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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Blade Runner
"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."
"Blade Runner: The Final Cut," is the first version of the movie that truly seems like a finished product. The film is a few minutes longer, yet seems leaner, with a tighter narrative that is now worthy of the outstanding art direction and cinematography. This definitive print should be the last push that "Blade Runner" needs to complete its 25-year journey from box office failure to cult favorite to full-blown classic.
From the beginning, the movie was controversial. Filmmakers willing to butcher Philip K. Dick stories have become as commonplace in Hollywood as collagen injections, but the maverick Scott was the first high-profile scavenger of the author's work. The "Blade Runner" screenwriters took little more than the main character and key concepts of Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," and added their own twists and turns.
Ford's narration is so dopey and lackluster in the original "Blade Runner" that you can almost imagine producers pointing a gun to his head. That happy ending looked as if it came from another movie, which it did. (For the final scene, Warner Bros. borrowed an aerial shot from Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," which had come out two years earlier.) And while the so-called director's cut from 1992 left the question of Deckard's humanity a matter of debate, "The Final Cut" makes it much more clear, injecting a short dream sequence that suddenly makes Edward James Olmos' origami hobby much more significant.
Other scenes are added and extended as well, although the next best reason to see the "Final Cut" is the tuned-up special effects, which give the film a nice 21st century sheen. The director restores the film's brutal violence, including important scenes of savagery from the Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer replicant characters, Pris and Roy Batty. Their capacity for cruelty is particularly important to see, contrasting with Batty's contemplative final scenes in the movie.
The movie has aged exceptionally well. Part of this has to do with the time: In a world filled with filmmakers such as Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams, a science fiction film-noir cop thriller doesn't seem anywhere near as unusual or misguided as it did in 1982.
Much of the credit goes to director Scott, who took the opportunity to give "Blade Runner" the topiary treatment one last time, and turned his already great film into a masterpiece.
This film contains - language, nudity and violence, plus a tortoise lying on its back, with its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs to turn over, but it can't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=a_saUN4j7Gw
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Gal
Trad climber
a semi lucid consciousness
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Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest.
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Lennox
climber
just southwest of the center of the universe
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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Nov 13, 2011 - 01:45pm PT
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amarcord - federico fellini
a moving
portrait.
don't
blink.
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S.Leeper
Sport climber
Pflugerville, Texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 14, 2011 - 07:05pm PT
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Just watched Gandhi.
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Phil_B
Social climber
Hercules, CA
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Nov 14, 2011 - 08:11pm PT
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The Red Violin
Quite interesting.
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dee ee
Mountain climber
citizen of planet Earth
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Nov 15, 2011 - 11:13am PT
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To Have and Have Not- Bogart, Bacall, Brennan
classic
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 16, 2011 - 02:46pm PT
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Cold Lazarus "is set in the 24th century, in a dystopian Britain where the ruined streets are unsafe, and where society is run by American oligarchs in charge of powerful commercial corporations. Experiences are almost all virtual, and anything deemed authentic (such as coffee and cigarettes) has either been banned or replaced by synthetic substitutes.
At a cryogenic research institute in London, funded by a pharmaceuticals tycoon, a group of scientists is working on reviving the mind of the 20th century writer Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney). His brain is kept in a dull glass bell. Unable to see any profit in the project, they consider discontinuing it, but a media mogul envisages making a fortune from broadcasting Feeld’s memories on TV, and proposes to the team that they work for him.
The leader of the team is unaware that a member of her team is a member of the resistance group RON (‘Reality Or Nothing’), which attempts to undermine the reliance of society upon advanced technology. The team member approves of the broadcast of Feeld’s memories, which he believes might provoke a revolt against the ‘inauthentic’ life propagated by the authorities.
As more of Feeld’s thoughts and memories are unearthed, it becomes evident not only that Feeld’s mind is conscious of its predicament, but also that Feeld is attempting to communicate with the scientists, and is pleading to be allowed to die. He is suffering. At this point the team begin to doubt the morality of their project. The RON team member is by one of the other team members denounced as a RON member and saboteur. Having been warned, he heads for the laboratory to put Feeld out of his misery....."
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 19, 2011 - 12:24pm PT
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David Barison, Daniel Ross - The Ister (2004) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gvCRxni5bkg
The Ister (The Danube river)
"In his "Phaedrus," Plato records the myth of Theuth, or Thoth, the god whom the Egyptians credited with the invention of writing. Theuth urged Thamus, the king of Egypt, to teach his people how to write, claiming: "Here is an accomplishment, my lord the king, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians." But Thamus turned this boast on its head: "You who are the father of writing," he insisted, "have out of fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. ... And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality; they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant."
Plato's myth of Theuth offers a perfect route into the questions raised by "The Ister." For the major subject of the film is the power and danger of technology, of which Theuth, like the Greek Hermes, was the patron deity. And the filmmakers' major interlocutor, the philosopher around whom the film cautiously circles, is Martin Heidegger, whose suspicion of technology went hand in hand with a powerful challenge to conventional ways of writing and talking about ideas.
The film takes its name from a poem by Friedrich Holderlin, the late-18thcentury German Romantic, whose hymn to the Danube River called it by its ancient Greek name, "the Ister." More specifically, the film is inspired by a lecture course on "The Ister" that Heidegger gave in 1942, one of many he devoted to Holderlin's poetry. The formal structure of the film is simple but fertile: Camera in hand, Messrs. Ross and Barison (who never appear onscreen) follow the course of the Danube, from its mouth on the Black Sea back to its source in Germany.
Their travelogue pays careful atten tion to the bridges and ships and cities they discover along the way, thus providing an illustration of Heidegger's major theme - man's imposition on Nature, in all its destructive necessity. Messrs. Ross and Barison produce several lovely tableaux - of rivers, mountains, forests - but the visual strength of the film lies not in beauty but in clever juxtaposition.
In Romania the filmmakers visit the ruins of the bridge across which Trajan's armies marched into Dacia; in Yugoslavia they show the bridge at Novi Sad, destroyed by the NATO bombing campaign in 1999; in Hungary, they find a bridge at Dunafoldvar which was attacked by the invading Soviets in 1956. Over the course of the film, and with very little nudging by the filmmakers, the figure of the bridge comes to bear the full weight of Heidegger's critique of technology: As a human intervention into Nature, it is both essential to life and bound up with violence and death.
The bridges on the Danube are products of what Heidegger, in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology," called "enframing" - a way of thinking that makes Nature subordinate to human ends. In that essay, Heidegger showed how his thought about technology relates to his thought about poetry, and specifically the poetry of Holderlin. Taking up another one of the poet's river-odes, "The Rhine," Heidegger contrasts "'The Rhine,' as dammed up into the power works, and 'The Rhine,' as uttered by the artwork, in the Holderlin's hymn of that name." The contrast speaks volumes about Heidegger's sense of the betrayal of Nature - its reticence and mystery, the essential Being that Holderlin invokes - by technology, which turns it into merely an exploitable resource.
To the great credit of Messrs. Ross and Barison, however, they do not stop at simply illustrating Heidegger's thought; they allow it to be challenged, trusting the viewer to take part in a series of complex philosophical debates. These are expounded in the interviews that make up the intellectual pith of "The Ister," a series of talks with three French philosophers - Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. (There is also an interview, much less compelling, with the pompous filmmaker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg.) Editing their questions out almost completely, Messrs. Ross and Barison allow these thinkers to elaborate on their own disagreements with Heidegger's views on technology - disagreements that spring from a fundamental indebtedness and respect. Thanks to the informality of the settings - we see Mr. Stiegler quieting his dog and blowing out candles at his birthday party - the men become more than talking heads; we take in some of their eccentricities along with their ideas.
As the filmmakers' itinerary reaches Germany, "The Ister" turns to confront another, more controversial aspect of Heidegger: his embrace of Nazism, and his seeming refusal, even after the war, to acknowledge the magnitude of its evil. His lecture on the Holderlin poem, after all, took place at the height of the Nazi period and contained admiring references to "National Socialism and its historical uniqueness." Mr. Lacoue-Labarthe devotes most of his screen time to explaining Heidegger's infamous equation of the concentration camps with "motorized agriculture," and elaborates a powerful critique of Heidegger's view of history. And Mr. Stiegler, the most charismatic figure in the film, convincingly challenges Heidegger's bleak view of technology, arguing that were it not for technology - above all, that of writing - we could not live historically at all.
This lesson, too, is implicit in Holderlin's poetry; as he writes in "The Ister":
But the rock needs incisions
And the earth needs furrows,
Would be desolate else, unabiding.
"The Ister," then, not only contains a humanistic defense of technology; it is itself part of that defense, using one of the newest media to address some of the most ancient questions. The film cannot by itself serve as an introduction to Heidegger's thought, and much is inevitably simplified and taken for granted. To fully appreciate what Messrs. Ross and Barison are up to, it is helpful to have already spent some time with Heidegger's work. But the fact that it could be made, and even distributed, is heartening testimony to the potential of a usually barren medium.""
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S.Leeper
Sport climber
Pflugerville, Texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 23, 2011 - 10:51pm PT
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Just saw "In a better world"
What a fabulous movie!
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 24, 2011 - 02:41am PT
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Barely halfway through the Showtime series "The Tudors". Pretty accurate and
well acted. That ol' 'enry should o' been named Randy.
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Batrock
Trad climber
Burbank
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Nov 24, 2011 - 03:01am PT
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Antiques Roadshow
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Ihateplastic
Trad climber
It ain't El Cap, Oregon
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Nov 24, 2011 - 03:23am PT
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Last night we went wholesome... Monte Carlo with Selena Gomez. If you want something young girls can enjoy with their family, this ill do it.
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DionFernandez
climber
Hazlet, NJ
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Nov 24, 2011 - 07:38am PT
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I've just recorder Time with Justin Timberlake from an online web page using free screen recorder http://freescreenrecorder.net/ so I'm watching this movie and I must say I really like it so far.
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sandstone conglomerate
climber
sharon conglomerate central
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Nov 24, 2011 - 08:31am PT
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oh, geez, Fargo...an oldie but goodie, oh ya?
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Nov 24, 2011 - 03:59pm PT
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girl with the dragon tatoo, the swedish version
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