One To Maybe Miss - A film review about Earth to Echo

I don’t know whether this film is meant to be a target for my reviews or not as the only detail I have for it is “some children receive mysterious messages on their cell phone” and then the trail runs cold. It doesn’t go into specifics as to what the messages may be or where they’ve come from or even the circumstances under which the messages arrived so, given that the title has ‘Earth’ in it, I’m going to assume it means some aliens get in touch with the children via their phones and the children find it strange. I don’t even know how the messages arrive – are these phone calls, texts or have the aliens got Facebook?

Worse still, have the aliens been trying to send each other cheeky photos of their arses and pressed the wrong digits, sending the pictures flying towards some unprepared teenagers whose first contact is with the hairy cheeks of a little green man? I dread to think how far they got before they realised they were sending them to the wrong place and had to work out a way to apologise given that their language structure would be very different from ours. How do you say “Sorry you saw my nipples” to a race that’s evolved millions of light years away from your own world?

I can imagine the horror of the parents who had saved a fortune to get their child the latest mobile only to find it had been filled with intergalactic smut and had to take it back, leaving the poor thing confused and angry that they’d waited so long for such a gift only to have it removed. The banks lost all of their parents’ money trying to make their own fortune and, just as they started to recover, their only device of value was taken off them leaving them exposed to bullying from their peers and nicknames like “E.T. No Phone” through no fault of their own.

One To Maybe Miss - A film review about Yves Saint Laurent

Fashion is a peculiar practice. What makes something popular depends on a number of things such as the position of the moon, whether people can be bothered to look at an item and what colour sand lies on the nearest beach and yet, when something becomes popular, it is no longer popular because everyone has one. Fashion never stands still as it is always moving forward, however sometimes it needs to move sideways or even backwards to move forwards. I’m sure it’s not laziness when a designer takes something from thirty years ago and sells it for twice as much as it’s worth. I’m absolutely positive. 

People who are fashionable often take the opportunity to sneer at those not currently following the same trends and it’s easy to see why. Those with upturned noses have about three days to enjoy it before they have to go shopping again for new clothes and a complete makeover of their house and they can start sneering again. Some people bankrupt their families in the pursuit of acceptance and know they’re ruining themselves but can’t seem to stop. I know of people who get rid of last season’s stuff because they suddenly would never be seen dead in it despite the fact it still serves a purpose – keeping the wearer warm or cool or, at the very least, covering our desirables. 

To sit and watch a film about people who spend their lives fleecing the ignorant would be a horrendous waste of my life and would fuel the perception that what they do is necessary and valuable. What fashion houses actually do is create yet another divide between people who should be working together for a better future. I may sound like a hippy for saying so but I would much rather build a society without creative and social prejudices than wear jeans with stains on them and laugh at people who genuinely think they look alright.