Posts by Duff-e

I've heard many people make the same argument about Citizen Kane...that it completely changed the format of motion picture and introduced new techniques but that at this point to anyone who has been to the movies all their life it can only be boring and cliche. I can understand that. It makes you wonder how much of history is "right place, right time" vs inevitable technical advancement. Or if even such a distinction can be made or is worth making.

Well why does high production value = not cheap looking? Like I said, it could be a plate of beans type thing where you have the director moving a slider 1 inch to the left and 1 inch the the right on all the settings for 10 days only to set it back to default and hear him scream out "PERFECT!!!!!"

Sorry to be a dick I'm just playing devils advocate

Just as an example, maybe you saw chunking express? That's a pretty critically acclaimed foreign film. I think it's ugly, slow and boring. It looks like it was shot by someone who got a camcorder for christmas. You could say "but that's the genius! It's so raw!" in the same sense that you could say Kubrick made the lights artifical (which in normal practice would probably be the opposite of what a director would go for). My argument is that just doing something different doesn't warrant acclaim, it needs to work with the medium and the story, not the directors vanity.

Steppenwolf, just because Kubrick had a concept he was going after with clearly defined techniques doesn't necessarily mean the finished product is an automatic success. I personally think the lighting is fine and if the reason for it was extensive planning then so be it but someone else who doesn't like it could easily say it's a case of over-thinking a plate of beans.

I believe in any art medium it's on the artist to make sure the viewer sees his creative genius. Art is a failure if it requires anything beyond the expectations of the basic senses. If an artist does his job you shouldn't have to sit through a film putting yourself in the position of the editor, director, cinematographer, lighting engineer, and so on to appreciate it fully. The same goes for art that requires obscure knowledge of a historical period or creative "shout outs" that are supposed to be appreciated instead of the merits of the art on its own. What I think IS an acceptable suggestion for Eyes Wide Shut is that it was a personal film for Kubrick and Kubrick enthusiasts. It wasn't meant to be appreciated on a wide scale. At least with this explanation you can understand the acclaim within the context of his oeuvre and the disinterest from the general public. It's condescending to just imply "you don't GET it."

edit - I just wanted to add that you might say "well, say the director does appeal to the basic senses, it will be cheesy and hackneyed and obvious like a transformers film for example." That's not true. What makes a great director is taking 30 people into a room to watch a film and trying to get an emotion from as many of them as possible. Don't ask me how this is done, if I knew that I'd start making films tomorrow, but that's the point, that's the skill. Off the top of my head a good example might be Jaws when it first opened. Beyond that it's not even about getting the same reaction from everyone...the BEST OF THE BEST can create an emotional experience that means something completely different to every individual person in the audience.

Lets not forget the horrible indoor replica NYC sets

dux answer my damn question in EOT you bastard!

eyes wide shut is good for a couple things

1. the ritual scenes in the temple thing are pretty boss (also, yay bewbs)

2. nicole kidman getting high with tom cruise wearing a slip

I find something irresistibly attractive about Nicole Kidman that I can't describe. She's such a woman that I would feel inferior being near her without 2 years of bodybuilding and a shoulder length blonde wig (think Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall). Australian actresses are always so confident and it makes them ridiculously sexy.

Also: If you watch the following video at least half way you will automatically become an American citizen.

(high volume is recommended but required for Steppenwolf)

I hear in Paris they have a theater that plays Easy Rider all year round. A fine choice.

Quote from Sentura

with the exception of ayn rand's birthplace

/me strokes beard and connects the dots...

This is one of the few times in life I envy quad amputees...and little people....quad amputee little people

San Francisco:

[Blocked Image: http://ryanhellyer.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/me-on-the-steepest-street-in-san-francisco.jpg]

but....but.....what about....duff-e

nope daano I haven't but I'll add it to the list. most of the Russian stuff I've read so far is Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Nabokov

edit: I just checked online and you can read the whole Oblomov on google books

http://books.google.com/books?id=UZJgAA ... CBoQ6wEwAw

Oh Steppenwolf I know that Faust is worthy of all the merits it's given. I don't claim to understand them all but I've read about the philosophy behind it and everything beyond that. What I was trying to say is that in the conversations where "Faust" or "Faustian" came up it was clearly just a stand in for the expression "making a deal with the devil." From my experience this is the extent to which your average person in the U.S. comprehends Faust. I'm not implying that we're stupid, I'm just agreeing with you that a lot of the subtlety that makes it a classic for native German speakers is lost on others.

Well Faust is on my list of things to read and I can't read German so I'll let you know when I get there

When people speak about the german literature you mentioned above it usually is in some kind of metaphorical abstraction. For example the entire play or book will be condensed into a single theme and that theme is what you're referring to when you say something like "Faustian." Of course it varies but for your normal college educated layman this is what I most often see.

Do people in Germany read translated works of Shakespeare? To me that sounds as ridiculous as translating Goethe sounds to you. But then in that same respect the Italians probably think we're wasting our time reading a translated version of Dante's Inferno.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not warby :x

What makes an author talented and a book exceptional is GETTING "emulation of thought through a semantic." I've heard many great authors say that the novel in their head is much better than the one they manage to get down on paper. For better or worse, language is how we communicate. I could say that in my head I have devised the greatest story ever created, but that doesn't do anyone much good. For this reason new technology is being created all the time the enhances the way we communicate (music, film, video games).

It's similar to why a program might be written in C instead of binary. You sacrifice some efficiency (requiring better hardware) for the ability to express yourself (not taking 2 days to write a program that converts Fahrenheit to Celsius).

Being inspired by a translated novel is a testament to the greatness of the work, especially if it's translated by someone other than the original author. It's like breaking down Michelangelo's David into fist sized rocks, sweeping them into a pile and having people still look at them in awe.

thanks for answering

I was reading The Brothers Karamazov when I thought of the question. I really enjoy Russian literature for some reason but I realize much is probably lost in translation. Odds are I'll never learn to read Cyrillic so some of the most clever and witty lines will forever go over my head

Are you comfortable reading English? As comfortable as your native language? Your national newspapers are in your native language, correct? Are most people you know this way and it doesn't bother them?

I know mapcore is a pretty international forum so I figured it would be a good place for this question.

What language do you read your books in? I've noticed in the "purchased" thread a lot of you buying english language books. In your home country do most people read in english or only mass market type stuff? If you have the choice which language would you read in? What kind of books are available in your native language?

I know this varies widely depending on country but plz educate me. Any other book/language related tidbits welcome (cost discrepancy for example)

Barry Lyndon has a very comfortable feel to it. It unfolds so gradually it's like watching a book.

Unrelated but very sad:

word on the street is dennis hopper, who has been on his death bed from prostate cancer for the past couple weeks is probably going to die soon. very sad, probably my favorite actor. he had a very interesting life.

In his honor you should check out a few of his great films:

Easy Rider

Apocalypse Now

Blue Velvet (especially)

super mario brothers (if you dare)

speed (POP QUIZ, HOT SHOT)

I don't agree with the following quote at all but appreciate its well thought out point of view

Quote

Okay, so I finally saw this movie. I've also seen Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, At Play in the Field of the Lord, Gulf War I and II and many other films/media versions of reality that are tossed around as the original "going native"/exploitation of aboriginals stories.

Everyone who says that Avatar rips these off is wrong. Avatar, and James Cameron in particular, is brilliant.

Avatar strips bare the archetype that all these other films are built around. More precisely it strips away all the equivocation and ambiguity of context and bias that any discussion of analysis of those films is plagued of. All of these other films, like Pocahontas, DWW, or even the Iraq War, are clouded by their historical context. We are the product of the trouncing of the natives. The food we eat comes from land stolen or cheated from the Native Americans. We are the people who killed the natives sitting on the shit we wanted. So all of the earlier films of this archetype we're subject to the criticism that, while what was done back then was bad, the product of it, us, is good. Therefore, the criticism goes, those films are biased because they don't present the good that came out of it. This is the entire basis of conservative criticism of film.

Furthermore, we implicity believe that science = good and religions other than today's mainline established ones are backward or pagan, which = bad. So the natives had to be civilized and brought forward into the present out of the past, and anyone that fought back wasn't fighting only the invader, they were fighting civilization, science and progress itself.

What Cameron has done in Avatar is constructed a story in which none of that equivocation is possible. It's set in the future, so it's about where we are going, not who gave us the world we have today. So he present a choice for the audience - nothing on the screen is you or your ancestors, it is about who you want to become, where you want society to go.

Cameron executes this brilliantly. Yes, the plot is completely predictable, not because you've seen it before, because you actually haven't. Avatar differs from the plot of every single one of those archetypical films in one extremely important way - the forces of civilization/progress/technology lose. The backdrop of Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves is that history tells us the natives lost and progress won - we are here today, aren't we, so we must have won. Whatever moral high ground the natives had was rolled over by the inexorable advance of progress. The Lakotas were a good and noble people. Too bad the U.S. Army kicked their asses anyway. Pocahontas's land is now our land. The Indians gave us corn, and we gave it to Monsanto to genetically re-engineer and poison us as HFCS. Civilization has perfected its title to the native lands.

So Avatar is the first of these kinds of films to make it clear that the people who represent us as we live today are the losers. But the reason everyone thinks the plot is totally predicatable is not because they've seen it before, but because simply by beginning with the premise that Pandora has a mineral that earth desperately needs, we already know how its going to play out, because that's the history of our civilization.

You're correct in pointing out that "unobtanium" is a macguffin, but Cameron wants us to know that he knows that. That's why he picked the name. He picked the name "unobtainium" to tells us that the "thing" we want could be anything we can't already get, He also wants us to know it will always be something. Once a long time ago it was salt. Than it was gold, metals, spices, trade routes, higher ground, clean water, warm water ports, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, a place in the sun, etc.

Jake says as much on page 103 of the script: "When people are sitting on shit you want, you make them your enemy. Then you’re justified in taking it." That's the history of the world.

What unobtainium is is unimportant in the film. Unobtainium gets less screen time than than those corkscrew plants or that giant rhino hippo thing. All we need to know is that it's something that we can't get and it's worth a lot of money. Cameron doesn't bother to explain any more because he understands that audience knows implicitly that because we can't get it we will take it. This is brilliant economy of story telling. It's like putting a black hat on the bad guy. You don't waste any screen time explaining human's motivation on Pandora if the audience walked into the theater already knowing it like it was a universal truth.

Furthermore, Cameron constructed Navi culture to be completely reality-based. The glowing tree and the interconnectedness of all things is not their quaint unenlightened religion. It's an actual, real, objectively verifiable physical thing. Grace says, "I’m talking about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest...It’s a network -- a

global network. And the Na’vi can access it -- they can upload and download data -- memories." In other words, the pinnacle of our civilization and our history, the global communications network called the internet, grows naturally on Pandora. They didn't need to learn about mining, semiconductors, Maxwell's equations or the like, because what we managed to do with that they had already.

But it's not a function of religion, it's a biological fact. So who is more quaint, humans with their unprovable religions that they ignore when it's convenient or the Na'vi personifying the very real giant neural network that constitutes their whole world?

So Cameron has eliminated the casting of the Na'vi as being in need of civilization. They don't need it, they don't want it, and what they already naturally have is in many respects better. So the audience now understands that it isn't simply - stubbornness of fear of change underlying Na'vi rejection of humans gifts to them. It's that the Na'vi simply don't need what the humans are offering.

Finally, Cameron does one more to neutralize the typical criticism of this genre (the "going native" genre, not sci fi) - he casts military training in a positive light. Jake, we are told, is a marine, the first to control an avatar. And all of his achievements are couched as a product of him being a trained marine. He gets lost in the forest, and no one expects him to survive. But he is shown, fashioning a spear, using the local flora to improvise a torch and survive. As Jake says in a voice-over "But there was only one thing I was ever really good at. Ooh-rah."

Cameron shows us that military people are highly capable, adaptable, efficient, and very often moral. There is no negative portrayal of the military (another common conservative critique). There is a very negative portrayal of Blackwater/Xe-esque corporate mercenaries, however. But Cameron is not allowing the audience to use ambiguity in the story to conflate the two.

I could go on much longer - I love that the script is available because there is so much to dig into. But in the end, I think Cameron's film is brilliant because he recasts the archetypical film about the conflict between civilization and the natives into a question for the audience. Who do we want to become? What and how much are we willing to destroy in ourselves and others to get the things we want in a n effort to preserve this imperfect world.

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