Just read the name "ivanka" in a Facebook message and had to try hard to remember where I had heard that name before. Another thing I'm having trouble with is remembering if and when "intent" matters with the NYT. They run an op-ed from a troll, I guess intent is irrelevant?
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A platform like Facebook is very hard to build. Serving billions of users, hundreds of millions at the same time, is a mostly unheralded accomplishment, probably like putting a man on the moon. Yet this never comes up in the public analysis.
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I don't watch a lot of movies these days thanks to the pandemic I guess. But in the last two days I watched two,
NomadLand and
I Care a Lot. It's hard to imagine two more different movies. NomadLand is a character study, played by a 63-year-old
Frances McDormand. Her age is important. I understand this somewhat because I'm 65, and it's like that great
Al Pacino speech in
Any Given Sunday, as you get older
things are taken from you. Parents, friends, lovers, and then pieces of yourself start going, and you're left wondering what the fuck. That's NomadLand in a nutshell. The acting is beautiful, the scenery, the characters, the feelings (somewhat) -- but the story? It's like viewing a work of art in a museum. It's just there. It's for you to decide what it means and a lot of that will depend on how old you are, I imagine. I Care a Lot is very much the opposite, but interestingly it's also about things being taken away from an old person, in this case played by 72-year-old
Dianne Wieste. So much happens in the first few minutes of the movie, and it's so anger-making, I turned it off at least three times to regain my composure to continue watching. But then it becomes a rollicking ultra-violent comedy, kind of like a Quentin Taratino movie, but funnier. If you want entertainment, I Care a Lot is for you. I will watch NomadLand again. Sometimes movies like this don't grab me on the first viewing, for example,
There Will Be Blood, which i panned after a first viewing, then
loved after a second. I'll let you know.
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BTW, the title, I Care a Lot, is a joke.
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