Change Your Image
hskppmmgxm
Reviews
Winchester (2018)
The movie is nowhere near as creepy as the real house
I've been to the Winchester house in San Jose. It's a beautifully detailed Victorian with stained glass windows and luxurious wood detailing. At first, the house seems normal, but then you notice that there are stairways that go directly into a ceiling with no outlet, doors that open to nothing, and all kinds of very strange architecture spread out over hundreds of rooms. Walking around there is a tour through a very insane mind.
The movie falls flat on its face, however. There are what looks like models or CGI images of the outside of the house. They look fake and don't convey the size of the house because they don't show the surrounding acres that were undeveloped at the time. The sets don't convey the bizarre arrangement of doors and steps, along with the weird connections between large and small rooms in the house. The sets, for the most part, look way too normal.
Instead of relying on the house to set the tone, the script uses cheap tricks. Ghosts appear with "spooky" music. Some have the predictable eyes with no pupils. Things move around in "spooky" ways. People are pulled around at high speed by "spooky" unseen things. "Spooky" lighting is used liberally. "Spooky" voices come out of nowhere. It's all very predictable.
The only real mystery is how they got Helen Mirrin.
The Color of Care (2022)
My experience
Thank you, Oprah!!! A few weeks ago, I talked to my doctor about the mathematical algorithm mentioned in this documentary. It's almost universally used in the US to "correct" black people's kidney test results. This wasn't a matter of me feeling like somebody maybe might have discriminated against me. It had appeared, in writing, in my lab results. Somehow, my kidneys are different because I have a certain level of melanin in my skin. I told my doctor that I did not want that "correction" used in my health care. The "correction" allows me to be sicker than a white person but makes my numbers appear to be better. The better numbers falsely indicate that I'm healthier than I actually am.
So how did we get to this algorithm? People from all over the western African continent were brought to the US as slaves, where they interbred with people from all over the world. Some of that interbreeding was voluntary, and some of it was not. All of the descendants of these people with widely varied genetic backgrounds are seen as being exactly the same. Statistically, that makes no sense.
It appears to be based on a belief that white people and black people are fundamentally different, so the numbers are cooked to reinforce that belief. Jim Crow laws were also based on the belief that white people and black people are fundamentally different. I thought that the country got past that long ago.