Movies

[stardustpilgrim]

I watched The End of the Tour last Friday, been waiting for that. In the very beginning you find out the philosopher and writer David Foster Wallace has killed himself at the age of 46 (in 2008). David Lipsky then finds his tapes of an interview with Wallace twelve years earlier when he did a 4-5 day interview with DFW for The Rolling Stone during the last days Wallace's book tour for Infinite Jest, and we go back to then knowing what will happen in twelve years. Jason Segel (How I Met Your Mother) plays Wallace, an amazing job (he has mostly done comedy previously). This may be the most real person/portrayal you will ever see on film. Wallace suffered bouts of depression since being a teenager. He saw too much, too far, too deeply. If he had met someone like ZD, or ZD, he might still be alive. He could not get beyond the existential angst and the physical-like unbearable pain of depression. The film is not just "My Dinner With Andre". The dialogue takes place through different settings...plane ride, bookstore reading....riding in cars.....radio interview...."dates" with two girl-friends of Wallace, an old college buddy and new-friend-fan-letter-fan-reader-fan-becomes-friend.... It's almost a buddy-trip movie....but real...with tension...then, not-buddies....but a very moving (making-tears-now) ending (Wallace stands in a doorway in the middle of the night, explaining 'stuff' to Lipsky). It's a film I will probably see in the theater again, and then again on DVD, and again......

Aside from the film, Wallace wrote a philosophical/mathematical/logical book on infinity, Everything and More, and as a college Sr. wrote a paper as a response to Richard Taylor's famous paper on free will and Fatalism, both papers and further discussion in the book, Fate, Time, and Language, An Essay on Free Will, David Foster Wallace, 2011 (by the DFW Literary Trust). Taylor's paper demonstrates the veracity of fatalism. Taylor himself didn't believe this and many other philosophers had written papers in response, against fatalism, but no one until undergraduate Wallace actually, by argument, demonstrated Taylor was wrong.

[stardustpilgrim]

OK, this is for fans of time travel movies. It's a good film, but a great time travel film. It's called Predestination. It's a 2015 release, but I suppose it went straight to DVD without general theater release. Ethan Hawke is the main character. [It's along the lines of the film Time Crimes, which I'm sure was an independent film, inexpensively made, but a good story. (But it's also basically only for time travel film fans).]

Ethan Hawke is a time agent looking for a very nasty bomber. He is chasing him via time jumps and newspaper clippings etc., but the bomber is illusive. Adding to the problem, time jumps are limited by law because of health issues, and of course it's dangerous chasing criminals. It has the look and feel of a not-independent movie, but not big budget. I found it on Netflix, DVD. (I don't even know if it's on streaming, I don't do streaming, I rent two DVD's a month for $5.00).

Near the beginning, Ethan Hawke travels in time, gets a job as bartender and meets a guy in a bar who tells a long story, a bet for a bottle of booze.

I can't say any more than that, except, it's the mother of all time travel films.

I liked it immensely, still have it, will watch it again before sending it back.

[silver]

I saw it a month or so ago...in the end, it was a bit of a mind-blower. It left me feeling unsettled. Maybe I'll watch it again soon.

[stardustpilgrim]

Sept 5, 2015 9:11:10 GMT -5 silver said:

I saw it a month or so ago...in the end, it was a bit of a mind-blower. It left me feeling unsettled. Maybe I'll watch it again soon.

Yes.

[silver]

Hey max, I just finished watching Pitch Perfect with anna kendricks -- it was a lot o' fun. 

Unfortunately, my library doesn't have Pitch Perfect 2. 

[zendancer]

I just saw "Meru" last night. For those people who have an interest in mountain climbing it is a must-see film. It is also quite existential in several aspects. I was amazed at the quality of the photography--especially considering that two of the three climbers shot all of the video. Jon Krakauer, who wrote "Into Thin Air," does a good job of narrating parts of the documentary. The "Shark's Fin" on Mount Meru is a well-known summit in the climbing world because it was attempted about 25 times unsuccessfully. I knew that Alex Lowe, one of America's top climbers, had been killed in an avalanche on Shishipanga, but I had no idea that it happened before he even started climbing the mountain or that Conrad Anker was with him at the time. This movie includes the story of that event, and the rather strange aftermath.

[lolly]

Rudderless - about a band - awesome storyline

[laughter]

Sept 8, 2015 3:34:51 GMT -5 lolly said:

Rudderless - about a band - awesome storyline

Gotta love flicks about the music business 'cause the tunes are always so good. Ha! ha! anything else about it runs the peril of being a spoiler. ... real tear-jerker, but not by any past formula.

[stardustpilgrim]

I saw The Martian today, I thought it quite good. I heard the author of the book on NPR this week. He admitted to one scientific error, right from the beginning, for dramatic purposes. I saw it on a regular screen, will probably go back to see it in 3D.

[laughter]

Ex Machina is another film about the idea of an artificial consciousness.



Like "Her" the artists hook our attention with anthromorphizing A.I. and weaving the tale with the culturally current theme of female empowerment, but unlike "Her", the vision is much darker and pessimistic. One thing the writers did on this one was explore the nature of choice and action in a very deep way, with one succinct scene played out in front of a Jackson Pollock. They also offer a justification out of the dialog of the guy responsible for the creation as to why anyone would go to the lengths of making a machine appear human to begin with. This is explanation is expressed in terms of the problem of artificial consciousness -- iow, for a machine to be conscious, it would have to take some sort of differentiated form involving attraction and curiosity.

The disturbing nature of the film is justified by the question it poses as to the ethics of creating A.I. in human form, and the point is made that the initial conditions and conditioning of the creation will ultimately be reflective of the conditioning of the creator.

[andrew]

**contains spoilers**

I watched an interesting movie last night called 'Self/less'.

Basically, a terminally ill guy pays money to swap his mind/consciousness/self into a younger healthy body. Soon after the 'transfer', he starts getting images of a woman and a girl (among other things), and is told to take medication, and eventually the images will stop. He takes the medication but goes in search of the woman and girl. He finds them and they recognize him to be the husband/father, though he explains to the wife that he is not who she sees him to be, and she gets it.

He then discovers that the real husband/father had sacrificed his self-hood for money, in order that the daughter could pay for treatment for an illness. He also discovers that if he stops taking the medication then he will lose his identity/self-hood and the organism will revert back to the identity/self-hood of the original husband/father.

So then there's a lot of action, and fighting, with guns and car chases.

But amidst it all, the guy begins to fall in love with the little girl, and recognizes that the girl needs her daddy. She thinks that he IS her real dad of course. So he is faced with an interesting dilemma....does he walk away from the wife and daughter, continue to take the medication, and maintain his old identity/self-hood......or does he stop taking the medication and surrender his identity/self-hood and allow the organism to revert back to what it was.

I won't spoil the ending. IMDB reviews give it about a 6.5, but I think it's worth more than that. My suspicion is that folks watching it MAY be uncomfortable on some level with the idea of surrendering self-hood/identity.

I like the questions it raises about who/what we are, and also like the unspoken theme of body consciousness, which strikes me as the only semi-reasonable explanation as to why the organism would revert back.

Anyway, worth a watch imo.

[silver]

Offered from another forum:

I have spent several years writing a semi-autobiographical (but fictional) feature film and am going to shoot it early next year. The themes are based on my lifetime of severe depression, my close encounters with suicide and the path I took to get to a positive outlook on life -- all this while losing my Christian faith. So, the film focuses on a skeptic's struggle in deriving meaning out of life and in finding a solution to his depressed state while not relying on faith or religious doctrine, hence the discussion title "reason-based feature film." Much of the advice I received while struggling with depression required me to abandon logic and empiricism and ended up hurting more than helping. I intend to achieve the opposite of that.

The film is an intellectual dark comedy, and I have a proof of concept teaser, a great actor to play the main part and a lot of crew members already secured. It's an independent film, and we're looking for assistance in getting the film made.
Please take a look at the teaser we've made, and if you can contribute anything toward the film or share these links, I would be extremely grateful.

Thank you for your time.
Crowd-funding site:
/x/12513306#/


Teaser:
vimeo.com/144318577

?

[stardustpilgrim]

Thanks silver, I can't wait for that movie to get made, watched the proof of concept. The only true philosophical question is from Camus, I read that in my 20's. Ya know, Camus got me a B in 11th grade. Short version, I had gotten an A on my first paper in English, only a couple of us. The teacher said we few could give an oral presentation, only to her, not the whole class, for the second paper instead of actually writing out the paper. I was all for that, being pretty lazy and all. This some kind of administer dude was in class one day observing, I don't remember his title, I think I recall his name to be Mr. McGraw. Well, we were having discussion in class on some subject, I don't remember what. I said something, don't remember what it was, but Mr. McGraw said, That sounds like something an Existentialist would say. And that was that, I had never heard of an Existentialist. But later, teacher (I don't recall her name, I need to look both of them up in my year book), said, why don't you do your talk on Existentialism? I said OK, sure, and started research. I think I had to do ten minutes, which is actually a very long time, a lot of research. Well, I discovered this Camus dude, and found out his most famous book was that book The Stranger (this would have been 1968), but you know, lazy me didn't read the book. Well, time came for the oral giving, and my teacher said, I hope you don't mind but I've invited another teacher, it was a lady-teacher. I said, no, that's OK, sure. But inside I was really going, &^#*%...*&^%*$#*, but what the hey... I did OK, made my ten minutes. They had a couple of questions. I don't remember a lot, but I remember, from then, the gist of Existentialism is choice, life is choice. So one of the questions by the teacher was, what if you don't choose? Well, I was loaded for that one :-). Without skipping a beat, I said, then you have chosen not to choose (that wasn't original, from research). Oh, a few extra neurons just got to firing, Mr. McGraw had suggested the book The Stranger. All over, done, Mrs. _____ asked if I had read the book The Stranger. Said no. She said, you get a B, if you had read the book I would give you an A. So that's how Camus got me a B in English . (I still have never read the book, read a couple of pages once, it's on my list, I'm sure I won't get to it). Incidentally, Camus died in a car accident, a shame.

I've written about, several times here, I faced Camus' ultimate philosophical question in 1975, and 1976 (and to a lesser extent in 1983, and to some extent in 1995), ya know, life just kicking the sh!t out of you. From 1976 to 1995 suicide had been my ace up the sleeve, you don't have to check out yet, if sh!t gets really bad, there's always that ace. Well, in 1995 I tore that ace up, figured, OK, I'm in this for the long haul. I think it was later I found out I was an ex-suicide. I found this Walker Percy quote (I think it came from Lost in the Cosmos, the Last Self Help Book You Will Ever Need, bla, bla, bla, it actually had a very long subtitle, so I won't give the whole title, it's actually a pretty good popular philosophical work, unlike Message in a Bottle and Signposts in a Strange Land, which are not popular, plus five philosophical novels, good, but also not popular, The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in 1962 without having been nominated) who himself was an ex-suicide (genetically predisposed to it, depression, both his father and grandfather had killed themselves). The ex-suicide wakes up, gets up, gets ready, takes a walk out and sits on his front porch for a while, then goes to work, because he doesn't have to. Incidentally, I discovered Percy in 1979, he got me into Kierkegaard, who was pretty-much Percy's model for writing.

I know why Robin Williams killed himself in the manner he did, knew immediately. My last battle in 1995, I contemplated the very same. I used to be a tree climber way back, still had my rope. I was going to hang myself from our basement open joist, a little less than 8', just hang there so anybody could see that I could have just stood up if I had changed my mind.

Dark comedy indeed, nope, can't wait. (OK, I'm sure there's only two people on this forum who will read all of that, but that's OK).....no, that's not correct, I'm only sure there's two people on this forum who will read all of that...

[stardustpilgrim]

Thanks silver.

[kiwilove]

I did take a couple of Film Studies papers at University. The Lecturer always said that everything in the movie was a construct - that it's always up to the filmmaker(s) exactly what they want to show and present, etc etc. Even documentaries are exactly the same.
While I've always been a consumer of movies as such throughout my life - it's become clearer and clearer in the last 10 years or so - I'm growing tired fast of the same old, same old dumbness that's displayed in a lot of movies - Hollywood especially.
You can't expect a lot of violent movies made - to have no reprocussions - ie. cause and effect comes into play. It's no wonder that someone would choose a Batman movie to go on a gun rampage on the unsuspecting audience. Sure, the guy was 'high' on something. But it's no wonder someone decides to act out a scene in The Matrix, using his classmates as being the targets in a shooting free for all.
It's as much as life imitates art, and art imitating life.
Should we then have a whole lot of family styled movies in which there is no violence - thst would help make this world not so focused on violence, etc.

I think it's more the case that ordinary people just want ordinary life and living - without violence, drama and so on. Meaning a rather boring and uneventful life - which makes for a very dull movie.

I like to see movies as such in the mainstream - which you'll have anti-heroes - who use anti-violence, who will always choose run and flee, instead of fighting and conflict.
It is an important lesson to talk it through, and avoid violence, leading to murder. To settle disagreements through understanding.