Fire in the Blood

It's hard to believe that medicine is available to alleviate the suffering of millions of impoverished global citizens, and, that due to associated prohibitive costs, they're left to die because they can't afford treatment.

According to Dylan Mohan Gray's Fire in the Blood, pharmaceutical companies are the most profitable in the world, but their obsession with increasing their profits primarily and treating the sick as an afterthought is disturbing; always thought curing illness was the primary function of discovering cures for illness, mistaken was I, holding on to a drug's patent so that you can monopolize its sale to people who have no alternative and then jack-up the price is the primary function, recently formalized by the WTO's adoption of TRIPS.

It's revolting.

The film is about the struggle of many African countries to receive access to antivirals which combat but don't cure AIDS, allowing people who contracted it to live a relatively normal life.

A brilliant doctor from India,Yusuf Hamied, created a generic alternative, produced and sold it for a fraction of his American competitor's price, but the sale of his drug was initially not permitted in many countries due to their governments acquiescence to the demands of patent holding pharmaceutical giants, whose stranglehold on the free market was more voraciously tightened by TRIPS.

Apparently these companies don't even spend much on research and development, the majority of R & D for new drugs being funded by the public sector. Why governments don't patent the drugs discovered through such research and then sell them at affordable prices is bizarre, such sales prolonging the lives of their tax payers, thereby increasing tax revenues.

In my opinion, religious organizations should be passionately defending the rights of poor people to have access to affordable medicine.

Isn't this issue profoundly more important than whether or not gay people can get married?

They're gay. They love each other. They want to get married. Who cares? Love doesn't know the difference.

Fire in the Blood mentions how the costs of potentially life saving drugs are becoming prohibitive for many Americans as well.

Prices keep going up, wages keep staying the same.

Another serious problem.

RoboCop

Didn't think they should remake RoboCop, the original being one of the best action films I've seen, up there with Die Hard and Aliens, but they did, it exists, I obviously couldn't resist seeing it, and tried not to spend too much time comparing it to the original while watching, even though my efforts proved futile.

The first RoboCop's much more gritty, a different degree of debauched desperation. Pre-internet, its world is much more local, focusing on criminal thugs, corporate power struggles, and terrorized police forces more than international paradigms and their relationship to the United States, a raw frantic highly organized pedigree, wherein RoboCop's (Peter Weller) identity and family aren't primary to the structure of the narrative.

The internet-era RoboCop deals with multiple big-picture issues. The ways in which multi-billion dollar companies agitate to infringe upon integral civil liberties. Maintaining a humanistic identity while constantly embracing eclectic electronic onslaughts. Media personalities and their institutionalized agendas. Scientific ethics, parenting, global politics, cyborgs.

Cyborgs don't really seem like far-fetched highly aggressive airy-fairy daydreams anymore.

There's a Fido-like script involving a cyborg possibly starring Matt Damon waiting to be written.

Co-starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Sally Hawkins.

Like Archer, I still fear cyborgs however, and as RoboCop (Joel Kinnaman) loses his identity in the new film, fears regarding consciousness altering technocrats are rebelliously voiced, their counterparts receiving plenty of airtime as well in the movie's dialectic (the sequel's set up well).

More polished than the original, lacking its wild conditioned sense of experimental zealotry, the relationship between the two films reflects the potential maturation of the original's fan base, much like the first three Terminator films, while making me think today's youth must be hyperactively aware (Michael Keaton's [Raymond Sellars] presence perfectly establishes this transition [casting by Diane Kerbel and Francine Maisler]).

Perhaps they didn't like it.

I did meet a youngster who enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness however (co-starring Peter Weller).

Ésimésac

If you like community focused films that celebrate the strength of tightly knit towns without hesitating to unabashedly and wholeheartedly melodramatize their conflicts, you'll likely enjoy Luc Picard's Émisésac. 

If you like social democratic allegories which charmingly utilize the magically real to critically examine the affects of economic risks and their associated dreams primarily through the social interactions of an innocent, unworldly, inspirational protagonist, you should check Émisésac out.

If you like romantic resolutions that emphasize the human as opposed to the mathematical factors worked into strategic financial planning, Émisésac is for you.

And if you're looking for a film to inaugurate your cinematic holiday season, it's a total must.

Thoroughly enjoyed Émisésac's ample simplified multidimensional spirit, as well as its humble humanism.

Could have used some more multicultural material.

Joyeux Noël

The setting's World War I. Scottish and French troops are fighting the Germans. Heartbreak, lesions, and loss on both sides as they dig in and fight it out attrition style. But Christmas arrives and three commanders miraculously come together and order a ceasefire to give their troops time to celebrate. This unsettles their superior officers and soon enough there's hell to pay, respect for humanity be damned. What Christian Carion's Joyeux Noël points out is that superior officers who are theoretically responsible for representing and maintaining acceptable models of behaviour often take none to kindly to being outshone by their subordinates, especially when such actions resolutely salute the ideals for which each respective officer stands. A gregarious film showcasing hearty camaraderie and its humanistic complement, Joyeux Noël is a must for the annual holiday circuit inasmuch as it thoroughly embodies the spirit of the season.