The Official Movie Thread

have the Expendables 2 on bluray, waiting for the right time to watch it with my brother and a couple other friends.
watched Underworld Awakening last week. the Underworld movies make me happy. Hope they keep making them.
 
Krigloch the Furious said:
have the Expendables 2 on bluray, waiting for the right time to watch it with my brother and a couple other friends.
watched Underworld Awakening last week. the Underworld movies make me happy. Hope they keep making them.
Click to expand...

expendables 2 = the first expendables movie

Underworld Movies >>>>>> The Hobbit
 
Looking forward to Man of Steel. I've always liked Superman better than Batman. Don't get me wrong, the new Batman movies were pretty great, but a Superman movie with the Batman director involved in the story? Should be badass....
 
I just watched Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and...

SPOILER

Read this review afterwards, holy fuck


...I'm haunted by it. What makes it so fucked up, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassemble process of its own damn mind. Its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—"I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid"—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
 
Jimmy... Dead. said:
I just watched Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and...

SPOILER

Read this review afterwards, holy fuck


...I'm haunted by it. What makes it so fucked up, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassemble process of its own damn mind. Its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—"I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid"—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Click to expand...

It's an existentially terrifying film. Thinking of it in light of this quote from Nick Land makes it all the more terrifying:

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to ground zero. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of [techno-]capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

Thus the entire linear track of that film: from prehistory, to the advent of technological resources (i.e. the bone-tool as a kind of originary technological development), to the future's comfortable assurance of technological resources (HAL and the robotic, mechanical environment that you identified) that also results in a certain dehumanizing alienation. Of course, there's also a certain mystical element to Kubrick's and Clarke's vision that I don't quite buy into, and that's the whole "starchild" concept. The promises of techno-capitalism may seem unlimited, but the true infinite is the finale segment ("Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite"). It's a quasi-spiritual component that doesn't do much for me, although the special effects are incredible for the 1960s.

For a more interesting and less optimistic/anthropocentric version of this mystical direction, you should totally check out Tarkovsky's Solaris; the original book by Stanislaw Lem is fantastic also. It posits a kind of complicated intelligence that exceeds the ability of human comprehension (as does the alien essence of 2001, and the intelligence of HAL to an extent); but it doesn't suggest that it is concerned with human beings in any way, as the aliens from 2001 are.
 
Great insight.

I honestly could not believe I made it through the entire movie. I was inspired to watch it after I watched Melancholia and Tree of life. Someone told me it would blow those movies away. They were right.

I liked Solaris too. IMO the Lost series was very well positioned to echo the ending of Solaris, I was disappointed.
 
Yeah, Tree of Life was disappointing; visually stunning in certain parts, but a weak narrative. I know it aspires to the level of "art film" or whatever people want to call it; but it doesn't match the same intellectual plane, in my opinion. You can have gorgeous shots of landscapes and the cosmos all you want, but it doesn't make up for poor concept.

I do like Melancholia. Very depressing film, but it really takes anti-humanism in cinema to a new level; and it's also visually impressive.

Still, my favorite recent film in this "anti-humanist" trend is Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter.

@Jimmy: interesting thought on Lost; I never considered it in that way. I knew they were going to do the cheesy uplifting conclusion though, it seemed pretty obvious halfway through the final season.
 
I only saw it once, and I'd like to see it again before forming a definitive opinion; but my first impression was that it didn't handle its subject matter as effectively as I wished it had. I loved seeing Mortensen as Freud and Fassbender as Jung, and I think they did a great job; but their dialogue, and the topics addressed by the script, barely scratched the surface of the psychoanalytic discourse that went on between them. Furthermore, it stereotyped in a negative way (i.e. when Freud casually remarks "Have you considered the log might stand for the penis?" or something like that; far too reductive).

I think Cronenberg thought that the psychoanalytic scene was a good locale in which to explore his obsession with psycho-sexual violence; but I don't think he contributed anything interesting to the psychoanalytic tradition, and not much else either. It was a mildly entertaining film, I thought.

Keira Knightley with a Russian accent also didn't do it for me.
 
Yea, I thought it was much too short. They should have considered a 3 part or maybe a series on HBO or something.

Another movie I really need to watch is The Fountain. It looks really well done.
 
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