Enemies ... oh .. so wise!

For some reason the enemies of Batman have a lot of philosophical quotes! Joker had lots and this is my favorite one from Bane: "Victory has defeated you!"  ...aah ... how Victory can defeat people indeed... indeed ....


By the way, I feel that the recent Batman series are going down a kind of uncanny valley, once you get too deep in the meanings and become serious, then the guy wearing the strange custom and jumping around kind of feels out of place! Maybe super hero movies should find a different direction?

The End of the Line

What would have happened next if most of the seven Samurai had not died after trying to defend the village? How would they have felt after the success? Would they have regret the unpaid effort? Would they have extracted meaning from the whole scenario? Would Kyuzo have continued his swordsmanship practices like it was the first time he had the blade in his hands? Would Kikuchiyo have maintained his built up attitude? Would they have stood for the village again? Would they have witnessed their own descent? Would the hunger have fed with greed?

Is death the only option for eternal success? ... maybe yes... maybe not ... probably not for the people raised with Bushido which is said to be the "Way of Dying" or living as though one was already dead!

Black and White

Black Swan, a perfect movie that defines perfection....

Eternal Sunshine

After a long period of not seeing that many movies and watching crappy mediocre ones every once in a while, I enjoyed this movie really a lot, absolutely fantastic : "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind"... phewww...

Thanks to Yaser for providing it and Kasra for recommending it :).

We had fun for some time ....

I had always been a Japanese Anime and Manga fan but the recent days life style of mine has diminished the opportunities to catch up with the whole atmosphere. Very recently, a food friend at work brought me the DVDs containing a Japanese Anime series called: "Death Note". I thought that the DVD will be queued like the many movies I've stored, in the hopes of viewing one day, one day which is totally not any of these days. Realizing that these series contained 37 episodes made me sure they'll gather lots of dust before being watched.

Anyway, quite unexpectedly, I decided to watch a portion of the first episode in order to evaluate its art style and see how the Anime scene has progressed, that was it .... I froze like water in absolute zero degree in fron to of the TV ... watched every second ... and by that I literally mean every second... listened to every word spoken on the series... thought about every action ... and whole heartedly enjoyed the whole 37 episodes in quite a few days. Absolute euphoric experience that I had probably never enjoyed before from any entertainment of this form.

This thing is just great, period. Wonderful story with lots of mind twists, good philosophical foundations, excellent directing, art, voice over (had lots of japanese nostalgia run to me by the way) and awesome music, specially the dead metal theme intro from episode 20 on.

The pace started strong and never cooled down afterwards, something usually not experienced in other movies and series.

I gotta find the other story worked on by the author now.

The last statement of the series : " ... we had fun for some time".

Go foward in Reverse

Freedom, oh the sole sensible target for our soul.

This most complicated parameter in human lives. Love, the reality we are hardwired to sense. New experiences, the revolving platform we desire to roll on to feel alive, the gain freedom, to find love. Finding the love that we run away from once found in search of the freedom out there we seek with excitement to experience the rush of love again somewhere in between the lines of becoming and blurred by the reality of being. The everlasting effort to find happiness, guiding us to blame on the dynamics around us, mainly the society, leading us into solitude, only to make us believe that “Happiness is only real when shared!”, shared with others, which will lead to a society again.

Spiral out, keep going, Spiral out. Is there a sign of evil here or is this all that is real? Our quest for beauty, the beauty which is all here, a beauty which was always here. Searching reality, reality which we try our best to hide every second. Entrapped by time, enslaved by the repetitions of actions, actions which follow the pathway of betrayal towards our subconscious, leaving our conscious, moment feeling, life feeling, love sensing, free mind in solitude. Is there an escape strategy from this loop or should we enjoy the moments of this merry-go-round?

"And in my darkest moment, fetal and weeping.
The moon tells me a secret. My confidant.
As full and bright as I am, this light is not my own
A million light reflections pass over me
It's source is bright and endless.
She resuscitates the hopeless
Without her we are lifeless satellites dreaming dreams.
And as I pull my head out I am without one doubt
Don't want to be down here feeding my narcissism
I must crucify the ego before it's far too late
I pray the light lifts me out before I pine away.
before I pine away.
before I pine away.
before I pine away."

Thank you Sean Penn, thanks for making such great movies. “Into the Wild”. Wonderful movie based on a true story, great accompanying sound track by Eddie Vedder. And special thanks to Ash for pointing us to the movie.

I gotta see this again.

Seconds

Every second can be lived better... every moment is a life ... every thought and every action while a spark lives can change everything ... oh all these seconds ... focus ... focus ... the time is now ... life is now!

Take me to the other side

Looking at the recent best sellers in the box office we can observe an interesting fact. The fact that most of these titans have been either comic book hero re-creations or animations. The obvious question here would be, why?

Lets try to evaluate some predicates in order to see if we can get anywhere about this question.

1 - Recent technology has enabled producers to create such movies and animation.

Well... true... but just because they can make them now doesn't specify why they have to be best sellers. There should be much more.

2 - People have good memories from the comic books and would love to see them live on the silver screen. Nostalgia effect.

Hmm... well true... but not for everyone ... the everyone who make these movies become hits... and there are many contradicting examples too, take for instance "Kung Foo panda" or "Ratatouille" ...

3 - There are lots of action in these movies and people like action movies.

Again ... there are many action movies out there... Batman, Iron-Man and Hulk are the winners. Should be something more.

4 - The target audience for these movies are the young and they go to the movies a lot.

Only the young people alone can not halp the Dark Knight break the world records.

5 - There is something deep inside us humans that makes us love to jump into the fantasy worlds and witness the un-known and hard to imagine experiences, disconnect us for a while from the boring and repetitive world around us, show us that anything can be possible. The important keywords that can be connected to this fact are: freedom, power, randomness, hope and overcoming fear.

This one I like and delving into it can yield to beautiful facts about us humans and life.
Freedom and power are symbols that have roots in the same type of reality, randomness as opposed to full determinism is required for dynamic systems to have a chance to enhance their situations when faced with trouble, hope can have meanings when there can exist randomness that would create freedom leading to power and overcoming the fear is necessary in order to have hopes and jump into the random sea and show courage to try different things which would make you free and ultimately add to your power, add to your power because you increased your available options out of the total option state space.

Such movies, putting our "I am an intellectual and hate such movies" attitude aside, are valuable I believe ...

Today is a gift

Kung Fu Panda is fun to watch.The 3D rendering has a unique style which makes it seem like traditional 2D animation, the animation weights and timing are tremendous, unlike the 3D animations from the previous years where every character seemed like a robot, overall lighting and colors look beautiful, not to mention the whole story concept which revolves around Kung Fu which is great. I specially enjoyed the Zen quotes of the master, "Oogway", and this one:"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.".

Wake us up

Richard Linklater is a fantastic director. I was first amazed by "Waking Life" a few years back and then "Tape","Before Sunset", "A scanner darkly" and very recently "Before Sunrise", which is an old movie now actually. There are some serious questions about life discussed in all these movies. They are all very direct by the way with wonderful dialogs.

A director that walks the lines that are seldom touched by this art form usually.

On the peak of Power!

We were able to clear God of War 1 with the help of our great tools coder, Faham. The ending reminded me of the ending in the movie "God Father 1". Maybe all movies or games with "God" in them should end like this :).

Kratos is offered to be the actual "God of War" and sits on his throne. Michael Corleone is also offered to be the "God Father" and sits on his chair (throne). They both sit there, alone, with the same gesture and get drowned in deep thinking. I am sure they both have the same thoughts at those moments, thoughts that will be generated in the mind knowing you possess the ultimate power. Well if we observe the results, it is clear that they both engage in the same types of actions after that, God of War 2 and God Father 2. Beautiful.


The next time you saw a man sitting alone on a chair like that, beware of the consequences.

Art ??

Art and the meaning of quality for it have always been big wonders. The case used to be really simple in the old days and it was even known that good art is art that resembles nature most in Aristotle's times. However, things have quite changed specially in the modern age and by the birth of modern art, not to mention post modern art too.

"Art school confidential" which has been produced by John Malkovich has a really interesting touch regarding this issue and reveals a lot of things going on around the art world in present times. I really liked it.

Beautiful violence

If you want to know what would happen if beauty became the binding element between everything else, then watch the recent movie by Tim Burton, Sweeny Todd. The visual colors and composition is beautiful, the music and dialogs are beautiful, the character movements, emotions shown and the violence and blood is beautiful.

This is a truly different movie but very well composed. Nothing deep and meaningful but a showcase for aesthetics in overall elements.