Driving Cadillac’s in our Dreams

Conditions: Totally Miserable

Explorers.

There’s a new mission to Mars being put together, but it’s one with a difference. This one will involve humans, and they’re not coming back. Now I don’t know about you, but the one thing I would hate more than being stuffed in a small box and sent to Mars would be being stuffed in a small box and sent to Mars with no chance of coming back. However this seemingly fundamental flaw in the mission profile hasn’t put as many people off as you might have thought.

The Mars One project by NASA which aims to colonize Mars beginning in 2022 has reportedly revealed that more than 1, 00,000 people are eager to join the project in a bid to visit the red planet but do not want to come back.
[...]

The 6 billion dollar project will be media and sponsors funded and the application fee for people who want to explore the mission will be based on the gross domestic product per capita of each nation.

The report said that the multicontinental group of 40 astronauts is set to leave for Mars in September 2022, landing in April 2023 and another group of four will be deployed two years later and none of them will return Earth.

- dnaindia.com/

So, a million people want to go and die on Mars. Some people will do anything to get famous.



Film Review: Now You See Me

This is one of those huge twist movies, a whodunit wrapped up in a heist flick, with the assurance of a professional Vegas showman. I won’t reveal the twist ending, for the simple fact that the entire film relies on it. It’s the kind of ending that makes the entire film, the moment where the whole theatre is rendered silent in surprise. This is a film that invites, in fact demands, that you pay close attention in order to figure it out – but you won’t. 99% of the audience simply won’t see it coming, and the ones that do are the kind of people who watch movies with their arms folded. You don’t want to be like that. However while the ending is engaging, everything else has some issues. Four magicians are recruited by a mysterious figure to put together a giant heist, using three big magic shows as distractions. The cops, the feds, even an Interpol agent are brought into the mix to try and figure out what’s going on, but in fact they are all just led around like puppets. This is a slick movie, full of moxie, misdirection and showmanship. But peer closer under the hood and the sheer implausibility of the thing is glaringly obvious. Some things are set up here that simply do not work, and do not hold up to scrutiny.

Even more serious is the odd way in which the story is constructed. The four leads are essentially characterless – with no real development of who they are and what it is they are doing, save for their introductions. As the film progresses they become even more remote as our focus is forced instead to the lead detective who is trying to figure it all out. Furthermore, Morgan Freeman is brought in to play an ex-magician who now debunks magic tricks in a popular television show. He squares off against Michael Caine who plays the rich benefactor who is apparently bankrolling the magic shows. Why has the film seemingly changed focus half way through?

It’s an aggressively-directed show, and it may be a swell magic trick, but it’s not much of a story. Despite the acting talent on hand, the only real characterisation comes between the lead detective and the Interpol agent, who is mysterious and interested in the history of magic. They kind of hit it off, and it kind of works, but it’s really lost in the chase and the razzamatazz of the big magic shows. Our four key magicians become even more ethereal before effectively vanishing out of the film completely. Any comeuppance or justice over the various robberies is ignored, any of the Robin Hood type crimes the team pull off can fairly easily be addressed and corrected by the authorities with a little hard work, and I really can’t see who it is I’m supposed to be caring about in all this noise and smoke. Too slick for its own good. One rabbit out of five.



- Peace out