If there is one thing this book has sort of reinforced is the reason why we industrialized food in the first place instead of sticking to less mechanical means. Because it's cheap, and organic living cannot be managed on a mass scale.
I hate to say this, but when I read that Whole Foods has virtually fallen into the same trap as the rest of the industrialized food industry, I was rather amused. Why? That's certainly not a good thing, but it goes to show that no matter how righteous one feels about saving the animals and providing organic fruits, you're still not much better than the industrial machine. They tried to fight it and they pretty much failed.
Because you cannot ship organic foods straight from the farm, across country, to a grocery store! Everything, thus, has to be local if you want straight organic foods and that simply is not possible, at all, for every city. Where is New York going to get their organic foods if there can't be any preservatives? Are there enough farms around there to feed 8 million people (I don't even know how many people live in New York. That's just a ballpark figure and it's probably very wrong) and the rest of the surrounding area? I'm pretty sure farm lands are in short supply up there. Not that they don't exist but that they cannot possibly produce enough to feed that many people. And even if they do, what about the surrounding areas? They'd just starve?
To be quite frank, though, I seriously doubt anyone is going to be able to get rid of the food industry completely. It may produce extremely unhealthy foods and have animal abuse (I love animals too and I think the FDA should look this more closely!), but it does make food on a mass enough scale to feed the 300,000,000+ in our population.
I guess you could rightly call this my primary criticism of this book. It's saying a lot about how good Joel Salatin's farm is, how much it produces, and how it produces but it is not saying anything about how we can transport this. Other than the fact that Joel Salatin refuses to go beyond local.
This is probably what I find annoying about quite a few environmentalist writings that we've read. They totally ignore practical reasons as to why Salatin's way farming hasn't spread like wildfire to other farmers. He seems to be making a decent living. And part of that is because it simply is not practical! Organic food can't be shipped! Or isn't supposed to be shipped because they prohibit the use of preservatives.
Durning did the same thing, because I criticized his article which was so bent on proving the American people are ill with consumerism, that he totally ignored the fact that happiness is quite largely based on job satisfaction. He was so certain materialism is the sole cause of happiness that he completely ignored how job satisfaction is pretty much at an all time low. Big business has CEOs that keep awarding themselves huge bonuses and severance checks(even for doing a crappy job), and meanwhile their poor employee on the lowest rung of the ladder is constantly ignored and withheld bonuses despite working 40+ hours a week. Yes, NOTHING wrong or even pessimistic about that picture at all. (See? I'm not a capitalist through and through. Unregulated capitalism is horrible! Ergo, our current financial crisis right now.)
GoldBug
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
The Omnivore's Dilemma
There is a point where limited scope of the situation is a real distortion to the reality of the situation, but I guess I never actually knew just how pervasive this problem of families eating only fast food really was. I even worked in the fast food industry for four years and I never realized how bad it really was. Had I suspected? Oh yeah. I knew that my friends' families usually ate out or, at the very least, did not actually sit down for a dinner together. It was every man for himself, usually.
I certainly remember the diet craze that swept the country, but I also do not remember my grocery stores actually changing all that much. My parents tried to partake in the craze, but my brother and I remained aloof. My mom usually cooks dinner at night and although my parents would pick and choose what things they ate, everything was still made and my brother's and my habits never changed.
I definitely remember the videos that had come out about the fast food industry that was meant to show incriminating evidence about how bad the food was and my reaction was, "What? People didn't already know this? Of course it's not good for you!"
And, as I stated in a previous post, it can drain your wallet fast.
Now, the actual book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I like how he starts off with how ridiculous these diet crazes have gone when he says, "Somehow this most elemental of activities - figuring out what to eat - has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?"
Yeah, I don't know either, Mr. Pollan. Although, you could take this several different ways. Forget what has actually led us to this point, you decided to focus on actually telling people what to eat. Well, that is nice and practical. Hopefully it will actually make families healthy, but I'm going to go ahead and say that there is actually a social problem at work here.
It all starts with the beginning of the century, when women stayed home and did the chores and the men worked. Man would come home to a nice dinner made by his wife. Well, now the women work and now they're tired when they come home too, but still, somehow, the dominant mindset is that the woman should still cook the dinner. Why can't Mr. Man do it? Or why can't they just pitch in together to create a healthy meal?
I will fully admit that my mom cooks the majority of the meals at our house (that's mostly because she's the best cook), but my dad occasionally cooks, mostly grills. Since my Freshman college year when I had to survive on horrible, horrible dorm food, I have craved home-cooked meals and I actually bothered to start cooking myself. So, this winter, when I'm working on my portfolio and not going to Dairy Queen, I'll probably end up cooking quite a few of the meals. Why not? I'm fully grown, I wont' be carrying a job, and I'm staying under their roof, ergo I have the time and the obligation to cook.
There is one more thing I would like to address that he finished his introduction with:
"Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them."
I am not ashamed to say I am one of those people, simply because I just don't care. I really don't. When these dieting crazes and shocking videos of what's really behind the fast food industry came out, I made sure not to bother with them. I had no interest and, as stated above, was actually surprised people weren't already suspecting at least some of the dirty secrets behind the fast food industry.
At the moment, there are far more pressing issues going through my mind like, "Will I get a job? Where am I going to apply? Crap, I need to do this paper! Shiiit, I could lose my scholarship if I don't make the grade in this class!" When you're a poor college student, who doesn't have anything close to a kitchen (no, microwaves don't count) then how you're going to eat a healthy meal just doesn't factor into your daily thoughts.
I probably think of the future and what lies there far more than most people do in a life time, but when it really comes down to it, that's the future. I'm in the present and all I can really do is live in the present. Maybe once my metabolism slows down, I will actually take greater care in what I eat, but until then...I will worry about what readings I have due for classes tomorrow and the day after that.
Thankfully, I do have the added bonus that I have spent the majority of my life eating home-cooked meals, a luxury that it appears most people have not had the opportunity to do and I feel sorry for them.
I certainly remember the diet craze that swept the country, but I also do not remember my grocery stores actually changing all that much. My parents tried to partake in the craze, but my brother and I remained aloof. My mom usually cooks dinner at night and although my parents would pick and choose what things they ate, everything was still made and my brother's and my habits never changed.
I definitely remember the videos that had come out about the fast food industry that was meant to show incriminating evidence about how bad the food was and my reaction was, "What? People didn't already know this? Of course it's not good for you!"
And, as I stated in a previous post, it can drain your wallet fast.
Now, the actual book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I like how he starts off with how ridiculous these diet crazes have gone when he says, "Somehow this most elemental of activities - figuring out what to eat - has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?"
Yeah, I don't know either, Mr. Pollan. Although, you could take this several different ways. Forget what has actually led us to this point, you decided to focus on actually telling people what to eat. Well, that is nice and practical. Hopefully it will actually make families healthy, but I'm going to go ahead and say that there is actually a social problem at work here.
It all starts with the beginning of the century, when women stayed home and did the chores and the men worked. Man would come home to a nice dinner made by his wife. Well, now the women work and now they're tired when they come home too, but still, somehow, the dominant mindset is that the woman should still cook the dinner. Why can't Mr. Man do it? Or why can't they just pitch in together to create a healthy meal?
I will fully admit that my mom cooks the majority of the meals at our house (that's mostly because she's the best cook), but my dad occasionally cooks, mostly grills. Since my Freshman college year when I had to survive on horrible, horrible dorm food, I have craved home-cooked meals and I actually bothered to start cooking myself. So, this winter, when I'm working on my portfolio and not going to Dairy Queen, I'll probably end up cooking quite a few of the meals. Why not? I'm fully grown, I wont' be carrying a job, and I'm staying under their roof, ergo I have the time and the obligation to cook.
There is one more thing I would like to address that he finished his introduction with:
"Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them."
I am not ashamed to say I am one of those people, simply because I just don't care. I really don't. When these dieting crazes and shocking videos of what's really behind the fast food industry came out, I made sure not to bother with them. I had no interest and, as stated above, was actually surprised people weren't already suspecting at least some of the dirty secrets behind the fast food industry.
At the moment, there are far more pressing issues going through my mind like, "Will I get a job? Where am I going to apply? Crap, I need to do this paper! Shiiit, I could lose my scholarship if I don't make the grade in this class!" When you're a poor college student, who doesn't have anything close to a kitchen (no, microwaves don't count) then how you're going to eat a healthy meal just doesn't factor into your daily thoughts.
I probably think of the future and what lies there far more than most people do in a life time, but when it really comes down to it, that's the future. I'm in the present and all I can really do is live in the present. Maybe once my metabolism slows down, I will actually take greater care in what I eat, but until then...I will worry about what readings I have due for classes tomorrow and the day after that.
Thankfully, I do have the added bonus that I have spent the majority of my life eating home-cooked meals, a luxury that it appears most people have not had the opportunity to do and I feel sorry for them.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The Dangers of Consumerism and apparently Christianity
This last week had a whole host of themes, which might make this post a little jumbled and jumpy; consumerism, spirituality, christianity, western mindset, and even a little feminism thrown in there. With that said, though, I think I will focus a little bit more on the consumerism and Christianity aspect.
I'm glad Professor Rouzie said that, to an extent, there is truth to the idea that money can buy you happiness, mostly in the sense that the constant worry of paying bills and knowing where your next meal will come from is relieved with a good job and salary. Durning wrote in his essay, "The happiness that people derive from consumption is based on whether they can consume more than their neighbors and more than they did in the past." I personally disagree that everyone is driven by this imaginary competition to do better than their neighbor. Is it still a driving factor? Yeah, I think so. In grade school my friends were constantly telling me how "rich" I was but I had difficulty seeing their point. We lived in the same neighborhood, we went to the same crappy public school. But I had the nicest house, I had two TVs, and all kinds of video game systems to play with.
I had more stuff. Was I happy? Well, yeah, I was hardly ever bored.
But what about now? I am currently living in a dorm room that's barely big enough to qualify as anything but a closet - the lack of elbow space does annoy me and it always takes some getting used to - and yet I feel probably just as happy and fulfilled as I did ten years ago with the three-story house. Why? Well, I have great friends here, at the very least, but I was also able to squeeze in some of my most prized possessions: my Calvin & Hobbes books, a couple of Fantasy novels, my laptop, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Game Cube, my SLR digital camera, and my book of DVDs and video games. Just as my friends make up a part of my life so do some of the items that I possess and I can honestly say that I would be a far less fulfilled person without one or more of these items. Seem silly? Perhaps but there is a certain something about the material things we get that drives the very reason we insist on buying them: escapism.
As an artist and a writer, I am constantly looking for a new story to get lost in and even though I may read the same books and play the same games over and over again, I can honestly say that I always get even a little bit of entertainment from them. Material things can make you happy, it all depends on how you use them.
To an extent in Alan Durning's essay, I think he misses the point. He says, "Luxuries become necessities between generations as well. People measure their current material comforts against the benchmark set in their own childhood. So each generation needs more than the previous did to be satisfied" (774). Actually, my parents often reminisced about the frugality of their childhood to curb the materialism in my brother and I: "When I was a kid, we would go to the local burger joint and get a large drink, maybe once a month, and I had to share it with my three sisters. We never had individual pops. That was outrageous!"
But, to get back to the point, I don't think everyone actually measures their happiness based on what items they have. In my family, it's all about job satisfaction. I do not think anyone in my family has ever really and truly enjoyed their job. If they did, it certainly was not for long. We spend about 90% of our adult life doing work and rarely, if ever, does a person find satisfaction with it. If we spend 90% of our time working, then our job will most certainly factor very largely in the happiness scale.
I have worked at Dairy Queen for four years. I not only hate it, I loathe it. The very summer's beautiful hot days were tainted by the fact that I had to go to work and go through the same motions minute after minute, serving hoards of people. I do not work during the college quarters and I could not wait to get back to school and away from that miserable aspect of my life. Well, since I'm going into video games, job satisfaction should be much higher when I actually get a job.
I find it very surprising that Durning bases his whole essay on the evils of consumption and yet when he gets to the part about the most fulfilling aspects of our lives, he doesn't think for an instance that being happy with our job would factor in to how happy we are totally? He brushes over it but he turns away from that avenue almost as quickly as it presents itself:
"Similarly, analysts such as Scitovsky believe that reported happiness is higher at higher incomes largely because the skilled jobs of the well-off are more interesting than the routine labor of the working class. Managers, directors, engineers, consultants, and the rest of the professional elite enjoy more challenging and creative pursuits, and therefore receive more psychological rewards, than those lower on the business hierarchy" (775).
And for the record, my dad is an engineer and my mom has a masters in business and works at a bank, so they are among those "professional elite" but after thirty or forty years of putting up with the same thing, work loses the interest it once had.
Next up on the chopping block is Lynn White Jr.
Now he and I can actually agree on something: we both dislike Christianity. Him because of the psychological impact its had on the way our country thinks and me because the evangelists attempting to hijack the elections and apparently turn the country into a Christian theocracy are pretty scary, even as much of a minority as they are. I also dislike it because of the way it affected some of my friends and eventually came to dominate their lives.
To begin, I love how he starts his essay with an example of a new plow created to create suitable conditions for growing crops and implies a cold and calculating attitude to the peasants who used it. "Man's relation to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature" (406). So, peasant farmers from the 7th century are now evil simply because they used an instrument that allowed them to live and feed their families.
Now, this will seem like a silly analogy but there is a game called Bioshock, where you play as a man who has inexplicably found himself in this chaotic underwater city where the people are murdering each other to stay alive. There are these creatures that walk around, carrying a lot of money and energy that is essential to the survival of your character. However, they do not attack you. They simply wander around, living peacefully, but the game requires you to attack them or you cannot go on to the next level. Without this requirement, I would simply let them be. They are not doing anything to me and despite all the valuable items they carry, it wastes quite a bit of ammo to kill them.
Needless to say, humans are a common sense creature. If they did not have to "rape" the fields to grow their food then they wouldn't. Plowing them in this violent manner, as the text describes, is time consuming and it takes group work and a bunch of oxen to do it. If it could be done with two oxen and a man, no one would waste time pooling their resources to "attack the land." Furthermore, their being Christian had nothing to do with them developing new technology to stay alive. They could be Buddhist and still they would have to resort to such harsh means. That is the power of survival.
Furthermore, I remember watching this documentary on Christianity and it pretty much covered how very astrology-based it is and how it borrowed virtually every one of its elements from the other religions of the day. I believe it was called Zeitgeist, but the dominant religion that was constantly compared to Christianity was the Egyptian religion which was around looooong before Christianity came into being. Needless to say, I have a difficult time believing that Christianity is the first anthropocentric religion. It would not have become a dominant religion or come into being at all if people at the time, to an extent, did not believe that the land was there for the taking. They had the lion in cages, they rode the largest land mammal on the planet, the elephant, of course they would have thought pretty highly of themselves.
I'm glad Professor Rouzie said that, to an extent, there is truth to the idea that money can buy you happiness, mostly in the sense that the constant worry of paying bills and knowing where your next meal will come from is relieved with a good job and salary. Durning wrote in his essay, "The happiness that people derive from consumption is based on whether they can consume more than their neighbors and more than they did in the past." I personally disagree that everyone is driven by this imaginary competition to do better than their neighbor. Is it still a driving factor? Yeah, I think so. In grade school my friends were constantly telling me how "rich" I was but I had difficulty seeing their point. We lived in the same neighborhood, we went to the same crappy public school. But I had the nicest house, I had two TVs, and all kinds of video game systems to play with.
I had more stuff. Was I happy? Well, yeah, I was hardly ever bored.
But what about now? I am currently living in a dorm room that's barely big enough to qualify as anything but a closet - the lack of elbow space does annoy me and it always takes some getting used to - and yet I feel probably just as happy and fulfilled as I did ten years ago with the three-story house. Why? Well, I have great friends here, at the very least, but I was also able to squeeze in some of my most prized possessions: my Calvin & Hobbes books, a couple of Fantasy novels, my laptop, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Game Cube, my SLR digital camera, and my book of DVDs and video games. Just as my friends make up a part of my life so do some of the items that I possess and I can honestly say that I would be a far less fulfilled person without one or more of these items. Seem silly? Perhaps but there is a certain something about the material things we get that drives the very reason we insist on buying them: escapism.
As an artist and a writer, I am constantly looking for a new story to get lost in and even though I may read the same books and play the same games over and over again, I can honestly say that I always get even a little bit of entertainment from them. Material things can make you happy, it all depends on how you use them.
To an extent in Alan Durning's essay, I think he misses the point. He says, "Luxuries become necessities between generations as well. People measure their current material comforts against the benchmark set in their own childhood. So each generation needs more than the previous did to be satisfied" (774). Actually, my parents often reminisced about the frugality of their childhood to curb the materialism in my brother and I: "When I was a kid, we would go to the local burger joint and get a large drink, maybe once a month, and I had to share it with my three sisters. We never had individual pops. That was outrageous!"
But, to get back to the point, I don't think everyone actually measures their happiness based on what items they have. In my family, it's all about job satisfaction. I do not think anyone in my family has ever really and truly enjoyed their job. If they did, it certainly was not for long. We spend about 90% of our adult life doing work and rarely, if ever, does a person find satisfaction with it. If we spend 90% of our time working, then our job will most certainly factor very largely in the happiness scale.
I have worked at Dairy Queen for four years. I not only hate it, I loathe it. The very summer's beautiful hot days were tainted by the fact that I had to go to work and go through the same motions minute after minute, serving hoards of people. I do not work during the college quarters and I could not wait to get back to school and away from that miserable aspect of my life. Well, since I'm going into video games, job satisfaction should be much higher when I actually get a job.
I find it very surprising that Durning bases his whole essay on the evils of consumption and yet when he gets to the part about the most fulfilling aspects of our lives, he doesn't think for an instance that being happy with our job would factor in to how happy we are totally? He brushes over it but he turns away from that avenue almost as quickly as it presents itself:
"Similarly, analysts such as Scitovsky believe that reported happiness is higher at higher incomes largely because the skilled jobs of the well-off are more interesting than the routine labor of the working class. Managers, directors, engineers, consultants, and the rest of the professional elite enjoy more challenging and creative pursuits, and therefore receive more psychological rewards, than those lower on the business hierarchy" (775).
And for the record, my dad is an engineer and my mom has a masters in business and works at a bank, so they are among those "professional elite" but after thirty or forty years of putting up with the same thing, work loses the interest it once had.
Next up on the chopping block is Lynn White Jr.
Now he and I can actually agree on something: we both dislike Christianity. Him because of the psychological impact its had on the way our country thinks and me because the evangelists attempting to hijack the elections and apparently turn the country into a Christian theocracy are pretty scary, even as much of a minority as they are. I also dislike it because of the way it affected some of my friends and eventually came to dominate their lives.
To begin, I love how he starts his essay with an example of a new plow created to create suitable conditions for growing crops and implies a cold and calculating attitude to the peasants who used it. "Man's relation to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature" (406). So, peasant farmers from the 7th century are now evil simply because they used an instrument that allowed them to live and feed their families.
Now, this will seem like a silly analogy but there is a game called Bioshock, where you play as a man who has inexplicably found himself in this chaotic underwater city where the people are murdering each other to stay alive. There are these creatures that walk around, carrying a lot of money and energy that is essential to the survival of your character. However, they do not attack you. They simply wander around, living peacefully, but the game requires you to attack them or you cannot go on to the next level. Without this requirement, I would simply let them be. They are not doing anything to me and despite all the valuable items they carry, it wastes quite a bit of ammo to kill them.
Needless to say, humans are a common sense creature. If they did not have to "rape" the fields to grow their food then they wouldn't. Plowing them in this violent manner, as the text describes, is time consuming and it takes group work and a bunch of oxen to do it. If it could be done with two oxen and a man, no one would waste time pooling their resources to "attack the land." Furthermore, their being Christian had nothing to do with them developing new technology to stay alive. They could be Buddhist and still they would have to resort to such harsh means. That is the power of survival.
Furthermore, I remember watching this documentary on Christianity and it pretty much covered how very astrology-based it is and how it borrowed virtually every one of its elements from the other religions of the day. I believe it was called Zeitgeist, but the dominant religion that was constantly compared to Christianity was the Egyptian religion which was around looooong before Christianity came into being. Needless to say, I have a difficult time believing that Christianity is the first anthropocentric religion. It would not have become a dominant religion or come into being at all if people at the time, to an extent, did not believe that the land was there for the taking. They had the lion in cages, they rode the largest land mammal on the planet, the elephant, of course they would have thought pretty highly of themselves.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Michael Clayton
Ah, a pretty good film about how a man topples an evil corporation that did its best to obscure, mask, and road block its opponents into a stalemate and eventually achieving its aims: paying little to the plaintiffs while continuing to market their obviously harmful product, because the amount of money coming into the CEOs overrules the money that would go into fixing said product into something safer. But, still, first and foremost this film is not about some...not really lawyer person doing the morally good thing and bringing down the company for the good of the planet.
He managed to turn his conversation with Karen Crowder at the end into a confession of nearly killing him and definitely killing his charge Arthur. It's all about revenge. George Clooney had no other motivation to bring down this company other than the fact that he suspected someone had killed Arthur. It only turned really, truly personal when they stupidly tried to kill him. Of course the evil henchmen screwed up. They always do!
Since I'm a media student, I'll go ahead and just focus on the technical aspects of the film, namely the story. Touched on above, I can't tell if the film would have been better if it was started right at the beginning of the trouble or if it hadn't shown us the future and double-backed. I mean, it does say "4 days earlier" not long after the car bomb and cars don't usually explode. Obviously, someone was trying to kill him. We don't even have to get halfway through the film before we can recognize the enemy as the evil company. Obviously the evil company attempted to kill him so that they could more effectively clean up the mess their rogue lawyer made.
I guess you could argue that it made for an enticing beginning, to draw the audience in and make them want to stay, but it's a film about lawyers! Everyone hates lawyers! It will eventually get pretty boring and...it was. It was a little boring. And a little annoying. I kinda wish the little boy hadn't factored in at all and I'm not sure what his purpose was anyway. Was the boy's fantasy book (geez, was it Realm & Conquerors?) really that important to the story? I was under the impression that Arthur, as crazy as he was, always had a tangible idea of what was going on with that company and he proved his genius, if not his recklessness, during that scene where he calls - I'm not even sure who. He called someone merely for the soul purpose of heckling the people obviously listening in on his phone calls - and shouted about the kind of choice language that people within the company should write to avoid incrimination in lawsuits, particularly this one.
Smart, crazy man.
But, it's pretty obvious by this time that since the company listened in on this particular conversation, that this lawyer is in fact doing his best to win the lawsuit for their clients. Well, that would ruin their reputation and they would lose too much money, so they decide to go ahead and kill the annoying flies that pester them.
So, you go to all that trouble to make sure Arthur dies in a suicide, and yet you sloppily attempt to kill George Clooney with a car bomb? Not only did it fail but, as I said above, cars just don't blow up! It would be rather obvious that someone rigged it to blow and since Clooney just cleared himself of his debtors...who else would want to kill him? Man, this company is not very subtle.
At any rate, it is still a decent movie. Not especially thought-provoking since the basic premise of man overcoming evil business has been done before. I kinda wish they had gone more into the nature aspect of the movie, where a business obviously ignored laws and inflicted harm not only on the environment but on human life. But the whole violation of nature and its destruction was more of an irrelevant detail than anything significant and the movie was focused far more on how evil businesses will do personal harm in their eagerness to escape prosecution and lawsuits.
Even so, I still prefer V for Vendetta. Bundles a nice package of food for thought with incredible imagery and plenty of action.
He managed to turn his conversation with Karen Crowder at the end into a confession of nearly killing him and definitely killing his charge Arthur. It's all about revenge. George Clooney had no other motivation to bring down this company other than the fact that he suspected someone had killed Arthur. It only turned really, truly personal when they stupidly tried to kill him. Of course the evil henchmen screwed up. They always do!
Since I'm a media student, I'll go ahead and just focus on the technical aspects of the film, namely the story. Touched on above, I can't tell if the film would have been better if it was started right at the beginning of the trouble or if it hadn't shown us the future and double-backed. I mean, it does say "4 days earlier" not long after the car bomb and cars don't usually explode. Obviously, someone was trying to kill him. We don't even have to get halfway through the film before we can recognize the enemy as the evil company. Obviously the evil company attempted to kill him so that they could more effectively clean up the mess their rogue lawyer made.
I guess you could argue that it made for an enticing beginning, to draw the audience in and make them want to stay, but it's a film about lawyers! Everyone hates lawyers! It will eventually get pretty boring and...it was. It was a little boring. And a little annoying. I kinda wish the little boy hadn't factored in at all and I'm not sure what his purpose was anyway. Was the boy's fantasy book (geez, was it Realm & Conquerors?) really that important to the story? I was under the impression that Arthur, as crazy as he was, always had a tangible idea of what was going on with that company and he proved his genius, if not his recklessness, during that scene where he calls - I'm not even sure who. He called someone merely for the soul purpose of heckling the people obviously listening in on his phone calls - and shouted about the kind of choice language that people within the company should write to avoid incrimination in lawsuits, particularly this one.
Smart, crazy man.
But, it's pretty obvious by this time that since the company listened in on this particular conversation, that this lawyer is in fact doing his best to win the lawsuit for their clients. Well, that would ruin their reputation and they would lose too much money, so they decide to go ahead and kill the annoying flies that pester them.
So, you go to all that trouble to make sure Arthur dies in a suicide, and yet you sloppily attempt to kill George Clooney with a car bomb? Not only did it fail but, as I said above, cars just don't blow up! It would be rather obvious that someone rigged it to blow and since Clooney just cleared himself of his debtors...who else would want to kill him? Man, this company is not very subtle.
At any rate, it is still a decent movie. Not especially thought-provoking since the basic premise of man overcoming evil business has been done before. I kinda wish they had gone more into the nature aspect of the movie, where a business obviously ignored laws and inflicted harm not only on the environment but on human life. But the whole violation of nature and its destruction was more of an irrelevant detail than anything significant and the movie was focused far more on how evil businesses will do personal harm in their eagerness to escape prosecution and lawsuits.
Even so, I still prefer V for Vendetta. Bundles a nice package of food for thought with incredible imagery and plenty of action.
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