Money or Dreams

This week has been tumultuous. I’ve been all up and down like a birthday clown coming off meth, and GEE WHIZ has it been fun for the people around me. Props to my boyfriend for not breaking up with me (thanks guy, you’re great), and props to my family for not changing their last names and going into hiding to get the F away from me.
The reason for the moody mood-ring emotional rollercoaster? Why, dreams of course. Splendid Rose-glasses-tinted dreams. The kind that mean you are like a bloodhound on a scent when it comes to jobs and opportunities and real life. The kind of dreams that wait impatiently in the back of your mind whispering:

“why haven’t I been realized yet? What are you doing? Every day you don’t do something valuable is another day closer to death.”

I like to imagine the voice whispering in the voice of Darth Vader, “psssh Paris, caaaaaw, what are you doing pssssh, cawwww with your fucking life pssssh.”
I digress.

So I’ve been temping here and there…whatever it’s boring… I mean it’s not that boring, I’ve worked in some cool companies, made some new contacts, you know the usual…and this week the Temp Agency (which has been excellent and kept me busy) contacted me and asked me if I’d be interested in being put forward for a job outside of the Creative Field. The role sounded like boring admin, but here’s the kicker… the money was excellent.

I had to have a good grapple with myself. I gave up a cushy admin position back in August to pursue my dreams of Film and Television. I’m young, I don’t really have any commitments, but HELLO it’s been exhausting scraping by each month. A part of me was really really REALLy attracted to the offer.

And then Darth Vader exploded in my head.

Literally, the Dark Side was calling me, but in this case the Dark side was the corporate world, the world of 9-5 and boring KILLMYSELF office politics. Stability. Health care. Benefits. All those words which must mean a lot at some point.
But not today, and possibly not tomorrow, and possibly not for the next few years.
It is stressful trying to keep a positive attitude about going after what you love (especially when a lot of other people seem to want it too), but there is also knowing in your gut when something is the right or wrong path to take. Do I want to wake up in ten years and realize that I’m unhappy? NO.

Would I rather keep slogging it out, working for free, getting involved with lots of projects and running myself ragged in the hope that I will get to where I want to be?
I think so.

But it is a tough balance, and on the days where I have to pay my rent, and phone bill, and internet and buy my Transport for the month and still try to budget for food and entertainment… well on those days I think about just taking a day job.
And then I remember that this my life and I only get one shot at it, so I better make the most of it…yada yada cliché, read them in Morgan Freemans voice. So I hoick up my falling down ratty old jeans, eat my stir fry for the fourth day in a row and keep going.

Because one day Money and Dreams might just go hand in hand.

My quest for Fame and the disintergration of ethics in Social Media

I wouldn’t usually use the word “Whore’ to describe myself, (let alone anyone else unless I was EXCEPTIONALLY pissed off), but there is no denying that for the last 3 days I am been whoring myself on all forms of social media for one reason only.

*Gasp* I have entered a reality tv show type competition.

AND oh MAN do I want it.

Twitter (which I haven’t ever fully appreciated and use mostly for posting stuff about the volunteer TV interviews I do)

Facebook (which I over-use for sharing photos and funny stuff with friends and family overseas)

and Instagram (which is mainly just pictures of snow, cut off “artsy” pictures of my face and the Canuck boyfriends dogs)

I am HATING myself all over Facebook and twitter because I am being so annoying and inundating friends and family with ME ME ME-ness.

VOTE FOR ME! I tell them, and I start thinking it is totally normal to start harassing people I haven’t spoken to in a year (umm…hi….i know we haven’t spoken in a while… and we probably don’t have anything in common any more… but would you be a dear and click this link and rate me even though this is a thing you don’t even care about….)

I have turned into one of those spamming douches that people right-click, hide, on their news feeds.

What have I become?

The truth of the matter is that I cringe to ask people to do this. Not because I am afraid of failure (oh no, I’ve taken quite a few knock-backs in my life and I am FINALLY FINALLY learning to dust myself off and pick myself back up) but because social media has etiquette, and begging for votes or views goes against that etiquette. I am like the prim old lady of Social Media.

But it’s not just me and my well-to-do online profile. There are many articles and sources to look for the way one minds their online manners, and you better not fuck too hard with them because a rain of hate will fall down on you. Delete, dust hands of person. Perhaps in real life you will begin to think less of them.

There have been people who I have been close to deleting because of their online spamming. And now I have morphed into one of those people!

BUT whats a girl to do?

I have been fighting for my bit of the TV/FILM pie for a while now and the one thing I do know is that you have to be in it to win it. You have to say “Hi, I’m here and I’m keen”.

There is a high likelihood that I will not make it into the top forty of this comepetition (No! What am I saying – positive thinking/vibes/ooooooohhhhhmmmmmmm – (thats me meditating to the spirit world of reality tv competitions)) but the fact that I made a video, put myself out there and went for it…well who knows who will see it and think, “that girl is cool.”

There is a saying I heard here in Canada which I love and I think about it all the time.

the saying goes:

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

So here it is, my first shot at goal for Much Music…. but who knows?!! At least I’m up for the game.

 

 

The Next Five Years

“Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans” is something my father has been known to say on occasion, but which google reveals to be a John Lennon quote/song lyric. Never is that saying truer than it is for the month of February, which at 28 days most years, goes by in a flash. Here we are March 1st and I’m thinking, we should probably take down the Christmas tree.

My Mum wrote a very funny blog earlier this week, about how she feels she is just hanging around in the waiting room of life. She’s 43 years old and all her children have fled the nest, and she’s not sure what the next twenty years will look like. Well funny that, none of us do.

A day after reading her blog, a package I sent myself six weeks ago arrived. During the Christmas break back in Hong Kong, I spent some time going through some of my old stuff that has accumulated in my mothers tiny apartment. I found my old school blazer (which was gigantic on me in year 12 and now sits the way my work blazers sit…ever an indication of aging and thickening) old programs from Musicals I was in, and I found precious newspaper pages on which I featured.

When I was 15 and living in Hong Kong there was a section of the South China Morning post called “The Young Post” and for a period of time they had different groups of kids (I think they started with 9) come in, photograph them in a couple of different poses, and then send then get them to respond to certain questions. The idea was that you would vote one kid out of the young post every week.

I only lasted 3 weeks or so. My downfall week, the question was “tell us a joke”. My parents had a thick book of politically incorrect jokes that used to sit in our bathroom (wildly inappropriate for children, but hey, I learned a lot about sex and sexual interaction from that novel!) Now, I know what you are thinking, I went ahead and did the one about the Nun and the Irishman. WRONG. Because somewhere in the back of my rude-joke-packed-mind I realized that these jokes were hilarious but also WILDLY inappropriate for the young post, I looked up online, “politically correct, lame jokes,” and came up with the following, which I used as my answer:
“What’s brown and sticky? A Stick!”

I was eliminated. Well Fuck.

But that isn’t where our story ends today. The question before the one that ended my career as Supreme Young Person of Hong Kong 2004, was “Where do you see yourself in 15 years?” And I answered the following:

“Wow! I’ll be 30! Well I hope to be working in a creative Job, maybe Acting because that is something I have always loved, living in some far away exotic place, with some really hot guy.”

Well.

This year I will be 25 and that means it has been ten years since I wrote that.

Let’s check in.

I am certainly living in some faraway place; Toronto is NOT exactly close to Hong Kong, and I’m not sure what I would have defined as exotic back then, having lived the majority of my life in Asia at that point. Compared to the busy, loud, crazy city that I consider my home…snow covered everything is pretty exotic. Eh?

As for the job…at this point I’d take any job as the endless weeks of Temping blur into one another and my sent inbox fills with more and more desperate and unanswered emails, (I’m totally kidding, I’m still working towards the creative thing and have actually had a couple of non-creative job offers suggested to me, which I have politely turned down. I didn’t bust my ass being poor and interning for the last 6 months to give up and take yet another Admin job which pays the bills, but kills my soul.)

And as for the really hot guy thing, let’s not even go there. You don’t want to hear me gush about Canuck boyfriend and he’d probably de-friend me if I did. But I think I’m on-track with that one.

But the next five years is going to be pretty huge I’m guessing. There is obviously no way of knowing (because 2 years ago I would have never thought I’d be where I am today), but the one thing I do know is that life is an ever changing thing. You can never get too comfortable with the way things are, for better or worse, and it’s always for the better in my opinion.
I find it interesting that my Mother feels rutted in her life when she is still in the prime of it. I get it that the hands on child-rearing faze of her life has fizzled, but she never gets to stop being our mother (sucks to be you) and she never gets to stop being a part of her already fairly eccentric family. Maybe that’s her problem (and I suffer from it to) there are days when things just seem too calm and normal.

And that is freaky.
The good news is that she has the next generation to look forward to. Maybe not in the next five years, but, thanks to stupid biology, certainly in the next 15. And she’s already threatened to be the grandmother that feeds the grandkids sugar and lets them stay up late and gives them money to sneak out to concerts and will generally be considered “cool” and therefore loved more than me. Stupid ungrateful unborn, un-conceived children.

I guess we’ll just have to see where we’re at, twenty years from now.

Temping, Prositution of the Corporate world

Temping:

temp [tɛmp] Informal
n
a person, esp a typist or other office worker, employed on a temporary basis
vb (intr)
to work as a temp

Turns out Temping is better paid than retail (not by much, but enough for me to go buy those Croc boots which I swear aren’t ugly, just give me a chance to show you) and because I continue to be ignored by the world of Full Time work in an industry that I am dying to work in, I decided to give Temping a go. Since the beginning of the month I have taken on four different assignments, 2 x 1 day assignments, 2 x 1 week assignments, and learned about a whole new world that I never knew existed.

The world of the Temp.

Let me give you a little run down.

The world of the Temp is a place ungoverned by your average 9-5. You wake up at 7.30am with the hope that at 8am, someone (Pimp) will call you and tell you they need you at XYZ location, and the dress code is *blank*. You slap on some make-up, make sure you vaugely know where you are going and sprint out the door. On the train you wonder again what you are doing with your life, but the other part of your brain says “this is the last job, I promise you. We’ll get the money and then move to Florida.” You get to the destination, you make small talk, find out what the client (John) likes and what they need. You settle down, close your eyes, and daydream you are somewhere else (like at a real job). When it’s all over, they thank you plenty of times, and you shuffle out clutching your time sheet. You buy yourself a couple of drinks to try to forget the disappointment in your mothers eyes.

Temping is the Prostitution of the corporate world.

But you know what? I don’t hate it.

My first two assignments were in Film and Television production companies, and you bet your Chihuahua’s left nut that I worked it like I was on the sinking Titanic and had to get my third-class ass on a lifeboat. The one day gig was a bit of a bust, it was a monday and quiet as hell, but the week long gig yielded fun, a bit of professional networking with an awesome Aussie guy who took my resume and some new surprising friendships with girls my own age who worked in the company. Turns out some of them had been in the same boat as me and some of them even got their jobs after temping first.

Actually, when I started to look into it, Temping seemed to be one of the ways a bunch of people I know got their full-time jobs. They’d go for an assignment and the company would say, you know what, why don’t you stay on, or, why don’t you give us your resume to take a look at. It was kind of like a pre-interview. And hell with the number of resumes and cover letters I have sent off, any chance of getting into ANY company as more than just a name on a piece of paper is a big bonus.

So why did I always think there was such a stigma attached to Temping? I couldn’t even tell you. Maybe there is, but now that I’ve joined the ranks I just don’t care. The job market is so tough out there, and lots of people who want to do what I want to do are stuck in menial jobs, frittering away their youth and talent.

I’d rather wake up each day with the fresh and exciting opportunity of meeting someone that may assist with opening a career door for me, than be marking down sweaters for the third time this week.

End Rant

MUM MUM! I’m going to be on TV!

I am looking forward to Tomorrow morning because when I wake, I’ll brush my hair, wash my face (usually it looks like a snail slept at the corner of my mouth because of all the shiny drool marks), I’ll try to put on an outfit that doesn’t make me look fat or emphasize the natural redness of my face, and I’ll put on my clipity cloppy shoes, take my handbag full of grown-up things like keys and left-over birthday cake, and I’ll go to the TV studio where I do my internship with a happy little jiggle in my step. Because Tomorrow I get to film a reporter segment. That’s right, some crazy person here in Toronto is actually going to let me interview someone and (theoretically) put that gargled-word-spew on Television. Where people can watch it. People who haven’t been strapped to an electromagnetic pulsing chair with their eyelids held open.

Yay me!

In all seriousness, I probably won’t be that bad. I’ve done five minutes of research on the organization we are covering, and I even went to their website. I’ve read the media pack and I am good to go. How much more prepared could I be? Doing this uncut, un-edited 6 minute interview with children will be as easy as squashing my triple d’s into that bra I swear still fits.

It’s going to happen one way or another. I just hope it won’t be too painful.

No but seriously, I am so happy to have this opportunity. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m turning 24 next week, and for some reason I keep feeling like working in retail is crushing my soul and making me question if I’m doing the right thing being thousands of kilometres away from my family all alone in a random country that no one in my family had ever even thought of before I decided I’d never leave.

Oh I’m sorry… I didn’t mention that I’m having one of those what-the-hell-am-i-doing-with-my-life moments? At what point do we just give up and say “Paris you are not just having a what-the-hell-am-i-doing-with-my-life moment, you just generally don’t know what the hell you are doing with your life” ?

In theory, when people ask me about my life-plan, I mumble something about film and television and Tina Fey and riches enough to buy me a sweet purebred dog and an apartment overlooking some kind of harbour. And in theory, North America seems like the place to be for all that jazz, what with its massive amount of productions and population and all that stuff. And yes, you are right, technically I should be in LA or NYC but I haven’t figured out how to navigate the USA visa website without getting exhausted so SHUTUP I’m in Canada, which is like wanting to Keep up with a Kardashian but instead sitting in a room with Bruce Jenner trying to figure out how to find Kim or Koala or whatever the other ones are called.

In the last almost two months since that weird vortex called Camp finished and I came back and joined the real-world after a summer of living under a micro-scope and fighting about who got which days off, I have applied to probably 60 film and television companies based here. I have written funny cold call type emails and attached my Resume, I have tried to network with people I think might know people, I have literally not stopped pushing at that glass aquarium that surrounds the entertainment industry, trying to find a crack. And whoever did the waterproofing has surely done a fine job.

No cracks are to be found.

I did have an interview with a very big production and distribution company thanks to a friend of mines dad (oh did I tell you I didn’t know it was an interview and thought it was a meeting so…kindof just turned up totally mentally unprepared?) and even thought that went AWESOMELY I (surprisingly) didn’t really hear back from them (outside of it was great to meet you).

I know that people search for the right job for months and months, and its winter now and blah blah blah.

But give this girl a break.

I am hardworking and smart and I have a pretty great Resume for one seeking just an entry-level job… what is it?!

I need the Universe to unfold as it should FASTER. I am trying to approach each day as a learning experience, trying to keep faith with the old patience and trying to keep working and chipping at that old job-searching thing but LORD is it exhausting to try to contact 60 people and to hear back from 4, all politely to let you know that they currently aren’t hiring.

I’m not alone I know. I have two friends who just arrived in Toronto trying to get jobs too. And they are in Finance/HR and Business. So it isn’t like it’s just my industry. BUT COME ON! We’re girls and we need to start making some money so we can buy nice things and take our boyfriends to trendy restaurants. This isn’t the 50′s any more. A girls got to work it.

Thank god the internship I’m doing is still throwing challenges at me and making me feel like I’m maybe not probably trying to cling to the imaginary hope of a career in this industry.

So yeah, I’ll let you know when you can tune in. Hopefully the Canadians will be able to understand my accent.

End Rant

(Photocredit: Icanhazcheezburgers.com)

The Help…er

In the last fortnight I have read ‘The Help’ by Katherine Stockett and viewed the movie adaptation that has an amazing cast including Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis. Both were excellent.

I haven’t been able to put either out of my mind, and I couldn’t help but draw similarities between the African-American maids of 1964 Alabama, with the Filipino maids of Hong Kong in the early 2000′s that I grew up with.

My the time we moved back to Hong Kong when I was 14, the term “Maid” wasn’t very widely used, and instead the more “Politically Correct” term for these women, was “Helper” (are you starting to see the similarities? No? Ok, just go along with it.)

Hong Kong, and other major expatriate cities like Kuala Lumper, Singapore, Dubai, Shanghai and Bang Kok are teeming not only with Foreign expatriates working the high-powered corporate gigs, but also a plethora of people (mainly women) from Sri Lanka and the Philippines. It seems to be a cultural expectation of women, particularly from the Philippines, that they will go to these far away cities, often with no job lined up, to find a family, to work for them, and send pretty much all of the money home.

Filipino maids get paid very little per month. I think that in 2002 when we moved back to Hong Kong, the minimum wage for a full-time, live in “Helper” was somewhere around $3200HKD per month. I’m going to assume that it was 5 to 1 in those days and that the Australian dollar and Canadian dollar were fairly evenly matched (probably all wrong information, don’t listen to me, I’m an English and Film major) and that works out to be roughly a salary of $640AUD a month.

Keep in mind if you will, that these helpers work 6 days a week, cook every meal, clean the house, do the laundry, walk the dogs, pick up the children, entertain the children and basically follow out every instruction given to them. It is not a 9-5 day. It is a day with no real set hours. And in the tiny apartment (of massive mansion depending on your Corporate peg on the ladder) they have a tiny room to themselves with a bed, usually a tv, and not much else. Or sometimes if that is not possible, the “Helper” would live in a room with a child or infant. I have heard horror stories of Maid’s sleeping in the kitchen. Some will have their own Bathroom (is this starting to sound like the Bathroom initiative in ‘The Help’?)

When we moved back to Hong Kong (after being maid-less for a number of years in Australia) we hired a lady called Lolita to be our Helper. Lolita was literraly 4″zilch and the shortest person I had ever seen outside of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory. Not a dwarf, just, a tiny person…which worked out well considering the room we had in our first ground floor apartment was the size of a broom closet and she could have a custom made childs bed.

Lolita was there for the good times and the bad. With my mum suffering from depression, and my dad working in China 5/7 days, Lolita was really the one keeping us alive and not looking grubby. She packed our lunches, cleaned our uniforms, made sure we had money to get to and from school, took my youngest brother to school, and saw myself and Kip, my middle brother off on the ferry or bus. She took us to play at the members only pool (of course she didn’t swim – but hung out with the other maids in a kind of segregation… sound familiar?)

She also celebrated with us when we had triumphs, awards, achievements, birthdays. She was a seen, and yet unseen part of our family unit. She could NOT say the letter P, so when she called me, it would be “Faris” and she was forever cleaning up our golden cocker spaniels “Foo Foo’s” and she called the Philippines the “Pil-ipines” which made no sense to me because it was already a word with the “Fff” sound. She had been an accountant in the “Pil-ipines” and she used to help me with my Maths (because I was awful at it). She made more money being our maid, than she did as an accountant in the Philippines. True story. I also knew that she was married, and that she had been a world vision sponsor kid, that that is how she had been able to go through University. Somebody sponsored her all the way through. I think Lolita said she was an older British lady.

And that is really all I know about Lolita. My last year of high school was kind of blur because of all the traumatic shit that went down. I can’t remember if Lolita left before I did for University or before. I’m sure my mum will be able to shed some light on the subject (sadly it is 12 hours ahead in Hong Kong, and therefore she is in bed). I never sought to keep in touch with her, and I don’t really know what happened to her. I didn’t really know that much about her to begin with… so…

I asked my brothers what they remember about Lolita (we had plenty of maids before that when we were little, but she is the one we all most remember. She was also our most recent one).

This is what my brothers had to say:

R: (Who was pretty much raised by her between the ages of 9-11) I don’t really remember much about her.

K: All I remember is helping her set up her computer so she could use Skype, and that she had a husband and house in the Philipines.

Me: (In response to Kip) Doesn’t it strike you as kinda weird that we didn’t really know that much about her… and yet she knew very intimate details about us?

K: I guess, at the time I never really thought about it.

And there you have it in a nutshell. We didn’t really think about it. Lolita was literally our helper in every way. She helped us with our homework, helped us when we were sad or sick or angry, she cleaned up after us, fed us, she did everything a parent does, but she was not a parent. We didn’t love her… we didn’t know her.

Paris

 

 

Is there something wrong with me?

This week I have seen two films starring child actors in central roles.

The first was “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and last night I saw “Hugo” in 3D with the boyf.

Both are based on books, and I had heard nothing at all about ELAIC but had heard rave reviews from boyfs brother about “Hugo.” On paper “Hugo” is amazing. It boasts some great actors, Ben Kingsley, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frances de la Tour, Richard Griffiths (who I met in Hong Kong a couple of years ago) and some cute, wide-eyed child actors, Chloe Grace Mortez and Asa Butterfield. Not to mention is is directed by Martin Scorsese and has captured the use of 3D superbly.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” also boasts some pretty big names, if you’ve ever heard about a little old actor named Tom Hanks, and some woman or other named Sandra Bullock (I think she won some kind of award or something last year before he tattooed retard of a husband left her for a woman with a swastika tattooed on her forehead – mama would be so proud). Also when I saw the trailer of the film, my first thought was “Oh god. Not another 9/11 film.”

But here’s the weird thing and the reason for the title of this blog. Hugo has 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and is generally accepted as a masterpiece of cinema, while ELAIC has a 54% rating, many people, like my initial reaction, questioning if 2011/2012 is not a little to soon to be dredging up memories of the “The worst day” (to quote Oskar Schell, the main character from the film.)

And how did I react to these films?

I loved ELAIC. I wept the entire time. I thought the cinematography was amazing. The script was tight. The characters were full-bodied, flawed and sweet. The scenery of various parts of NYC was visually delightful. The journey tore at my heart-strings apart, and then put me all back together with the final redeeming scene.

Hugo drove me a little bit nuts. I thought it was predictable, I found the main character aggravating (why are you always running away/looking teary eyed at people…yes yes I know you’re an orphan…AND?!) and I kept noticing sloppy continuity throughout the film, which fixated me far more than why the old man (Ben Kingsley) was so cranky. I groaned at some of the dialogue eg:

Weepy Child Actor: I’m sorry…it’s broken.
Gruff older man type, suddenly warmed by poor, brave little boy: (clearly talking about child) It’s not broken. It’s just perfect.

Boyf LOVED the film. “The best film I’ve seen all year” and was UTTERLY shocked that I was like… “meh.” So too boyf’s brother (a film buff and wannabe director), eager to find out if we adored it as much as he did. They have since both pronounced me fools, and although they deny it, I can see them re-evaluating my presence in their lives.

*Secret whispered conversation*

Boyf: Well if she doesn’t like Hugo, imagine what else she might not like!?
Boyfs Bro: You’re right! She doesn’t have the same judgement as us on this film…she’ll never be one of us!
Boyf: True… better just dump her now…oh? What was that? Yes coming dear. She’s onto us! Must go.

I love film, and although I’m lazy in remembering directors and actors names, I do view widely and have a very varied film taste.

My favorite Director is Wes Anderson and I most particularly love his film ‘The Darjeeling Limited.” But there are lots of other styles that have tickled my fancy, like Saving Private Ryan and Bridesmaids, which are as different as Metal and Moss (did you like that? I was going for something different from “Chalk and Cheese”).

I like to go into movies knowing very little about the film so I haven’t been swayed by my favorite reviewers or had my mind tainted by badly put-together trailers that give everything away.

So yeah, I was surprised by my reaction to Hugo vs ELAIC because I already had heard things about them.

I didn’t HATE Hugo as a film. There were a number of redeeming factors in the film, the visiting of early movie history with the Lumiere brothers and George Meilies turning out to be the cranky old man from the train station toy shop (very interesting). There is also the joyous and visually fascinating world of the inside of the clocks and mechanical devices in the train station which whir and click and are engaging combined with the wonderful time period (1930′s) and set in Paris too AND in 3D. Wow. But then that’s a small pet peeve – all British Cast in France, brummy accents, posh ones…It’s Europe…it’s close enough… (??!?!)

But definitely the major difference between the two films was that one had an actor playing a child with mild Asperges syndrome, doing an outstanding job, and then there was “The young actor in the title role (of Hugo), Asa Butterfield, (who) is a bland presence with a painfully narrow range of facial expressions.” (Joe Morgenstein, Wall Street Journal).

I don’t know, maybe that’s harsh, I didn’t act in a Martin Scorsese film at age 12 like Asa has.

Maybe (like my sweet Boyf semi-jokingly suggested) I have no heart.

But I don’t know. I weep in commercials sometimes. At certain times of the month anyway. And I would describe myself as a compassionate, liberal, loving person. So…

Boyf likened the story to Great Expectations (which I had to study in University and which I did HATE) so maybe it’s in the vein of that, poor boy coming up in the world (uhhuh…yawn).

Maybe I’ll give it another go when it comes out on DVD, but for now, too much cheese. See it for the visuals, but see Extremely Loud and Incredibly close for the storyline.

But what are your thoughts? Have you seen both? Did you have a preference?

Time

In the last week and a bit I have seen a number of movies that relate in one way or another to Time.

First it was ‘The Timer’ (2009) which my roommate and I found on Netflix and were kind of intrigued by (actually we were tired and it looked chick-flick-ey). The premise of the film is that you can get a timer implanted in your wrist and, providing the person you are meant to spend the rest of your life with has one too, the timer will count down until you lay eyes on each other. The main characters isn’t working because her “True love” hasn’t had one implanted. So it is blank. Her sisters says she won’t meet the person until she is 42.

In the film everyone is obsessed with how much time is left on their clocks, and finding the corresponding person with the timer. Plot holes aside (-seemingly that everyone in America seems to pair up with someone in that country, the pre-ordained nature of life – the timer seems to know you wont randomly move to…Canada say? – And most couples seem to be hetero) everyone in the film is obsessed with finding their “True Love” and rather than comforting to know that you will find that person, people’s lives seem to shut down and it all becomes about, “The One.”

‘

 

In Time’ (2011) is Justin Timberlake’s new (non-musical, take me seriously because I’m a SERIOUS Actor now) film. The trailers made the film look really interesting and a bit sci-fi-ey which I enjoy. The premise of the film is that humans have become genetically engineered to not age past 25. When you hit the age of 25, you get one year of time – also the currency for things like living, food (e.g a cup of coffee is four minutes).

Will Salas (JT) is from the ghetto, where people live day-to-day, hour to hour, working shitty jobs and getting low pay (do you see the analogy there for today’s world? You should! The writer and director hit you over the head with it constantly!)

I won’t ruin the film for you if you plan to see it (don’t waste the money at the cinema) but basically it somehow turns into a Robin Hood/Bonnie and Clyde thing that is so random. And they say TIME like 300 TIMES. SO you get kind of over it.

Oh that movie was about time? Sooooer random, I never picked up on that!

Then last night I saw ’50/50′ (2011) with Seth Rogan and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the film is about Cancer and running out of time. And unlike ‘The Timer” or “In time” the film doesn’t bash you over the head with the idea of the ticking clock, it obviously does make you think about our mortality, I mean the main character Adam played by JG-L is only 27.

So what did I learn from these films?

Yes I learned something from them, even the first two which were kind of weird/not that good.

They made me reflect on the “Time” that we do have, and we have no timers or numbers counting down to tell us when our life is over, or any indication of how much time is left.

And therefore we must live in the moment, achieve the things we want to achieve. Be spontaneous, strive to be happy, not take things for granted.

People say, and I’ve said it too, that life is short. Compared to the universe, yes, compared to our aging earth, yes, but short is relative. I think that if we strive to live the lives we want to live, life is just long enough.

Paris