Unfriended
Interesting review of Unfriended in The Verge, by Emily Yoshida:
Most film and television, no matter the story being told, offers a vision of a world in which humans in developed societies are only at a computer two, three minutes a day. It’s a disbelief we suspend almost without thinking about it, for good reason: watching someone go about their daily business on a computer or smartphone is not very entertaining. But at the same time, art and life are beginning to diverge: there’s a fictional, cinematic world where the bulk of the developments in our daily lives happen in physical spaces, face to face with other people; and our real lives, where more and more of the defining moments in our lives happen on a screen.
Neeva 22:47 on 21/04/2015 Permalink |
That’s a really interesting thought, and not without precedent. People don’t really drink water in movies, either. It is sort of a function of the medium and the requirements of compressed storytelling. You cut out the boring stuff add a liberal helping of conflict. Computing for hours is visually pretty boring on the big screen.
But…I just imagined a movie that was just someone computing for two hours oblivious to surroundings, while in the room and background all this dramatic stuff is visible: car chases, quarrels, people being amorous, alien invasion, flood, zombie apocalypse….then maybe at the end you realize all the stuff going on outside was really a projection of what the person at the computer was experiencing while using the computer. In essence the room and background acts as a giant thought bubble for the character at the computer.
Hmmmm…..so many ideas, so little time.