A Few Thoughts Generated By Recent Movies

I watched The Great Gatsby mainly because I heard it looked pretty. It did, and that was generally all, except I was surprised that, perhaps due to Hollywood ineptitude, Tom Buchanan actually struck a chord with me. I never liked the book. Well I should say I thought the book well written, but never liked any of the characters, nor the plot. To my younger eyes, there was nothing to hold onto, no happy ever after, no appealing character, no moral, nothing. And yet, hidden in all this glitz is the Buchanan's daughter, hardly ever reference and seen only at the end of the movie. And Tom, after seeing that his mistress died a brutal death, started putting his family back together, even as he incited the mechanic to murder. Daisy would have been happy just leaving her child; she says as much when she asks Gatsby to run away with her. Gatsby is impossible. Nick likely got his emotions, both his love and eventual revulsion of all things New York, out of a bottle. That little girl in the hallway is the next generation, and in the midst of the partying little another generation will never come, the one who tones it down enough for that child to have a chance ends up looking better than the rest of them to me.

I watched World War Z and found three things that tempted me to believe they were propaganda. I suppose the fourth would be that anyone at the U.N. was competent, but I mean stuff coming out of character's mouths, after what seemed to be action set up to 'prove' it.

1.) Movement is life.
2.) Mother Nature is a serial killer
3.) Vaccines

The elites move, but they move from stronghold to stronghold. They've got bunkers. Indeed, a lot of them have houses in London, and they've been pushing the envelope on how far down you can build, mainly because of the local laws, but still. This is said as the thing that you have to do in these sorts of apocalyptic scenarios, but it is not clear that this is good advice at all. Troops and people on the move are vulnerable. Sometimes it is necessary, but it shouldn't be your default assumption.

Death is a part of nature. This line didn't make any sense, and the ensuing monologue about nature leaving clues because she wants to get caught didn't either.
This was both an unhelpful anthropomorphization of nature and an estrangement of man from nature, as if we are not a part of it and it is our enemy.

I liked the solution to the zombies, but I did not like the fact that they turned it into a vaccine. I don't think that is even legit from a scientific perspective. It would have to be live. I suspect you'd have to send infected troops out, kill all the zombies in an area, and then get the troops back and give them an antidote. Vaccines just didn't make sense, except, of course, that is what your friendly U.N. has been trying to sell around the world for years.