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And so...what?

That was it? I went in hoping for a rousing retelling of Leni's 2022 campaign, giving it the platform it needed for the audience to understand "why her?", and what went wrong. So we don't repeat it in 2028.��

Instead what we got was a meandering, structureless, Maria Ressa-forward documentary. It never fully articulates why we're revisiting A Thousand Cuts here (though I did Google after that Ramona Diaz really intended this to be a companion piece).

Leni's campaign deserved the full scope of a political documentary, perhaps a la Knock Down the House. Something that chronicles her staggering uphill battle against a dynastic Goliath, her life behind the scenes, the principles and policies she propped her political career up on. Instead it was reduced to vignettes and campaign b-rolls, never providing a deeper insight into the movement. We get more of Maria tearing up at her book, getting that call about the Nobel prize, and Rappler journalists being stress-tested for the death of democracy. All worthy subjects, but maybe oddly hyper-focused here.

There is no deep dive of the woman who was to become Vice President, which I felt was such a missed opportunity. It never gives Leni the space to become a full character with her own arc - beyond her being a widow perhaps. It assumes we already know (and love) her, and that tells a lot about who this documentary was being made for. Not people we want to welcome into the cause. Not for those who asked “why her?” It perpetuates the echo chamber, the same one that turned people away from her and the cause. The very insularity that cost her an election, and the Filipinos a better version of…whatever parallel universe we’re in today. We don’t see the buildup to Leni’s story - why was she beloved? What prompted these grassroots campaigns, the bikers, the Miss Gay candidates, the theater folk? At the other end of the spectrum, why was she hated? Who was she up against?

Halfway through Marcos Jr.’s term and a budding Duterte resurgence, this story becomes all the more important to tell. We need to remember what went wrong. The film follows a campaign that, in Diaz’s words, was “never seen before”, but she fails to translate the heart, the nuances. So for 113 minutes, things just…happen. But maybe that’s the point. That democracy is slow and unraveling, messy and nonlinear. I just hoped it told me something I didn’t already know.

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10 lessons I learned from Amazon

AKA things I don't have the heart to post on LinkedIn, so it'll go on my Tumblr instead

Working for a company that has a start-up mindset despite employing 3 million people has its upsides and drawbacks. And sometimes they mean the same thing. For example, you learn to be resourceful because there is no single way to doing things at Amazon. Everyone does their own thing, so you learn to adapt and be scrappy. A net positive, because you learn, but it's frustrating as hell.

The higher you are up the corporate ladder, the dumber you become at reading. Someone becomes a senior leader and he magically loses the ability to make sense of letters strung together, and when a phone tool award clearly says DO NOT EMAIL THE ADMINS, he will, in fact, email the admins and demand his phone tool award.

Silly little things like phone tool awards matter so much that people will fight tooth and nail to be given one, even when it has no real currency and no bearing to how people do work at Amazon.

There is always a pre-meeting prior to the real meeting, because we're all children and cannot be trusted to know to say the right thing at the actual meeting.

At Amazon, you are allowed to disrupt people's sleep for every non-issue and inconvenience plaguing your existence at the company. There is a paging mechanism (with a painful siren alarm to boot) which allows you to summon servants from their slumber by pressing a button, preferably going off at 3 in the morning for the full effect.

Everyone is required to read a document in meetings, after which people will need to comment on the doc and discuss them afterward, giving true meaning to "this could have been an email". Because, Jeff, you could have just forwarded the doc for us to read and mark up, and you could've scheduled a call if things need further discussion. But where is the fun in that?

Re-orgs are so frequent that I have had more managers than I have had years working for the company. And re-orgs are often done in a way that is disruptive to work, because there is no other way.

The more you weave Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles and use buzzwords like "Work backwards" or "It's always Day 1", the more chances you get of being inducted into their secret corporate cult.

You don't need to lift a finger. You just need to claim credit for someone else's work, et voila! Promotion.

They do stack-rank people, but don't disclose it. :)

[thatfraudcassandra]

the haunted body of a daughter

stoker // Blythe Baird // Brian Kershisnik's // ? // bojeck horseman // pink // lana del rey // sharp objects // f fitzgerald

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Day 24: Your favorite superhero movie

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Day 23: a film you fell asleep to

Sorry, Daisy

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Day 22: A film that makes you giddy

Having (well, baking) her cake (well, pie) and eating it, too

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Day 21: The first movie you remember watching in the cinema

Pocahontas, 1995

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Day 20: A film with bad reviews that you liked

Letterboxd rating: 2.9xx/5

My rating: 4/5

Bad review 1:

2 stars

this could've been an email

Bad review 2:

2 stars

i'm sorry i just really couldn't care less about the relationships in this movie and didn't think the black mirror fingernail test made any sense or was even interesting. they cast three of the most talented actors working today: jessie buckley, riz ahmed, and jeremy allen white and then gave them basically nothing to do. i really just didn't get this but those three main performances at least kept me somewhat engaged.

Bad review 3:

2 stars

Attempt at a Charlie Kaufman conceit- a world in which a love test can determine a couple's short- and long-term viability- is about as flat and obvious as such a premise could be. (Turns out that love is more mysterious and malleable a thing! Who'd have quessed?) Wild that a film with these three actors could have so little juice.

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Day 19: A movie with great music

IYKYK

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Day 18: A film you think deserves a Best Picture Oscar

Interstellar over Birdman over and over and over again

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Day 17: A film with a character who is most like you

Emma Morley in One Day

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Day 16: A film that sparks nostalgia

I recently went into a romcom binge and rewatched these nostalgic gems. Mid-2000s romcoms are top-tier, change my mind!

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Day 15: a movie with great rewatchable quality

Qualities of a rewatchable film:

Decent runtime--doesn't make you sit on your butt for 3 hours

Light and breezy (literally in this case)

Cute actors!

Just enough sad themes to make me relate to it and keep coming back.

About Time ticking all the boxes!

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Day 14: A movie you resonate with

Aftersun (2022) they write anything from poetry to dissertations about this kind of loneliness

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Day 13: A movie you really dislike

Song to Song (2017) is satire and Terrence Malick is fucking with all of us, there I cracked the code