Blog Master G

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Rumblings & The Island

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 · No Comments

One of the fun things about owning an old home is hearing the floor creak as you walk around; catching the angle of the glass in the windows that reveals their age in the warps; feeling the solid doors shut; admiring the original fixtures. One of the fun things about owning a WRX is hearing the engine rumble — I can hear it when Jen’s coming down the street on her way home from work, and so can the dogs. Most mornings in winter I get the WRX warmed up for Jen before work. Whenever the car’s running in the garage, especially in the winter when the air is crisp and everything is still, our dishes and glasses on the back shelves in our kitchen rattle from the rumble of the WRX. I like it. It’s as if old and new are meeting to say, “How do you do?” And we have a detached garage.

The Island, starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, is, perhaps, misnamed. But maybe that’s the point. Like the characters in this movie — the ultimate in stem cell research gone wrong (manufactured humans who are living, breathing, and thinking, rather than in the vegetative state they were supposed to be in) — we are tricked going into it that it’s going to be about an island. The film is a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that tackles morality and ethics in 2019 head-on when the rich buy “insurance policies” — clones of themselves — to have on hand in case they need that liver or heart transplant, can’t get pregnant, and the like. But what if those insurance policies begin to question their own existence and begin to discover the notion of self? What if those insurance policies break out of the DoD-sponsored underground compound to confront their “sponsors” in the real world? I enjoyed the movie last night a lot more than I expected to. We like to joke that Ewan is Jen’s boyfriend and Scarlett is my girlfriend, so we didn’t mind the eye candy, either.

Two years ago today we had just endured 24 hours without power in the midst of our packing for our cross-country move.

Tags: movies