{"id":2571,"date":"2011-12-10T12:33:59","date_gmt":"2011-12-10T20:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2571"},"modified":"2011-12-10T13:55:17","modified_gmt":"2011-12-10T21:55:17","slug":"ghosts-with-shit-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2571","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts with Shit Jobs."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jim Munroe could squeeze lymph out of granite.<\/p>\n

You may remember me going on a few years ago about \u201cInfest Wisely<\/a>\u201d, a \u201clow-fi sci-fi\u201d movie made on a budget of about $700. \u00a0It was uneven, it was coarse, it had production values two steps up from those of a backyard puppet show.\u00a0 But it rocked<\/em> on the strength of its chewable nanosprites and its sentient cats and its urinal-haunting semen-jacking identity thieves \u2014 in short, on the strength of its ideas<\/em>. That emaciated little stickman of a movie had more brains than any half-dozen summer blockbusters put together.<\/p>\n

I was tempted to top today\u2019s post with a headline along the lines of \u201cJim Munroe Hits the Big Time\u201d, or \u201cJim Munroe Sells Out\u201d because this time around his budget has increased by, literally, an order of magnitude<\/em>\u2014 which sounds amazing until you realize that this implies a budget that\u2019s moved all the way up to four digits from three.\u00a0 His latest opus, \u201cGhosts with Shit Jobs<\/a>\u201d, is still a shoestring affair. But it\u2019s a much shinier shoestring; the FX have improved commensurate with the budget (\u201cInfest Wisely\u201d had one, count \u2018em, one<\/em> FX shot; \u201cGhosts\u201d has more, by an order of magnitude). There is CGI, here and there.\u00a0 And where there isn\u2019t \u2014 where the grungy no-tech location shots seem intuitively out-of-step with the traditional shiny view of Futureville 2040 \u2014 well, what would you expect from the third-world continental ghetto that North America collapsed into after the US declared bankruptcy in 2016?<\/p>\n

For this is \u201cGhosts\u201d\u2019s plausible, almost mundane conceit: that current trends continue, that China rules the world, that we here in the ruins of the west make a marginal living doing the shit jobs of the title.\u00a0 It is a classic tale of outsourcing come home to roost. The beauty of this premise doesn\u2019t lie in its originality; anyone who hasn\u2019t been living in a closet or watching Fox News could make the same basic prognostication. But the premise of an economically devastated backwater is a very friendly one to any film-maker on a limited budget, and Munroe makes the most of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cGhosts with Shit Jobs\u201d plays out in the form of a documentary \u2014 one of those socially-aware pieces that we see every now and then on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d, those guilt laxatives that treat us to bite-sized glimpses of Asian sweat shops, make us sadly shake our heads over those poor children<\/em> and human rights abuses<\/em> before we go out and buy a new pair of Nikes for little Davey\u2019s birthday. \u00a0Of course this particular documentary is in Chinese, for Chinese; we wouldn\u2019t even be able to understand it if some invisible user didn\u2019t invoke a pop-up menu to select the English soundtrack thirty seconds in.\u00a0 Fortunately, they do; and what follows is a series of vignettes \u2014 complete with the clich\u00e9d noodlings of some melancholy pianist to set the mood \u2014showing days-in-the-lives of those poor white trash retained to do the jobs that \u201cno one in China would do\u201d.<\/p>\n

At least one of those jobs (\u201cHuman Spam\u201d) already exist.\u00a0 Another (\u201cBaby maker\u201d) awaits another decade or two\u2019s advancement in robotics.\u00a0 \u201cDigital Janitors\u201d \u2014 people who go online and scrub copyrighted material out of virtual worlds \u2014 hover somewhere in the middle, and \u201cSilk-gatherers\u201d are just fucking off-the-wall: how did giant baby-eating spiders end up living along my running route anyway, and how to they get around that whole inverse-square-law thing and avoid collapsing under their own weight?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if the movie ever answers that \u2014 Jim et al<\/em> are posting these vignettes online at regular intervals, and as of this writing the \u201cSilk-gatherers\u201d clip has yet to appear.\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t really matter, though. \u00a0This is social satire, not science, and if you\u2019ve got a few minutes to kill, you should really check it out<\/a>. \u00a0In terms of squeezing maximum bang out of every buck I don\u2019t know of anyone who can lay a glove on Jim Munroe; the man could make a stick of chewing gum last for a month.\u00a0 I\u2019m tempted to call him Canada\u2019s Twenty-first-century answer to Roger Corman, but that would be an unfair comparison. Even Corman\u2019s budgets were always way bigger.<\/p>\n

And frankly, I like Jim\u2019s stuff a lot more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Munroe could squeeze lymph out of granite. You may remember me going on a few years ago about \u201cInfest Wisely\u201d, a \u201clow-fi sci-fi\u201d movie made on a budget of about $700. \u00a0It was uneven, it was coarse, it had production values two steps up from those of a backyard puppet show.\u00a0 But it rocked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2571"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2576,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2571\/revisions\/2576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}