Steve Jobs (2015)

Steve Jobs (2015)

Steve Jobs is an excellent movie in every aspect. Its grounded in the clever screenplay by Aaron Sorkin who chooses an unusual structure and pulls it off better than anyone could have imagined. The other foundation of the movie’s success is Michael Fassbender in the title role. Fassbender is always brilliant but here he shows some facets I hadn’t seen before from him. Kate Winslet is amazing too in an interesting role. Danny Boyle’s direction also helps to keep the film entertaining, with unusual camera angles, different film stock and a fascinating color scheme. The movie is not realistic or authentic, but one of its charms is that it is fully aware of that and never claims to be. It breaks a lot of rules that normal Hollywood movies tend to follow and proves that sometimes that’s the right way to go. I mean, I’m not a big Apple fan (to put it mildly) and I have a hard time admiring Steve Jobs, but none of this stopped me from enjoying the movie so much, which proves how successful it is in telling a compelling, intelligent story.

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Revolutionary Road (2008)

Revolutionary Road (2008)

(no real spoilers)

Revolutionary Road is the adaptation of a great novel by Richard Yates that I read many years ago and dearly loved as an amazingly early criticism of our culture.  The movie achieves to portray the problems from the novel in a very effective way. I don’t want to compare both of them too much, because I think the movie is its own thing that works well. It features great performances, especially by Kate Winslet and Michael Shannon, but really, all the actors are great. It’s beautifully directed and shot, with a great Thomas Newman score. Director Sam Mendes treads very similar territory as in his American Beauty, but the movies are very different in their tone.

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Generation Cynical

Generation Cynical

How often do you hear people, especially teachers, say that the youth of today is not what it used to be, that they are lacking in intelligence, interest, motivation, anything really. “It wasn’t like this when I was young!”, “It’s so different now!”, “Oh, today’s kids…!” I often disagree with any of these assumptions, just on principle because I never think kids are dumb or worthless, but our hope and future, so it’s up to us to show them the way and not to complain about them all the time. Besides that, I think that most talk about how things were different in the past is nonsense because history rather repeats itself than to change, and while I think that some things have evolved for the worse, I disagree with most of the aspects that people talk about normally. Changes in modern generations are also not necessarily bad and rarely intentional, and often reflect what they learn in our society. Why am I saying all of this? In a recent lesson, I had the strong feeling that the kids were much different than I was at that age and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s true and if it is, why?

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