If we're honest we all know that Facebook can be a real drag. Privacy concerns. Farmville updates. Phishing scams. Inappropriately mushy PDA. Theses days people will send a Facebook message to you instead of an email! It's enough to make you want to pull the plug.
If you do you're making a huge mistake.
I am not a Facebook super fan. I annoy and am annoyed by just as much of the stuff I listed above. But it does not change the reality that Facebook is currently the largest networking site on the planet. For better and for worse it has become the hub around which most people congregate.
Can you afford to be absent? For some people with infinite resources and no need for networking I could understand. But are you one of those folks? I honestly cannot think of a single person who fits into either of those catagories.
There are no infinite resources. And most of us are just a few pay checks away from needing some sort of networking (social or otherwise). The obvious exception is old people who live their lives outside of modern technology.
Your great grandparents might do this. That sounds kind of rude but I can see how a retiree who is set in their ways might want to avoid Facebook. They probably won't be looking for a job any time soon. Then again, both of my parents love being able to show off photos of their grandkids on Facebook.
I love everything about movies except taking time to watch them. I know this is problematic as movies reflect our culture. I'm interested in cultural conversations so I'm trying to address this problem.
I am working a new shift at work that leaved me with two days at home during the week. I've decided that I am going to try to watch a new movie every weeek. I have a lot of them on my Netflix instant queue so even if I don't feel like watching one it can be on in the background while I'm playing Maple Story.
Seven Samurai is on Hulu Plus but I didn't want to bring the PS3 into the living room and the subtitles make it difficult to focus on something else while watching it. I decided to go ahead and finally watch Oldboy. I'd heard great reviews of Oldboy when it was released in the states around 2003/2004. And the reviews are right; the movie is really well done.
For those of you haven't seen it Oldboy tells the story of Oh Dae-Su, a man held captive in a room for 15 years for reasons he does not know. He wakes up one morning free and spends the remainder of the movie trying to find out who did this to him and why. My friend Nathan described it as the best revenge movie ever. I would have to agree; there's nothing quite like it.
My favorite scenes (in brief with spoilers)
The fight Oh Dae-Su has in the hotel hallway after torturing his warden: this isn't a slick martial arts treatment, it is a desperate man with a hammer fighting his way through a hallway of thugs.
There is a flashback scene where Oh Dae-Su remembers meeting the young girl, Soo-ah, and witnessing her sexual relationship with a young man he would only much later learn was her brother. The cuts between past and present were incredibly effective.
The final confrontation between Oh Dae-Su and his captor. There is some fighting but it is secondary to the conversation where we actually learn why Oh Dae-Su was held captive for 15 years. Why is that length of time significant?
There are several gotchas in this movie but the biggest one came when I learned that Oldboy was based on a comic book. Like most movie gotchas if you pay special attention throughout the movie it becomes obvious:
The incest plot
The extreme amount of physical abuse an average person can survive
Oh Dae-Su is told if he doesn't figure it out why he was inprisoned they will kill him in 5 days.
If Oh Dae-Su does figure out why he was imprisoned his captor will kill himself,
His captor has a killswitch in his pacemaker that his doctor added at his request.
This sort of ridiculousness is pretty common in manga and would normally jump out at me. It is a testament of great filmmaking that I didn't notice them sooner.
