Beware the Rise of the Idiots

I saw Idiocracy a long time ago and actually enjoyed it. At the time, I had already grown passed fart jokes and laughing at random unnecessary vulgarities, but Idiocracy actually had a message and was a funny satire on our culture. I mean of course they had the random vulgarity, but it was warning us that we may be okay with that. For example, we would never think to see a restaurant named ButtFuckers, but in the 50's, we never thought we'd see two people in the same bed in movies, much less having sex! We are becoming more and more okay with things and we have to decide where to draw the line.
That's only one point though. The biggest point of the movie was to be funny and I definitely thought it was. The idea that the worlds population was dying from famine because a gatorade type company monopolized all the fluids of the world is hysterical. The idea that this world has slowly grown to not be able to take care of itself is not too dissimilar to what Pixar's Wall-E did. The people in that world all became fat and lazy, not knowing anything but what they saw on their computer screen. Probably one of the funniest ideas was that a person from our world, who has an average IQ and an average job could be considered the smartest man on earth. Seeing the world through his eyes was interesting. They put it nicely when they had the conversation about Einstein. They wondered if he walked around thinking everyone was a dumb-shit. Now, I didn't walk away from this movie thinking it was deep and metaphorical, raising plenty of questions about the way I live my life. I just thought it was a funny satire on our lifestyle and a fair warning of where we might be heading. Dr. Strangelove did the same thing, showing us what would happen if we accidentally went to nuclear war that we programmed to be unstoppable, thus causing the end of the world.

Idiocracy could be easily compared to Dr. Strangelove. If you don't see the satire and the intentional bizzare factor, you won't understand any of it at all and just think it's stupid.
Although, if opinions mattered, I'd say Dr. Strangelove is the better movie/satire.

Itty Bitty Living Space

Yeah, I just made an Aladdin reference before talking about The Haunted Vagina. Everything about this story was weird and surreal. The first half was probably the most explicit thing I've ever read. At times, I figured that it was purposefully trying to weird or gross me out because it's a bizarro fiction. The entire scene with the skeleton crawling from her vagina had my head cocked and my eyebrow raised. Then I almost wanted to vomit when the main character orgasmed deep in her throat. There are just some things I don't want to read and that's one of them. But it definitely had the effect of the bizarre on me. It was so disgusting but I was so intrigued as to where this skeleton came from and what it meant that I just HAD to continue reading.
The novel took a weird turn after he actually climbed into her vagina which turned out to shrink living things down into a micro-universe. The way he described the world was almost like watching a crappy Sy-Fy Channel movie. All the props seemed fake and cheap. All the characters there were literally bad CGI. He specifically comments on it, saying "She steps back away from me, her footsteps weightless, her shadow looks all wrong. No, she's exactly like a CGI character. She's like Jar Jar Binks." I kept thinking to myself that this would be impossible to portray through film without looking cheap, no matter how exact you get it to the book. It's MEANT to look and feel cheap which is interesting.
Then, out of absolutely no where, the main character tries to explain this world through science and rational thought. He explains how these people evolved to live within the womb of a woman and never die because they feed off of her body and they don't take mush to stay alive.
This story was definitely bizarre and was definitely a page turner. It seemed to tackle multiple genre's at once. From sexual, to fantasy to science fiction, and with a hint of horror with the idea of ghosts and attacking skeletons.

Cyber-kinesis

I thought I'd give a shot at blogging about one of the films. I saw Akira a long time ago and even now I'm still not sure i understand the plot, but at the same time I love it. I am a huge fan of telekinesis and the film and graphic novel capture it perfectly. Also, what I love is the idea that this power can be obtained through technology. It was as if the tech was evolving or becoming part of our biological selves.
And of course the motorcycles... Those motorcycles are awesome and they definitely spell out cyberpunk. Everything about a punk motorcycle gang in a futuristic/post-apocalyptic Tokyo, Japan screams cyberpunk. They acted like they were from the 80's wearing leather jackets and running around just being rebels, but they rode these bikes that were comparable to the light cycles from Tron.
The city itself can also be an example of cyberpunk. It's very futuristic feeling but at the same time very grimy and run down. I could see this being the Tokyo in Bladerunner. It just had a very cyberpunk feel to it.
The ending was confusing to me. I mean, I understood that Akira was more of an idea, but the giant baby creature was confusing. Obviously Tetsuo's power was cybernetic because when he touched the stone, blocky cyber extensions or roots grew out of him. But the giant baby thing seemed too organic. I wasn't very sure where they were going with it.

Language

Reading Babel 17 was fairly interesting, but also hard to understand at times. I found that the entire idea of understanding languages was explored by actually reading it. For example, the one character, Brass, who could never use the letter P and said "Ca'tain Wong" or "A one-tri' grou' can be a hell of a 'roblem to disci'line." Then there was an entire scene where all the sentences seemed to be cut short. I actually thought I had a bad copy of the story and looked it up online, but no. There was meant to be a scene with uncompleted thoughts. For example, they would say, "Her ease infected him; and either she reached playfully to take his hand or he amazed
himself by taking hers, and the apparition as real beneath his fingers with skin as smooth
as." I kept thinking, smooth as what? It was interesting that the language would make me think this way. Also, another aspect of the book I found interesting was the scattered way it describes things. Sometimes, descriptions are perfect. I felt that I knew exactly what Captain Wong looked like, but i had almost no idea what Brass looked like. I couldn't decide if he was an animal or a human.
Probably the biggest part that caught me off guard even though it shouldn't have was the scene where they were trying to correct the space ships course. They were stumped and needed to find a way out, but Wong discovered the answer through the language she's trying to decipher, Babel 17. The entire scene left my brain a mess as they were explaining these seemingly complex equations and ideas that somehow fixed their problem. I figured a scene like that would happen considering it's a sci-fi novel, but I was completely lost. But, that interestingly falls into the language barrier that the book is trying to convey.
I thought the concept behind the story was great and I do like stories about a ship with a captain. In that sense, it reminded me of star trek only with crazy body-mod'ed crew members.