Registered: Apr 2001
Location: 0.50
Posts: 9355

watched this last night. it was pretty great, really. started slow, but when the cloud images started i was caught up. the urban scenes were at times kind of shocking and other times kind of pretty. i didn't really get the "theme" of the thing as presented at the end (which i liked, as that way you aren't told what to think about it) from the images, though. what i saw was that people are animals, and that our constructs are extensions of that. that "society" is a part of a sort of planetary evolution, i mean we arose from the animals and our cities arose from us and now we kind of rush around like blood and proteins and junk in a giant machine doing our proscribed tasks to make the thing function. that sort of thing. that the things we see as making us "human" are incidental, art and music and personal expression (outside the extraordinary) have nothing to do with daily events. i mean, they might throw a person or two in a certain direction, but no more than a bit more salt than is normal affects the motion of a cell. and stuff.
that sounds a tad pessimistic, i guess, and i don't think that life is pointless (in a practical sense, i mean. i think life is good), but most things just don't matter. ghandi altered the course of human events, world politics alter the course of human events, but these things are often conditional, they're pushed into occurring by everything else occurring. very rarely is anything caused by an individual.
but i don't mean that individuality is pointless. just that it's insignificant. and...well, pointless. but not in a bad way. i've never thought of existentialism as a depressing concept. nihilism either. live to increase happiness.

i must say, though, the human condition is freaking me out today. i don't imagine that it's due to the movie exactly, but these people i am talking to are insane. and the churchy links fiasco was insane. people are freaking me out.

way to ramble, big guy. i'm not even sure that this belongs in SO anymore.

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: 0.50
Posts: 9355

or even that world politics and the "entire course of human events" doesn't affect LIFE as a whole. war in iraq didn't change anything i can see from an operational standpoint any more than stubbing your toe causes liver failure. though acupressurists may disagree.
what i mean is, no matter what we're going to buzz around and do our small parts to make the machine go. the machine changes, and so our jobs change. we don't need assembly-line workers in a car plant in the same way we don't need fur.
and so on. i have to eat lunch now, break is obviosuly necessary. hard to work in this frame of mind.

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Registered: Jun 2001
Location: finding the new flesh after killing the old one
Posts: 1978

I adore this movie ... hell bp I wish that you still had a pc .. i'd post you powaaqatsi the sequel ... I ripped it the other day ....

philip glass's soundtrakcs rip my stomach out in these movies too ..

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: 0.50
Posts: 9355

i'm going to rent that one on thursday, or the next day i get a chance to anyway. yeah, it was great. the images were just sort of a different perspective. not something you normally see.

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Registered: Apr 2003
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He's got his Third Film out this year.

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: the heart of an awl
Posts: 3691

they showed the new one in Salt Lake for one weekend and i missed it.

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Registered: Apr 2001
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watched the seond one yesterday. the guy seems to hate cities, which is understandable from the perspective he is presenting. seemed to re-humanize people, compared to how i saw the first one as showing people as machine components, but even then it looked to me that the people he was showing as happy and "down to earth" would acknowledge our position as animals on it (as most "primitive" cultures seem to do, anthropomorphising more than dehumanizing the other creatures and so claiming a kinship). as in the first film, the "message" at the end seemed more pessimistic than the images as i saw them, but it did get me to thinking:
we, as western culture, haven't really earned our spot at the top. we really do feed off of others to maintain our position of priviledge. i certainly don't earn my relative (to an indonesian villager, for example) affluence by my weak tech supporting (in anything other than a capitalist viewpoint, that being that i am earning this because people are willing to pay me for it, which is backward to me). of course, i'm a pretty prime candidate for being lured into the romanticism the director built around the country life.
made me want to live in india. pull a cart. or work on a dock somewhere. something honest.

Last edited by buddha's penis on 05-20-2003 at 10:55 PM

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Registered: Apr 2001
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also, it underlined my existing beliefs of race being bullshit. more genetic diversity within as opposed to between "racial groups", not to mention more genetic diversity between individual fruitflies than people. total garbage.
makes me wonder why people bother with generalizations at all.

ps. this is a movie thread.

Last edited by buddha's penis on 05-20-2003 at 10:53 PM

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Registered: Aug 2000
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i still liked the first one better.

burning spaceships rock rock rock.

and no, our western society isn't really sustainable without having an outgroup to exploit. Production specialization by geographic region has nullified historically self-sufficient areas.

as long as i can shit in a toilet though, instead of a pit in a forest, it's all good.

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Registered: Apr 2001
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fuck that, i'd totally shit ALL OVER a forest.
i liked the first one better also. the images were more abstract, sort of. both started off super-slow i thought, though this one took longer to get interesting.
or whatever. by "interesting" i mean i was thinking more. i'm not sure how much of that is governed by what i'm watching.

anyway, the exploitation thing isn't really conscious, and that's kind of what bothers me. it's just that people always say that capitalism and our western model is designed to maximize the comfort of everybody involved by the natural alignment of market factors, and some people actually BELIEVE that. i obviously can't be too hard on the system without being a hypocrite (until i become a shepherd, i mean), but that's kind of crazy. in the same way tax cuts for the rich=wealth for the poor! = crazy. we're not all playing for the same team, see.
speaking of which, i was thinking about "game theory" and how it's applied to economics, and how that's kind of funny because by the nature of the theory if we applied it to quality of life overall, as in us vs misery, wouldn't that improve everything? "game theory". obviously that's all about priorities, my idea of gain and loss is not the same as the oilmens. i guess i might as well stop there.

change your shorts, change your life,
change into a nine-year-old hindu boy, get rid of your wife.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Holy shit
Posts: 1081

bloody hippies!

Iruiniraqi is the one I want to see. Fireballs over Baghdad, Bodies exploding in slow motion, metal in motion, the prayer before the battle...all scored to Phillip Glass.

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