Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Written by Ashley Kelmore, Posted in Adventures, Reviews
I’ve been bumped up to the advanced acting class. Woo. I’m going on auditions, and even had a call back. It’s fun and kind of weird. I sometimes get nervous, but then I remember that I’m lucky in that my whole livelihood isn’t at stake. I have a great job that pays pretty well, and I have a boss who recently told me she wants to support the acting thing, so if I get cast in things we can work around it. That’s beyond rare. So I really do just treat each audition like a rehearsal. If I screw it up, I screw it up. It’s not the end of the world. And if I get a callback or, some day, a part? That’s pretty cool.
I don’t know about you, but I go in Netflix spurts, where I’ll not watch any of my movies for a couple of months, and then watch one or two a day for like two weeks. I’m going through the latter, and have just seen some pretty sweet documentaries. I finally saw Jesus Camp, a documentary about evangelical and pentecostal children. CREEPY. I don’t have kids, and none of my close friends have kids, so I haven’t seen, up close, how pliable children really are. And they are so genuine. This one poor girl was talking about dancing for god, and how she shouldn’t dance for the flesh. The heck? I’m conflicted – at least these parents seem to care about their kids. But oh my, the damage they could be doing. How does it help for a kid to think in some of these ways?
I also just finished two other documentaries – This Film is Not Yet Rated and Maxed Out. The former is about the MPAA, and puts forth some interesting ideas (note to the sensitive – don’t watch it with your parents; the nudity is off the charts, since they show a lot of what has made movies get an NC-17 rating). I didn’t think it was necessarily a good film, but it was very interesting to see the history, the censorship, and, as it seems is often the case, the delusion of those in power.
Maxed Out was a bit better done, I think, and really drove home the interesting points about consumer debt. This is another place where I get conflicted. On the one hand, why aren’t people smarter about their money? And why should the collective we have to bail you out? But on the other hand, I don’t want to be the person, or be surrounded by the person, who doesn’t have compassion for the people who make some bad decisions. Does making a bad decision, or even a string of them, mean someone should be screwed forever? Should they kill themselves out of shame or desperation? Two of the people profiled were mothers of young adults who took the campus credit card bait and ended up killing themselves because they couldn’t see a way out. I do push for personal responsibility. I just wish that applied to the companies that offer credit cards to kids with no income or people who clearly already have loads of debt. And that is why I’ll never be able to be a pure capitalist – I don’t think that the market will sort everything out to a way that is satisfactory to my ideas of right and wrong.
Also? Totally made me want to set a stricter budget and save up. had a great vacation this year, and I want to be able to travel more, but also . . . yeah. I should really think about the fact that I’m not so likely to win the lottery (especially since I don’t play).
Finally, has anyone seen “Taboo” on National Geographic channel? Oh man. It is crazy.