Change Your Image
maria-mckay
Reviews
CSI: Cyber (2015)
Just...boring
Disappointing. The CSI franchise has overreached this time. Hacking, back-hacking, ISP addresses, and ultimately fear-mongering are just too real for fiction. The physical crimes feel like add-ons, attempts to create drama where none exists. The procedural work in this procedural drama is undramatic, mundane.
I don't watch TV to find out how vulnerable my identity is; I have the news for that.
I wanted to like it. Patricia Arquette has always been compelling, and the "black hat turned white hat" theme is a good one. But it's not working. Six episodes in, the characters just aren't enough to carry this load.
Finding Mercy (2012)
personal meets political
This film is sweet and sad, enlightening and terrifying. Film maker Robyn Paterson overlays her idyllic childhood in the Zimbabwe of the 1980s with the reality of the Mugabe regime, as she travels back to the country she left with her family 14 years earlier in search of her best friend "Mercy." While the search for Mercy (get it?) drives the film, it's the modern social and political legacy of colonization and despotism that provide the real content of the story. This is a story of colonialism, racism, tribalism, and the unrelentingly, irrational fear-based tyranny of the oppressed that can result.
Thankfully, it is also a story of escape and resilience.