In praise of boring movies
Mikaela Collins
Boring movies get a bad rap — and that’s fair. Often, they’re forgettable. No one can remember what happens in a Michael Bay movie because every single scene is so full of explosions and chaos that the climax is indistinguishable from any other action sequence. In the same way, boring movies have such minute ups and downs that it’s almost like nothing happens at all. Yet sometimes, I hanker for these movies.
Inane adult dramas with a twist that is inevitably centred around adultery, most sports movies, any American political thriller made in the golden hour between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, and anything where Jodie Foster pretends to be attracted to a man — these movies are all boring; I have nothing to say in praise of them except that they scratch a certain nostalgic itch. Boring movies make me feel like I’m sitting on the couch with my mom after begging to stay up a little later, stubbornly watching whatever she wanted to watch after I was supposed to go to bed. They stir in me not an apathy toward the adult world, but a memory of obliviousness that, sometimes, I can pretend to still possess.
Drugs are bad, m’kay?
Darien Johnsen
Just kidding. Drugs can actually be great, for a lot of things. But I was thinking recently after smoking a nice, big joint purchased legally from a (kind of creepy and too-clean) government-regulated weed store that, actually, I’m a little concerned about our society normalizing the use of drugs and alcohol.
I started thinking about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopian novel where the population is consistently dosed with a happiness and peace-inducing drug called soma. I know it’s a stretch: we don’t live in a dystopia (at least not entirely). And I’m not shaming anyone who does use drugs (as you can see, I partake in it myself now and again), but we should be careful about what we put in our bodies and be mindful about how it affects us.
Yeah, drugs can be fun, but the paranoid, anti-government hippy (or is it the cop?) in me gets a suspicious feeling when I see the control and distribution of possibly mind-numbing drugs by the government. That’s not to say we shouldn’t advocate for decriminalization and the autonomy to do what we want to our bodies, but I know first-hand that both weed and alcohol can make you passive and, frankly, kind of lazy.
So this isn’t to say that you should never use drugs; they’re fun at parties and on the weekends when you’re hanging out with friends, but don’t let the government placate you! With social movement after social movement popping up, far-right extremism on the rise, and a warming climate, now is not the time to let our guards down — we’ve got battles to fight.
(Rain Neeposh/The Cascade)
Darien Johnsen is a UFV alumni who obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree with double extended minors in Global Development Studies and Sociology in 2020. She started writing for The Cascade in 2018, taking on the role of features editor shortly after.
She’s passionate about justice, sustainable development, and education.