First, Elijah and I watched Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. Now, maybe that's the real reason I was cranky--starting with this day brightener! But nah, I've been reading about peak oil for about 18 months now, lived with the rest of you through the peak in oil prices this past summer and the subsequent economic crash and current major deflation in prices, and none of the movie was really news to me. Still, I'm glad Elijah and I could watch it together. Yeah, he's only 11 going on 12 but he's been overhearing me talk about this so much and he is a bright enough mind that I think him knowing the facts will get him thinking about ways he can make a difference. We talk about it as if he and much of his generation will discover new things, new/perhaps old ways of doing things again, etc.
Despite Lesley Stahl and the Saudis fawning all over each other last night on 60 Minutes, worldwide oil production has likely peaked (as it did in the USA in the 70s), what's left is more and more expensive to process and at the current prices it will be hard for anyone to justify new exploration and/or using the latest expensive extraction technologies. We need to face we're in a perfect storm regarding oil, housing, debt and general economics in this country. The sooner we do, the better we can prepare and respond.
Okay, on to the next one. We watched Luther: One Man's Faith in God Launched the Greatest Revolution Of All. The movie was entertaining, and it made Luther look like one radical dude! Which, of course, he was. As was Jesus. It made me proud to be a Lutheran, though Luther himself didn't think there should be Lutherans--just a reform of the one catholic church. I got Elijah to watch much of it with me by telling him it takes place in the Medieval age, which it does, and which is Eli's current obsession. I hope it has inspired him as it did me.
Luther and Crude Awakening go well together because both are about times of radical societal change. And hey, Luther lived pre-oil and things didn't look so bad so it gives me hope. No, I don't think we'll be going back to THOSE days, but you know even before our current petroleum driven society there were smart thinkers, amazing art and clothing, and beautiful places.
I guess that's all we got to yesterday, seemed like plenty. Earlier this week I'd watched Cold Comfort Farm, a very odd movie I'd picked up at the library. If you like the English countryside and can put up with extremely strange characters (think Beverly Hillbillies meets the Addams Family meets the Munsters meets Jane Eyre meets...), this is, shall I say, an interesting enough movie to watch. All turns out happy and well in the end, at least.
A couple more recent movies that I'd recommend are Penelope and Nanny McPhee, both a bit odd as well. It's funny that we watched them both in one week earlier this month. They fit together like Luther and Crude Awakening do, having similar themes. Both focus on appearances (big noses!) and how we view others and ourselves. And that when we view someone with truly loving eyes, even extreme facial traits or other deformities can be overlooked. And of course it goes deeper than that, but on the whole that's what I took from the movies. Both of those movies are entertaining with a good message.
Well, that's it for movie reviews.
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