#It's awesome the way one piece of media or literature leads you on to another | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moviemunchies · 4 years

Photo

[This review is written with the assumption that you have at least a passing understanding of who Harriet Tubman was, unlike that one studio executive twenty years ago.]

Part of the difficulty of making a biopic, especially one of a person who has been so lauded by both media and literature for over a hundred years, is trying to make it stand out from others. There are only so many “inspiring historical figure movies” you can watch before they all blend together. And in some ways, Harriet plays precisely how you expect: here is a woman who escaped enslavement, and decides to continue leading her people to freedom, constantly breaking the limitations others set on her and seeming to do the impossible.

In other ways, there are choices this film makes that don’t fit the mold. For starters, the film goes out of its way to show us Harriet Tubman’s religiosity. Not in a “Oh, by the way, she’s was a religious person,” type of way that Hollywood sometimes does, but in a “She had trances which may have been the result of a childhood head injury but she considers visions that she attributes to God.” Which is Truth in Television, by the way. I was surprised by this, not only because I didn’t know about this prior to viewing the movie, but biopics tend to downplay people’s religious beliefs and their effects on their lives, or try to credit religious experiences like visions to scientific explanations. Not Harriet; though the possibility of her “visions” being because of brain damage is brought up, and personally subscribed to, the film for the most part takes Tubman’s word for it. Is she getting visions from God? We don’t get a clear answer, but she thinks she is and it seems to work out for her. So that’s all we’re left with.

The film also makes Tubman look like a bit more of an action hero than I suspect she was in real life. Don’t get me wrong: the woman was a badass, I’m not denying that. On her own she led seventy people to freedom, and could boast that she never lost a single person on the journey. She also carried a pistol with her as a conductor on the Underground Railroad (a revolver rather than a flintlock like in a film). But the movie has her outrunning horses in scenes thanks to some clever editing, and being shot at close range without getting a scratch. One scene has her charging a horse through a line of armed slave hunters, and she just… pushes through without much of a struggle.

It’s disappointing when the film makes things too easy for the main character, because she is a strong and powerful character that it shouldn’t have to rely on dumbing things down to make her seem awesome. Like I said, Harriet Tubman is one of this country’s certified badasses, and there are plenty of things she does in this movie which are incredible enough that we know she’s smarter and more than capable of dealing with these situations in ways that make more sense.

Another problem I had with the film is a problem I tend to have with a lot of biopics: mainly, that there are parts of the person’s life that seem glossed-over, like some of the details of her journey to freedom. But I tend to give this one a pass: there’s an awful lot of story to tell, and we’ve got to get to it, so I’ll excuse the movie for not going into every single detail and instead moving along to get to the meat of it.

This film boasts a very strong performance from Cynthia Erivo as its title character. She depicts Harriet as someone who has had more than enough, but still full of love for her family and her people. She carries a broad pallet of human emotions: love, fear, annoyance, fury and heartbreak. If there was a better choice to play this role, I do not know of her. I’d heard that for a while there were bigger-name stars like Viola Davis attached to the role, but I’m appreciative that a lesser-known actress plays the lead, so that A) she hopefully gets more job opportunities from doing so well in this film and B) that we don’t think of the main characters as being “X-Star playing a role” and become more invested in the character herself.

Leslie Odom, Jr. plays William Still, a leading member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (and a remarkably snazzy dresser). He doesn’t get as much range in this movie as we know he can convey; mostly it boils down to astonishment at Harriet’s accomplishments. That being said, despite his most famous role as a man with no fervent beliefs in anything, I hold that Odom, Jr. does his best when he’s playing someone with overwhelming conviction, which he certainly does here as an abolitionist.

Joe Alwyn plays Gideon, the (fictional) son of the Brodress family which held Tubman and her family in slavery. He’s… interesting. Alwyn easily could have tried to play him as a frothing rage monster, but he comes across as complex. But never sympathetic, mind you, because when he’s not upset he still comes across as creepy and possessive. In a way he’s a perfect antagonist for this sort of story.

What surprised me was how likable Henry Hunter Hall as Walter, a black tracker that works with slave catchers until he sees Tubman in action and decides to switch sides. A rascal sort who decides to defect to the story’s heroes… entertaining, but nothing new. What makes him interesting is that he is contrasted to Bigger Long, who starts as his partner, but stays working with Gideon as a runaway slave hunter and is a completely detestable human being throughout the entirety of his screen time. Despite not having huge parts in the overall story, both actors give their characters memorable performances and I can’t help but hope to see them in more screen projects.

And there’s Marie, as played by Janelle Monae, doesn’t have as many scenes as she should, but for what she does have Monae does excellent. She runs a boarding house where many freedmen and women stay, and she helps Tubman find her feet after her escape from Maryland. Monae gives a certain haughty insensitivity to the character that mellows over time.

This isn’t a movie I’d say is necessary for anyone to see, but it is good, and while it’s not precisely a history textbook, you’ll learn some about Harriet Tubman if you ever decide to look up what’s true and what’s not from the film. It’s a good period piece and biopic, and I feel it stands out enough from others to be worth watching. Try to catch it if you can.

-Eduardo A. Hernández-Cruz

#Movie Munchies #Harriet #movie review

2 notes · View notes

axiomabstractions · 3 years

Text

One Step Forward

For many years, one of my most deeply held beliefs has been that the most powerful thing any individual can do is inspire others. I’m almost positive I’ve been saying this since high school. A TED talk I watched earlier today (June 11, 2021) reminded me of this. Now, here I am, closing up what may be the single most important piece of literature I’ve yet written in my life. It's definitely the one I'm most proud of.

I won’t provide you with a complete synopsis of the TED talk, as I believe it’s good enough to deserve you listening to it in its entirety and in full context. However, one of the central ideas was that of looking inward in order to first develop a stronger sense of self, and then to strategically, methodically align your intention, efforts, and actions with those things that inspire you in a positive way. It was an excellent presentation, and the themes resonated with me strongly enough to inspire me to write this essay. I feel like many people in America, particularly many young adults, have been very impassioned and inspired for the past several years. It’s good to be inspired. Inspiration is where action and change come from. It shows that many of us care to make a difference, which is important and necessary, but I’m not so sure the picture of the world we are being inspired by is accurate.

The way I see it, the truths each of us is able to see are not only becoming further and further divorced from the way things actually are, much of those truths are being manufactured by a technological and informational infrastructure designed to exploit each of us for our attention as effectively as possible. In order to maximally draw our gaze, the artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms track our activity across the internet, and develop an increasingly accurate picture of the type of content each of us tends to engage with most consistently. The fact that I even believe this may very well be a direct consequence of what I just described, except I listen to a lot of podcasts and actually pick up a book every now and then, so I’d venture to say enough of my sources exist sufficiently outside of this framework to provide at least a moderately effective filter. In any case, the general trend I see is that, within this infrastructure, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to distill the same truths as one another concerning the state of the world and the direction we are heading as a society. We’ve seemingly been reduced to engaging most strongly with, among other reference points equally unfit to facilitate the expansion and forwarding of the conversation in any meaningful way, memes, sound bites, “gotcha” moments, group think, moral outrage, and open resentment and hatred for “the other.” The identity politics serve only to devolve the conversation into a finger-pointing fest devoid of any potential to produce real, practical forms of change which could serve all our interests.

Okay this seems like a monster of an issue, so what the hell do we do about it. Well, one approach would be to demand more stringent regulatory oversight of the tech superpowers responsible for maintaining the infrastructure within these systems. That would be great, and I think that idea does deserve some careful attention. However, I prefer to work from the ground up. By that I mean I try to focus more on what each of us can do as individuals, as opposed to relying on some institution to implement changes that probably won’t ever happen. Even if the necessary changes were implemented on this scale, I believe the time it would take to get there would allow for much more damage to the ethos of our society than any of us should dare to flirt with. We need to change the way we’re interacting with these systems and with each other, so we can collectively break the spell being held over so many of us.

I mentioned something above, which I think serves as a good starting point for finding a solution: the idea of a filter. Functionally, what this filter should do is provide each of us with enough variation in perceived perspectives, incentives, and outcomes so as to enable us to break the gridlock of these confirmation-bias bolstering meme machines. We need to re-enable ourselves, re-equip ourselves with the psychological, contemplative framework from which we can make more reasonable determinations about what information qualifies and what information has no utility as a piece of the story we tell ourselves about the state of the world, about ourselves, and about each other. Again, this could be done by regulating the systems which deliver this information to us (i.e. try to make is so that no bad information is broadcasted), but I think it’s more important for each of us to take personal responsibility for the way we interact with these systems, not to mention the implications enforcing such regulations would have for our free speech. There are powerful forces at play, and if we aren’t mindful and strategic about our approach to overcoming this, I fear we will simply be inviting the technocalypse. The filter needs to come from inside each of us. It needs to happen in your mind, not in silicone valley.

If we rely on tech or the news media companies alone to address this issue, we will be perpetuating the cycle of disempowerment and victimhood, a cycle whose trajectory only leads downwards into the abyss. The same can be said for any institutional problem that we care to identify and take a stand against. Regardless of which position you start at (victimhood or powerlessness), the same positive feedback loop is activated (“positive” in this case meaning that these two modes of thought are complimentary and enforce one another, not that this feedback loop is good in any way). When you frame the world through the lens of victimhood you rob yourself of your own sense of autonomy by the assertion that the outcomes of events in your life are outside of your control, and thus the processes which determine those outcomes should be governed by another. Allowing our outcomes to be increasingly governed by others gradually robs us of our ability to make decisions over outcomes in our own lives, and thus constructs a society wherein we are all increasingly likely to be made into victims by those whom we have allowed to steal our autonomy from us. See how this feeds into itself? My basic proposition would be that personal responsibility and accountability serve as the antidote to this cycle, by re-empowering us to control the outcomes of events in our own lives. If each of us chooses to be accountable for our contribution to the outcomes we experience in our own lives, we empower ourselves to change the way we choose to contribute, thus can gracefully pursue the outcomes we most desire.

I believe firmly that the macro social phenomena we see are necessarily the direct sum of our attitudes and actions as the constituents of our society. Consequently, it is imperative that we manage how we interact with the framework of our society, the relationship between ourselves and our institutions, and the personal policies we carry through our day to day lives as individuals. I was recently introduced to the simple notion of us all taking one collective step forward by Douglas Murray, a guest on Eric Weinstein’s Podcast “The Portal.” To clarify, I am in no way associated with Douglas or Eric, but It’s a fucking awesome podcast. You should check it out sometime. Anyhow, the point I’m trying to make is that I see much more potential in the idea of working to inspire a healthy perspective shift across 350,000,000 people, than I do in the notion of regulating our institutions so as to attempt to please 350,000,000 people. The latter seems like a fool’s endeavor to me, which is why I care more to work from the ground up. And yes, that starts with working on myself. I wouldn’t be telling you all this, if I was not adamant about incorporating these ideas into my own life.

If we bring our focus back now to the filter, I do have a suggestion for how specifically to make this happen. You ready? Spend less time getting your information from within the framework designed to extract as much of your attention as possible. Get more of your information from books, scientific literature, observing nature, conversations, etc. Go to a library if you need to. Find more places from which to extract your model of the world we live in, places which are not manufacturing an artificial truth for you. Intentionally seek diversity of perspective to help you build a model that is well examined from as many angles as possible. Insofar as you do choose to consume content on facebook, twitter, Instagram, wherever you get your tailored version of reality, be more critical of the ideas you choose to adopt and/or share. Indeed, I think a more critical general audience would be a natural consequence of us forming better habits around where we get our information.

I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I don’t believe humans were evolved for our brains to compete with supercomputers in constructing our perspectives, incentives, and policies of living. I believe we evolved to extract our understanding and meaning through the process of interacting with and carefully examining our natural environment, and testing those observations, in good faith, against what others have observed. Another big difference is the sheer volume of information the average American in consuming on a daily basis. It’s outrageous. There’s no way to possibly keep up with and make sense of it all. We need to stop bombarding ourselves so haphazardly with mind numbing click-bait that’ll be irrelevant in 12 hours or less.

And look, right now, as I’m writing this, I am as much telling this to myself as I am telling this to you. I’m not perfect, and I’m not immune from this either. It is every bit as important for me to grow and improve in these ways, and to remain cognizant through my effort to do so. In fact, that’s what this whole thing is “axiomabstractions.” This is my standing invitation to everyone to not only bear witness to the process of my growth in real time, but to become more involved in the process of their own growth, so that we can grow and build a better truth together as we move ever-forward into the future. If we fail to do this, we will likely continue to suffer from the existential angst produced by the unbalanced distribution of perspectives, incentives, and outcomes manufactured by our technological machinery. We will likely continue to fall deeper into the grips of insecurity, fear, powerlessness, and victimhood together, which if that’s the ride we’re on, then it’s the ride we’re on. I’d much rather be on a different ride though, one that ends in a better place than mutually assured destruction.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a pessimist. I can just see catastrophe looming. However, the fact that I make the effort to share this with all of you is my way of saying I have faith in us to get through this shit. It would be a total waste of my time if I didn’t have a fundamental, unwavering faith in humanity. We’re not going to accomplish it alone though. The conversation on how we’re approaching progress needs to shift in a manner which promotes more collaboration, cooperation, and honest communication. We need to start participating in growth with each other in good faith again.

In closing, I’d like to send a short message to all active members of the IDW:

We, your viewers, desperately need continued and even more exposure to your perspectives, just as your perspectives deserve increased viewership and broader consideration within the context of our society as a whole. Please keep the conversation going as you have been. This movement, by far, does not stop with you, as I’m sure you are already all starkly aware.

#nuffsaid

0 notes

neriad13 · 5 years

Text

Impressions of Media Consumed 3/10-16

Mainatin’ in horror movies, heck yeah.

The Bride of Frankenstein [movie] - The sequence in which the Bride comes to life was 10x more dramatic than that of the original monster. =0

The scenes in which the monster is briefly enjoying human company...man, that’s heart wrenching. ;o;

Homunculi!! Why is that the best effect in the movie??

Perhaps most importantly, why on earth does Frankenstein’s castle come equipped with a self-destruct lever?

Cronos [movie] - Surprise favorite of the week. Fantastic makeup, acting and probably the one and only time I’ll ever beg another character to eat Ron Perlman instead.

House on Haunted Hill [movie] - Lady, I can see the strings on that skeleton. Why are you screaming?

Also why didn’t the blood on Ruth’s hand lead to anything?

The Pit and the Pendulum [movie] - Alrightish (1950s and 60s Vincent Price movies really liked premature burial and adultery didn’t they?), but DAMN, THE ENDING. I was laughing hysterically at the final shot and my mom (who had only walked in during the last ten minutes of the movie) was like “Wasn’t this supposed to be a horror movie?” 0.o

Yes...but it’s also hilarious. And horrible. At the same time.

Hellboy [movie] - Awesome makeup! Phenomenal character design! Niles Crane as a fishman! And...a completely standard action movie plot.

You can call back a soul from hell that easily?? What. What is the point.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army [movie] - Holy. Shit. This blew the first movie completely out of the water. Wild character design on top of wild character design and only getting better as the movie went on. Genuine sorrow and beauty in the destruction of a forest god. And the Angel of Death...I’m not sure if any performance has ever given me such shivers before.

I can now be sad with the rest of you that the trilogy’ll probably never be finished.

Kids Baking Championship 2019 [series] - Cute. Watchable when there’s no Great British Bake Off or Spring Baking Championship to be had. But it’s not usually a show which sends me off looking for recipes to make myself.

My Age of Anxiety [book - nonfiction] - I’m still processing this one. It’s an incredibly raw, incredibly researched personal account and history of mental illness. The author’s hopelessness is palpable. The maze of research and contradictory findings on the subject is staggering to behold. It’s not a book which offers anything resembling a conclusion or a way out of misery. And yet...

It’s full of accounts of people who have done amazing things both despite and because of their anxiety. It describes how anxiety has shaped art, literature, science, how it is both a curse and an evolutionary advantage. Even as the author is deeply ashamed of his condition, he makes a compelling case for how essential it is to the human experience. Another one I’ll dwell on for a long time. And a genuine piece of art.

#anxiety #hellboy #frankenstein #a thought

0 notes