My Magical Place: Disconnect Review

“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.” – Charlie Chaplin

If there is one thing you should learn in this digital day and age (albeit not as digital as science and science fiction speculated in the 20^th Century) it’s that social networks will undo you in a matter of seconds if you are not careful. Look at what happened to model, Jessica Leandra Dos Santos on Twitter last year – two racist Tweets out of anger and her modelling career went down in flames. Disconnect looks at how our online activities affect our everyday lives over time.  The film is centred around the idea of how people’s online lives spill over into their ‘real’ lives and how, ironically, being connected via the Internet people have actually become disconnected from each other.

The plot follows the stories of four different sets of characters and contains a number of interconnections between the different story arcs. Disconnect is not the movie I expected from what was revealed in the trailer and I am glad it isn’t. I was expecting a feature with a strong focus on cybercrime in terms of fraud and paedophiles preying on children by means of social media and sinister chatrooms. The latter issue is a very important to address but usually movies deal with it in a manner that freaks viewers out in the same way slasher movies do. Disconnect deals with all these issues in a very human way. The story is simply about people who are drifting further and further apart as a result of being too connected to the communication platforms that the Internet and the technology surrounding it affords. Henry Alex Rubin’s (Girl, Interrupted, 1999) direction is brilliant in terms of how the story is paced and how it develops. Many of the scenes are very quiet and all you can hear is the sound of people typing away on keyboards and when they do talk it’s usually over the phone or via a webcam. All these methods of communication feel very natural to the viewer because that’s how we communicate on a daily basis. Reading a fairly large portion of the movie’s dialogue onscreen as people text each other becomes second nature. The film reaches a dramatic climactic point that you just don’t expect and blows you away for a few seconds – especially after how calm everything has been more or less up to that point.

Andrew Stern (Nurses, 2007) wrote a good story that will stay with you for a while after seeing the movie and the ensemble cast delivers some good performances. The initial story is that of Kyle (brilliantly played by Max Thierot), an underage chatroom worker who meets a reporter, Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough), in one of his chatroom sessions who wants to help him leave that world behind by sharing his story. The question, though, is does he need her help?  There is the story of teenagers, Jason (Colin Ford) and Frye that deals with the issue of cyberbullying and its outcomes. Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) is the victim of the cyberbullying by the two boys and the plot also centers on the fragmented lives that he and his family lead. This arc of the story deals a lot with loneliness as one of its major themes. Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses, 2011) and Hope Davis (About Schmidt, 2002) play Ben’s parents and Frank Grillo (End of Watch, 2012) plays Jason’s father. The last story is that of a couple, Cindy (Paula Patton) and Derek (Alexander Skarsgård) who have become distant from each other as the result of having lost a child and how they cope with having their credit card details stolen online as a result of them spending so much time on the Internet in an attempt to find refuge from their problems. These stories are all cleverly and subtly interwoven throughout the movie and at times you are given glimpses of how things could have gone in another direction instead of the one the plot follows. Things could go horribly wrong or they can go right.

I enjoyed Disconnect a lot. It’s a very apt story in our digital age and hits home with its message. I highly recommend that you go see it.

Navigating the Two Realms

I'm scared. Very much so. It's midnight and I'm lying in bed, my mind restless as I try to unravel the digital strands of my presence on the Interwebs and order them in a more structured manner. It feels as though my online life is getting out of hand and Twitter is the final frontier facing me and then total virtual chaos. I'm on almost every other online social platform: Facebook, Google+, Blogspot, Shelfari, Linked In, You Tube, BBM, Mxit and a myriad of forums and other bobbles. My digital life is just more than I can live - it's too overwhelming!

Navigating The Circular Ruins of my mind.

People feel hassled and harried in the 'real' world as is, what with the breakneck pace of daily living to put food on the table and hang a 42-inch LCD TV on the wall. Then there's a whole other landscape (or is it more mindscape?) to navigate in form of the digital frontier - especially with the rise of social networks. Life is much easier now in terms of communication than is was some years back and it's so much more difficult at the same time. This paradox doesn't bother us much I've noticed, it's just the way it is these days and we go with the flow. We adapt and survive I guess. Also, we don't. I'm being coy with you aren't I? With all these little paradoxes. Well, it's because of how schizophrenic we've become - pieces of our beings divided between the 'real' and virtual realms. For the most part we cope with the strain quite well and then, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, there are the times when things fall apart and our centre can no longer hold.

Then there's a whole other landscape (or is it more mindscape?) to navigate in form of the digital frontier - especially with the rise of social networks.

I'm a little OCD about things and like a certain degree of order to my online life, which is at odds with the chaotic nature of the Internet. It's difficult to keep track of the pieces of our selves that we put on social platforms. I always feel as though I've no real control of my virtual existence and that scares me at night! My dreams are riddled with post apocalypse scenes of Terminators roaming blasted landscapes and enslaving humans to do the god of technology's evil bidding. This, of course, is the rather exaggerated fear of an overactive mind and it holds very little water but it is symbolic of the relationship we have with the Internet and navigating that space.

We are connected to so many people and share with them our day to day activities and thoughts even though we don't really 'know' them all that well. Sure, you went to primary school with Thato and Shannon but when was the last time you really got to talk to them? It's nice having the option to catch up at the push of a button but we rarely actually reach out and do so. It's not because we don't want to, it's simply because we have too much choice and it's overwhelming. I've noticed that BBM already cuts into my time doing everything else. Whilst I'm reading, writing, eating, watching a movie and all manner of other life activities that menacing flashing red light appears on my Blackberry to inform me of a message awaiting my rapid response. Balancing 'real' life and digital life is a difficult act.

People keep telling me to make the jump onto the Twitter wagon as it will make it easier to connect with my friends because Facebook is dying. I can see the need to make the shift somewhat because people are always talking about my online activities like blogging on Twitter and I have to hear from other people that something I wrote is popular on Twitter. But I worry about the balancing act and how much more of my limited time I'll be spending on Twitter as opposed to being out and about staring at clouds.

I'm interested to know how you guys manage the balancing act. Is it a seamless transition navigating the two realms or, much like my experience; is it a herky jerky fumbling between the two? Please let me know.