Harvey » Thu Sep 09, 2021 5:34 am wrote:Western 'Civilisation' of the last five centuries is eminently comparable to the roughly five hundred year main sequence of Roman 'civilisation' and although Jack might jump in to point out that such comparisons are not helpful, serving only to trivialise the mass murder of ancient Rome, there's definitely something there...
Don't be stupid. No one ever did mass murder like the empires of the 'Western' civilizations of the last 500 years.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline: I am by virtue of its might divine, The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
Harvey » Thu Sep 09, 2021 5:34 am wrote:Western 'Civilisation' of the last five centuries is eminently comparable to the roughly five hundred year main sequence of Roman 'civilisation' and although Jack might jump in to point out that such comparisons are not helpful, serving only to trivialise the mass murder of ancient Rome, there's definitely something there...
Don't be stupid. No one ever did mass murder like the empires of the 'Western' civilizations of the last 500 years.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
Harvey » Wed Apr 01, 2020 8:18 pm wrote:Has some added resonance just now. Everyone is confined to their home, interpreting cryptic instructions relayed via their televisions.
I almost placed this in Annie's "I had the funniest idea for a movie last night" thread over in the lounge, but felt it better placed here, as it has "a certain quality" to it - bizarre!
The plot can be found at wiki, but it also serves as a spoiler for those who prefer watching movies 'cold,' without any foreknowledge of what lies ahead more than a tease like this clip. https://tinyurl.com/vf6z7zdr
Jug Face AKA The Pit is probably the most weirdly accurate satire of our present moment ever likely to be made:Spoiler:descendants of plague survivors living in the woods pour the blood of their children into The Pit (Capital?) believing that in return, it will protect their health as it once did. Only trouble with that theory, the film was released in 2013.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
Whatever my own experience The Holy Mountain is just one of many illustrated guides to the experience I've come across but undoubtedly one of the most vivid and definitely among the most coherent. It's probably just one of those things, but since seeing his masterpiece The Dance of Reality (which I would not have encountered were it not recommended by someone at RI) I have not seen any of his other films and I do wonder why that is, since the two I have seen have made such a deep impression upon me.
Thanks again.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
Harvey » Sun Jun 06, 2021 8:01 am wrote:Nightwatching (2007) by Peter Greenaway is another discussion of art and power in film, this time through the forensic examination of Rembrandt's most famous painting Nightwatch, a fascinating enquiry into the image, the philosophy and art of Rembrandt himself and Greenaway's own ideas and obsessions. Greenaway suggests that the painting is an accusation against it's commissioners, the record of a conspiracy to murder and the subsequent cover-up. Along the way the film itself is a portrait of corruption, child prostitution, blackmail and intrigue. Beautiful, thought provoking and astonishingly enjoyable.
The film is complemented (or was conceived as a film in two parts) by Greenaways documentary, Rembrandt's J'accuse which I shall see tonight.
Not long after you posted this I located a good copy of Nightwatching sans captions. Enjoy!
There's a scene outside some kind of hospice (it's a while since I saw it) in this film which almost refers to a thread on RI which I haven't been able to locate since. I feel sure the thread was begun by Wombat, and involved submitting ideas for movie outlines, or something... In any case, the theme is a rich man lamenting the temporariness of life (his own) and for whom a kind of technological transcendence is on offer, that is, he gets to live again. Complications ensue and perspectives change. A fine SF film and little remarked upon after it's release, but no wonder.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
“DON’T LOOK UP” IS AS FUNNY AND TERRIFYING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING AS “DR. STRANGELOVE” WAS ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR Adam McKay’s new movie may be the first film in 57 years to equal the comedy and horror of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. Jon Schwarz December 12 2021, 6:00 a.m.Don't Look Up!
IF YOU’RE WONDERING whether we’ll do anything about global warming before it destroys civilization, think about this ominous fact: It occupies barely any space in popular culture.
This contrasts with the gusher of movies and books in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s about nuclear war. Anyone old will remember “The Day After,” “War Games,” “The Planet of the Apes,” “99 Luftballons,” and many, many more in which nuclear terror was the central subject or background.
All of this helped generate a worldwide anti-nuclear movement, which in turn generated a larger audience for anti-nuclear culture, which in turn strengthened the movement — all in a virtuous circle. In other words, we avoided atomic Armageddon in part because we spent lots of time imagining it and so were motivated not to experience it in reality. But with global warming, there are few indications that we’re imagining it at all. We’re blithely stumbling forward in a fog, with little comprehension of the catastrophe we’re stumbling toward.
That’s why the new movie “Don’t Look Up” is extremely good news, unless you’re hoping that humanity will obliterate itself and be succeeded in 50 million years by superintelligent squirrels.
The fountainhead of nuclear war culture in the U.S. was Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” released in 1964. It pried open space into which countless other creators rushed. “Don’t Look Up” has the potential to do the same thing for global warming.
“Dr. Strangelove” is usually called a black comedy, but that doesn’t do it justice. Instead, you could say it’s a Vantablack comedy, the blackest comedy ever invented by the human mind. “Don’t Look Up” may be the first movie in 57 years to equal it, in both the darkness and the laughs.
“Don’t Look Up” was directed and written by Adam McKay and based on a story by himself and the journalist David Sirota. (I’ve been friendly with Sirota for a long time.) McKay established himself as one of the funniest filmmakers in America with work like “Old Glory Insurance” — persons denying the existence of robots may be robots themselves — “Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” and “The Other Guys.” Then he swerved in 2015 to make “The Big Short,” about the implosion of the housing bubble, followed by “Vice,” about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s bland rise to brutal power.
With “Don’t Look Up,” McKay has taken all of his talents, and all of the power he’s accumulated, to pull together the world’s biggest movie stars to confront the most important subject in existence.
Taken literally, the movie is about a huge comet heading directly toward us. It’s the same size as the one that hit the Gulf of Mexico in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which wiped out three-quarters of all species on the planet. Before that comet, dinosaurs ruled the earth, and our evolutionary ancestors were little vole-like creatures scurrying around trying not to get eaten. Since the comet, the tables have turned, and every year we eat 65 billion chickens, the dinosaurs’ persecuted remnants.
But as McKay has said, this is “the most thinly disguised metaphor in the history of metaphors.” It is in fact about our profound commitment to cooking ourselves to death. The movie begins with the sound of boiling water and features two appearances by polar bears.
Pretending it’s about a comet, however, makes it possible for “Don’t Look Up” to fit the format of a standard blockbuster that the median moviegoer will love. Instead of depicting the slow degradation over decades of the ecosystem until human life is untenable, we’re all going to die in exactly six months and 14 days. Even if the endpoint is the same, our minds can grasp instant worldwide conflagration more easily than incremental deterioration caused by sunlight and an invisible molecule.
The two main characters are scientists, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, desperately trying to get the world to take the danger of the comet seriously. (Beyond that, it’s best to go in without knowing anything more about the plot.) DiCaprio is dressed down into near-normal schlumpiness, while Lawrence appears to have taken a brief detour to art school before starting her astronomy Ph.D.
Meryl Streep plays a president who is much like Donald Trump, except without his depth and emotional empathy. Jonah Hill is her son and chief of staff, who informs a rally of supporters that “there’s three types of American people: There are you, the working class. Us, the cool rich. And then them.”
Mark Rylance is the movie’s Dr. Strangelove, as bizarre and frightening as the original but updated for the epoch of tech billionaires. Rylance portrays “the third-richest man in history” as a kind of omnipotent baby, soft and vulnerable and mushy and completely unaware that anyone else is real.
The rest of the cast is from the same pinnacle of acting. Seemingly everyone with more than two lines has won an Academy Award. And the entire production crew operates at that level of excellence, from the editing (by Hank Corwin), cinematography (Linus Sandgren), music (Nicholas Britel, production design (Clayton Hartley), and visual effects (Raymond Gieringer and Dione Wood).
ogether they achieve the near impossible. Almost all successful comedies are 90 minutes or less, because past that point audiences usually get a kind of humor fatigue. “Don’t Look Up” is 145 minutes long but stays funny until the absolute end, getting one of its biggest, most satisfying laughs in the final credit sequence. This section may also deserve an entry in the Guinness World Records for the most naked old people ever to appear on screen.
On the surface, the primary target of the movie’s joke blizzard is America’s nihilistic media and its inability to focus on life and death for more than two seconds. But if you watch closely, you’ll see that “Don’t Look Up” depicts this as a common human struggle no one can escape. The top NASA official in charge of planetary defense is ensnared by celebrity gossip. As the clock ticks down, DiCaprio’s character argues self-righteously with people on the movie’s version of Twitter.
In fact, “Don’t Look Up” includes a direct critique of itself. At one point, Lawrence says, “Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn’t supposed to be fun. Maybe it’s supposed to be terrifying.” In a long monologue toward the end, DiCaprio tries to explain, “Not everything needs to sound so goddamn clever or charming or likable all the time. Sometimes we just need to be able to say things to one another. We need to be able to hear things.”
DiCaprio also asks, “What the hell happened to us?” The answer the movie suggests is that cable TV and social media have successfully hacked human cognition, destroying our ability to pay attention to anything whatsoever or even understand what’s real outside our little screens. And we’ll never be able to stop global warming without paying sustained attention to reality.
Like most comedies, “Don’t Look Up” is probably best seen in theaters. But be prepared: As in “Dr. Strangelove,” the depth of comedy of “Don’t Look Up” is matched by a subtle, profound grief. The end of the movie is unbearably poignant; in particular, Lawrence delivers one line that is clearly the filmmakers explaining why they made this, even if it turns out to be completely futile. There may be a few movies that will make you laugh more and some that make you cry more, but if you add the laughing and crying together, it’s hard to think of anything that puts more emotional points on the board.
The good news, if there is any, is that when the lights come up at the end, you’ll realize that in reality we’re only half an hour into this story. We can still save ourselves if we want to. And part of that will have to be much more human creativity like this, in service of understanding the horrifying destination toward which we’re heading.
Adam McKay makes fun popcorn movies about Wall Street or the Bush admin sold as documentaries. Kubrick makes a movie about NY elite practising Babylonian sex magik on Christmas sold as a dream. Then dies suddenly. Then Warner Bros make strange alterations. Then we find out about Jeffrey Epstein. Then people like me are permanently damaged with paranoia.
My Dinner with Andre was sampled on this bit of synthwave - I tracked the film down after hearing it &........ummmmm yeah - well I still quite like the track
Bait? Yes, I love it. Alloneword (who knows the film makers) said it was just a bit of fun on their part, but nevertheless, it captures something of that larger sense of how things really are.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
“DON’T LOOK UP” IS AS FUNNY AND TERRIFYING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING AS “DR. STRANGELOVE” WAS ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR Adam McKay’s new movie may be the first film in 57 years to equal the comedy and horror of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. Jon Schwarz December 12 2021, 6:00 a.m.Don't Look Up!
Totally irrelevant comparisons aside, and having had no high expectations as to the artistic level of the movie going in, it turns out to be fucking excellent. Just watched it, and theater would have been excellent, but as y'all know we can't have nice things currently.
All the elements satirized or really just depicted in it are well captured as far as the realism or verisimilitude. Near impeccable on the timing, almost all of the jokes land.
On the meta level it's about the one obvious thing (human -- well, actually, American -- responses to the ongoing ecological catastrophe induced by their civilization), but if it were seen more as a set of modules sketching various elements, it would be easily adaptable to many other crises, real and fake alike.
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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline: I am by virtue of its might divine, The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
by JackRiddler » Fri Sep 10, 2021 8:30 pm 
