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Jesse80025
Reviews
Taylor Tomlinson: Have It All (2024)
Weirdly sexists
HUGE fan of the last two Taylor Tomlinson specials. I've been an evangelist for her cause. This special, I don't know what happened! It's like she suddenly has so much vitriol for men! I hate to sound like I'm partaking in the "everybody hates straight white men" conspiracy, because I generally shush people that tell me that the world is out to get us, but she makes generalizations of swm that are really bizarre. It's like she's had a habit of dating REALLY obnoxious guys and somehow crystallized this into a man bashing special. Really disappointing because I was HYPED for this and her late night special! Taylor! Where did you go!? What happened!? Honestly feels a little betraying. It makes me wonder if maybe some demographics really do feel like it's open season on swm. I generally ignore such sentiment, but there is a difference between equal and playful stereotyping, and full on disgracing.
Charlie Says (2018)
Good Cult Study film, but should have been longer
I'm a huge Hannah Murray fan. I'm a huge cult studies guy on top of that - so I had to watch this. For someone interested in cults, this will be a sometimes tedious but ultimately rewarding flick. Matt Smith's acting is phenomenal and some of his dialogue is beautifully written. He is compelling as the lunatic poet messiah turned murderer. However, this should have been 2.5 hrs. Instead, they wrapped it up in a little under 2 hrs. So much feels rushed and what is left in feels like gratuitous sex, violence and nudity. While initially a very compelling picture of the Manson family begins to be painted, it is rushed and I'm left here having to use my imagination to fill in far to many details to explain why anybody would have actually been convinced to follow him. The cast is excellent, including Hannah, although, again, I just wish this flick had been 30-45 minutes longer on character development to allow the actors to really show a more full range within the characters.
How Should We Then Live? (1977)
Just thinking out loud here...
I recently watched this. While an interesting thesis: that the Christian worldview is the only truly solid ground for a promising scientific, governmental, and moral worldview, I found his presentation of the evidence solipsistic. He also doesn't deal with any contrary evidence.
He essentially goes through all of Western history from the Roman Empire onward, explaining how each civilization rose and fell via how closely they came to a Judeo Christian ethic. The main emphasis being the existence of an infinite loving God. But he doesn't address many things that would seemingly contradict that idea. Think about it: for as far back as there has been human history, we've seen the Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamist empires, all of which have done pretty well, most lasting well over 400+ years and making major contribution to human science. Meanwhile, Rome fell around 470 but became Christian in around 380. It then splintered into the Byzantine Empire and that eventually fell further and further apart. He never addresses that at all. Then Europe fell into the dark ages, dominated by feudal slavery as Christianity took further hold, but Schaefer argues that these were actually very productive times, scientifically and "dark ages" is a pejorative term that secularist scholars have come up with to slander Christianity. Well, okay. I'm not a historian so I don't know. Then, of course, the Islamist empire rose and fell and the Christian imperialist countries of Western Europe took their place as they discovered the new world around 1500. 500 years later, of course we live under a World dominated by these same Western influences, more or less. Moreover, Western Christian society has had its share of evils that need not be named. Schaefer simply argues that these resulted from humanist influences. Let's go back a moment and also not that waaay back, around 1000-0 BC, there was this struggling Jewish power called Israel that, according to the Bible, was practically a superpower, although no other ancient history reflects much acknowledgement of this. Israel, despite being founded on the Judeo-Christian God, of course floundered time and time again as is recorded in the Bible itself. And, of course, in the Far East there have been countless Hindu, Chinese, and East Asian empires and their own scientific advances, all the while never having anything like a Judeo-Christian monotheistic God.
Ultimately, it's extremely hard to see the 1 to 1 correlation. A zoomed out view of history reveals that a myriad of empires have risen and fallen all while holding very different religious and philosophic views. Appealing to the recent success of Western countries seems like a weak argument because, in the scheme of things, none of the Western powers have persisted longer than the Egyptian or Roman empires, and, of course, we in the West today look nervously on while India and China grow more technologically and economically and militarily savvy. There's absolutely no treatment of this possible and very obvious criticism at all, in the show.
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
Trashed old characters for no reasons
Luke barely got any screen time, and the screen time he got was used to depict him as a complete coward and idiot baby man. He was reportedly to "train" Rey in this, but barely even does that. Rey gets no development, either, but still manages to become more powerful than any Jedi we've seen yet. For children!