The Invisible Counterpoint

12 Years a Slave (Review Part One) 
I've only seen one film this year that kinda gets at how someone could become a person as sadistic as Fassbender's slaveowner is in this film. Insidious 2 got how a little, vulnerable boy, completely owned by an absolutely terrifying mother, was going to have no chance building an independent self apart from her. His life was on the line, and you can imagine how a six or eight or however old a boy he was, would have a brain formed largely on ensuring he does nothing outside of what she wants. The point of life ... is to not be devoured. And the great homo sapiens brain of his would be using all its evolutionary excellence to contrive means to ensure he manages this--even if this means making him into someone who would be to any sane outsider, deviant, insane ... strangely ill-purposed to what life would confront him with. The rest of the world does not realize that this one brain alone negotiated avoiding oblivion! What of if i...

The Circle It's difficult to figure out why everyone is so ready to laugh at the humiliated Carrie in Carrie . We're told at the beginning that it's the popular gang's fault, where everyone else laughs along so to not be caught out and be deemed part of her very dubious camp. And this is substantiated at other times, when one or two kids show that, when no one's really attending, they're quite prepared to interact with her as if she might not have the plague. But then again, when the prom's on, and they laugh at her while she's covered with blood, it's impromptu, immediate, reflex: there's no calculation of what is expected of them, they simply automatically in chorus respond in awful jeering. So, what? Kids can be mean? Except they're not really quite kids anymore. So, people can be? Except not everyone is. There's not an ounce of it in the gym teacher. Nor in a few others who met her at the prom and reacted to her openly. The film ha...

Ender's Game One of things that is supposed to be notable about Ender, is that he encourages other kids to think for themselves and chip in. He is even reminded of this just before his biggest battle against the bug aliens. So what does he in fact do? He leaves all his other commanders' forces to be sacrificed, and therefore left with nothing to individually command. How nice it would have been to see the focus pulled off him, as he ostensibly wishes, and actually witness some of the other commanders make decisions. But we don't get that, and instead the sense that all we need is one great leader, and everyone else might as well being prompt, order-applying drones. A good pilot or good gunner might get some special accolades--nice flying/gunning, ace! especially you, cutie!--but not for any property of leadership. Maybe one of the reasons he has so many sympathy for the Queen alien, is that he's effectively looking in the mirror. The two boss commanders, vastly superi...

The Circle Dave Eggers clearly thinks most of us have become incredibly needy and paranoid—guessing that anyone who is private, is doing so to deliberately withhold approval from us, and must be chased down and punished. There is a scene in this book where the main protagonist is going to pieces upon learning that 3% of her workplace doesn’t like her. All she can do is imagine who they might be, and wonder how they might be courted to her. Our collective regression to the emotional state of an abandoned child, is according to Eggers what could empower our wanting some giant company—a Google gone total world domination, for instance—to have everyone in some way under wraps. Little lollypop Google icameras everywhere, ensuring no one does anything that might be felt by our Earth hoard as a snubbing. Terrorism isn’t the issue. Nor really crime or racist behavior. It’s that someone if they could would “unfriend” you, if only if it could be done anonymously.