Dumb me downs

We saw the much-hyped movie, "Syriana" a couple of days ago.
Now, I'd like to first off confess that I could not understand it completely, and had to have Vijay pause the film and explain it to me at crucial points.
Sample Q &A:
Me: Who is that old white guy?
V: He's the president of the company.
Me: Why did he just talk to this guy?
V: He wants to broker a deal.
Me: For what?
V: To get a license to open an oil field.
Me: What oil field?
V: The one they've been talking about throughout the film, dumbass!

And this was with the closed captioning on, mind you!
So, my feelings about the movie were obviously negative. Now, I'm not one of those people who shy away from intellectually challenging films-- ahem! But this one was really going above my head.
Now, one thing I can say for sure about me and movies is this: If I do not understand certain parts of a film, and the film still sort of makes sense, I take it as my shortcoming, and do not blame the film. But if, as in Syriana, which has multiple storylines, each lasting for a whole five minutes before cutting to the next, most storylines do not make sense, I tend to blame the filmmaker.
How can he make the audience look dumb? It's not a nice feeling -- feeling dumb --I can tell you that.

And then you blame the audience for gravitating toward shows like, "Deal or No Deal."

People often decry that media, especially the visual kind, is making fools of the general public, not letting them think, and making them passive receptors of information.
Now, it depends on what your definition of "making people think" is, as our dear former president would say :)

Making a person think of the consequences of what is depicted on the screen is different from making a person think, "What the hell does that mean?"
Intelligent media do assume a certain level of intelligence and general knowledge on the part of the viewer, and I believe the bar may be too high for "Syriana."

In spite of George Clooney, I do not see the merit in the movie. Even when I understood parts of it, the quick cutting away tended to irritate me.

Speaking of irritating cuts, does anyone else find characters talking and walking, on television series, irritating to no end?

I do.

Starting with "Law and Order," where everyone really is walking, mostly unnecessarily, from one end of the office to another, the list of this goes long.
Now, I understand that investigators are supposed to be up and about, but that does not mean just walking around the office.

Several shows, like "24" and even "Monk (does anyone else LOVE Tony Shaloub and this show?)," have realized that modern investigators probably spend a lot of time in the office, just sitting on the computer. "Law and Order" just doesn't get it, yet.

Oh, and let's not forget the latest from Aaron Sorkin, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," another walk-and-talk show, though it's probably justified to some extent. The show, however, has other problems.

I can see the show running toward its doom. The show, a fictional behind-the-scenes look at a comedy show akin to SNL, debuted at rank #22 in the U.S., and by the end of the season, had plummetted to #60 and above, also dipping in viewership and market share.

Sorkin, the creator of the show, seems to have a stereotypical direction and dialog delivery style for his characters, which can be quite irritating unless you are a fan.

Also, the main story line of the show, which is that intelligent comedy cannot exist and thrive anywhere but the most liberal, blue states, is really dumbing down the mid West audience, and in its quest to provide a clean light sort-of comedy show, has become as bigoted and prejudiced as the people it seems to make fun of.

Newsflash: They aren't big fans of you, either, buddy! You are out. I give it two to three seasons, max. And definitely out of its prime time Monday night spot.

Show-related lingo and the issues they seem to refer to are not close to Americans' hearts, perhaps, and they don't seem to realize the value of viewership, really.

The usual response may be what the first episode of the show, ironically, begins with -- the lobotomzation of the U.S. television audience, but I, once again, beg to differ.

People liked the West Wing, perhaps because they cared, and perhaps because it dealt with international issues when there weren't too many on televisio n otherwise, but who cares about the lives of television comedy sketch writers?

And Sorkin, with Sports Night (far better, in my opinion than Studio 60), already spoke about the corporate nature of television drama and delivered that lecture from the pulpit. Why must we endure it again?

I kind of liken him to Maniratnam, the Indian director. The reason? Maniratnam started with romantic movies, and some of his best films are his earlier ones. Once he got bogged down with international issues, he lost his way, it would seem. His best scenes in his current films are also often the romantic ones.

The parallel? I feel Sorkin has mounted his high horse of cleaning television of its impurities, and though his strong point may be the plot of the story, he seems to have lost sight of it. Instead, he focuses on religion on TV, globalization of television and other causes that people frankly, do not care. Sorkin obviously does, being in the business, but why would I, a grocery store cashier, care?

Dinosaurs of the 21st century

I thought I was hip and trendy, and was reasonably caught up with technology-- until about six months ago, that is.
What's when our subscription to "Wired" magazine kicked in, and I realized that I was so offline.
I had never seen a video on YouTube, nor was I on MySpace -- two things that seemed to decide whether you were "in" or not.
There was a little sidebar on whether or not collective intelligence was good or bad -- wasn't even sure what that meant. Is that just a bunch of people talking?
I was slightly taken aback, as my ignorance would be ratified every month, as soon as the issue came in the door.
There was another cover story about gaming, and I had not even set sight on a Play Station, let alone play on one.
And yet, I asked myself, why do I think of myself as "in" with the digital?
In the office, the three people sitting closest to me are always listening to music on their headphones while working, something I still cannot bring myself to do. I did try to bring my headphones in once, but was paranoid about missing a call, or getting too distracted by the music, that I had to get rid of them.
Since subscribing to the magazine, I have seriously begun to contemplate the future of the newspaper. Now, how much news does a fairly retro person like me get on actual paper? Actually, probably none.
My attention span has decreased to automatically spam block any article over 2,000 words (unless the headline seems fascinating), and in the library, my hands automatically reach for the short stories.
And almost all my news comes to me online. And all the people I know in the United States are doing that -- getting their news online.
In 15 years, when I'll be looking forward to my retirement (as I am now), what choices might I have? Will my career be forced to change course automatically? Will the skills I learn as a journalist be relevant in this blogging, MyTubing world?
How fast will I have to adapt?
Perhaps it's all relative, I thought. A lawyer friend of mine resisted buying a cell phone for the longest time, and would ask his wife to store numbers, because he couldn't figure out how to do them. Now I was better than he, wasn't I?
But then, there's my father, whose learning curve on computers must have have been real steep, but he caught on amazingly -- perhaps by necessity. He would get in and out of chat rooms, and voice chat with us all the time, until, I believe, he hit the ceiling. Of learning and boredom, that is.
Yahoo! forever asked him to update to its newer version, and with falling telephone rates, he just thought it was easier to call us! He is probably not going back to the Internet for anything that he needs, probably just for entertainment.
The Internet may just be a pastime for my father, but for people like us, it is imperative to keep up. The future is indeed very digital, and analogs must die, for sure.
Even if some still believe that computers are not the god they are made out to be.
My mother-in-law, who worked in a bank her entire life in India, retired early, but finds her colleagues struggling with learning computers. These are people in their early 50s, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be for them, to just take that leap into computerdom.
"It's much easier, actually," said my mother-in-law recently, "to just do it by hand."


PS: Just after I wrote this, I wondered about how people are able to maintain blogs regularly -- and I realize I might not have adapted my message to the medium. A blog, perhaps, needs to be more chatty and writing a blog like I would a report (replete with AP style) may not be what this medium is all about!
But writing as a conversation may be a forced style for me, and it might require a whole different style of writing-- catch my dilemma? Change, my friends, change!