![]() Is she a dreamer? A skeptic? A convert? A devious conniver? A true believer? I have no idea, and you won’t either. Watson is an earnest young actress, sometimes to a fault she hasn’t quite shaken that Hermione-esque eagerness to please, which leaves her stranded in a film that hasn’t figured out who she’s supposed to be playing. ![]() The movie seems to have a lot of things it wants to say about technology, but it hasn’t thought them, or its main character, through all that carefully. And just when the movie is starting to settle into a logical arc for Mae, it shifts suddenly, turning her into, out of nowhere, a blatant social media exhibitionist, with no set-up or payoff. Is she a brave, regular person battling the impending lurch of technology? Or is she actually the perfect fit for The Circle’s particular brand of cultism? Beats me, which is a problem in a movie in which everyone is either a salt-of-the-earth, nature-loving, makes-stuff-with-their-hands technophobe or a social media pod person. One of the many problems with The Circle is that it never gets much of a handle on Mae. ![]() I defy anyone to define even basic biographical information about Boyega’s character.Īt least I think she’s wary. She takes a job with The Circle, a Facebook-crossed-with-Google-like corporation whose goal is to “elegantly streamline the chaos of the Web,” which basically boils down to owning every financial transaction and, ultimately, the having ability to handle all governmental-type tasks. It stars Watson as Mae, a digital babe-in-the-woods worried about her ailing father (Paxton) and her off-the-digital-grid platonic love interest Mercer (Ellar Coltrane, from Boyhood). Part of the problem is that the movie doesn’t know what it’s about it keeps changing its mind and losing focus. Everything is set up perfectly for The Circle. It is a film of the moment, about surveillance and oversharing and living in virtual world devoid of human connection. It’s directed by James Ponsoldt (who made the excellent The Spectacular Now and the intriguing The End of the Tour), co-written by Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers (based off Eggers’s novel), and features a dream cast, from Emma Watson to Tom Hanks to John Boyega to Patton Oswalt to Bill Paxton, in his final film performance. The project was commissioned by Super Slow Ways.The Circle is a big honking sloppy mess of a movie, one that flops around so aimlessly that it’s baffling so many intelligent people had a hand in making it. This installation has subsequently been exhibited as a two channel projection combined with 8 monitors a second more intimate two channel video and a resource room offering insights into the project and its community, through a documentary film, books and digitized archives and a timeline on historic rise and fall of the textile industry the rise and fall of Lancashire Solfa (Shape Note) singing the introduction of Sufi Dhikr chanting brought by Pakistani migrants who came to work in the mills from the late 1950s onwards and a brief overview of the project development.Ĭollaborators include anthropologist Massimiliano Mollona of Goldsmith’s College, London, musicologist Ron Pen of the University of Kentucky, USA, Rauf Bashir, of the Free Spiritual Centre and Building Bridges Pendle, filmmaker Mark Thomas of Soup Co., and community organizer Paul Hartley of In-Situ. The production was a distillation of months of community conversations and collective chanting and singing that ended in a dinner with 500 hundred residents in the largest gathering in the mill since its doors were closed. A year later Lacy and filmmakers Mark Thomas and Graham Kay presented a multichannel video installation in the same mill, with a Resource Room in the old Brierfield City Hall that captured the performances, interviews, and processes from the exploration. Hundreds of voices resonated in the mill’s vast spaces, using traditional and fusion forms of vocal and spiritual expression including Shape Note singing and Sufi chanting. In September 2016, the community came together over three days, along with Shape Note singers from across England, to perform and to film themselves in the place where many used to work. This localised critical inquiry into race, work, and capitalism, captured as a three day performance in the epic spaces of one such mill that stands as a symbolic remnant of the globalised trade in skills, commodities and people across the world. In this three-year project with the people of Pendle in Northwest England Lacy explores the demise of the textile industry as an economic and social driver in the North West of England and the resulting separation of South Asian-heritage and white communities who used to work together in the vast mills there.
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