Bird Box & Plastic

           

            Last week we watched Stephen Colbert interview Sandra Bullock on The Late Show and heard what she had to say about her new Netflix film Bird Box. It sounded like it would be good, so with nothing better to see on regular tv programming, we turned to Netflix to watch it. It starred one of our favorite ladies from Speed, While You Were Sleeping, The Blind Side, and Gravity, still one of our favorites even though she also starred in quite a few stinkers like The Heat and The Lake House. These last two should have sounded a warning but we ignored it.

Bird Box was another take on a post-apocalyptic threat to mankind, sort of like A Quiet Place but with a visual instead of an auditory threat. All about some mysterious alien force that causes people to kill themselves when they look at the sky or into the eyes of anyone affected by this strange disease. So one learns early on not to look at the light or into any affected eyes. Best to cover all windows or to wear a blindfold if one has to go outside. A pregnant Malorie (Sandra Bullock) has narrowly escaped the trap and makes it into a house full of others who have found this refuge, sort of a representative group of mankind’s types, like the folks in Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter. John Malkovich is the leader of the group and carries a shotgun at all times to ward off anyone who tries to get into the house. The story is told over a five year period, flashing back and forth from when the suicides first took place to her harrowing, blindfolded ride down a river in a small rowboat with her two children, called Girl and Boy. I’m not sure what the significance of those names had to do with anything, but it certainly gave us something to ponder. They were making this boat trip because they’d heard about a community along the river that was safe from the danger. We kept waiting for what we were so sure would be good to start happening. I mean, after all, it’s Sandra Bullock. Right?  Okay, it was Sandra Bullock, but it was more wrong than right. It made Sea of Trees look like an Oscar winner. The reviews of Bird Box were mixed, many of them finding it far better than we did. I must be getting too irascible to review movies. I wanted to like this science-fictiony premise but it was just too stupid. Just give me a quiet place and let me take off my blindfold.

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What about plastic? We’ve all seen and were appalled by that Texas-sized mess of plastic junk floating in the Pacific. But what can we do about it? It seems that most plastic takes about 450 years to biodegrade, nearly half a century. And we keep making more and more products out of this almost indestructible stuff. We can try to recycle it, but one stat I just read said that 90.5% of all plastic is not recycled. I guess that means that most of it makes its way down rivers to various oceans and seas to pollute our waters forever. China, which used to buy our plastic refuse for recycling, has now said they wanted no more. There are so many different kinds of plastic, each of which needs to be separated from the others before any reuse can happen, that the process is too expensive. How could we use all this plastic stuff? We could make highways that are virtually indestructible, or make plastic blocks for building houses. Now here’s an idiotic use I just came across, edible plastic retainers for six-packs of beer or soda. Edible. Now, who in hell would be dumb enough to want to eat fake plastic beer binders? Maybe dunk them in a fake plastic dipping sauce? C’mon, folks, let’s make plastic roads and houses.