New Media and Memory: a review of “Adoration”

Sometimes it’s nice just to go to the cinema alone.  The fact that movie-watching in theaters is typically a social occasion makes me highly cognizant of my solitude — a sensitivity which, I think, enhances receptivity.  So, tonight I saw Atom Egoyan’s latest, “Adoration”, a film that I found quite striking for a number of cinematic and personal reasons.

The film details one teenage boy’s struggles to piece together the truth about his parents, one of whom may or may not have been a Palestinian terrorist.

The bad news is that the film is somewhat overwrought.  The characters’ interconnections, which are labyrinthine á la similar films “Babel” and “Crash”, are hard to believe.  Indeed, two of the characters make remarks essentially to this effect.

Second, the relationship at the center of the story, that of a star-crossed love of a Lebanese Palestinian violin restorer and a brilliant Canadian musician, is beatific to the point of sappiness.  However, the sentimentalism may be attributed to some of the character’s eulogizing memories — hence the title of the film, which also leads to the good news.

Michael Jackson is not a demi-god!

Not even deceased heads of states or founders of religions get memorials like this.  Ugh.

Michael Jackson Memorial in the game Second Life, on Michael Jackson Island (no kidding). Image courtesy of Valsadie, via Flickr.com.

John Mayer suffers the audience to listen to his subpar rendition of "Human Nature". Earlier, a gospel choir sang, "We're going to see the king," inducing hallucinations of nightmarish narcissism. Image from Flickr.com.

Other than the Jackson Family’s odd Nation-of-Islam-inspired uniforms and, of course, the golden casket, what bothered me the most was the perverse deification of the man.  As though the Christ-like images of the “King of Pop” broadcasted upon the stage weren’t gratuitous enough, that the King family would stoop so low as to proclaim that God Himself had sent Jacko to earth on a divine mission to entertain us all twisted my stomach into knots and made a mockery of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

A great talent?  Indisputably.   A pioneer for Black Americans?  Of course.  But he was also a symbol for much of what goes wrong in America’s minority and celebrity cultures.  Yet, even that speaks to the most tragic aspect of Michael Jackson: when the stage lights dimmed and the curtain closed, at the end of the performance, he was just a man, flawed and troubled — not a demi-god.

Review: Caprica

The shape of things to come?

Just took another long stroll through downtown Hague, only a few blocks from my apartment.  Leave it to me that one of the first Nederlanders I get to talking with turns out to be a radical Tamil nationalist from Sri Lanaka hahaha.  As I mentioned in my last post, I took a few minutes Sunday evening to watch the uncut pilot episode of the Battlestar Galactica spin-off series, Caprica. What follows is my first-ever television review (lite spoilers ahead)…

Taut, introspective, and very, very adult; much more mature than its predecessor series, which is saying a lot — Caprica is brimming with potential.  Where Battlestar Galactica, quite controversially, seemed to return to its Mormon theological roots, Caprica, although set 58 years prior to the events of the original show, seems to be reaching forward toward the Techological Singularity prophecied by futurists since the 1950s.  Questions about morality and belief, the value (and undermining) of family and multicultural democracy, and the nature of humanity and transhumanity, abound in a dense hour and thirty minutes.