{"id":4942,"date":"2014-08-03T18:05:02","date_gmt":"2014-08-03T22:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4942"},"modified":"2014-08-03T18:05:02","modified_gmt":"2014-08-03T22:05:02","slug":"lucy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4942","title":{"rendered":"lucy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just saw this movie, and I have some things to report.<\/p>\n<p><em>Lucy<\/em>, as has been widely reported, centers around the &#8220;humans only use 10% of their brains&#8221; thing, and, yes, that is entirely not true.  If you&#8217;re the sort of person who&#8217;s going to worry about that while you&#8217;re watching the movie, I think you&#8217;d probably be happier seeing something else. I just saw a nice trailer for some movie with Helen Mirren and an Indian restaurant, for example.<\/p>\n<p>(The magic in Harry Potter, the warp drives in Star Trek, Middle-Earth, and the Force don&#8217;t exist either.  Sorry  \ud83d\ude41  ).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I thought <em>Lucy<\/em> was fun. Completely bonkers, yes, but fun. It&#8217;s a little like a lecture on the inner workings of the human brain as delivered by Quentin Tarantino (well, in that case it would have been even better, but that gives you an idea).<\/p>\n<p>Lucy, who is a student (and apparently not a very good one since she&#8217;s supposed to be in college but she&#8217;s clearly around thirty years old), has a really sleazy boyfriend, who locks a mysterious briefcase to her wrist, gives her some really bad advice, and then gets killed. Lucy is in a state of 90% terror and 10% defiance for the next fifteen minutes, ending up with a big bag of drugs sewn into her &#8220;lower tummy,&#8221; which then gets ruptured, spewing the drugs into her system.<\/p>\n<p>(By the way, this movie must be the most unabashedly pro-drug movie made since, you know, 1969 or something. The leaking drugs have only good effects; when Lucy gets into difficulties she snorts <em>more<\/em> drugs which make things better; and then at the end she gets <em>all<\/em> the drugs that were in the other drug mules, and, well, I won&#8217;t reveal what happens, but, as we used to say, wow, man. Far out!)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, here are two very pertinent links from <em>The Atlantic<\/em>:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/entertainment\/archive\/2014\/07\/what-in-the-world-is-scarlett-johansson-up-to-lucy-under-the-skin-her-a-feminist-disappearing-act\/375141\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scarlett Johansson&#8217;s Subversive Vanishing Act<\/a>&#8221; (a very interesting commentary on three of her most recent movies &#8212; though I think they neglected to draw out some lessons from <em><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4872\">Captain America The Winter Soldier<\/a><\/em>, the movie where the fact that her character is female is pretty much irrelevant &#8212; it&#8217;s not really a gendered role, which is interesting in the context of what they say about the other three movies).<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/entertainment\/archive\/2014\/07\/life-is-futile-so-heres-what-to-do-with-it-according-to-lucy-a-spoilereview\/375006\/\" target=\"_blank\">Lucy: The Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity<\/a>&#8221; (This review made me like the movie much more than I did already &#8212; everything in the movie is a deliberate riff on people who are this clunk-headed and literal. After reading this, I want to see it again.).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The best scene is probably the driving scene, where Lucy pilots a police car through Paris at high speed, including zipping through oncoming traffic for periods of time, causing many accidents but not being in one. The cop whose cars she&#8217;s driving asks where she learned to drive like this.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve never driven a car before in my life,&#8221; is her completely deadpan reply.<\/p>\n<p>I was going to write about <em>Guardians of the Galaxy<\/em>, too, but I&#8217;m having too much fun thinking about <em>Lucy<\/em>. Here&#8217;s my one thought about <em>Guardians <\/em>for now: It&#8217;s pretty good, definitely worth seeing, and if you jacked up the things which are good and dialed back the ones which are bad &#8212; a lot &#8212; it would be <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/entertainment\/archive\/2005\/12\/the-movie-review-serenity\/69420\/\" target=\"_blank\">Serenity<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"pdfprnt-buttons pdfprnt-buttons-post pdfprnt-bottom-left\"><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F4942&#038;print=pdf\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-pdf\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/pdf.png\" alt=\"image_pdf\" title=\"View PDF\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F4942&#038;print=print\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-print\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/print.png\" alt=\"image_print\" title=\"Print Content\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just saw this movie, and I have some things to report. Lucy, as has been widely reported, centers around the &#8220;humans only use 10% of their brains&#8221; thing, and, yes, that is entirely not true. If you&#8217;re the sort of person who&#8217;s going to worry about that while you&#8217;re watching the movie, I think [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4942"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4946,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942\/revisions\/4946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}