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Category: Entertainment Page 1 of 4
For those who are not privy to nerdy, futuristic dystopian science fiction movies, Soylent Green is a classic. By today’s standards, it’s an awful movie (maybe even by that day’s standards as well). It’s pretty bad. Regardless, the plot is of particular interest here.
Released in 1973, the movie portrays a time in the future, specifically the year 2022, when the population of New York City (one slice of the world’s total population at the time) has exploded to a massive 40,000,000 people. Resources are scarce (especially food), poverty is rampant, streets are crowded, and all power has been consolidated into the hands of the government to control the masses of people who are out of control. Because of the lack of food, a company used by the government, Soylent Corporation, produces high-energy ration wafers that the people can consume for nutrition. There is Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow and a new product, Soylent Green. Long story short (here’s a spoiler), Soylent Green turns out to be processed dead people. It’s a sort of secret, government-sponsored recycling program. Yeah gross.
Green River Ordinance, a band of some friends from Christ Chapel, have a new music video that has premiered on MTVu.com. Check out their latest album on Lala.com: Enjoy!
Worth noting, if you’re an avid prime time NBC fan … I’m not, but some of you may be. Don’t get me wrong, I like a couple of shows (The Office to name one). But I do find quite a conflict of interest with all of this green talk, GE, NBC and the Obama administration ties to all of it:
- ObamaVision: Brace Yourselves For the NBC-GE `Green Week’ Push
- NBC’s ObamaVision: GE Uses Network To Push Obama’s Green Agenda – And Rakes In the Dough
- NBC’s ObamaVision: Will Peacock’s News Division Expose the Alarmism?
UPDATE: Added more:
- NBC’s ObamaVision: `Law and Order’ – `This Is Why We Need Health-Care Reform’
- NBC’s ObamaVision: Green Week and Lousy Writing
- NBC’s ObamaVision Causes Facebook Brawl
- NBC’s ObamaVision: Changing the Channel
(Original): The Gospel and the Gosselins
(Archived): The Gospel and the Gosselins
Reality shows honestly make me ill, kind of like Jerry Springer shows in the middle of the day when you are sick and nothing else is on so you just wind up turning the thing off. The concept is worn out, over-used, uncreative, trivial, trite, shallow, and mind-numbingly boring. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather not watch on television than reality shows, because they are anything but what they claim to be and cheapen the very concept of … well, reality. TV becoming “reality”? I don’t get it and fail to understand how an entire culture is okay with this stuff.
Huxley’s vision of the future, portrayed in Brave New World, is coming to pass and we’re okay with the mundane, the brainless, coming to love our servitude to nonsense and emotionalism. Instead of having an outside oppressor like a totalitarian regime control us by brute force, as portrayed by George Orwell in 1984, instead what we love is killing us and holding us captive (Amusing Ourselves to Death … read it, everyone). Coincidentally, that is exactly what sin does. I honestly believe these shows are all loosely scripted to give the portrayal of “reality” and lack any level of depth that would give them some form of lasting cultural value (you know, like a Shakespeare work or Homer’s Iliad). They are trivial and a giant waste of time to be involved in.
But that’s all just an opinion. On the basis of someone else’s taste preferences, the same could probably also be said of shows that I like such as 24, The Office and FoxNews. My taste preferences are not the same as others. TV in itself is a waste of time (in general) … and I honestly like some of it. Guilty as charged.
Regardless of what I think concerning reality shows, many people like them, and can’t wait for the next episode to come around. Okay, fine and good, I don’t take issue with that. However, the “reality” show Jon and Kate Plus 8 on TLC has brought to light something evangelicals really don’t want to talk about (which the fact we don’t want to talk about it is a whole other issue in itself): our acceptance and absorption of the cultures’ worldly, materialistic, narcissistic, self-absorbed values; the slow (or fast, depending on the timeline we’re talking about) slide toward the secularization of the evangelical church in America.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
Excerpt from the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
Boards of Canada – Poppy Seed (Remix of song by Slag Boom Van Loon)
I like this song because of the emotional sense of seriousness and urgency it conveys. And I just think it grooves.
News as entertainment dominates our culture. It has for quite a while. This can be clearly seen in the recent Caylee Anthony story, the little girl who was allegedly killed by her own mother. Of course this is an unbelievably sad story and the pain caused by such a tragic act is tremendous for all parties involved. It should break our own hearts that this kind of wickedness happens, because it breaks the Lord’s heart. I do not intend to minimize any of this with my comments. But I do intend to attack the obsession our culture has on this story and how as Christians we need to watch our own hearts that we not fall into such wicked fixation, intending to puff ourselves up in our own supposed righteousness that we are somehow better than Caylee’s mother.
For the past year or so, ever since it broke, there has been an incessant fixation of the media upon this story. In particular, Nancy Grace has “Breaking News!” every night on her program concerning this case. I can’t think of a time I haven’t flipped past CNN that she hasn’t been ranting on and on about this story. It’s just sickening to me. We make celebrities out of murderers and every shred of “new” information that comes out of this story is somehow the greatest and biggest show-stopper in our lives, like it’s a living and breathing soap opera that we are somehow attached to through TV viewing.
Keep in mind … this was in 1977. Still weird, but it gives it some perspective … 31 years ago during the middle of the Cold War, two years before I was born.