The Halloween Gods Bested Us

I should have known that a shoot scheduled for a Sunday on Halloween weekend at college wouldn't go smoothly. I woke up at 10 am prepared to film and things slowly fell apart as we discovered that one actor had left a sweatshirt at home over fall break causing huge continuity errors. Then as our team was almost fully assembled at 1130 we attempted to contact our star. No answers, until we get a call back half an hour later, not from the star, but from his room mates. They informed us they hadn't seen him since the night before and were concerned as well. So we called off our shoot for another day and now we race against mother nature begging that she doesn't drop 2 feet of snow on us. I feel your scheduling pain.

Now onto some analysis. The movie They Live, released in 1988 speaks of issues relevant today. In the movie a lower class construction workers stumbles upon a bunch of sunglasses that are more than they appear to be. They interpret the world as it actually is, and it's a scary world. All advertising is broken down to simple commands such as "Obey" or "Consume", all television programs and media had subliminal messages. To make matters worth, all people with a great deal of wealth or political power were revealed by the sunglasses to actually be aliens. The main character got fed up with all this and it led to this



I think that the general concept of They Live is a very blunt metaphor for what many people in the country are angry about. People are mad about the state of things. The middle class is disappearing as the wealthy get wealthier and the poor get poorer. Wall Street has its hand deep in politics, along with bankers, pharmaceutical companies, and defense. The Republican candidates fielded against Barack Obama seem like jokes, all while congress struggles to overcome 14 trillion dollars of debt. At times its hard to believe that some of the people in positions of power aren't actually aliens. But so many people are distracted by the media and being consumers that often times its hard to create change.