A few reviews

[TM2YC]

Idiocracy (2006)
... the people are shown plugged into mind-numbing hi-tech entertainment equipment but also shown to be so stupid that they could never have designed, maintained, or operated any of the same devices.

I mostly agree, but I think the idea here was that the tech was pretty old by the time the main character arrives, and the design and creation was all done by a previous generation. The interfaces are so user friendly that any idiot could operate the tech, but nobody was left who might know how to invent or fix any of the stuff.

Yeah, I got that bit of exposition but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. You get the impression that mankind has been brain dead for perhaps centuries, decades at the very least by which time all the tech would've stopped functioning. A good work around would have been if we were told man had invented self-repairing tech, or robots who did the repairs and they just quietly went about their jobs fixing everything, while humans atrophied, unable to remember how they created it all. We're already nudging that stage with today's computer algorithms, performing computations so complex, that humans are incapable of verifying their conclusions. By the way, even a TV show that's just about a guy being kicked in the balls takes a large amount of creativity, intelligence, technical knowledge and planning to execute. But I was laughing throughout, so I kinda forgave those problems but they are still there... and it raised some interesting questions, I'll give it that.

The Boy Friend (1971)
Director Ken Russell indulges (and over-indulges) his theatrical tendencies in this 1920s period Musical, set entirely within an English Musichall (Vaudeville) theater. The story of the Musical the actors are performing, reflects their backstage lives, as they strain to impress a famous Hollywood Director in the audience. A third level is us seeing the stage show through the eyes of the Director, magnified and expanded into dreamlike fantasy. Every sequence is a dazzling Busby Berkely-esque feast for the eyes in isolation but I got sick of them after a couple of non-stop hours, like scoffing too many delicious sweets. The scene where Twiggy dances on a giant revolving record player is the best, it's done so well that I almost couldn't see her at a human scale anymore. The colours look amazing in HD.







I re-watch these delightful clips ^ on their own and I wonder how I could have not loved the film as a whole.