This is not a review, just some friendly advice on what not to watch on TV prior to attempting to have a good night's rest. I'm referring to the 2011 movie, Elephant White, which is zero degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, who plays a rather unlikeable supporting role, gets his nose broken, complains about his designer clothes getting ruined, and is your basic scumbag pimp of under age Asian girls in Thailand. As a side hobby, he collects guns used in movies but also sells guns to mostly the bad guys, two rival gangs in Thailand and one lone good guy, the main character of the movie, played by Djimon Hounsau, who starts out as just a guy doing a job. Basically a sniper for hire. There are several hints the two characters have a past connection.
The plot involves the usual vigilante who kills for a good cause, in this case kidnapped young girls or girls sold into the sex trade by their families (according to one gang leader, if he is to be believed). The girls are then forced into drug addiction and it only gets worse for them until our mercenary turned missionary reluctant hero slowly develops feelings, due in large part to being aided by an enigmatic, attractive, elusive young woman and some Buddhist monks. There are several car chases and explosions, nothing to write home about, and plenty of gunfire, blood, and martial art damage. The movie was less than 90 minutes, had no redeeming musical score other than the opening song, some subtitles when appropriate, and one of those endings where there are short depressing statistics on how many underage girls are in the sex trade.
Attempting to clear my head, I watched a re-run of Charlie Rose afterwards about brain research and still felt like I spent the night wrestling with an angel of the Lord, although I did not wake with a broken hip joint, a new name nor dietary restrictions imposed about eating thighs. However I did learn about area 25 in the brain, or rather I learned how little neuroscientists and psychologists actually know about this area, even after a decade or so of study and actual brain surgery. Scientists went from studying rats, who don't even have an area 25 to a small clinical trial of 20 people suffering from chronic depression that doesn't respond to the traditional course of talk therapy, prescription medications or ECT. Read the scientific journals online. Come to your own conclusions. Perhaps it wasn't the movie at all that disrupted my sleep.