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Reporting

The High Cost Of Unpaid Internships

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Unpaid internships have become increasingly common in the current career landscape, becoming almost a requisite milestone in “growing up.”

Couched as an “investment in yourself,” and a place to “make contacts and get a job someday,” they are all too readily accepted as the only available path to full-time employment. Yet, the internships of today are a far cry from the apprenticeships of yore—by some estimates as many as 50% of internships are unpaid. Are they the quid-pro-quo arrangement they are posited as, or simply a front for employers to secure free labor that would otherwise have to be performed by an employee? With internships rife in all branches of the government, they stir up thorny questions about access, equality, and opportunity. A movement against unpaid and exploitative internships has been gaining steam since the economic crisis of 2008 made employment prospects especially bleak, and a number of important legal precedents are now in place. Ultimately, the question is not just whether internships give that extra experiential learning boost for interns’ resumes. The more important question is whether unpaid internships have become yet another playground of “the haves” that perpetuates the status quo of limited social mobility and income inequality.
The unemployment rate of the 16-24 age group today is more than double that of the remaining population, at nearly 20%. The average starting salary today is lower that it was in 2000. Internships have become so coveted in this stagnant climate that they have become a veritable industry—arguably one that lines the pockets of everyone involved but the interns themselves. Colleges charge students thousands in tuition money for the “opportunity” to earn academic credit for internships; a myriad of programs have sprung up promising students insider access to internships (The Washington Center and Washington Semester Program, to name a few). Yes, it is so competitive out there that securing an unpaid internship can be just as difficult, if not more, as securing regular employment.
Ross Perlin’s seminal work Intern Nation: How To Earn Nothing And Learn Very Little In A Brave New Economyoffered one of the most thorough exposes on the issue, shattering the image of the typical intern as a college student and showing the sheer breadth of the intern demographic. A Georgetown law student, 41-year-old Eric Glatt, was one of those “non-traditional” interns, who in seeking to transition to a career in the film industry, worked as an unpaid intern on the set of the movie “Black Swan” in 2010, essentially performing the functions of an accounting clerk . In September 2011, after being referred by Ross Perlin to a lawyer, Glatt sued Fox Searchlight Pictures, asking for compensation for his work. “Obviously, this was not a suit about back pay only. It was a suit to put this culture under the legal microscope and see if it withstood the test in court.” Some of the legal underpinnings of the suits have been the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the Labor Department’s Fact Sheet 71. In a New York Times article, published on April 10, 2010, Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division, said, “If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law.” In essence, Fact Sheet 71 established the six federal legal criteria of what constitutes an internship. Glatt’s case proved that the standard very much holds—the judge ruled in favor of Glatt and his fellow interns, deeming their “intern” work to be labor requiring compensation and allowing the suit to continue as a class action one.
Glatt continues his activist work outside of court as well. He explains that a group he is a part of, Intern Labor Rights, initially began as a grass-roots offshoot from the Occupy movement, and has since grown to be a part of an international coalition with branches in six other countries, including the UK, France, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Canada. Describing the two main issues the group works on, he states “most organizations did not seem overly concerned with how the practice of unpaid interns fit within the law/legal code, nor did they worry about the ethics and economics of the practice.” In essence, a lot of the work of Intern Labor Rights has been educational in nature—getting the public to see the flaws in a system that embodies and promotes inequalities of opportunity.
The economic impact is significant in some fields where unpaid internships seriously undermine the health of the labor market, especially in what Glatt calls the “cultural production industries,” such as film, music, and journalism. He attributes that to the notion that “thinking labor” is somehow perceived not as “labor” because it is mental and not physical. The implications of unpaid internships being the only “in” in cultural production industries are worrisome—a narrowing in the voices of our future journalists, and thus, the viewpoints we hear. In a study conducted in the UK, Alan Milburn found that 54% of top journalists were privately educated and “the media had become one of the most socially exclusive of professions.”
Unpaid internships are rife in many branches of government and international governing organizations, including the EU, the UN, and others. These positions are coveted because of the prestige and access they might grant. As a commentary on just how stacked the deck is in favor of the employers, the Department Of Justice now has unpaid intern positions for “special assistant US attorneys.” One can easily see why the kind of cache of exclusivity these internships permit and the hypercompetitive arena for landing one of them only serves to perpetuate entrenched social divides. While one could argue that non-profits really do need the help of interns to operate, the same cannot be said for the government or for the private sector.
So, how true are the assumptions of inequality? In a study conducted by Intern Bridge, women are much more likely to be engaged in unpaid internships than men, who prefer to participate in paid internships with for-profit companies. The “liberal arts industries” are much more likely to offer unpaid internships. And “high income students through their preferences, social networks, and status, enjoy more opportunities at the largest companies, are more likely to be paid, and have access to a limited number of opportunities in organizations their peers compete fiercely to enter.” Almost ¾ of interns report holding a second part-time job to support themselves while on internships.
While the challenges faced by unpaid interns are formidable, the movement to correct employers’ abuses is picking up tremendous momentum, both through legal filings and grassroots activism. The arts and labor working group of Occupy Wall Street demanded that the New York Foundation for the Arts stop advertising unpaid internships. Designer Alexander McQueen ignited a controversy for advertising a full-time, unpaid internship. And groups like The Fair Pay Campaign, Make Youth A Priority, and The Campaign for America’s Future are at the frontlines of this long overdue battle.
Reporting

The Buzz Over The Dire Decline In Bee Populations

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The Buzz Over The Dire Decline In Bee Populations
Worldwide, bee populations are suffering significant decline and rather than a single cause, it seems to be the result of multiple factors working in concert. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a report in 2012 citing a “complex set of stressors and pathogens,” and calling for “multi-factorial approaches to studying causes of colony losses,” yet stopped short of making any policy recommendations. The EPA has, sadly, been woefully lackadaiscal in taking steps to stem the problem. Perhaps that will change with the recent momentous suit filed by beekeepers and environmental groups against it for failing to protect bee populations.

Nearly 40 percent of U.S. domesticated hives did not survive this past winter, making it the worst loss to date. Far more than just giving us honey, bees are a crucial player in our food production; they are responsible for pollinating many flowering plants–by some estimates, almost one out of every three bitesof food that we eat was produced with the help of these natural pollinators. Cashews, beets, broccoli, cabbage, watermelons, cucumber, strawberries, macadamia, mangoes, apricots, almonds are just a few of many of the delicious crops our six-legged worker friends toil on.

Domesticated bees are not the only ones being affected either—wild bee populations have decreased by an alarming 90% over the last 50 years. The ecological implications are nearly catastrophic; so are the resultant economic and food supply concerns. The World Conservation Union predicts that 20,000 flowering plant species will disappearin the next few decades as a result of bee losses.

 

Bee die-off is in part attributed to the appropriately-ominously-named phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which bees fly off en masse and never return to their hive. Climate change, habitat destruction, pesticides, and disease all seem to have an influence on the occurrence of CCD and are factors that often interplay with each other–the worldwide bee population decline speaks to the multiplicity of causes not endemic to specific regions.

 

Climate change and habitat destruction are affecting ecosystems as a whole and bees in particular. Erratic weather patterns have an indelible effect on the schedule of flowering plants. Plants may blossom early, before honeybees can fly, or may not produce flowers at all, resulting in no pollen for the bees.

 

The impact of pesticides on bee depopulation has been widely examined by researchers. Jeff Pettis of USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and his team found that a pesticide called imidacloprid is weakening the bees’ immune systems and allowing infectionsto spread through hives. Another group of pesticides, extremely commonly-used worldwide, the neonicotinoids, chemically-related to nicotine, could harm bees by disrupting the navigational and learning abilities they use to find flowers and make their way back to the hive. The neonicotinoids have often been likened to “nerve agents” for the neuroactive effects they have on bees. In a landmark move, the European Union passed a measure last month to provisionally banthe use of neonicotinoids for the next 2 years. By contrast, the EPA continues to greenlight chemicals widely recognized even by the EPA itself as “highly toxic to bee health,” allowing the use of the pesticide sulfoxaflor manufactured by the Dow Chemical Company.

 

In addition to their neuroactive effects, pesticides also tie into another element in the explanatory chain–disease–by decreasing pathogen resistance. The blood-sucking parasite, the Varroa mite, is one of the most virulent pests of bee colonies. It is dangerous not only in its own right, but also in that exposes hives to other viruses too. Another suspect is the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin in the pollen of genetically modified corn, which German scientists found compromised bee immune systems. The bacterial disease European foulbrood is yet another pathogen.

 

Communities worldwide are astir about the danger of bee extinction and the buzz is certainly gaining in volume, with many states, including Oregon,passing measures to ban the use of certain pesticides. Clearly, the battle against CCD will have to be waged on a multiplicity of fronts.
Reporting

Dunbar’s Number–Why Your 1000+ Friend-Having Friends on Facebook Are Really *Not* Paying You Any Mind

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My post for the Ministers Of Design Blog

Revolutionary evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has the answer to the question of how many friends do you need. The Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University earned the coveted honor of having a number named after him when he posited that 150 is the number of people we can maintain a meaningful social connection with.
Robin Dunbar arrived at that number by conducting a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the British. Amongst some of the findings of the study were that about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. The chief finding, however, was the number of cards sent out always seemed to converge around the number 150. Over the past two decades, he and other researchers have arrived at 150 as the magical Pi-like number of social relationships. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us,” Dunbar explains. “Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
Dunbar’s work has been of tremendous interest to social media architects who initially conjectured that this number could very easily climb in the baseball-card-version-of-friends world of Facebook and its ilk. Facebook conducted research on this: while the median friend count on Facebook is 100, for most people (84%), the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count. “Facebook has muddied the waters by calling them all friends, but really they are not,” Dunbar states. He regards Facebook’s main impact on social circles as an ability to preserve long-standing or long-distance friendships that might otherwise decay rapidly. The downside, he suggests, is hanging onto old and remote friendships prevents us from making new non-remote ones: “Since friends exist to be shoulders to cry on (metaphorically speaking!) and shoulders that are physically remote aren’t much use for crying on, this might not be ideal.”
The scope of Dunbar’s work is significantly larger than the rather reductionistic concept of 150 and he has continued to conduct research and expand his study of human social interaction. And while Dunbar’s number has been critiqued, it has managed to withstand the test of replication, remaining relevant event  two decades later ( for example, research conducted in 2011 on Twitter found the average number of people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200). Dunbar agrees that people have different social networks for different purposes, but he qualified the term “friend” as a person we have an emotional connection with, independent of his/her utility to us: “Someone like your boss, or the person you borrow $50 from to pay the drug dealer, these people are meaningful in your life, but they’re not meaningful to you as relationships.”
The ultimate question remains not how many friends one can have on Facebook but how many friends one actually pays mind and heed to. As Dunbar explains, “Yes, I can find out what you had for breakfast from your Tweet, but can I really get to know you better? These digital developments help us keep in touch, when in the past a relationship might just have died; but in the end, we actually have to get together to make a relationship work.” Dunbar was first inspired to conduct this sort of research when he examined the grooming patterns of apes–what differentiated the humans was not just brain size but, much more importantly, the capacity for language. This capacity, funnily enough, is what is hyper developed in the world of social networking, yet Dunbar would argue words are hardly the glue of a strong emotional bond. Real meaningful interaction, research shows, still remains face-based and not word or baseball-card-collection-based.

Reviews

Pandora’s Promise–A Movie Review

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Pandora’s Promise Review

Pandora’s Promise is an exposé on the past and future of nuclear energy that readjusts a lot of public assumptions in a rather explosive way. By featuring a coterie of respected, world-renowned environmentalists who have had a change of heart on the issue, the film, although clearly on the pro side of the debate, shines light on a paradigm shift afoot. The crux of its argument is “to be anti-nuclear is to be in favor of using fossil fuel.” In other words, despite all the strides made towards renewable energy sources, we remain mired in the climate-destroying reality of oil and coal usage for energy production and this state of affairs is not tenable from any perspective. The film astutely observes that nuclear power has been forever imprinted into the public’s psyche as a “weapon we feel badly about” and seeks to destigmatize it, remove it from its Armageddon-esque milieu, and put it in a different and less malevolent context.


Pandora’s Promise does rely a bit heavily on the “if these environmentalists and scientists had a change of heart, does that not indicate the general public should as well” persuasion tactic. The film features appearances from Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog), Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb), Mark Lynas (formerly of Earth First and Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet), and Gwyneth Cravens (Power to Save the World). It also has references to extra star power for added ammunition – Richard Branson and Microsoft’s Paul Allen have joined in – and Bill Gates has formed a nuclear power company that is working on a reactor for use in the developing world. Nonetheless, it occasionally veers into the territory of portraying the anti-nuclear movement as stodgy fear- mongers in a rather sweeping sense.

The documentary thoroughly covers the history of the use of nuclear energy, bringing in many of the original nuclear scientists to speak about its development. Charles Till explains that in the 50s, two types of nuclear reactors were being developed: the breeder reactor, which breeds plutonium and recycles it, and the light water reactor, which creates much more waste. The selection of the light water reactor to use as a commercial reactor appears to have been made very short-sightedly and, not surprisingly, not by a scientist but by a military official. Since then, technology has progressed in a significant sense with many breeder reactors built successfully and progressing to a third generation reactor which recycles all waste. More importantly, disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are now much more preventable by implementing containment chambers and adequate cooling systems. The film also brings up a lot of lesser-known examples of how political pressure and public opinion has prevented a lot of facilities from opening—for example, a nuclear waste storage facility was constructed in Nevada and never used, despite the success of other such pilot projects in New Mexico. There were other plants which were built and never went into operation; the Integral Fast Reactor program was shut down.
The main point of Pandora’s Promise is that not until recently has it become apparent how huge the gap between fossil fuels and renewables is. Electricity is the one thing that causes the most significant improvement in the quality of life. With the growing development of the “Global South,” the need for energy is only expected to rise; energy consumption of the planet is expected to double by 2050. Use of coal is, shockingly, accelerating and it has cemented its role as both the most common source of energy and the fastest growing. The environmental effects of this fact are clearly destructive. One pound uranium is the equivalent of 5000 barrels of oil in energy output. Thus, it quickly becomes apparent why nuclear energy is viewed as “clean and efficient.” The film brings up the example of France which derives nearly 80% of its energy from nuclear power, has the cheapest energy in Europe, and the lowest carbon dioxide emissions.
The film stumbles when it addresses the specter of nuclear accidents and the eerie aftermath of contamination for generations, glossing over the dangers in a rather dismissive way. It argues that in terms of the mortality rate, nuclear is the safest industry, second only to wind. The assertion about Chernobyl and Fukushima that “there were so few casualties,” may be factually true but it does not really address the afterlife of radiation and its health risks. The assertion that “only” plutonium is long-lived and that nuclear waste is volumetrically non-significant (e.g. all the fuel rods could be fitted into a football field) is meant to assuage fears yet is not explored as in-depth as it could have.
Director Robert Stone relies on many detonative revelations to make a very compelling case for nuclear energy. The presence of environmentalists advocating for it certainly gives its credibility a strong boost. The assumptions we have held to be true for so long will indeed need some processing before they can be dispatched away as “we were wrong.” A more measured response might be that global warming is a serious threat and nuclear energy certainly poses a very promising solution, but one can’t help but feel as though it is a solution *only* because of our insatiable energy thirst and its ensuing pollution. With technical advances, the risk of accidents and toxic waste leaks is also decreasing; nevertheless, it will take some time before the general public can be thoroughly at ease about it. When Stone asks Lynas if he is still pro-nuclear when he visits Fukushima, his retort back to Robert Stone, “Are *you* still pro nuclear?” is not exactly entirely fear-allaying.

Reporting

Share My Dabba: The Big Impact Of A [Small And Sticky] Message

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My Ministers of Design Blog Post

Mumbai is a city of gross disparities, a monolith of have and have nots, where the chasm between the rich and the poor is more like an uncrossable abyss than a gap, with over 8 million of its dwellers living in slums. The growing income disparity is a sweeping trend that has, sadly, become all too prevalent in an increasingly globalized world, driving a wedge between the rich and the poor, who are having a hard time accessing even the most basic of social services. As the Share My Dabba video shows, every day 1.6 million people in Mumbai have food in their dabba, while 200,000 children go starving. The Happy Life Welfare Society, an Indian NGO, decided to do something about this, having worked on previous campaigns like Spread Some Warmth and Share Your Wealth.
Advertising agency McCann came on board to help the NGO figure out the strategy and came up with the “share” sticker. Whoever wanted to share his/her lunch put a sticker on the dabba. Next, however, came the more difficult step–how to collect the food and distribute it to the children without disrupting the to-the-minute-precision of the daballawah system, a Forbes Six Sigma certified system for its accuracy and a Harvard Business School case study. Every day, 5000 Dabbawalas deliver 200,000 boxes per day using only bicycles, relying on a complex series of collection zones, sorting points, and delivery zones, supported only by a manual coding system.
So as not to disturb the intricate time balance of the system, volunteers gathered at the point where dabbawallahs assemble after having collected the tiffin boxes after lunch; there, they initially used to empty the food from the containers into plastic bags and plates and give it to the children. But a much better system was devised–The Happy Life Welfare Society went to the slums and told kids and their families about the distribution point so, now, they just come there with their own utensils and are served food directly from the dabbas. All of this has to work with clockwork precision as there can be no delay in the dabawallah system–so the whole process is completed in 15 minutes.
The lesson that The Happy Life Welfare Society also learned is the importance of actually talking to people to get one’s message across, i.e. literally the legwork. To accomplish the involved planning needed for the success of this operation, volunteers had to talk to shopkeepers, workers, and office goers to make them want to share the dabba and involve them in the process, as well as the children living in the slums and their families. It would be impossible to introduce the system into a new part of the city without that educational campaign, states Kanupriya Singh, the Vice President of The Happy Life Welfare Society. There was a PR challenge from another avenue as well–addressing the critics who took umbrage to children eating messy leftovers, so the people sharing their dabbas had to also be encouraged and educated on only sharing clean food.
Share My Dabba is an excellent example of the wonderful confluence that happens when the message aligns with the successful execution of the thought behind it. A minimalistic approach lends itself well to snappy branding and messaging, but the importance of some good ol’-fashioned talking to people is also clearly underscored in this example.

Reporting

Hipper Than Thou–The Ever-So-Elusive Search For “The Authentic” In A Cleverly-Consuming World

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My first post for The Ministers Of Design Blog:
The search for “the authentic” has become one of the most dominant spiritual, moral, and consumerist quests of our time, states Andrew Potter, the author of The Authenticity Hoax and The Rebel Sell. Too bad that it is about as elusive as the Abominable Snowman—the author argues that there is no such thing as authenticity. Before you go hi-fiving your college cultural studies professor for teaching you that in the first place and leafing through your Cultural Studies Reader, let’s hash out the argument.
The obsession with “keeping it real” and “keeping it underground” has been a veritable mother lode of satire-worthy material, creating a whole new genre, the consumption critique, and launching Portlandia and Stuff White People Like into the popularity stratosphere.
But isn’t Look At This Hipster hilarious precisely because it is the ultimate [and very meta] hipster thing to laugh at other “poser hipsters”? With all this meaning upon meaning, and layers of meta upon meta, how is one to parse out what is happening?
Let’s start with the concept of selling out. How does one express one’s individuality without “selling out” to the man or the machine or some permutation thereof? Potter defines this “eternal trope of American life” as the idea that “once you had principles that were dear to you and you have given them up in exchange for comfort, material wealth, a job, etc.” It seems that the ultimate litmus test of a band “selling out,” for example, is when their music is used to shill some product for a corporation. So if consumerism is anathema, then why has the response to the “corporate” smacked of consumerism with no less intensity? Are these values we are giving up genuine values or were they a front for status seeking in the first place? This is the question posited by The Authenticity Hoax.
Take the organic/local food movement–clever consumption has become the new keeping up with the Joneses, argues Potter. As he explains, the in thing du jour has shifted from eating organic, to eating local, and then even further, eating artisanal, ramping up the exclusivity factor.
Ultimately, this quest for the real, the authentic has become no less corporatized than anything “commercial.” Begs the question–is there nothing real under the sun anymore?
One of the most seminal counter-cultural parables Fight Club and others of its ilk (Matrix, even) posit this idea that society is a land of falseness and illusion and that all one needs to do is wake up to this fact to escape its evil spell.
But how does one go about escaping this? Our culture is undeniably a countercultural culture and corporations have become incredibly good at selling rebellion to us. Potter argues that a common and very prevalent misconception is that capitalism requires conformity. As he explains, “capitalism relies on the concept of the constant churning of desires among consumers. It simply does not require conformity at all—quite the opposite.”
Consumerism (and more specifically clever consumerism) has become the hallmark and the vehicle for social status expression. In the decades of yore, one would argue there were more opportunities for standing out and finding one’s place in the social hierarchy. With the dwindling opportunities, social status is currently negotiated by consuming and displaying what you have found to be “authentic.” This “clever consumption” is the yard stick at present—why? Because consuming something different, something obscure grants one an especially coveted social status cache.
So now that the proverbial curtain has been pulled from your eyes, what is your take on this? Is it a case of “I faked it so real, I am beyond fake?” Do you agree that clever consumption is the new social ladder climbing? Comment and let us know your thoughts.

Reviews

Disconnect Movie Review

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My review of the film Disconnect

In some ways, Disconnect, the new film by Murderball director Henry Alex Rubin,
is American Beauty for our wired world, an arresting look at the complicated entanglements that technology can create. Merely calling it a cautionary tale about the dangers of the big bad Internet would be reductionistic, however–sure, none of the calamities that befall people in the movie are terribly novel and, in fact, seem directly plucked out of headlines, but it’s the acting that lends a very human touch to what could have otherwise run as a public service announcement. The film’s title could be interpreted as a reference to the disconnect and alienation the characters feel from each other and for the need for all of them to simply click the log-off button and disconnect from the webs they are so inexorably captured in.

Cindy (Paula Patton) and Derek (Alexander Skarsgard) are a married couple still mourning the loss of their baby. Their relationship strained by Derek’s stoic way of dealing with it (think the very male “I don’t want to talk about it” scenario), Cindy turns to an online support group for help, developing a cyber friendship with a man. When all of their assets are stolen by an identity thief and they seek to find the culprit, they are forced to face their own estrangement. This is one place where the movie mildly sputters, especially on the technological tip. For example, the private investigator tells them that this person “knows everything about you,” as though the fact that the thief has their vacation pictures is of the most relevance here when he has emptied out their bank accounts. Also, the explanation for how one can get a credit card number on the Internet and how a “Trojan” works was ham-handed at best and seemingly aimed at an audience that apparently has yet to learn what the definition of phishing is. The typing out of chat conversations on screen is also a bit clunky.

Jason Bateman turns in a compelling performance as a high-powered/Blackberry-indentured lawyer, oblivious to what is going on in his son’s life. When his son is the victim of cyber bullying, he plunges into a world of self-condemnation and guilt and turns to Facebook, ironically the very source of the tragedy, to “get to know” his son. Frank Grillo plays the overwrought father of Jason, the cyber bully. The film does a good job of showing how bully behavior is often a learned behavior and one that has roots at home. It also excellently portrays the vicious mean boys/mean girls school environment today’s youth have to contend with.

Nina (Andrea Riseborough) is a career-minded, unscrupulous TV reporter who convinces Kyle (Max Thieriot), an 18-year-old webcam model, to participate in her piece on the underage sex webcam industry. Initially, she appears to mean well, but quickly finds herself way in over her head and her motives become increasingly loathsome and self-serving. She uses Kyle to further her career yet does nothing to really extricate him from the life he is trapped in, especially when her actions literally endanger his life.

Disconnect thrums with suspense and maintains an undercurrent of threat to the very end. The acting is engrossing even though the character development leaves a bit to be desired. Ultimately, it does a good job of portraying just how elusive “reality” is starting to become in the superficial world of Facebook and social networking. Are the characters revealing their true selves and unspoken truths when shielded behind a screen or are they acting out an alternate identity in the digital playground? And while they somehow manage to weave their way back towards at each other, the costs are undoubtedly high. Disconnect manages to avoid the pitfall of being overly didactic and preachy, even if the subject matter could have been something plucked out of cyber security awareness month brochure.

Reviews

BYT Spring/Summer 2013 Movie Guide

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BYT Spring/Summer 2013 Movie Guide

The East (May 31) – Brit Marling’s latest movie, The East, sounds like an incendiary amalgamation of The Edukators and If A Tree Falls, with a dash of Fight Club-esque nihilism for good measure. In Sound of My Voice, she played a cult leader and the protagonists were the infiltrators; here, she is the infiltrator, attempting to gain access into an “eco-terrorist” group that launches attacks against major corporations (I use quotation marks as I am not quite sure the rather-easily-slapped-on terrorist label should be bandied about quite so freely in cases involving environmental issues). The East finds Brit teaming up with long-time collaborator and fellow Georgetown alum Zal Batmanglij to once again explore the more subversive side of life (they also co-wrote and produced Sound Of My Voice). Alexander Skarsgård plays the group’s firebrand (ha!) leader and Ellen Page one of its members. The East promises to be a thrilling take on some very cogent, all too terrifyingly real issues and if Brit’s past work is any indication, expect this to be thoroughly and I do mean thoroughly engrossing. The trailer alone will give you chills.

Passion (September 7) – Brian De Palma knows a thing or two about the lurid, with a resume featuring Scarface, Carlito’s Way, and Carrie. Rachel McAdams (yes, the ebullient girl next door Rachel McAdams) and Noomi Rapace (yes, the girl with the dragon tattoo) star in De Palma’s remake of the 2010 French thriller Love Crime, which follows two women playing games with each other in a business setting. Think The Devil Wears Prada with a lot more violence and sex, maybe? While things start out with a little good ol’ taking credit for someone else’s idea – Rachel McAdams’ character takes credit for her underling’s work – they quickly escalate. I mean, didn’t Desperate Housewives teach you the jump from casserole bickering to murder isn’t all that great!? McAdams and Rapace could be the new Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis from Black Swan: things are looking pretty steamy, lack of leotards and anorexia notwithstanding.

Music

Nobody Loves Me: A Valentine’s Day Playlist For The Eternally Single

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A playlist I created for The Vinyl District

Hey sad sack, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we represent the mix just for your lonely heart, “Nobody Loves Me.” Whether you view today as a celebration of love, or a reminder of the absence of it, we’ve got one wicked wallow. Happy Valentine’s Day?
The “dating scene” is much akin to a Russian land war in winter—it’s brutal, brutish, unwinnable, and full of casualties. And I am well-equipped to give a report from the trenches—in all of my years on this lovely planet, I have never had a date on Valentine’s Day.

That, however, is not cause to turn all bitter and rail against the “Hallmarkiness” of this holiday, not the least of which because any holiday that dates back to Chaucer predates Hallmark. Ha. So, no, my dearies—I do not propose that we all sit down in some lame Sex and the City/Shit Girls Say kumbaya-ish “love sucks” circle.

Why not take a Zen approach to this and sit with it, as the Buddhists say, or marinate upon it, more colloquially put. Alternatively, as Ovechkin says, “it is what it is.” Or you could, you know, just Rage Against The Machine and assert how love is for losers. (Although, that would be a bit extreme because while dating sucks, love is awesome!)
I would not leave you without succor on this darkest of days. I will remind you that A. you are avoiding eating overpriced, horrible dinners (“put chocolate in her face/steak with extra shrimp”), earning the scorn of the poor overworked restaurant industry, and B. you get to have 50% off candy on the 15th. Here’s a little playlist you can chill to, rage to, and commiserate to.

Reviews

Film Review: Mama

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My review of Mama

Like one of the child protagonists in Mama, the movie cannot find its legs, wildly scampering about and moving from a promising premise to a kitchen sink approach in a desperate play to make this a full-length movie. Based on a brilliant, intensely creative 3-minute short by Andres Muschietti, the full-length Guillermo Del Toro-produced film careens from presenting one red herring after another and loses grasp of the crux of Muschietti’s idea, the fairly innovative “Mom is mad at us. But wait… Mom is actually a ghost.”
The movie opens in a straight-out-of-Let The Right One In wintery scene, with a financial-crisis-aggrieved father, having just murdered his estranged wife and business partner, driving on a snowy road with his scared two little girls in the back seat. There is a grim finality to his intentions, undoubtedly, since he’s a broken man on a tortuous road with a dead end. Muschietti’s cinematography is absolutely phenomenal, with a crispness and an enthralling clarity not commonly seen in ghost story flicks. Dad’s plan is thwarted by Mama, who as the little girl points out, “does not walk on the ground.”
Five years pass. The girls, Victoria (Megan Carpenter) and Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse), are discovered, having somehow survived alone in the wilderness, turning feral in the process, crawling and scampering about on all fours, scared at any sound and barely human. They are taken in to live with their Uncle Luke (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his rock-band-playing girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain), to whom this all seems like one big nuisance putting a damper on her bon vivant lifestyle. Obvious nod to a familiar trope: when was the last time in a horror film that adopting children was a good idea? This is the first major issue with the film. The very Flowers In The Attic set-up is ripe with psychological material for exploration. At the same time, there is a fine line to tread between queasy voyeurism of the results of child neglect and a compassionate inquiry into it. Most of what we are presented with is through the lens of the girls’ sessions with a therapist, who we later come to realize has some questionable fame-seeking tendencies, and this is the part of the movie where things start to hit the hokey spectrum fast. Speaking of the therapist, Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash), displays some typical horror movie inanity. He runs out of the house as soon as he gets a whiff of Mama, but then right away goes in search of her in the abandoned creepy cottage in the middle of the woods, of course. Because we wouldn’t have it any other way.


Another major flaw with the film is that less than even half way through, the audience already knows what Mama is searching for when a well-meaning librarian ominously declares that a ghost is an “emotion bent out of shape, bound to repeat itself until the wrong is made right.” Therein is the crux of the problem with Mama. For the first good three quarters of the movie, it is eerie and atmospheric and scary and then all of a sudden, it bafflingly turns into a sloppy hodgepodge of clues meant to somehow make the story more believable but are really *gaping* plot holes that serve to unravel it and make less believable instead. Oh, Mama is a ghost, but she needs a hole in the wall to pass through!? No, seriously. Oh, Mama is searching for something but when she is handed it, she quickly tosses it aside. Oh, the Doctor tells Mama he has something that she is looking for, but oopsie daisie, he forgot it in the office. And the ending will literally having you howling with laughter as it looks plucked straight out of where-CGI-goes-to-die-archives, soft light glow bathing things, things breaking up into dust particles and butterflies, and the family clinging to each other at the edge of the cliff, literally.
The ingeniousness of the original short lies in the interaction between Mama and the girls. It had the absorbing and equally disturbing absurdity that the very banal “Mama is mad at me,” situation takes on when Mama is not human. There is enough horror even in the opening of the closet door. It would be intriguing to explore how Lilly and Victoria respond to her differently. All of this rich material seems left to languish, untouched, in favor of vapid scare tactics. Mama has so much potential that ends up ghostly vanishing into thin air, but it does offer some good old-fashioned, mercifully-gore-free frights.