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hugo_goedel
Reviews
Juno (2007)
What about contraception? Flawed or dishonest script from the start.
The worst thing about this movie is what it was awarded an Oscar for: the script. It may contain some funny dialogs (like step-mother Bren's remark about doctors) but its story is flawed from the start and for me logical flaws always spoil everything. (Since I liked the soundtrack and can enjoy it independently of the rest of the film, I gave it one star above minimum for that.) The story is about Juno, a self-confident, witty, sarcastic teenager who consciously decides to have sex with a class-mate whom she knows to be in love with her. After she suspects to have become pregnant (what a surprise), she even is self-confident enough to buy three pregnancy tests in a local store among a lot of loud fuss-making with the store-keeper.
And here's the problem: If she's that witty and self-confident, and if the sex with her class-mate was a conscious decision, why oh why on earth didn't she think about contraception for one moment? What would have prevented her from either getting a subscription for the pill or buying a condom and using it on the boy who was shown have taken a passive part in the act anyway? (He was sitting in an armchair at least at the beginning.) And the lack of logic doesn't even stop here: When she tells her mature, sexually active friend and then her open-minded parents about her pregnancy, nobody even asks her about whether she and the boy did or did not use contraceptives. (After all contraceptives can sometimes fail.) It's not as if something in the sex-ed went wrong or as if contraceptives have failed or as if Juno made a regrettable misled decision about unprotected sex, it's as if contraception didn't even exist in the world that Juno lives in. However that must be some parallel universe, because there is contraception in our world.
So in the parallel universe of the film sex invariably leads to pregnancy and if this is unwanted, it of course only leaves the choice between abortion or giving birth to the child and setting it up for adoption.
The next flaw in the script is when Juno decides to have an abortion in a clinic and in front of that meets an anti-abortion activist from her school. That school mate tells her that the fetus already has fingernails and from all human traits a fetus develops, it is just those fingernails that makes Juno revise her decision.
Given that this information given to Juno is just wrong at that point of time (after all she is said to be around week 12 and fetuses only develop fingernails from week 18 onwards), Juno's decision is now based on wrong premises. But that never gets cleared up in the film.
Instead Juno now finds a yuppie couple as adoptive parents who despite appearing to be quite nice (yet also a bit shallow and superficial) soon turn out to have some problems with themselves. However they have money and this alone seems to qualify them for being good parents.
Yet another flaw is when the lawyer of that couple leaves Juno the choice between closed and open adoption and Juno goes for closed adoption. This is in total disregard of the fact that Juno and the prospective adoptive parents already know each other and the places they live, so that that adoption can never be closed. (Juno will always know at least a little of the whereabouts of the child she gives birth to.)
I don't know whether the script writer (and those who bought the script and made a movie out of it) simply didn't think about these logical inconsistencies or if perhaps they willfully ignored them to push a conservative message ("Abstinence is the only way to avoid pregnancy, and if it's already too late adoption is an easier way out than abortion") with a purportedly progressive film.
Der große Ausverkauf (2007)
Ideology versus humanity - makes you sad and angry
This movie shows four examples of the drastic effects which privatization of formerly public goods and services had and has on the lives of real people: Electricity in South Africa, railway transport in England, water in Bolivia and health services on the Philippines. Interwoven you get to see statements of a World Bank representative, a computer-animated cartoon by the International Monetary Fund (because they are not available for comment in flesh and blood) and former World Bank Chief Economist and Economic Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who today is very critical of the role theses institutions play in the globalised world.
In all of the four examples privatization had negative and sometimes devastating effects on people's lives. There is for example the English train driver who gets paid less for more work and has lost the pride in his profession since punctuality and safety offered to the passengers have severely suffered through the process. And there is the poor Philippine mother who has to fight every single day so that her son can get a dialysis at least once a week, which he needs to survive. Those who profit from privatization remain in the dark.
In all cases the decisions for those privatizations have been made either by politicians who firmly believe in free market ideology (like Maggie Thatcher) or have been due to pressure by the World Bank and the IMF who also follow this ideology and have made privatizations of public sector services a condition for granting credits to developing countries.
The essence is that real humans have to suffer from a religion-like ideology which benefits the wealthy an threatens the poor. And ideology it is: after all the formerly public goods and services were the common property of all people in the respective countries and served them very well. There was absolutely no need to take this property away from them and put it in the hands of a few anonymous so-called investors. As the English train driver put it: When the people were offered to buy shares in the British railway they were in fact offered to buy something they already owned. And as you can see from the Bolivian example it requires massive police force (funded by the taxes of the people) to rob the people of its public property, while actually police should protect its interests.
This free market-ideology often masks as irrefutable science in the form of neoclassical economic theory. However this theory is based on the premise of a "homo oeconomicus", the assumption that all humans only act in their personal self-interest. Under that premise this theory seems to show that it's best or most efficient if governments don't interfere with markets, i.e. the voluntary exchange of goods and services. So basically this theory says that if everybody only acts in his personal self-interest, it's best if everybody only acts in his personal self-interest. It's clear to see that this is a logically circular and thus meaningless result. But apart from that the whole premise of this theory isn't even true. People do not only act in their personal self-interest. It's been proved that humans pretty often behave altruistically, i.e. they help others even when they can't expect anything in return for their help. As another Economic Nobel Laureate, George A. Akerlof, has recently pointed out, all the "scientific" results of neoclassical economic theory fall apart completely without the assumption of the "homo oeconomicus". Thus this theory turns out to be pure religion, which however serves those of the wealthy well, who don't want to acknowledge any responsibility for the rest of society. (Even if this society enabled them to accumulate and preserve their wealth in the first place.)
Children of Men (2006)
Two contradictory visions of the future packed into one film
The film depicts a not too distant dark future in which natural resources like drinking water have apparently become so scarce that most societies have fallen apart among fights over their distribution and instead turmoil and chaos are ruling. Britain has kept its status as a nation at the price of becoming a brutal police state that doesn't respect human rights any longer in its fight against rebels and refugees from other parts of the world. (The latter of whom are kept and treated like animals while getting deported into refugee camps.) The other vision which the film presents is that of the infertility of mankind for unknown reasons so that 18 years have passed already since the last birth of a human being.
This is the background on which the story is developed. However, the problem I have with this is that both of these visions don't fit together very well. Many of the environmental problems we are facing today and will be facing in the future are more difficult to solve due to over-population and would rather be relieved if mankind would diminish every day. Also the fights over natural resources should decrease and not increase if all humans knew that the days of mankind are counted and that day by day there are fewer people among whom they have to be shared. So for me the different aspects of the film simply don't add up to a plausible whole.
The story which evolves on that background is not very plausible either. There are different sorts of rebels ("fishes", "fugees") fighting against the government and also having their own inner fights. A young refugee woman has become pregnant against all odds and for some reason is now trying to get to some mysterious "Human Project" with the help of some untrustworthy rebels who apparently have their own hidden agenda.
Since from today's perspective the worsening of the environmental problems is by far more likely than global human infertility, the film would have made a good comment on our problems without the latter point. Perhaps the authors were just uncomfortable with the message that would have come across then: Namely that less humans would actually be a good thing and not something to be dreaded. With the combination of those aspects the message is mixed if not to say contradictory: Humans can not peacefully coexist with limited natural resources and yet their diminishing would be a catastrophe.
The film deserves some credit however for its strong and impressive imagery.