Orwell in Dubai

Italy is a peninsula that acquires the shape of a boot.

In his 2003 physique, Tim Robbins looks churlish naked. Perhaps he is supposed to look that way as Code 46 draws to a close, with Samantha Morton showing Deborah Winger how it's done if you you want to challenge ethnic types. There is a bit of Sheltering Sky to this speculative venture, one which doesn't add any additional spice with ad hoc contraceptives. Other than that, Winterbottom and Boyce paint a depressingly accurate portrait of our future, regardless of what we believe about the ability of neurologists to manipulate our minds.

There is also an aura of fatalism about European/American individualism invariability giving way to Asia's sheer mass. Was this intentional? The film ends with Morton's ironic glance of knowing the pleasures of defiance, enough to suicide by or take comfort in. In the past, Tom Reid and I would have talked about it for awhile; it's the type of film which would have interested him. I no longer have college friends, and but for digital props, it was as forceful as The Man from Earth, virtually free of anything but good acting and Tony Todd engaging in cream puff antics better suited to Forest Whitaker having a mood swing. There is depression, and there is the downer of an accurate portrait of where our societies are headed.

Tony Todd's Pacification, Gently

Well, my new hire just triggered my ringtone, but I did not swipe to take the call. I'm broke, and can care less. Maybe she is wondering if I fired her. That doesn't matter, but I just disconnected with her anyway, in droll and dilatory fashion, disgruntled with my inanity and self pity, not that I'm incapable of taking the scarred humanity of my own ego out of the picture, or discussing the masturbation on a piece of liver, which was, in its time, an original evasion from the threat of being rendered pornographic, debating whether or not to make that easy for you, to what I allude. If emancipation is one of the salutary values of story telling, then the man from earth is a brazen exhibition in that vein, proving that much can be done with simple monastic values of good dialogue, one in which Tony Todd juxtaposes urban horror and demonic vengeance in the face of torture with that of testosterone mitigation in the ensemble surrounding David Lee Smith. It was an interesting role, a contention that black men have softer sentiments, streaking their faces just like the rest of us, specious and overwhelmed, dried saline sticky on the outermost layer of our epidermis. Jerome Bixby had an integral authenticity in his art. And this is how it should be, triumphant and transcendent. One way or another, I am determined to achieve vindication.