave behind in the residuals of virtual reality. Senility and suicide present
themselves here beyond being an issue of sociological concern. Both as a
condition, (dementia) and a destructive act overriding survival (corresponding
suicides) Almereyla presents a family stifled and suffocating on itself. Geena
Davis, never entirely impressive as the Vitamin D American girl caught in a
vortex through association, in her A list days, (The Fly, Thelma and Louise), has
mastered the projection of a crabby 60 year old who knows the runaway train is
coming, and sends out her warning signals with a certain degree of fatalism. As
it is present in the pilot of The Exorcist in her solicitation of the priest,
it is present in Majorie Prime in subtler fashion, only in this world Geena’s
character is a troubled mother with an equally problematic mother daughter
relationship. Tim Robbins, as he does in Code 46, carries the onus of being
surly and frustrated vanilla, filling in all these melancholy lacunae until it’s
his turn to linger. Hamm has to project being a lifelike composite of a husband
we never knew, and almost as Spielberg does in his mawkish afterword in A.I.,
Michael leaves us with an open ended question about empathetic software
mimicking the ghost of the human spirit. We aren’t informed as to whether or
not the primes are voluntary, but each character goes through the motions,
rebellious resignation in tow. These moral obligations around virtual memory already
resonate here and now: Google has rules about what happens if payments for the
domain lag, everyone has an opinion about the erasure of Gawker as a
distinctive, now archival, media voice, questions swirling about how Peter Thiel defines his libertarian beliefs against a worrisome, and mighty,
plutocratic streak. Neither longevity nor voluntarily taking one’s own life
appear palatable in Almereyla’s, and by extension, Robert Redford’s vision. To
qualify a previous post, I realize the aging potentate of Barefoot in the Park is probably not micro-managing Sundance Studios,
but I read cues in this project easily attributable to what we know about
Redford’s public person. The column he wrote after Newman’s death stayed with
me, in a particularly masculine no nonsense manner.
If we look at where we are headed, through Almereyla's lens and other dystopian minded thinkers, libertarian outcry, if not defeated outright, is always compromised. Kokesh, the boy soldier idealist, envisions a free market utopia, but still plays cowboys and indians with an apparently zealous authority. Harassing stoners, intimidating militant quadriplegics comes easy; mass murder not so much. Nick Gillespie doesn't know where the total lack of boundary and freedom collide; (little did I realize Nick and I have far too much in common) Austin Petersen is aiming for a synthesis so the establishment can satiate his political ambition. How do we all fit under the same tent? More importantly, personal liberty is elusive, as an empirical matter. I need not remind my viewers that I gave notice hours before my power chair's demise, and if it is in any way binding, I'm still here, constricted. For every Fee contributor celebrating market dynamism, there are 15 to 20 Americans like me and my parental generation shackled to a rather troubled medical entitlement system. I heard Adam chant, "the state will fall," like a Baptist hymn. Eventually, the way things are going, it must, as our ability to enact in a concerted effort to change our paradigms, this is limited. On the small scale, however, government processes are already overwhelmed, not to remind you of Flint Michigan, or San Diego's homeless. I have lived five minutes to midnight for a very long time. There is only so much our inner resources can spare.
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