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Reviews
The Goop Lab (2020)
Nothing but pseudoscience BS
If you liked The Goop Lab, please go to YouTube and look up the late great James Randi. You won't believe in the nonsense anymore.
You're welcome.
In 2018, Goop paid a $145,000 fine for marketing its products using unsubstantiated claims. Goop claimed that the jade egg which sold at $66, could utilize the power of crystal healing, although the claims later proved to be false. Dr. Jen Gunter, a gynecologist, did a review of the product, and his report went viral. He suggested that using the jade egg could result in a toxic shock syndrome. The investigation involved a total of 110 products that Goop claimed to be health-related, and only 10 had valid statements.
Write Bruce Y. Lee wrote in an article published by Forbes: "There is absolutely no shortage of people trying to make money by trying to sell you pseudoscientific health products. Many of these people are willing to pay celebrities, athletes, health professionals, or any others who can give them a platform to sell their woo wares. That's why you have to be an informed shopper when sifting through health information and considering health products and services."
The business is not on the spot for false claims alone. Most of its products are overpriced. Goop products are way too high above the budget of an average citizen. Taking a quick look at the business' website will lead you to a $495 pair of sunglasses and a bath towel worth $116.
The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
Most people don't seem to get this movie at all.
First of all, it's supposed to be meta. It's supposed to be a parody of itself. Lana is too genius for you, it went right over most people's heads. The YouTube movie review haters just didn't get it at all.
The Matrix trilogy is a series that deals in binaries. Red pill vs. Blue pill. Man vs. Machine. The Matrix vs. The real world. Free will vs. Destiny. Zeroes and ones, baby. In the first film, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) takes Neo (Keanu Reeves) through a simulation training program, whose only message is that agents can be anyone and anyone can be an agent. "if you're not one of us, you're one of them," he intones.
22 years later, the Wachowskis have broken out of their own binaries, coming out as trans women. And only one of them, Lana, chose to return to The Matrix franchise. But it's clear that Wachowski has no taste for the binary anymore, as she delivers a film that shreds much of the original trilogy's ethos.
The most striking difference of 'Resurrections' is the collapse of the 'man vs. Machine' narrative. After Neo defeats Agent Smith and (seemingly) dies in the battle, Zion and the machines strike a tentative truce. But Neo's sacrifice inspires many machines to defect from the Deus Ex Machina and join sides with the humans. These beings are called Sentients, adorable droids that work with the city of Io. They are rendered in luminous reflective colors and curved lines, and bear little resemblance to the insect-like sentinels.
But it isn't only the worker droids who join the rebellion. The trilogy had plenty of sympathetic programs from the Matrix (like the Oracle) who wanted to help humanity. 'Resurrections' brings these programs into the real world via millions of nanobots that cluster and form into human shapes. These beings now have corporeal form in the real world, where they do stuff like help Io grow strawberries and work to defend the city.
So much of 'Resurrections' works to erase the line between man and machine. After his second bout in the Matrix, Neo awakens to have more ports, and more hardware on his neck. And he finds himself not just working with Morpheus, but a Morpheus/Smith hybrid with different abilities (and a flair for fashion). It's a natural extension of Neo's brokered peace with the Deus Ex Machina.
It's also an apt metaphor for our increasingly online life, for time spent on our phones or in a Zoom meeting. The man vs. Machine war is over, and our relationship with technology is more deeply entwined than ever. The teenagers who first saw The Matrix in 1999 were a bridge generation, the last to remember a time pre-internet. Nowadays, younger generations don't know a world without it. As one character says in Resurrections, "I'm a geek. I was raised by machines."
Wachowski's breaking of the binary rewrites the rules of 'The Matrix', but it also addresses our increased dependence on technology. In 1999, cell phones were still a luxury, and the internet was still being discussed as a fad or a temporary innovation. The ensuing two decades have seen an unprecedented leap in technology, and the near constant role it plays in our lives.
It's no surprise then that 'Resurrections' finds Thomas Anderson as a successful video game designer, translating his memories of the original trilogy into a game format. His reality transformed into a digital experience within a digital construct that keeps folding in on itself like a mobius strip. The question is no longer how do we defeat the machines, but how we maintain the connections and relationships that make us human.
Trump Card (2020)
Propaganda
Dinesh D'Souza distorts and fulfills George Orwell's warnings in his worthless Trump Card.
I suggest going and watching Dinesh D'Souza debate Matt Dillihunty. You can find the debate on YouTube.
The Principle (2014)
Garbage documentary
This is not real science, it pseudoscience and not how science works.
The End of Quantum Reality (2020)
Garbage documentary
Nothing but garbage pseudoscience trying to prove god with bad arguments. This is not how science works, you don't start with a conclusion before the experiment begins. They start with the assumption that god is real without first proving it to be true and then takes science and tries to fit in god. You must first prove god exists before you can say he did anything.