Monday, August 12, 2013

Summer movie fun . . . or not so much

It's summer movie blockbuster season. That means I get to see lots of superheroes and explosions and car chases.

Actually, that doesn't sound fun to me. I'll try to skip that as much as possible. 

What's more fun for me is seeing depressing movies based on real life. Well, maybe fun isn't quite the right word to describe that either, but it's how I've been preferring to spend my time this summer. Here are the last three movies I went to see:

Fruitvale Station. A young black man goes out to celebrate New Year's Eve and on the way home, he gets killed by a cop for no good reason.

Blackfish. An orca kills three people during the course of its captivity at Sea World, and he and his fellow orcas remain in captivity for no good reason.

Lovelace. A young woman is forced to make porn and gets famous for it, all the while being abused horribly by her scummy manager/husband who has no good reason (except for money, and control, and . . . well, whatever things seem like good reasons to awful human beings).

I recommend all three movies strongly because we all need to take a step back and see the enormous consequences of treating minorities, women, and animals as inferiors or as playthings. No one is anyone else's inferior. No one else is anyone's possession, and no person or animal exists for anyone else's whims and pleasures, or to make us feel better by making us feel superior. 

These seem like such simple concepts to grasp, and yet . . .