journal features

movie review - Jexi

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2021.10.16

This is an awkward semi-comedy featuring a guy who loses control of his life to an app. It starts out in an engaging way, and I liked the domineering 'personality' of the app. Unfortunately, the whole thing felt somehow perched, like everyone involved were shooting each other nervous glances as if to say, "this is funny .. right?" I feel like the lead is someone who needs lots of strong supporting actors and I'm not sure that works.

Not 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)