Olivia Wilde is so good in The Lazarus Effect, you’ll wish she’d used her star power to push for an R rating - and, for that matter, a better movie. The latest addition to super-producer Jason Blum’s glossy, cheaply made genre movie factory (which includes Insidious, Sinister and The Purge), The Lazarus Effect is the kind of wide-release horror film that tries to have it both ways: it’s safe enough to ensure its PG-13 rating and, thus, bring in the swarms of teenyboppers necessary for huge opening weekend figures, and it’s just nasty and bleak enough to win over the least discerning of horror aficionados. By coasting in that tedious middle ground, The Lazarus Effect flat-lines before Wilde’s ever able to help it transcend beyond the Ouija spectrum of Blum’s filmography. But, damn, is she dynamite in it. The lithe, quietly expressive actress plays half of a boyfriend/girlfriend scientist duo, Zoe and Frank (Mark Duplass), who are working on a gooey white serum that’s meant to resurrect the dead;

the plan, as they’re justifying it, is to give doctors and surgeons a few extra moments to bring someone back after they’ve checked out, to give people “the second chance they deserve.” sushi grade fish fremont caAssisting the scientists are three younger student helpers, all of whom attend the nameless religious institution where the experiments take place. sushi delivery london sw3There’s the one-note stoner dude Clay (American Horror Story regular Evan Peters), the soft-spoken and Zoe-obsessed Niko (former Community star Donald Glover, a.k.a. rapper Childish Gambino) and the perennially tank-top-clad aspiring documentarian Eva (Sarah Bolger, from ABC’s Once Upon a Time). jiro dreams of sushi essay

Together they manage to revive a deceased pooch, but just as the reanimated dog starts exhibiting signs of being a bit off-center, the university’s president shuts down the scientists’ four-year-long study due to “religious reasons.” yo sushi menu waterloo(Religious interference being one of the film’s many half-baked and ultimately throwaway plot points.)sushi kiss mac comprar Their video footage gets wiped clean and the campus fuzz raids their lab. documentos tv sushi global onlineBut you can’t keep a good living dead dog down. Hoping to repeat their success, they break into the facility to resurrect Canine No. 2 on camera, but a freak accident sends Zoe to the pearly gates and leads a weeping Frank to go against his team’s better judgment and inject Zoe’s fried corpse with their magical concoction.

It works, but it also taps into the childhood trauma that’d been giving her horrific nightmares as an adult, an episode in which a young Zoe watched neighbors in her apartment building burn alive. And once the bodies start dropping, Frank begins wishing he hadn’t played God. The Lazarus Effect’s director, David Gelb, meanwhile, merely plays the part of a horror filmmaker. Coming off of the critically beloved and altogether upbeat 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Gelb doesn’t have the visual flair or ingenuity needed to oversee a genre movie as blandly by-the-book as this knockoff hybrid of Flatliners and Pet Sematary. There’s no distinctive personality to The Lazarus Effect - it’s countless other Hollywood horror movies resuscitated into a hodgepodge of routine imagery. He relies on two overly familiar tactics to elicit lazy jumps from the audience: the old “obscure what’s behind a character via close-up and then pan back to show there’s someone standing behind them,” and more sudden blackouts than a neighborhood’s worth of unpaid electric bills.

The lights shut off, characters audibly voice their concerns, and then flashing bulbs reveal Zombie Zoe’s whereabouts long enough to frighten any viewers who’ve either never seen a horror movie before or just don’t care enough to demand more from the genre. At a scant 83 minutes, The Lazarus Effect mercifully doesn’t overstay its welcome, yet, due to that short running time, its third act feels rushed, as if Zombie Zoe has a bus to catch. Her kills are uninspired and toothless, beholden to the PG-13 rating and muted by the fact that none of her victims are more than one-dimensional archetypes. It’s a shame, too, because Wilde’s performance suggests she’d have gone for broke if given the chance. With blacked-out eyes and a devilish stare, the underrated actress does a great job of injecting real menace and a faint amount of helpless regret into the homicidal and slightly inhuman character’s presence. But the script constantly betrays Wilde’s skills, making her convey subtextual pain and remorse that are never earned and hardly logical.

Zoe’s tragic side never goes deeper than Gelb’s dull attempts at hallucinogenic flashbacks. There’s only so much Wilde can do with a recurring burning hallway motif that makes Barton Fink feel like The Shining. At best, The Lazarus Effect is proof that Wilde would be killer in a strongly made Bride of Frankenstein remake. She definitely deserves more than this Deadly Friend wannabe.The Priest and the Parachute It began with a joke. In 1968, Richard Bolles, an Episcopal priest from San Francisco, was in a meeting when someone complained about colleagues “bailing out” of a troubled organization. To remind the group to return to this topic, Bolles jotted a clever phrase on the blackboard:  “What color is your parachute?” The line got a laugh, but as Bolles recalls in a 1999 interview with Fast Company, “I had no idea it would take on all this additional meaning.” Two years later, Bolles lost his job as a priest and was shuffled into an administrative position in the Episcopal Church, advising campus ministers, many of whom were also in danger of losing their jobs.

Noticing a lack of good advice on the topic, Bolles self-published a 168-page guide to navigating career changes, which he handed out for free. Looking for a catchy title, he re-purposed his blackboard one-liner. The initial print run was one hundred copies. The premise of Bolles’ guide sounds self-evident to the modern ear: “[figure] out what you like to do…and then find a place that needs people like you.” But in 1970, this concept was a radical notion. “[At the time], the idea of doing a lot of pen-and paper exercises in order to take control of your own career was regarded as a dilettante’s exercise,” Bolles recalls. It was also, however, a period of extreme workplace transition as the post-war industrial economy crumbled before an ascendant knowledge work sector. Uncertain employees craved guidance, and Bolles’ optimistic strategies resonated. The book that began with an one hundred copy print run and a clever name has since become one of the bestselling titles of the century, with over 6 million copies in print.

This story is important because it emphasizes that one of the most universal and powerful ideas in modern society, that the key to workplace happiness is to follow your passion, has a surprisingly humble origin. What began as a quip jotted down on a blackboard grew into the core principle guiding our thinking about work. “What color is my parachute?”, we now ask, confident that answering this question holds the answer to The Good Life. But when we recognize that this strategy is not self-evident — and in fact not even all that old — we can begin to question whether or not it’s actually right. And when we do, it’s dismaying what we find… Let’s summarize Bolles’ insight as follows: the key to a fulfilling career is to first figure out what you’re passionate about, and then go find a job to match. For simplicity, I’ll call this the passion hypothesis. We can think of the past forty years — the post-Parachutes era — as a vast experiment testing the validity of this hypothesis.

The results of this experiment, unfortunately, are not pretty. The latest Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction, released earlier this year, found only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61% recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey. As Lynn Franco, the director of the Board’s Consumer Research Center, notes, this is not just about a bad business cycle: “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.” Though many factors can account for workplace unhappiness, a major cause identified by the survey is that “fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.” Put another way, as we’ve placed more importance on the passion hypothesis, we’ve become less interested, and therefore more unhappy, with the work we have. I call this effect the passion trap, which I define as follows: The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have.

I argue that the passion trap is an important contributing factor to our steadily decreasing workplace satisfaction. So far, however, my evidence for this claim is circumstantial at best. We need to dig deeper. The Young and the Anxious If the passion trap is real, recent college graduates should be the most affected. At this young age, before the demands and stability of family, their careers are more likely to define their identity. It’s also the period where they feel the most control over their path, and therefore also feel the most anxiety about their decisions. This predicts, therefore, that the passion trap would make young workers the most unhappy. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what the Conference Board survey finds. Roughly 64% of workers under 25 say that they are unhappy in their jobs, the highest levels of dissatisfaction measured for any age group over the twenty-two year history of the survey. To better understand why young people are so unhappy, let’s turn to Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001 ode to youth disaffection: Quarterlife Crisis.

This book chronicles the personal testimony of dozens of unhappy twentysomethings, and as the passion trap predicts, most of the stories revolve around uncertainty regarding the search for the “right” job. Consider, for example, the tale of Scott, a 27-year-old from Washington D.C.: “My professional situation now couldn’t be more perfect,” Scott reports. “[I] chose to pursue the career I knew in my heart I was passionate about: politics.” Scott succeeded in this pursuit. Though he had to start at the bottom, as a volunteer campaign aide, within two short years after college graduation he had the “Capital Hill job I dreamed of.” Rationally, he should be happy with his work: “I love my office, my friends…even my boss.” “It’s not fulfilling,” he despairs. He has since restarted his search for his “life’s work.” “I’ve committed myself to exploring other options that interest me,” Scott says. “But I’m having a hard time actually thinking of a career that sounds appealing.”

The passion hypothesis was so ingrained into Scott’s psyche that even his dream job, once obtained, couldn’t live up to the fantasy. Story after story in Quarterlife Crisis follow this same script: “I graduated college wanting nothing more than the ultimate job for me,” says Jill. Not surprisingly, she hasn’t found it. “I’m so lost about I want to do,” despairs 24-year old Elaine, “that I don’t even realize what I’m sacrificing or compromising.”The passion trap strikes again and again in these pages. This all points towards a troubling conclusion: not only is the passion hypothesis wrong, it’s also potentially dangerous, leading us into a passion trap that increases our feelings of unhappiness and uncertainty. These initial articles in my Rethinking Passion series have been negative. My goal was to tear down our assumptions about workplace happiness, because as long we cling to the passion hypothesis, other factors will remain obscured in its high-wattage glare.