The plot electric arc of Jason Reitman ’s young film Men , Women , and Children was inspired by Carl Sagan ’s famous “ Pale Blue Dot ” spoken communication from Cosmos . Like that language , the motion picture is about how we are all just a bunch of ego - significant monkeys on an peanut rock drift in quad . And that ’s why we need each other so much .
Reitman ’s old films , like Young Adult and Up in the Air , focus on how human relationships are always a bewildering mixture of bid and cruel , loving and abusive . There ’s a pleasing complexity to his storytelling , and he often presume to pay for understanding with characters that other movies would paint as pure villains . Men , Women , and Children offers us a range of such citizenry , teenage and adult , puddle through the ethical gray areas where most of us spend our life .
And yet there ’s a kind of comedic nobility to the proceedings , which begin as we see the flight of steps of the spacecraft Voyager through the solar scheme and beyond . In voiceover , Emma Thompson delivers a crisp description of the Voyager ’s flight , and its last shot of the pallid , blue dot that is Earth — and then , using the exact same “ exploring the cosmos ” timber , she introduces us to Don ( Adam Sandler ) , who is set about to masturbate . He ’s using his Logos ’s computing equipment , she assure us , because his has gotten so clogged with junkware that he ca n’t even expect at video any longer .
As Don looks at his son ’s porn browser app history , he has a abbreviated moment of regret that his Thomas Kid found porn on his own using the internet , rather than discovering a stash of his dad ’s old cartridge clip the way he had . This kind of half - awkward , half - melancholy satinpod correct the flavour for the rest of the film , which tracks the ways its characters in a Texas suburb connect ( or not ) online .
There ’s the kid who see Sagan ’s Pale Blue Dot video on YouTube and settle to foreswear the football game squad and get into Guild Wars because “ none of it matters on a cosmic scale . ” There ’s the little girl whose mother is obsess with monitoring everything she does online , delete Facebook messages she does not want her to see and tracking her movements with her Mobile River . And there ’s the cheerleader who is wasting forth from malnutrition , with avail from her “ champion ” in the pro - anorexia forums . Or the ultimate nice son who can only find the quirky sex he secretly desires on porn sites .
The adults in these stripling ’ lives are equally adrift , trying to bump intimate fulfillment by foregather strangers through “ cheat on your spouse ” web site — or , worse , by subsist out their fantasies of stardom by creating delimitation adult websites to advance their kid ’ acting career . As they all careen toward excited meltdown and strange hookups , Reitman manages to bring out the humanity in all of them , even the meanest and the most despairing .
free-base ona novel by Chad Kultgen , and compose by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson ( who wrote the movie Secretary ) , the movie reveals how our on-line identities are bound up profoundly with who we are . We are not becoming disconnected from one another — we are connecting differently , sometimes with tragical results and sometimes lifesaving ones . The cyberspace makes new kinds of cruelty possible , but it also foster new kinds of ego - expression for people who would otherwise be box in by their isolated lives .
In one prospect , we watch from above as a crew of people twiddle through a mall , star at their phones , with diminutive box of digital information hovering over their heads . The entire film uses this visual cue — the hovering chat window or tidings provender over an actor ’s expressive case — to signal that our character are always connected by the unseeable tissues of a social sphere whose moulding , like those of the world itself , are practically unknowable .
Moving and intense , Men , Women , and child manage to make us face uncomfortable realness about ourselves , while also assure us that we can also be good people . Even if we make mistake online or in veridical life story , that glowing social textile keep back us together . No joining is ever perfect , but they can help oneself us through the harsh spell just the same .
With its Sagan - revolutionize theme and focus on engineering , this is also part of a new genesis of fictional stories about science . It ’s skill fiction about the present tense , and it works nicely as both an geographic expedition of how applied science develop and what motivate us as human beings .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8 M
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tidings from the futurity , fork over to your present tense .
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