Men, Women & Children Movie Blurb by Shale October 17, 2014 I went to the noon matinee of this movie today and it was playing in one of the smaller auditoriums on the top floor of the Cineplex. It was a private screening as I sat alone with 85 empty seats around me. I was thinking if anyone was going to see this movie they would be texting and annoying me but that wasn't the case. This movie also got mostly bad reviews. But that didn't bother me, I enjoyed it. It is a portrait of the modern world with our world-wide technology and the impact it has on our lives. Not a documentary, just a commentary. It actually opens with the Voyager Space Probe as it passes Jupiter & Saturn and heads outside our solar system to parts unknown in the universe. There is a narration (by Emma Thompson) of this marvel of human technology; how it has a collection of earth sounds and a map from where it came and its bold hope that there are other intelligent life forms out there. What hits those of us who were around when it was set off on its voyage in 1977, was that it was made by ppl using slide rules and drawing on paper when "computers" were nothing more than big calculators and there was no internet or PC's or cell fones, the most portable fone looking like a brick. But back to the real world. Don Truby (Adam Sandler) can't log on to his computer so he uses his teen son Chris' (Travis Tope) computer where he discovers the trove of porn the boy has. Don (like me) thinks back to the simpler time when he was a teen and discovered his dad's stash of porn magazines in the garage and kinda misses the natural cycle of that father/son bonding. Don needs his porn connection because amusing himself is all the pleasure he gets from his wife Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt) who is not interested in having sex with him. The Trubys' Loveless marriage There is Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) a precocious cheerleader who aspires to be on a TV reality show. Her mother, Joan (Judy Greer) who failed at her chance in Hollywood supports her in this effort, buying her lingerie and taking pix, which are posted on a Website. The opposite extreme of that is Patricia Beltmeyer (Jennifer Garner) who snoops on all her daughter Brandy's (Kaitlyn Dever) web activity, has her passwords and deletes "harmful" thing for her, such as any teen conversation from boys. Mama Censors the Net Rounding out our Netizens is Tim Mooney (Ansel Elgort) who lives with his dad Kent (Dean Norris) after his mother left them. He is preoccupied with the Net game Guild Wars and has quit the football game, much to the chagrin of coach, principle and dad since he was the star player. All these different lives intersect IRL as well as on the Net. Despite the strict censoring and snooping of her crazy mother, Brandy does get out and she and Tim, both injured in their own way find each other. Tim & Brandy Connect in library Oh, there is much more to each of these lives, I just gave you the setup. It is basically a drama, with a few embarrassing sexual foibles, which gave it an R-rating, tho with limited nudity. (BTW, Voyager is still traveling for 37 years, 1 month and 12 days as of today - and one of the last pix it took of home shows us as a tiny, pale blue dot in the vastness)
Technology - My History by Shale October 18, 2014 I grew up in the mid 20th Century. We always had a telephone, a heavy black one with a dial that sat in our living room. Later, we had an innovation; extension fones in other parts of the house but still tied to the wall with a wire. When you were on the road or traveling you were inaccessible and everyone accepted this as a way of life. If necessary you could call home by a pay fone. I got into this change in 2004, when taking a rail trip with my grandson and knew I would be in downtown St. Louis before dawn and did not want to go looking for a pay fone to call my sister. So, I bought a Nokia TracFone solely for this occasion and to keep in touch while traveling about. I still have a cell fone - for my convenience and most of the time it is turned off until I need to make a call or if I expect someone may need to call me. Guess I am used to being off the grid after a lifetime of traveling thru the U.S., Centro America, Europe and Asia without anyone being able to contact me. There are young ppl alive today who have no knowledge of this low-tech time and take for granted that one is always available by fone or text 24/7. I also grew up in a paper world. There was no electronic storage or transmission. Pictures could be sent by facsimile, which was a time consuming process of burning lines on paper wrapped on a cylinder so it looked much like the early B&W television images. Libraries had books - words printed on paper and bound together. No computer stations, no WiFi. Just paper. I have some of my better school work, which was handwritten with pen and ink on paper. Being artistic I actually used a caligrafy pen dipped in ink and inserted drawings in my essays. Sometimes pasting pix cut out of magazines. Researching was done in the library, looking thru books or magazines or later scrolling thru microfiche images of newspapers or magazines on a monitor screen. Oh yes, magazines. When I was a young man wanting to look at young naked women, I subscribed to Playboy magazine. As a pre-teen you needed to have a friend with an older brother and raid his stash. As a teen, my friend and I would steal them from a local newsstand. If you wanted to watch porn action you had to have a movie projector - there was not even VHS until the late 1970s and DVD would not be around until the mid '90s about the same time as surfing the Web for porn. In fact, porn may be the main reason at this time that the WWW took off, spurring more advances in technology from shared Jpg images to videos and live streaming. Computers have been around a long time, tho not in the form of personal computers. I even took a class in 1970 and became a "Computer Operator," working for a while in a Bank Computer Room on big mainframe machines with all the peripheral card sorting machines and printers. That was my last job before dropping out of the paper fantasy for a while. I saw my first PC when my friend Tim got one in the mid 1980s. I was into fotografy so I took some security pix of it for him (35mm film). I was actually writing articles for magazines at this time on a manual typewriter, double spacing them for editing and mailing them and fotos for publication. But, I wanted to make a book out of a collection of those articles so I figured a computer would be needed for my desktop publishing. So, in 1994 I went looking for a computer. I had no knowledge of the things but was told to make sure it had 4 megabytes of random access memory - there were still 2MB computers on the market. I went with IBM, maybe name recognition as that was the mainframe computers we used in 1970. This was so much more than a word processor. Now I could write my articles and e-mail them to publishers. I also did my labor of love book, "Nude Attitude" illustrated with many of my own drawings. But I was now on the World Wide Web, thru a freenet account. I could join Usenet discussion groups tho only in text. It would be a few years before upgrading to a computer that could handle images and videos, but now I am here. It helped that for the past 15 years I have been working at an office job and spend the day on computers, learning little things of changing technology. Admittedly, search engines on the WWW are a great improvement over the archaic way of doing school research in the past - but now teachers have to be more wary of plagiarized copy & paste content. (Altho, I think I just hand copied whole passages out of encyclopedias myself - but they were credited). Oh, and not only can I see the most bizarre fotos of things in the world, including porn, but now I can add to the World Wide Stash. Yep, got my own stuff out there, on Literotica and a few X-Rated fotos on gay male sites like LifeOut. There is even an old Shale Webpage, which I was surprised to discover a teen from South Africa I knew from this forum board managed to find it using my e-mail address. But, teen boys have always been doing that, even in my generation finding naughty pix on paper.
