"Accept me as I am. Only then can we discover each other."
Another great old foreign movie, this one is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made, and I agree. After watching this, the similarities between this and Adaptation are insane. 8 1/2 was basically an autobiography of Federico Fellini, the director, and Adaptation was basically an autobiography of Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter. Each movie mixed together the past, present, and fantasy seamlessly and dealt with their shortcomings as human beings and their regrets, of course both ending with a revelatory message as how to come to terms with themselves and live a fulfilling life.
This is one of the few movies that stands the test of time, I think it will forever be applicable to whoever watches it. But, it is a poetic movie, and as Tarkovsky said, "the film for the large audience cannot be poetical", so only if your artsy fartsy in the least bit should you try watching this movie(or Solaris).
In closing, heres a creepy clip of a midget laughing maniacally for 3 minutes, and a great scene from the movie "Oldboy" demonstrating the sculpting in time theory.
"We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man!"
A while ago I made a list of my top ten sci-fi movies, one of them was the american version of Solaris. I said I never watched the original version because it looked like a boring 60s experimental movie. But then I learned of Andrei Tarkovsky's genius, and decided to see what his movies are like. This movie is a near masterpiece, and among the greatest movies made, making the american remake look superfluous and shallow.
What this movie does so well and so poetically, is present such themes as the inadequacies of human kind to comprehend the universe or the heart...human fraility, through its fundamental weaknesses of sentimentality and guilt...dependency. The alien in this movie is a planet comprised entirely of water, with which the humans try to communicate with. The planet, which is basically a perfect entity, tries to communicate with the humans by materializing people or things from the humans' memories or fantasies, in an attempt to understand them better. For the main character, it was his deceased wife. There is so much that could be said about this movie, perhaps another time I will exercise my philosophical thoughts in another post, but not this one, maybe never...as its better to destroy whats unnecessary than to create it, does it really matter what any of us has to say? Man generally writes to affirm his existence, to feel of some worth.
I would like to point out a cinematic theory that I love, that Tarkovsky created. He created the theory known as "sculpting in time", using long takes and few cuts to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another. I think, a movie like Children of Men is probably a good contemporary example of this idea(from my understanding of it), where there were several great long sequences with minimal or no cuts - the first car chase where Julianne Moore gets shot, Clive Owen escaping the safe house with the pregnant girl, just about the entire final 20 minutes in the refugee city. A long uncut sequence in a movie is more memorable than any other technique, in my opinion...leaves a more lasting impression as it is transcribes time in real time. It is this unique trait of the cinematic medium that should be better utilized. "The speedy jump-cutting style that is prevalent in music videos and many Hollywood movies, by contrast, overrides any sense of time by imposing the editor's viewpoint." Some music videos that I love that follow this theory are below, 2 for radiohead songs, the other for the old 90s band Wax, directed by the great spike jonez(Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine on the spotless mind).
So I had to make this a separate post because I have a nice little series of screen shots that will depict, in a different way, the destructiveness of the weapons.
So this is the map at the start, still with 10 players, again thats me in the white circle:
This next one shows all the missiles, in flight. It's hard to see, but I just launched the most destructive nuclear warhead in the game at that little city:
This is the resulting mushroom cloud from said nuclear device:
This is the final aftermath of everything, only the huge, water-filled crater is the result of my nuke, the other smaller crater was caused by the United Kingdom:
So I've been playing a lot of this simple little game called Scorched3D. It's free for any OS and has some pretty incredible graphics made entirely out of OpenGL. So I took some screen shots of the game in action.
Here is a snapshot of the land as it started...before I used the most devastating weapon in the game. Thats me in the middle with the big, white circle around me.
Here is the same piece of land after I used the weapon called Dr. Strangelove. If you look carefully you can see the tiny strip of land that was left in left corner area. There were originally 10 players, 9 bots plus me, afterwards there were only two.
I'm never buying a baked good from 7 11 ever again. I wish I lived in NYC, they have great bakeries and delis everywhere. What made it so terrible was that it was missing a very important mixture of abstract ingredients, that mixture being a lil TLC+G, tender lovin' care + gluttony. 7-11 brownies only had the abstract ingredient of gluttony, thus making it suitable only for gluttonous coach potatoes whose most thrilling conversations involve daytime talk shows and what crazy things they say they're gonna do this weekend but never actually do em.
Now, the way brownies are to be made is with love and special attention paid to each individual ingredient and its mixture with the other ingredients. As you prepare the brownies you want to have constantly on your mind how you are going to overindulge each and every single bite with some milk, until half the pan is gone in a single sitting, hence the +G part. 7-11 is evil, their brownies are like something you'd see in the Matrix, except of instead of tricking your senses into thinking their the orgasmically delicious brownies you always dreamed about, they still just taste like slightly dry brownies that were poorly made by a disgruntled baker whose dreams of owning his own bakery shop named "Le C'etat Baker" on a cobblestone street in Paris never came true, and is now stuck with a nagging whale of a wife and two ungrateful bratty kids that suck at life and bring no hope or pride to the family.
Just a perfect day, Problems all left alone, Weekenders on our own. It's such fun. Just a perfect day, You made me forget myself. I thought I was someone else, Someone good.
Oh it's such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you. Oh such a perfect day, You just keep me hanging on, You just keep me hanging on.
Perfect Day - Lou Reed
I just wanna say, it sucks having such strong feelings for someone you knew so briefly, and lives on the other side of the world. What makes it suck even more, is our different schedules. When I'm busy and not able to write to her for a while is when shes got a lot of free time and thus thinks I've forgotten her...and when I've got a lot of free time and wanting letters from her is when shes busy with stuff and makes me think shes moved on. Basically, we never feel like we truly know what the other is thinking and feeling towards the other. We both realize a lot can change in a years time(but does true love ever change?), and leaves us questioning the others love. Being mildly sufficient in each others language doesn't help much either. It wasn't a problem when we were together, cause words aren't necessary in the language of love, mhm baby thats right. Thats all for now.
On a different note, I was informed today that its possible to go snowboarding/skiing at Liberty for just 20 bucks on wednesdays from 5 to 10pm. So, LETS DO ITTTTTTTTT..seriously..I'm going next wednseday for sure so tag along people.
And heres a couple techno videos, the first a benny benassi song(obviously due to the same beat he uses in half his songs) and the other a very seductive song by Chicane, its like a technofied enya song, which is pretty incredibly ultra awesome in my book. The video aint too great tho.
It's that time again for a macabre post of music videos. I'll start this one of with a little Billy Joel, I've never actually seen the video for Piano Man.
Now we're gonna switch it up with some Iron Man by Black Sabbath...mostly because this song is awesome to play on guitar hero. Okay so this music video isn't as good as the recording or the guitar hero version but it's still going up.
This music video to Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden is pretty weird but I like the song a lot.
Wow, Dream On by Aerosmith with some orchestral accompaniment. And lighters. Lots of lighters. And a gong
Ive come to the conclusion that if I wasn't raised the way I was raised, I'd be a drug addict at this point in my life. Why do I say this? Because how many people work out hardcore while listening to "riders of the storm" by the Doors, just to get that euphoric effect that happens immediately following an intense workout, and just lay on the floor vacantly staring at the ceiling, as Jim Morrison's voice takes me to another plane of existence. Oh my crap, I wonder what it'd be like, to keep everything the same, but next time, throw in a strobe light...So tonight I will see how the music of Massive Attack affects my adrenalin and if its conducive to the effects of when the endorphins hit.
This blog is just a collection of stuff we like, so we can find them easily at any time later on. This blog is also to serve as a "creative" writing outlet for us...any posts with the label "potdana project" means one of us gave the other a topic to write about, and the style in which they must adhere too. So, thats why theres random stories and lyrics and poems and whatever.
