Film

Short Circuit is a kids-family movie, a bit like ET but more light-hearted. Making the terror of technology fun and cute-- submitting it to (80s-brand) human values, and to human innocence.

I just remembered the original Transformers The Movie, animated. From 1986. This is gold.

In terms of Japanese anime, my tastes run a little differently, I don't much care for older anime and prefer the very new stuff. The sharpness and daemonic contrasts, brutal philosophical destruction coupled with the most absolutely innocent beauty and lightness, all come together with state of the art film-making and drug-like intensities of color and music.. The emotions are fantastic and wind in with a ruthlessly inhuman distance on things.

Capable wrote:

Short Circuit is a kids-family movie, a bit like ET but more light-hearted. Making the terror of technology fun and cute-- submitting it to (80s-brand) human values, and to human innocence.

I just remembered the original Transformers The Movie, animated. From 1986. This is gold.

That was something alright. The television show was my favorite thing to watch for a long time. This is a legendary episode.

The movie itself was like a break in the universe - all the cast underwent this cataclysmic change full of suffering. The sharp edged master Megatron turning into the rounded slave Galvatron was deeply tragic, a kind of poetic soul-raping.

Quote :

In terms of Japanese anime, my tastes run a little differently, I don't much care for older anime and prefer the very new stuff. The sharpness and daemonic contrasts, brutal philosophical destruction coupled with the most absolutely innocent beauty and lightness, all come together with state of the art film-making and drug-like intensities of color and music.. The emotions are fantastic and wind in with a ruthlessly inhuman distance on things.

That sounds very appealing. I just don't know any of it except shards I've accidentally seen. But this is the reason I asked. If you could put down a couple of titles with a small description and a screengrab or clips or pictures from the web that would be nice - I want to make this a very visual thread, so that one immediately gets a taste for the specific movies being discussed.

The Matrix sequels pretty much forshadowed that looming distaste. They were very honest in that. But I think it redeems itself as a fucking hell of an attempt to philosophize cinema. V for Vendetta was the aftermath. Regardless of anything, they left for us a vast supply of cool meme references we had sort of forgotten. "Follow the white rabbit," "Mr andersonnn," "a revolution without dance...""I know kung fu." I know kung fu!!! Beautiful. Dishonest, but beautiful.

Old anime was cute. In retrospect, an episode of DBZ or Samurai X, even K of the Z is unwatcheable. It reminds me of that joke "how many Dragon Ball Z characters does it take two screw in a lightbulb?" "One, but it takes like 20 episodes."

Modern manga is a lot better. Bleach is an evolution of DBZ/KotZ to be reckoned. But the emo fucking bothers me, and no major manga seems to have been able to escape it so far.

Yesterday I watched Whiplash, written and directed by one Damien Chazelle (cool name)  - about drumming. But this was a movie actually about drumming. There were emotions in it and humans but they were all pushing the plot that was made out of this musical form. It was extremely watchable, featuring the Aryan Brotherhood captain from Oz [J.K. Simmons] as a merciless music teacher (screenshot) and some cocky looking kid who can apparently drum as an aspiring Jazz drummer. [from IMDB: "Miles Alexander Teller is an American actor and musician." That's a nice careerpath.]



I've never seen an ending like this one before either - a cool, confident piece of art.

I solemnly promise to make a post about comic book oriented movies as soon as I get access to suitable internet.

Whiplash was very good. Those Oscars were impressive, there was some kind of trend for justifying crazy plots with staggering visuals.

I know now that I prefer Wagner to Tchaikovsky. I thought I liked neither especially.

Wagner makes a stab at happiness.

I am listening to this mix now, it popped up under film music through the gogo-oglegoggle.

Still listening to that. My kind of energy wall when I need to zone out, phase down, sink into suchness - Much of it is like Hans Zimmer in a future youth.
Hans Zimmer is definitely instrumental to a lot of this, I suspect. The German surpasses most of the classical composers in his first decades of work basically before did Transformers.

True Romance, Lion King, Crimson Tide, three works I appreciate especially among his endless flights "wings of film" as he is rightly attributed. An Eagle? Maybe not; His worst work is the Rome scene in Gladiator we he said he's try out his Wagner. Shame, it should have ben a magnificent scene if he had gone all out philosophically. Maybe he didn't dare. It seemed to me a sensitive point in him, using Wagner as an ironic shield. What goes on in the psyche of a film musician?

He and Lisa Gerrard on Gladiator together, the whole cast of musicians Zimmer got from around the world to work on this, very cool. I mean only because it pays off, because what you get is a truly haunting musical tale that can stand by itself as well as a Beethoven concert can. But then Lisa Gerrard is terrifying, like a voice coming out of the Earth, a Galadriel among the elvenbreed ('got me a stable of elven' - elvenkind) of musicians, and Zimmer is respectful of that artist, he is deferent to her as he is to himself, as he recognizes that h recognizes in her fellow-true-artist, offering modestly "trust me, that's a very rare thing". The Gladiator extended bonuses are well stocked content of genuine surplus. I also like how when Ridley Scott is asked by one of the quality control people on the set of the barbarian battle if the Romans really used to  shoot flaming arrows. "They sure as hell do now!" That was cool, but having romans distribute printed pamphlets was a banal error. Same with gods; its not cool to believe in gods or attributes of gods that evidently contradict reality. But rather than dismiss half-notions, it is best to simply allow them to connect to other half notions and produce bastions within the excess; it is like walking half solidified lava, gods are that temporary solidification of the excess. It is pure play, pure danger, 'pure woman' - and one can not believe in gods except by loving and fearing them; two extremes of valuing, and so in the end the gods serve only to sharpen the sword of discernment. All the way into the probability principle, into its core, where the ratio is simply the positive probability of being.

That old cave where man is not free from truth.

the non-perpetuity of quality on analog video. Its gradual disappearance, its characters turning into ghosts. Notably these are images from the 80's, the times beyond the much more durable celluloid and the binary, either working or broken disc medium; shades of hero, Freddy Mercury comes to mind. What happened in the 80's stays in the 80's.

I find this a very real quality of Fatum.

Speaking of which,

The weirdest thing - I was looking at which time the paradigmatic planets of the underworld and cataclysmic and paradigmatic changes, Pluto and Chiron, were conjunct. I have both strong in my chart, they are always crucial in depth astrology, but for some reason I had never looked when they had been last together. It turned out to be around the 31st of december of 1999 and the first of january of 2000.

Semantics my ass ... astrology keeps weirding me out with its exactitudes.


What was additionally remarkable is that the conjunction also included the Black Moon.



" It would never occur to me to neglect this influence. The Dark Moon describes our relationship to the absolute, to sacrifice as such, and shows how we let go. "

(Joëlle de Gravelaine in "Lilith und das Loslassen", Astrologie Heute Nr. 23)
http://www.astro.com/astrology/in_lilith_e.htm

Lilith



The movie will continue in five moments






You know that it would be untrue

To pick one newer anime that is very good in the ways I mentioned, this one:
http://www.hulu.com/parasyte-the-maxim, Parasyte.













In terms of older stuff, it's true you can never go wrong with Akira or Ghost in the Shell.

It's funny how my relationship with astrology began with Knights of The Zodiac, where the Power of the Cosmos is a proto-force. When Zaori's grandfather shows Zaori the cosmos in his planetarium and the different constelations for each Knight or, more importantly, when Seya's master shows and explains it to him, how we are all made of the fantastic force of the collision of stars, it dawned on me how crucially important the astros are. I secretly began venerating Pegasus.

Then, in one transcendental trip, it really hit me in a funky way. How obvious it is, how deeply connected the stars and what happens here. This hit me like a love brick: there comes a point, that was allways there, where prophesy and allmighty centeroftheworldship become the same thing, where it's not important, it ceases to matter and becomes the same whether it is all being controlled with the mind or the mind is a helpless puppet of it all.

I have great fear and respect for astrology.

Shit, unfortunately I can only watch that link from the US. I will find some other link.
(also I scaled down the pictures so that they keep in bounds with the screen, so that the text does not extend so much in width)

Pegasus... it's a constellation that's more or less parallel with Pisces, is that correct?

I remember a magician 'friend' (could have been a friend if he'd be less... shadowy to me, though he did make some excellent orgonite for me) talking about Scheat, one Pagasus' stars, with great fear last spring when the Sun was on it... he was truly panicking.

Recently, I was meditating on Thor, when out of the blue (the mildly clouded sky) a terrifying thunderstrike shook the entire town on its poles in the mud. The next day on Facebook I read that this magician had been sitting on the roof, when the lightning struck a pole some ten meters from where he was sitting.

Interesting that I started this thread more or less, writing about the perspective of Ptolemy (whom in the first moments of Alexander I mistook for Aristotle, which was a bit dumb), who now counts as the ancient worlds most renowned astrologer.

Quote :

Yes, it was Ptolemy who invented the Pegasus constellation. Ptolemy was known to be the first to call a group of stars as such. The name Pegasus is a beautiful winged horse included in Greek mythology. This constellation was included in Ptolemy’s work, “The Almagest.”

In some of the pages of The Almagest, one can probably see that most of the details were actually invented before 2000 B.C. by the early group of people known as the Babylonians. This includes the twelve constellations in the Zodiac. [src]

Ptolemy wrote:

Those who have been true philosophers, Syrus, seem to me to have very wisely separated the theoretical part of philosophy from the practical. For even if it happens the practical turns out to be theoretical prior to its being practical, nevertheless a great difference would be found in them; not only because some of the moral virtues can belong to the everyday ignorant man and it is impossible to come by the theory of whole sciences without learning, but also because in practical matters the greatest advantage is to be had from a continued and repeated operation upon the things themselves, while in theoretical knowledge it is to be had by a progress onward. We accordingly thought it up to us so to train our actions even in the application of the imagination as not to forget in whatever things we happen upon the consideration of their beautiful and well ordered disposition, and to indulge in meditation mostly for the exposition of many beautiful theorems and especially of those specifically called mathematical. [Almagest]

"Dame tu fuerza, Pegaso!!"

My best friends have always been piscis.

Ptolemy sounds like quite a dude, must get that book.

It's Ptolemy who is quoted here below the logo at the top of the homepage.

You could try this link,

http://www.crunchyroll.com/parasyte-the-maxim-

Look,

It's Tarantino's first film, My Best Friend's Birthday.



It's really crumby, but some of his trademarks are there. Oh and the last reel is missing because the building they were editing in burned down or something.

Capable wrote:

You could try this link,

http://www.crunchyroll.com/parasyte-the-maxim-

Motherfuck, I get an ad, then I get a frame of the Earth with the text 'someone on earth and a sudden thought'. Then I see two elderly humans standing facing each other, and one of them cracks open and where his head was appears a psychedelic meat eating plants head, which bites the other elderly persons head off, at which point I'm quite shocked. Then the video shifts to a commercial. After 7 seconds I press skip add - another commercial. After 7 seconds I skip add, and another commercial appears, and another.

I've been through this process twice now, having only this now twice seen scene of the bitten-off head of the sensitive elderly woman to take away...

This is actually quite harsh in its effect.
I mean I'm a guy who thinks Boardwalk Empire is bleak.

I'm smoking a joint now to calm some of the mornings tremendations down.
But Jesus these Japanese are no walk in the park.

Not if you take it all so personally as I tend to do.

When I was in New Orleans in 1999, a skinny dude with a guitar with one string on it started bottlenecking a Ry Cooder kind of tune and coming up to me singing A broken heart ain't so bad/if you don't take it so personal!

Then a fat guy in loincloth offered me his nova-burst reading and said if the apocalypse comes he's coming to be on the roof with a bow and arrow, making sure nobody gets to him. "No guns, I can't stand that", he said.

What I find very painful about manga is that everything is always happening to these frail people that could be your auntie or littlest cousin

It's like what's so horrible about "The Pianist", Polanski's Holocaust film; when the Gestapo rams in the door of a delicate family and one of them wheels the grandpa in his wheelchair to the windows and topples him out to fall five stories.  It's clear that the suffering the filmmakers covey is theirs on a very fundamental level of their psyche.

Yes absolutely so. I agree. Sorry that link is saturated with ads. You can pay for the site to have ad-free, but probably you could also find a link or torrent download even somewhere else.

I haven't seen the piano but I've seen plenty of Nazi brutality in so many films. They are a nice Evil Guy to hold up as anti-human and make all of us feel better about ourselves; a good myth. I was struck by how two of the Xmen films start with the same scene of Nazi Poland with Magneto being separated as a kid from his parents.

You should find a good source and definitely watch the full first episode of Parasyte, if only to get a fuller picture of what the show entails. Of course if you don't really want to see more at that point I certainly understand that. I'm not even sure what draws me to so much to these more intense-extreme anime, other than what I said previously about how the combine so completely with beauty all the good and evil, reason and madness, life and death together as one story deep-set in the average-ordinary human world. The characters are indeed eminently human as you note, thus you get a very real and 'brutal' portrayal of their deep psychological and physical struggles, values, and how they change throughout the story.

Plus as me and also Pezer too notes, the music is phenomenal in its emotionalism, and the vibrancy of the color and smooth animation works well to see it all together.. A very nice "psychedelic" journey but not an irrational, drug-like one, rather one rooted in this reality and in our own human deep psyche, one more "reasonable" but no less "crazy" and no less entertaining.

I think the japanese need for mayhem in their art is a product of the perfect order in their society, the rape a product of their absolute homyness and delicacy.

"Only God Forgives"

:O

A Western film, but an answer to japanese movies.

Btw the guy who made it, can't remember his name, was the only one to have been given the complete tour of Dune by Jodorowski himself. Says its awesome.

I disagree, I see their order as a result of the extreme ruthlessness of their higher castes, and the rape as a presentation of what factually happens to every Japanese person by the hardness of this culture.

The way the Japanese have addressed life and death in their formative centuries has created a people that lives on the edge of the sword that cleaves human being and human undoing. That is why Aikido is ... what it is.

Which brings me back to Hollywood.

No, I had intended something, but another thing appeared.

Something even harder on the soul than Japanese psychological sadomasochism; the way the Germans dub their movies. On top of the fact that they dub them, of course, in which the are not alone. But a people that tolerates this, can not be entirely sane.



Ich Scheiss auf deine Stimmung.

Right, Only God Forgives, that's the director of Drive, I think. I'd like to see that too.

I don't think the brutality of the nazis is a general brutality; what this movie shows is how brutal they really were; it wasn't about the camps, or the experiments so much as in the manners during their killing.

Quite absurd. But I believe that to be a great part of cruelty and crudity; it is exactly the same thing as what bothers me about their dubbing. There is just no human sentiment. They just don't understand what an actor is supposed to do. He is supposed to be human, but this lies centuries beyond them.

Oh how they try;

German genius is always a radical exception to the German rule. And precisely because this rule is so pervasive, does it produce such frequent antitheses.

It's a thing about that destiny, the delicacy is hand in hand with the ruthlessness. I was reading about the history of the development of the tea ceremony, many steps before where they are today. They had these gatherings of warrior aristocrats where all they would do is the tea ceremony with discussions of asthetics, often about the tea pots themselves, which I imagine where very light.

The book I'm reading is Japan: A Short Cultural history by something Samson. Fascinating what happens when a high spirit is confined to an easy to defend island near a cultural monster like China.

To the medieval japanese, at least, simplicity and delicacy was the most important and the most heavy. Deepness was seen as unhealthy, fit for buhddist monks of the ancient era (this under the influence of zen).

I think modern manga seeks some of this. But since there is no violence in their daily lives, it has to show its relevance in the same frame.