journal features

movie review - I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2017.06.11

This is a movie about a loser name Ruth whose home is robbed. She engages a local weirdo in her case, and things escalate dramatically from there. The story is fairly straightforward, but it's the movie's viewpoint that matters. I can't think of something else that captures the same view of the world, in which assholes rampage through life making it impossible for everyone else. Pushed beyond anything she can tolerate, the main character hardens and is quickly out of her league but as events unfold she rises to it with naïve confidence and little else to go on. And the assholes, my god. A crucial scene takes place in a McMansion with people so unlikable it's hard to describe. But our girl stays true to herself and comes away with .. a win?

I enjoyed it immensely, this is probably the best film I've seen this year. Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)