Thoughts on
Pop Culture
By Augusto Pereira.

In a time of unlimited access to information, and availability of [art] producing technology, Our learning process is perhaps more and more attached to visual references than ever before. The mass productions of Hollywood and other studios, the world wide radio commerce, and MTV ideologies to cite but a few, may as we know have [de]formed the 'thinkings' of generations. But could such routinely exposition have also reached the frame of our human machine? Well, Intertextuality have indeed expanded its branches... Because we are all bombed with the same sources of entertainment, we began naturally to share the same references. Couple that with the instant thought sharing platform, also known as the internet, and we amusingly obtain world wide 'inside jokes'. Would our grandmas refer to Chuck Norris as the toughest guy on earth? Before our time, world wide intel were mostly convened in form of news papers or radio broadcasts and perhaps books (a by far more serious pool of shared information). But today, the world maybe isn´t as plain, it´s a world of interfaces and templates, of anonymous expressions and narcissist talent displaying on web platforms. Could such connection added with entertainment cartel produce a generation that could only express its thoughts in a wide rage by doing what may be called illegal intertextuality? Our generation ended up for lack of a chance having no direct bonds with Freud nor Sartre nor with any of the thinkers of mankind, but we often quote a certain Dexter Morgan or a bald hunter by the name of John Locke or the theories of a controversial clown-out law called Joker. And Yet quoting any of these in an artistic displaying is by law a crime. So, we are forced to dive into a library of distilled thoughts, and to have it as, perhaps, the only common link between us, and yet unable to express our, as said, pre-planned mental signs with each other without the sure risk of copyright infringement. Unfair in the very least. Why build our mental reasonings around a renting universe to begin with? _______________________ Ps: Some brave ID-less fellows, have fought the core of this paradox, acting not by producing new signs, but by subverting the present ones the 21st century Collective Unconscious. You may just see some of it on the walls of your town.

127 hours - 2010

By Danny Boyle

'127 hours' it´s a portrait of our desperate pursuit of purpose amid the ever more suffocating life experience. The quest for the never attained fulfillment and the growing inner bitterness youth faces when exposed to the real world in the transition of adolescence to adulthood (biologicly speaking or not) is by some replaced by exactly the opposite of what modernity claims to be the solution of humanity´s troubles, the return to the ageless connection with the wild world [held as obsolete], far from the shelters of our overpopulated cities. Is this long lost connection with the whole, that makes Aron Ralston [here played by James Franco, skillfully] 'dive' deeper into the limits of his world, the utmost frontier, the farthest we get without the 'high tech' inventions of our time, the wild land, or really: the place we all came from. Boyle captures that, and proposes a transition in his first minimalist shots, as quick and precise as our absorbing of information in the 21st century is, to his widely framed ones, contrasting the majesty of the 'ever there', changeless [as we can perceive it] part of nature. The thing with the story that fascinates us the most isn´t much that it is taken from a real account, but that it´s a real account of a guy that thought he needed complete isolation, to the point of not telling anyone 'where', nor 'when' he was going. I bet you´ll agree that we all feel like disappearing every so often; and perhaps moving back to our parents home, but this is a narrative of a guy that knew where he belonged, and allowing myself to draw a parallel with Herzog´s documentary - The Grizzly Man, where there too the hero used to understand life as modernity dictates as the alternative and not as we the majority [trapped to or consciously] consider the real deal. In that paradise, once universal, the hero finds his purpose. He (James Franco´s character) is so intimately connected to the place that he literally, when introducing the surroundings to 2 pretty explorers (Kate Mara & Amber Tamblyn), acts as if showing them his cds collection, or photos from a trip as one in the confort of his home would do. But as the 'trailers' show us, something goes wrong and an accident [fruit of his 'human' intervention + straight bad luck] traps him by his hand in a deep hole in a mountain And what was free and wide, gets so narrow and unstable that we as audience begin to share his fears, hopes and dreams in a way that only a talented director as Boyle could ever induct. The tension in the screen, is such as to allow Boyle to play with all of our emotions, for they range from the most anxious feelings caused by the despair we feel as the hero slowly realizes he´s utterly alone in his condition, the climaxing experiencing of compassion we all have as we witness an arm being cut off, to the hilarious cynicisms of scenes such as the 'fake talk show' one. Over all, 127 hours is a picture about the power of might over the problematics of life. It´s a film about nurishing faith in the future even when the unplanned and the overwhelming may appear to utterly impede our way out.

It´s cool to ponder on the fact that
Aron´s real life experience already stood
as a legacy to his family and
closed friends but that thanks to the art
of representation, 127 hours maximized
such legacy, and in spite of all the money involved in
north american productions, it really pleases me to be
exposed to such well done representations
of amazing real human
beings stories.
[thou Chuck Norris and followers are cool too = )]