Saturday, May 19, 2018

i'm still thinking about that movie birdboy, the forgotten children. i wonder if it's for kids. it's on g-kids, but whoa, it's a dark mofo. it shows a nuclear explosion and the afterlife, a denuded landscape of trash where, like now in many parts of the planet, the survivors root through mounds of trash to scratch a living, and they fight over trash as the last resource. but the water is poisoned and there's no food growing.
i have to admit i kind of tuned in and out so this is not a good review. i kept thinking ouch, that's harsh! i was scared- i don't have a kid, but my kid was scared, i kept thinking. birdboy couldn't fly, yet did, like me when i was a kid, i couldn't fly awake, and i was rooted in humiliation to the ground among other kids, but at night i flew like a demon, when i wasn't glassy-eyed with insomnia. i seem to even recall in flying dreams i was hunted, like birdboy is by the cops. the head cop kills him but he comes alive again and again. the junior cop asks, how many times have you killed birdboy? and the head cop can't say, many times. he wonders how many lives birdboy has and swears he will kill every one of them. i don't even remember how it ends now, and i cant watch it over, even if i didnt turn it in to the liberry. 
i guess it did catch something of the feeling of the times, and how tried childhood must be now. we had the bomb when i was a kid of course, but we didn't have a gazillion toxic chemicals and an e.p.a. that's part of a criminal corporate regime and protects the industry not the people. we had trash, but not plastic archipelagoes the size of australia and teflon in 99% of all beings. we had a lot of camps and a lot of prisons but we didn't think of earth as one big slave market cum concentration camp or prison planet. we had wars but not many multiple endless wars, or at least not that i knew of. but i was just a kid, what did i know. 
                                                                     ***

“Not everything with a body is alive,” someone warns. The cumulative effect is that of a broken world in which kids are conditioned for a violent type of self-sufficiency and trained to think of everyone as their enemies. Each societal malady becomes an excuse to restrict freedoms and encourage forgetting; nobody can remember why Birdboy is in exile, and it seems like Dinky and her friends are the last generation that might even vaguely remember a better yesterday. 
But even (or especially) at its most frightening, “Birdboy” flaps its wings and tries to fly true, urging viewers of all ages to create a new world instead of nesting in the rotten one they inherited. As abstract as this story can be, its miasma of morbid imagery sells that core idea with all the clarity of a fable. These characters may have been born into a sea of garbage, but they don’t have to die there.

-( from indiewire)

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