#undercompetent | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

amtoastpolitical · 9 months

Text

Globalization in its current state, under a near-universal adoption of neoliberal capitalism, continues to alienate much of the working class because it presents other countries and peoples solely within the context of capital. The Left ought to highlight this, and present its clear opposition to it within this context.

Under neoliberal globalization, immigrants and refugees are only to be welcomed if they can meet some impossible litmus of neither outcompeting nor undercompeting locals, and a providing a demonstrable economic benefit. Capitalists from other countries are welcomed to exploit local workforces whenever economically possible, and leaders provide endless incentives for them to do so in their country in a complete race to the bottom. Cross-cultural exchanges are commodified within the Machiavellian context of finding tangible capital returns, while cultural heritage is commodified and overtouristed.

When many people's primary interactions with other peoples and cultures are through exploitative attempts to find a profit, some wrongly turn to xenophobic, racist, and other reactionary and bigoted ideas.

The Left ought to work tirelessly to provide the masses with an alternative form of globalization, one which seeks to connect people rather than profits, and dispense of ideals of isolationism. A better globalization is possible, start imagining it.

#globalization #alter-globalization #internationalism #solidarity

1 note · View note

joedunphy · 7 years

Text

The Delivery Man / Vince Vaughn Edition (review under construction)

You were wondering when I was going to talk about a movie on this supposed movie blog, weren’t you? Was I going to spend the whole thing talking about what I saw on Cable or on whatever I could find on DVD? In fact, I came very close to doing so a few times. I almost did a review of “Up in the Air”, which I felt deserved a review - maybe even needed a few online, given the way in which it seemed to get savaged by other amateur reviewers who seemed determined to not get it, but I got distracted, time passed, and the memory of the film ceased to be fresh in my mind. I then vacillated with rare style, asking myself if I really was still prepared to write that review, until the movie left the theaters, leaving any review I would have written of that film on a level with a review of something I had just rented out. Not that I won’t do some of those, too, but a blog of nothing else would leave the reader with the stifling feeling of entering into the mental world of a recluse, vicariously living the life of somebody who has forgotten the scent of fresh air. Do not most of us get too much of a taste of that life on our own, even though we might be loathe to admit it?

Tonight, I will try to do a little better, having left the 115 minute movie about two hours ago, at this point, but perhaps without as much success as I would wish, because my memories of this film were already losing their freshness the moment I stepped out of the theater. I didn’t dislike the film, and the Saturday Night audience I was with seemed to be having a good time. I laughed … OK, smiled … frequently throughout the film, frequently enough that I didn’t mind spending a piece of my weekend and the full ticket price to see this. But, that having been said, something seemed missing, something that kept the film from being as good as it could have been, something that meant that this would be one reasonably pleasant evening that I’d have to work to remember the next year.

Part of that something might have been originality. Sam Allard, in his review “The Delivery Man is a Carbon Copy of ‘Starbuck’ … Except Much Worse” on Scene and Heard, presents us with official trailers for the Delivery Man and another film which I had not heard of until tonight, one called Starbuck. That I had not heard of it is no great wonder, as it was released in Canadian French and its first week box office receipts totaled about $13,000. As I watched that trailer, I found the scenes in it very familiar, and was wondering if what I had witnessed tonight was a nicely crafted piece of plagiarism. I don’t know, yet. I’ll see the (presumably older) film later, when my memories of its supposed copy have faded a little more, and I can do the foreign film a little more justice.

For now, I’ll focus on what I was dissatisfied with in what I saw, putting aside discussions of the ethics of the making of this film until I know more about the matter. Spoilers follow, as the name of the blog and the cut would suggest. You’ve been warned.

What I didn’t like about the movie is that, as an audience member, I found that it sometimes didn’t seem to tell me the truth, even when it should have known what the truth was, when the truth was about how life works instead of how the lead character functioned.

Consider, for example, the sequence in which Vaughn meets his bitter would-be actor son (by in vitro fertilization), who is working as a barista, and is angry that he couldn’t get out of his shift to audition for the role of a lifetime. I won’t say that there is no truth, or no humor to be found in it. As anybody who has ever worked food service knows, like acting, it looks so easy until one tries to do it. The overconfident and undercompetent David Wozniak (Vince Vaughn), meaning as well as a would-be father ever could, tries to help his biological son by covering for him during his shift and the script embraces reality … up until the end, when it flinches. Wozniak ends up over his head, as he should have, and as one might expect, the owner shows up, apparently trying to find out who this person is who is reducing his establishment to a shambles and why he is doing so. At this point, the writer (whoever that is, see comments above) is appropriately heartless toward his character. The owner does as an owner probably would, and fires the son whose absence has damaged his livelihood. The author lets the owner be something other than a saint, having him rant about how the son is nothing but a failure who couldn’t possibly have been offered a part, displaying the sort of undercutting of confidence a not very pleasant employer might use to hold onto his work force, by persuading it to not seek more interesting employment possibilities. There is some potential in that character, but before he manages to become even mildly villainous, he vanishes from our screen, not to be seen again.

So, with the best of intentions, this father whose son does not know he is the father, has engineered a disaster for his brusque and bitter son. Who knows when the kid will find work again, or if he will, given the reference the owner is likely to give him after this incident. We wait with David (Vaughn), waiting for the blowup that will turn Wozniak’s ill conceived attempt at getting closer with the son he did not know he had into a sad, embittering and estranging irony. The script should be honest enough to accept the presence of an obstacle it has to work past to get to that happy ending it seems to want, if it is to go on seeking that ending, but it does not. Instead, we are presented with a sort of deus ex machina, in the form of a successful audition.

This is not to say that successful auditions never happen, or that no actor ever gets the part of a lifetime. If I recall correctly, Vaughn himself could tell us a lot about such a role, himself. But then, people also manage to draw winning lottery tickets. Wild strokes of good luck happen, but they don’t happen frequently, so in real life, if one puts oneself in need of one or is put in need of one, generally speaking one gets hurt, because rare events happen when they want to, and the likelihood of that rare, random moment falling into a time slot we’ve set for it is low, indeed. Much as would be the chance of the cavalry just happening to be ready to come storming over a hill, the moment a wagon train on the other side is about to be wiped out by the restless natives. Deus ex machina, in any form, is something that some of us don’t care for, I think, because of a gut level understanding of probability, and of an instinctual understanding that Fate really does not look after the welfare of those who engage the real world without preparing for it.

0 notes