First of all, I again 2 extra KG by eating a stack of carbs coming from the noodles (Bun Ca) that the landlord gifted me. I’m thankful for the Bun Ca and obviously, I gained some weight, hopefully, water weight, the Bun Ca is tasty though but I’ve never expected that I could gain weight quickly by adding extra carbs to my single meal of the day. Fasting does help reduce the weight but I can still gain weight by eating more carbs and making my belly extra full. I think regardless of whether you’re intermittent fasting or not, a calorie deficit means you need to control your macro nutrition and the amount of food you consume still, like if you eat only one meal a day and if you eat a whole cake in that meal, you’re still going to get more fat. Simply because the amount of calories in cake is too dense and you can easily over-eating. I feel hungry lately though and really want to eat more, especially unhealthy food like donuts, cakes, fried chicken and French Fries, but luckily enough I feel lazy about going out to pick up that kind of food, just because I don’t have a car, and biking to those places are not worth it because it’s really tired and time-consuming to bike.
Anyways, back to the main topic, the movie. I watch Leave The World Behind on Netflix yesterday, the motivation for watching a movie was that I was too tired and wanted to get some sleep, therefore I just wanted to find some movie that could possibly be boring enough to me to make me fall asleep quicker. Spoil alert. This movie is about a family that rents a homestay outside of the city and while they take a break there is an epidemic happening in the big city (New York City), and everyone dies. The movie plot is somewhat similar to the zombie apocalypse type of movie, where the family starts to have to deal with trust issues with other families who are still alive. So it’s more like a human moral combat. There are some scenes that match my common sense: first of all, the wife, Amanda Sandford, doesn’t believe anyone outside of her family, she hates people. In the sense where the owner of the homestay passes by asking to have a night in his house and he’s willing to pay the family or refund half or even full of the rent to be able to stay in his house’s basement because the city is a blackout and having an unclear kind of crisis. Amanda doesn’t want him to stay despite he has proven that he has a key to unlock the forbidden cabinet (where the money guns and wines are, anything that the tenants don’t know and have access to), she even asks for his ID Card. I mean, in the end, she clearly states to her husband that she never wants strangers to live in their house. For me, that feeling is exactly the same, I never want anyone other than my parents to live or sleep in my house. I like to be alone and in privacy, the only exceptional cases are that I can live with strangers if I’m renting and I have to live with other housemates. Only if I know them they are not going to do any harm and be civilized as well. So Amanda is kind of a straight, frank, honest person, the scene where she meets G.H. Scott, the landlord, for the first time already makes me want to continue to watch the movie.
The second scene that makes me want to continue watching the movie, is that there are some brief scenes in which G.H. Scott looks at his personal pistol. The first scene that shows the gun is when Scott opens his cabinet for the first time to look for the stack of cash to give to the family for a refund in an attempt to convince them to be “allowed” to shelter a night in his own home (the movie also states that the tenants are very modest, if not poor). So he sees the pistol and he looks at that for three seconds. In the other scene where he is driving around and trying to find help, he also has his pistol on the passenger seat, right next to his seat, he also looks at it for a few seconds. In fact, the pistol has never been used once throughout the timeline of the movie, but the pause when Scott looks at the pistol already shows his hesitation of using it. He has a fight in his mind about whether he should kill the whole tenant family and dump them, since there is no government, and no law enforcement, the entire system has collapsed anyway. But then he decided not to do it. In fact, Scott is not only wealthy but he is extremely wise as well. After he gets the medicine from Danny (we will talk about Clay in the next paragraph), he sits in the car with Clay (Amadan’s husband, the white father), and tells him about a military strategy that could collapse a country with a very low cost: creating the chaos within the country itself. Yes, I believe this strategy is valid and has been applied throughout history: one of the most effective weapons is to make the enemy kill itself, from within, like creating chaos and stuff. If the people stop trusting the government and they want a revolution, then the economy will collapse by itself since most people will stop working and doing some shit like creating chaos and crisis. The foreigners won’t have to interfere, like sending troops and stuff, they just need to be able to control the media and control the people’s mind and tell them to revoke and start a military campaign themself and overthrow the existing government. In the end, when the government is collapsed, the system is paralyzed, then can just install a puppet, and then you know what happens next. And you know, the majority of people are stupid and impulsive. 90% of people are uneducated and do not have critical thinking, they will act without thinking deeply since they don’t have enough knowledge to understand what is happening around them. But anyway, back to the movie, I like how the director injects some scenes without speaking much about how a person is fighting for his morality, he can either kill/get rid of other people for his own benefit (like most people would do), or he can just not do it because he knows it’s not worth it and the tenants are harmless (even though both he and his daughter are being mistreated and they also do not trust the white tenant family).
The final scene that I think is good about the movie is where G.H. Scott and Clay Sandford (the husband) meet Danny (the contractor, the landlord’s friend) to ask for medicine to help Clay and Amanda’s son. The son has a disease that is infected by the terrorists causing him to lose his teeth. In this scene, it’s another time where Danny (the medicine’s provider) also has to fight for morality, whether he can just should both of these two guys (Scott and Clay) to get rid of complications easily, or he can turn to the good side and help them. Clay, as a helpless father, he was able to convince Danny to help his son, in the script, he tells Danny something like: “If you are in a position like me, a father, a husband, you would do anything to save the family”, and Danny, despite he is a loner wolf, having no family, but he understands the morality, he sees that Clay is desperate and being truly honest, he decided to help. You know what, in my case, I could easily shoot both of them because I didn’t want to be bothered, but after seeing Clay speak, I started feeling like I could help them since they are harmless, and also the help is within my capability.
In the end, the movie has too many conversations, which I don’t like the scene I feel like it’s cheap in budget and does not invest much in more actions. I wouldn’t recommend this movie anyway, despite that I like how it reflects people’s minds and the common sense that it’s difficult to trust people nowadays, but in the end, we are all good people and are kind to others. The movie literally mentions a conspiracy theory that the U.S.’s enemies, like Iran, Russia the Mandarin, and North Korea might join forces with each other to destroy the United States. I mean, it is a valid conspiracy, and for the sake of national defense, the Americans must be very cautious, they have been fighting for their interests for centuries and that’s their tradition, they must put their alert very high since the “enemy” might fight back at some point in future. The author of this movie, Sam Esmail or Rumaan Alam, must be afraid of Russians hackers too. The first plot of the movie where the war began, shows that the “Russian hackers” might be involved in taking down the information systems like satellites and datacenters of Americans.
In fact, in the current world stage, Russia has already lost hundreds of thousands of men in the Ukraine war, and the Islamic states (the Palestinians), which are linked directly to Iran, also lost hundreds of thousands of people in the Gaza Strip. Both of these wars are funded by Americans like the Israelis and Ukrainians are provided with weapons and intelligence by Americans which means Americans indirectly link to Russians and Palestinians’ deaths. I just wish the head of government in Asia were smart enough to not have war with China. I mean Chinese officials are smart too, they have Sun Tzu’s Art of War for thousands of years already and they know very well that a war with bloodshed is costly and the best way to win is to use diplomacy. Russia Palestine and Iranian are failing in a diplomatic war and now the people are spending blood. What has been happening has already happened, history is writing itself and the wheel of time continues to roll. Anyone, like me, as an individual, who is blessed with food on the table a warm bed and clothes, and a safe neighborhood, should be thankful for what they have and should continue to work hard to maintain the stability and peace of their lives.