Film

I saw there's film thread here, so I'm making one.
On account of the movie I saw yesterday: Fury.

Surprisingly good WWII tank drama. It all stays quite simple but produces some scenes that should already have been made about this war, but of which apparently no one had thought before.

Very powerful visuals, e.g. a breathtakingly serene, truly apocalyptic shot of incoming front of bomber planes - in general the film is very aesthetically driven.

Strangely (though Heraclitus would not have found it so strange) there is little that looks better on the screen than gritty, muddy war.  

My next suggestion is Mad Men. Not a film but a 7 season series, I watched the last episode two days ago, having watched the first season in 2008. It's been a struggle sometimes to deal with some of the characters (it's one of these shows were people are brought out in all their obnoxious self-ignorance), but all in all it is a fascinating portrait of the American 60's experienced from a corporate perspective, which is quite unique - usually we get it from the hippies.

Now we see the hippie-takeover through the eyes of men in suits drinking whiskey by the barrel.



Here is main character Don Draper, whose secret personal history is the driving element to his career in creating lures and fantasies.

Another one I would like to discuss is Oliver Stone's Alexander. It's gotten bad reviews, and I was saddened at the time that (Romeo & Juliet director) Baz Luhrman's version which was in production in the same year was canceled because of Stone's one - but I liked that it included a perspective of Ptolemy, played by Anthony Hopkins, and I appreciated films general attempt to be philosophical and somewhat 'psychedelic' - to jar the senses somewhat.

Watching it yesterday, I wrote down a quote from Hopkins' Ptolemy.

"Of course it was a myth.... at least it started as one."

How much of reality has not started as a myth? What people put themselves through to compare favorably to myths; myths must be integral part of higher human self-valuing.

The following presentation contains:
- Personal Judgments
- Hyperboles
- Nostalgia
- Pure References to other works
Suitable for types P and Q

One very interesting aspect of film, an aspect that came fully to light in the first two films of Tarantino, which marked the first half of the 90's, the most prosperous and carefree time in modern-western history, and may have represented a form of self-reflection only emerging in artists in very self-satisfied societies, is reflection of film on itself, and of a film on itself. America had all, and all it had was gold, be it the latest technology or stupid old B-movies. This extreme self-valuing is a source of melancholy because it already explicates the necessity of its vanishing; and it is also a source of a kind of infinite expanse of lightness; the experience that arises from the comforting knowledge that there are no more mountains to climb; that from here on, the one who lets himself fall most gently will conquer. This is what I see in Tarantino's leaf-turning; the end of an empire, the perfection of the artists conscience. If there was ever a filmmaker that knew his position in time, it is Tarantino in his first two movies. There is also no filmmaker who has paralleled him in annihilating the burden of time; take for example the  sequence where Willis' character sneaks up toward his apartment to get his heirloom watch. The progression of time is not manipulated, neither is the shot very nicely framed, but there is a boldness to the approach that makes the triviality of the frame a cause to very great emotion - it says "this is a motherfucking shot in a movie, and you're damn sure watching it." There is nothing going on but the acts of "making a movie" and "watching a movie". The plot does not matter.

The plot happens to be brilliant, but it is all so boldly shaped with endless trivialities that story appears to be a mere background condition. And this is what a good storyteller does in speech as well - there is first the experience of listening to a story, the crackling campfire.

Before Tarantino this atmospheric effect was created by the movie company intros and the music. Tarantino uses to thematic music, only pop songs; there is no need to glamorize things up, because he realizes, and shows this in all his decisions (in his first work), that the fact that they is working on a film is the glamour.

The postmodernism in this a special type of postmodernism; it is not merely the observation that one is pro/recreating memes but the absolute delight in that fact, which transposes it onto the audience with much greater clarity - a 'full bias', a bias so great that it effectively moves out of the way of interpretation.

That is to say, every person who likes Pulp Fiction is part of the postmodern world - this film made it possible to look at things and value them precisely because because they are hollow. Of course Andy Warhol did this with figurative art in general, but since his work did not involve dialogue, the difficulty of it is incomparably smaller.

To write dialogue that means everything precisely because it means nothing, and to activate actors by it so effectively as to have them entirely transcend what they themselves along with anyone else had imagined themselves capable of - this is pure being, I think; it is a form of valuing that uses both man and film as elements, lived half a decade and represented the apex of a paradigm of self-commentary; in view of the then immensely popular view that 'commerce is fake', the artist decided to create something entirely out of fake-ness, and call it a representation of the reality behind reality; this artistic boldness was a self-valuing form which included almost all of the rest of the world. The domestication of violence was was also completed in this being.

Film is vanity. Vanity, pride, will-as-imagination, self-adorning of the human mind, as a woman adorns herself to understand herself. (?)

For a philosopher to make film, he has to allow his ideas to attain arbitrary forms; to be fleshed out through the mechanisms of vanity and self-indulgence of the actor. The actor is most brave, because he throws himself into all his weaknesses at once; they are our "Christs". Not all acting attains to this, but it is what acting is becoming, under public demand; as the world burns our narratives become more and more important, we need to take it increasingly seriously, and it needs to improve constantly. Compare a Tony Soprano to a character of Charlie Chaplin, and see how serious we've become about ourselves, about what counts as real, what we can imagine to be real. In a sense film has taken over our imagination, human imagination has been externalized. But that is no different from what epic tales once did; a collectivizing of the senses, shamanism essentially; this is why narratives of expensive (collective) films tend to progress according to paradigmatic formulas; there is great risk involved. This is why I am so exuberantly praising the rather unparadigmatic, unforulaistic, 'unique' (arrrrgh that word I said it) event of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs; for once there was no emotional agenda beyond the film itself. The film was clearly enjoying itself playing out, and that enjoyment was the basic ingredient of the plot. Jouissance then - Excess!

The art had reached a state of technical perfection and narrative saturation so as to begin to partake in the daemonic. Tarantino was films first heros, who stamped being on becoming; the first destroyer thus also. When a thing becomes great, it begins to destroy itself. All greatness is challenged firstly by itself.

This is why both wars and alliances between great powers exist; to draw them out of themselves.

On day, things will change. Man will change. But first, the Gods must change.

d7rLVuOXUVc

[the following post was moved here from another thread, is thematically related but stylistically disjunct]

Spoiler:

"I see in her everything I fear...
yet I have no idea what it is..."

- What would you do if you ever reached the end of the world?
- I'd turn back and conquer its opposite.



Parallel: the maximally extended universe as defined by a moral limit, bouncing back inward toward a new crown-point.

I hate long dance scenes






I am waiting for - ah, the tumbleling weed - seldom an opening with such warmth, unconditional promise - it's typically one of those movies without women or where women are masculine. Movies are essentially masculine, 'hunter-gatherer', they can not afford the privacy of the cave.  fellar wnna tell y about.

Best opening in time precisely because it is also the ending. All momies you can watch endlessly are about time travel or are edited as a loop. Eterninity, believe ... every bit as stupefying... this here old story... Saddam and the Iraqis...

sometimes there's a man...

won't say a hero,
cause whats a hero...





I myself dabbled in pacifism once.



The first time I heard Lebowski say "the bums lost" I thought he said "the bomb's lost" in some obscure existentialist reference to the Hiroshima bomb which had destroyed without sowing new life.





It's a league game, Smokey.

Ladies in movies are vixens, as the gentlemen are vagabonds. Likewise actors are vagabonds and actresses vixens. Man surrenders to his baser instincts before he enters the movie theatre. I remember a sinking feeling in my stomach the first times I went into a theatre, I now understand that I surrendered to a passive state, thus was initiated into a feminine part, a communal part, around the totem which was about to inflict on me a force of great magic; the film is the masculine aspect of the relationship, it pries into our psyche.

We probably have to look, for a philosophical approach to film not tied to the glory of empire, at the dogma films. I did not specially like them in the beginning as I would only learn to appreciate the ascesis of it after rolling with the splendors, but they form the raw-deal norm to the opulent Tarantino spirit; it is as if the latter pushed the paradigm of postmodernism over into a strange synthetic film-text realm where 'moviemaking' became the lead actor; this pushed the emotional semantics way beyond what a normal human experiences, and so this actually forms an evolutionary force.

That was 1994 - a year that produced a staggering amount of quality films.
I now just googled "films" "1995". It is quite impressive what comes up, a handful;

Spoiler:

There's 5 or 6 I haven't seen, the children's movies - but the rest is largely quite memorable, speaking as a mundane moviegoing perspective.

In 1998, Fight Club came out. After that movie which breaks the entire fantasy-fantasy, we entered a new paradigm. Films became serious about death and nihilism.

American Beauty, Gladiator, heroism in death does not diminish our feast.
and in the background, HBO was starting a television series about a mobster who is seeing a psychiatrist.

The first century, from Deliverance to The Avengers, it's only a century old, and it's already destined to be with us forever.

Anyway, "dogme 95" is the official title of that movement. I didn't even know that.



Same year, this movie, which best I ever seen made by a woman - quite remarkable. It was the year that I made my last amateur film - the year before I started interpreting the phenomenon "vision" so differently.



Beyond that point I only made documentaries. I had become passive before a greater reality; a filmmaker must, I suppose, be quite myopic.

Compelled to insert this at this point.



This is about filmmaking as the conquering of both fear and physical reality.
It was in the Titanic age, which I think Hitchcock started, before film became God (Star Wars), and Man (Tarantino).

This is a great thread. I'll try to add something of worth.

Thanks. I try to just freely associate about any film that comes to mind in a positive way. Or any kind of show. Please join in. One thing I was meaning to ask, did you ever watch John from Cincinnati - the show Deadwood creator David Milch did after Deadwood? He only got to do one season because it was completely metaphorical, metaphysical and absurd. I was doing the filmacademy in New York at the time it ran, I was never happier. The opening sequence feels transcendent.



Right now I'm watching this.



Coppola emotionally states that we only have discovered 6 percent of what film can so - and 4,5 percent they discovered in the silent era. That's an encouraging thought. In general how these en comport themselves as if there is a whole war for future filmmakers to be won, is good to see. No satiation at all. Really the beginning of an era.

I would love to see some animated stuff. I mainly don't watch the great Japanese animated films because it is a paradigm, and in terms of culture  I can't manage half-paradigmatic love and it is for that that I watch movies, I think why we all watch it - love of power, of novelty, of the world - we dare to love ore and more aspects, it is incredible how much we've seen compared to the ancients. And we can see only a fraction of what there is; I was sitting in the par this summer and a guy came up to e for a light and stated talking. He said he'd watched some four thousand films the past year, dared me more or less to name one we could discuss. I suggested Margin Call, the most interesting film of that period I could think of. He hadn't seen it or heard of it. Quite indignantly he proclaimed that it must have some intellectual content. It does, it also has Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons and Demi Moore, but mainly it explains quite neatly what happened in the financial crisis of 2008, which provides for a very happy ending for the protagonist. It's one of those movies where you're partaking i the celebration of "evil", of what in normal life one would regard as the Lacanian Real of morality; that for which no appreciation or intuition can exist... investment bankers. And yet their characters in the film corresponds somewhat to the good natured fatalism of the characters I had the pleasure of meeting in the City of London - people with a keen sense of what other people want, and a deep affinity with this desire, so deep as to fully allow their life to be submerged in it; I once referred to one of them as "a subject" in an attempt to explain value ontology to him, upon which he exploded in rage. It too me a while to realize that this englishman completed the phrase with 'to the queen-mum' in his mind, and I was quite bewildered by his resistance to the term. I thought in it something noble, which tells me something about myself; I saw his noble revolt, I did not see his misunderstanding. Or perhaps, and this I dont take to be entirely unlikely, he in his moneymaking, dominating ways does not relate to the grammatical implications of the world subject at all; he wants an objective reality so that he can dominate it and be safe -- and yet, he realizes that it is all bound to fall quite inevitably; the contradiction of the man-as-such and time is here fully explicated and it renders the man quite if not poetic at least subtle and keen, with an eye to quietly navigate troubled seas... until stranger starts talking about ontological premises and his music is interrupted in ways I can not fathom except as a vague tingling.

Animated?! I have limited internet power, so bear with the lack of imagery:

First, last, the promise of last and the skipping of first; the wonderful, the incomparable, the ball dropping, soul elevating

Akira

My word, what a movie. It shows that japanese will always have the last word in interpretation as power.

It is almost shaming to go on after akira, but there is much to celebrate!

We all remember Dragon Ball Z, the ex-post-facto prequel to the charming Dragon Ball. This show will always remind us that childish and deadly serious are born in the same place. Power relations at their purest: the soul of it is that good and evil are but a slim cover for the absolute joy of measuring strengths.

Anime has decomposed a little in soul to accept the tremendous advance in technique, but it hasn't failed along the way to provide such pleasures as Full Metal Alchemist and... But wait, I skipped two important ones: Knights of the Zodiac, like DBZ but more about the stuff of power than the fact of it, and Gundam Wing, the horizon at the time and perhaps still of the questions raised by the effect of power for the joy of power on the weak... And the strong!

As I was saying, after the 80's explotion, there was a lot of emo. Perhaps the most brave representation was Bleach, Naruto's cooler darker brother.

Emo represented a difficult barrier for anime, it represented the christian catholic reactionism to the greek revivalism the Japanese lived through. Also, the subjascent Akira theme, still strong to process.

Tenggen Topen Gurren Lagan: emo is dead! What is out there? Brave answers to be found in this desert world, very brave indeed. As always, the japanese struggle to integrate femenine power into a world of boyish reverence.

On the west side, all I can present as an answer to this is the very good, very underground GodSlayer. Its clumsyness is a very conscios reverence to Japanese profisciency, and it is a very well accomplished work. It digests very well the more epic themes of apocaliptic movies, so close to the western soul, and explores childishness with a respect aimed at recognizing the Japanese effort.

After many years of struggle, Disney came up with an answer to Akira...

The movies Castle in The Sky, Princess Mononoke and others from the same filmmaker whose name escapes me did not fail to shake the ground of anybody that watched them. They are all effective paliatives for the psychic void that is a bad acid trip, precicely because they give the Disney perspective on the Japanese problem of child. Beautiful, rivetting movies.

Disney is the only competition to anime. The manipulating of medieval folk lore to address the terrible reality facing a child turned out to be a fantastic potency serum: The Lion King, Snow White, The Little Mermaid. A bit of the western idea of adult catching up with itself. Maybe the greatest was The Wizard of Oz, whose thematic imagery and music gave a depth no other western animation has been able to achieve.

Akira confronts us with the terrifying. It is Japans way to return to our souls the blastwave; I remember very viscerally feeling that in my heart as I watched it the first and second time. That was also the extended moment I knew this was not for me. Not yet at the very least. I was bound for Hollywood, optimism, the world of Los Angeles in the early 90's. But it was no longer the early nineties; we were drawing closer to the shift. Shit was about to go down. Human sacrifice made me consider the possibility of the apocalypse and draw inward. I became a fool of the tarot and wandered many paths that none would follow me and I would not follow myself; the horrors of this symbolic universe are unimaginable - the imperfections in the souls of the painters of these cards can come to haunt in repulsive ways because the symbolism they carry is so powerful. All symbols represent both eternity and human flaw. This is why the moving camera perspective has become so possible. Bourne Identity. The Bourne series are my next entry. I keep it light. Japan is at the top of the mountain of zen.

Cold mist creeps up the hill
A bell chimes in the valley
Are the cows already inside?

Let the mind go,
breathe into the hands
do not mind the cold,

mind, the cold, cold the mind cold, he breathed
the mountain was woozy

"Hey!" his last thought. "I thought I was dead!"

Eternal recurrence.



I saw Citizen Kane projected outside on a large square in Bologna this summer. The stones were hot in the dark, it was like Paris in 1996 with my friend before we called ourselves by other names, there was music and people only I was older and not anymore innocent, the moment no longer lay ahead of me, but past me, in me, in a future of a double infinity away, my life found its axis in Paris - 'the Trance of Sorrow' as Crowley calls it. Any good films in Paris? Not so many American ones.

The best French film I ever saw  as far as French-qua-french-films go is a little story called "Trop de Bonheur".

If you ever get a hold of that let me know. Now there's a story about justice, and injustice, and jouissance and the eternal lostness of youth....

Pezer wrote:

After many years of struggle, Disney came up with an answer to Akira...

The movies Castle in The Sky, Princess Mononoke and others from the same filmmaker whose name escapes me did not fail to shake the ground of anybody that watched them. They are all effective paliatives for the psychic void that is a bad acid trip, precicely because they give the Disney perspective on the Japanese problem of child. Beautiful, rivetting movies.

Ah I have heard of these. I must watch them.

Quote :

Disney is the only competition to anime. The manipulating of medieval folk lore to address the terrible reality facing a child turned out to be a fantastic potency serum: The Lion King, Snow White, The Little Mermaid. A bit of the western idea of adult catching up with itself. Maybe the greatest was The Wizard of Oz, whose thematic imagery and music gave a depth no other western animation has been able to achieve.

They have the ambition of a demiurg. Eisenstein was said to fear Disney as an evil magician.


Imagine if that;s your reality; with the best of our might you try to bring together an epic symbolic representation of the monumental effort of the revolution, and your competition churns out hammer wielding gummiflexible mice with supernatural powers and tales of Grimm with a manipulative twist and plays on money as the good of all kind - and with such - what is the word, there is a word obscene enough to describe it -- not zeal, not abandon, more something that thymes to 'gale' or feels like it -

In any case Disney knew the wolf. And to a Russian for an enemy to know this is especially disturbing.

"Comrade Wolf knows who to eat, as the saying goes. It knows who to eat and is not about to listen to anyone."  
- Vladimir Putin



My mum took me to see this, was the first Bond film I saw in the cinema. Fond memories.

The first movie I saw in the cinema was, I think, Back to the Future 1. Or E.T. Which was first? I think E.T. Was 1983, and BTF obviously 1985. E.T was really freakish looking back but, it was the eighties and everything was freakish. I think I find it scarier now than I did when I was a little kid. Life was ruff back then, streets were dirty with dog shit too.

I still find this a creepily powerful image.  



What first properly terrified me in the cinema, was the extended moment when Marty grabs the guitar in the Docs house and turns up the amplifiers. I figured it was going to be the literal amount of noise you'd expect from the feedback of the waiting machines, and was prepare to have my eardrums blown out. That was I think the scariest moment because it first confronted me with lack of power to change what was going to happen.

I had that same reaction to that opening scene in Back to the Future. And yea ET is full of terrifying imagery especially given an intended audience of children.

80's movies I really like for this dirty, grit and terror factor, of being down to earth. Blade Runner of course, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Alien/s, Risky Business, Ghostbusters, Short Circuit are a few of my favorites of this type. Probably more as I think about it more. Humanity was at that time still raw to technology and hadn't yet been subsumed within it, as we see today. Because of course despite all that reality there is also a profound innocence in these movies too.

Let me know your top 80s movie recommendations.

I saw an 80's movie recently, I can't remember what it's called. Fantastic movie, I think a step higher than Karate Kid in accomplishment of self value. It's about an American kickboxing team that trains to fight against the... Thai team, I think it was?
Anyway, it beautifully makes use and overuse of all the tools of the time to accomplish maximum 80's cornyness, and even has an ending so moving that it allows the cornyness and that essence of the 80's encounter with cool to fully exist; to exist by handing itself to a value older than itelf and the other side of the coin of its superficiality (what we spanish speakers use instead of shallowness, which we use for simple peasant values, sort of).

I enjoyed it tremendously, and has one of the most suave bad guys of the nineties as its hero.

Capable wrote:

I had that same reaction to that opening scene in Back to the Future.

Really? That's cool.

Quote :

80's movies I really like for this dirty, grit and terror factor, of being down to earth. Blade Runner of course, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Alien/s, Risky Business, Ghostbusters, Short Circuit are a few of my favorites of this type.

I like all these as well. Except Short Circuit which I haven't seen or heard of. It goes on the to watch list.

Quote :

Probably more as I think about it more. Humanity was at that time still raw to technology and hadn't yet been subsumed within it, as we see today. Because of course despite all that reality there is also a profound innocence in these movies too.

Let me know your top 80s movie recommendations.

Damn, that's hard. It's like a dark pond I know is full of fish, but from the exterior, looking at that whole decade, it is a shiny black surface.

Of course I like The Terminator, I think that movie is still a good simulation of a heart pounding, and the absurd first Robocop movie. I was partially very focused on action movies, watching even bad Jean Claude van Damme and Dolph Lundgren films, and of course everything with Schwarzenegger. I remember the opening shot of Predator, I used it as the first shot of my first movie, except I wasn't flying a chopper over the jungle panning up to the horizon but hovering my camera over the pavement panning up the crackhead who was about to shoot the passenger-by.

We usually went farther than Arnie in his movies as we killed everyone off. That's only going farther relativity, because the total bodycount would stack up to 6, 7 at best.

Im checking google now.

48 Hours is one of my favorites, the movie where Eddie Murphy had to prove  himself.



I'll list some more later on as they will come to me.

Pezer wrote:

I saw an 80's movie recently, I can't remember what it's called. Fantastic movie, I think a step higher than Karate Kid in accomplishment of self value. It's about an American kickboxing team that trains to fight against the... Thai team, I think it was?
Anyway, it beautifully makes use and overuse of all the tools of the time to accomplish maximum 80's cornyness, and even has an ending so moving that it allows the cornyness and that essence of the 80's encounter with cool to fully exist; to exist by handing itself to a value older than itelf and the other side of the coin of its superficiality (what we spanish speakers use instead of shallowness, which we use for simple peasant values, sort of).

I enjoyed it tremendously, and has one of the most suave bad guys of the nineties as its hero.

Those 80's fight movies were great, absolutely. It was the time right after Star Wars, the time where "Jedi-master" was an overarching cultural term for a great fighter, and where thus innocence and fighting could exist together.



Of course these karate and kickbox movies had no bearing on Star Wars plot wise or stylistically, but I believe that George Lucas caused a shift in how man perceived the nature of fighting. Before him, the hero would be a drunken ex cop who plants his fist in the head of a disposable villain now and then. In a sense George Lucas was like Zoroaster, introducing moral dualism and thus metaphysics into cinema. Before him the 70's movie-scape was full of moral ambiguity and nihilistic despair. Star Wars began to period of which the Matrix was the death.

Even though I was thrilled by it the first time I saw it in the theatre, I've come to strongly dislike the Matrix, for what it stands for idealistically and its absolutely forceless "kung fu".