the unhappy consumer

Rating: 1/10 (17 August 2002)

I'm having difficulty deciding whether to beat my head against the wall or bother to criticize yet another piece of soulless Hollywood entertainment/distraction. As more of the world sinks into poverty, starvation and despair, and this country rapidly transforms itself into a hyper militarized Rome, what more could we expect from that great engine of propaganda (that Hollywood unwittingly is) than one more slick lifestyles of the rich and famous in search of relief from the tedium of the idle rich.
Oh but the world needs entertainment, or is it that the world needs distraction from the evil sheet that's going down. Bread and circuses didn't hold a candle to video.
Oh well on a more specific note this was a mediocrely crafted psychedelic version of The Game (another waste of time) with a sort of Crowlian twist, and you either see what a sad soulless mess Crowley was or you idolize him as he idolized himself . Crowley, like Freud, in attempting to kill the mean-spirited Judeo-Christian God only wound up letting his own angry unexamined little psyche take his/her place. Ah but I diverge from the divergence that my subject of deriding this movie, or was it `civilization' is; well, either way they both suffer from the same preoccupation with uber wealth, high-tech toys and the fantasy that science will save us from our own mortality and/or our or society's unethical choices.
So, `Turning and turning in the widening gyre....' Its not the sheep that deserve condemnation, for they are for the most part only sheep/victims. It's the shepherds I would damn to the eternal pit of hell, and Hollywood as the shepherd of the psyche of man should take up about as much space down there as it does here.
Happy trails
the unhappy consumer