On "Home"

I watched Home earlier in the week and you can watch it on YouTube here, though a huge flat screen is definitely preferable. You get the idea at YouTube but the experience is vastly different on a great television.

Home reminded me of Winged Migration in a couple of ways: the sweeping cinematography and the score. (Important differences between Home and Winged Migration include that the latter had staged scenes, computer generated scenes, took over three years longer to shoot and had narration that was largely superfluous.) The cinematography did present a bit of a problem for me in that I often had difficulties with scale--I didn't know how wide or large things were, and though it might not necessary to know, I like to nonetheless. Also, there was something odd in the editing of Glenn Close's narration and often words would come in late and cut off, not to mention there were grammatical errors that drove me bananas.

And now that I've said all of that you might notice when you probably wouldn't have otherwise.

My husband watched the film over several days and took notes, which was most impressive. And he texted or Facebooked friends with various statistical tidbits and a recommendation to watch the film. As I've written previously, I never pushed him to go vegan, and now that he is I don't push him to do any vegan education. But he has come to that desire on his own, and has found his way of reaching people in his alien world of alpha male types, and I think that's fantastic and I certainly would never have been able to do it.

It's amazing to observe as someone learns about what we humans have done to this planet in such a short period of time, and how dire the situation really is. You can read about it all day long (or be lectured about it by your spouse), but to see it, and filmed so magnificently, is more powerful. Plus though the film isn't long (under two hours), it covers an enormous amount of ground (!), not deeply of course, but sufficiently so you get a clear picture that is impossible to deny.

On the animal front, there is definitely a message that factory farming is unsustainable, and that subsistence farming is and was preferable; there is a vague if-we-did-it-differently-it-might-be-sustainable message. But with so many other topics to cover, such as water and oil, that message that happy meat is acceptable doesn't even get any airtime.

I would like to have seen action points in the film: things the average person can do to stop our hyperspeed collision course with the annihilation of all of our planet's natural resources (and by consequence Earth's nonhuman and human inhabitants). I think that any film that presents a problem should also provide solution. But that's me.

Thumbs up, watch it, pass it around, and discuss thereafter.

Comments

[Bea Elliott]

I found the movie visually mesmerizing - although the scale was difficult to comprehend without some reference points...

Your husband is wise in taking notes. There was so much information; it became overwhelming to retain.

Overall, I think it does a great job at educating viewers of our perilous end if we proceed without change. Clearly the devastation wrought on this planet is not one that will be fixed by "buying" our way out of the problem. What I came away with, was the idea that consuming less was the first step towards solution...