17 Febr 2002 - 22
March 2002 Black
Hawk Down, a Story of Modern War
Film
reviews often tell you what would be
commercially attractive or to the common
expectations. Therefore these descriptions
of non-cliché latest movies you
might want to see but did not decide about
yet.
The
latest films.
Seen:
22 March. 2002. Director: Michael Mann. With: Will
Smith, Jamie Foxx, Mario Van Peebles, Jon Voight, Jada
Pinkett-Smith. Cassius Clay turned to Islam to become
Muhammed Ali. Why? He refused military service and was
almost put behind bars for it. He decided that the
white man's society, Christianity, is mad and that the
black idealism of Malcolm X and of Martin Luther King
were proof of the fact that repression in the white
arena had to be countered by the glory of at least his
physical prowess in boxing. So became the man a modern
time hero. Not being the great intellectual genius
having knocked his brains out in the end, he still
needs to be remembered as one at the right side of the
truth. The movie closely relates the feats of Ali's
career. Because of his troubles with the government he
lost his boxing license and thus he had a key-fight in
Africa where he had a revelation of his true
adherence: the natural of the black heart of rhythm
and communal consciousness ('Here even the pilots are
black!'). He was the representative of the natural
power and the cramp of white society was his enemy.
'Not the Vietcong are my enemy, I will not kill them,
you who take my freedom are my enemy, you I will
fight.' Very nice it is to see his theater talents of
rhyming his opinions and bragging about his
superiority in the ring. We sympathize with Ali,
although we do not like the violent proof of God. But
some have to use their fists, if not in the army, then
in the sports arena. So be it. Thank You Ali for all
your fortitude keeping to the right side of truth.
Never we'll give it up, We will go on till all the
shit of modern time is beaten out of us.
(website)
Seen:
22 March. 2002. Director: The Hughes Brothers. With:
Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm. End of the
nineteenth century Prince Edward of England got
syphilis because he cohabitated with whores from the
Whitechapel district of London. He had a child with
one of them, whom he maintained and even married. The
group of her colleagues were as witnesses to that
secret marriage one by one murdered directly after the
arrest of Edward and his love. The scandal of that
pregnancy, of that promiscuity and breach of the noble
culture had to be covered up. Edward already
syphilitic became a member of the Free Mason Loge, who
had taken care of the cover-up according this so very
truthful version of the famous Jack the Ripper
mystery. A physician mason [a crazy American?]
did the Job with the consent of all conspirators.
Later on having gone mad of the cruelties he was
lobotomized and incarcerated to be forgotten, being
condemned and denied by the Loge. The child called
Alice, taken away from the mother that was lobotomized
to become silent, was missing ever since. This
intensely cruel act of the higher class protecting its
false prestige of being holy and virtuous stirred the
whole world and is still recognized as the onset of
the murderous twentiest century with its serial
killers and its collective insanity of war that we
have left behind us. Freud spoke of the tide of the
unconscious that he couldn't stop nor fully
understand. What went wrong with the victorian
virtues? From where this regression into hell? Was it
the mechanical of man increasingly estranging from
nature that created the split of consciousness that
could materialize such a monster as Jack the Ripper?
Or was it the last cramp of the bad nobility that we
suffered by a lack of democracy? Since we, despite of
all political experiments , have not really solved the
problem of the cultural madman that is nowadays known
as the 'terrorist', am I in favor of the first
explanation. In the movie is it inspector Abberline
who has to figure out what is going on. He is addicted
to 'The Dragon': the chinese opium and the movie
begins and ends with him smoking away the problems he
couldn't really solve. He manages to get himself
together. He is clear-voyant and foresees the scenes
of murder. But despite of that he can't prevent things
from happening. He tries to protect the woman but only
the one he has fallen in love with knows to escape in
the end with child Alice who from now on is in
Wonderland about her royal blood (the book with that
name was written by the Queen of England). Because he
has to protect her he cannot join her and thus he
stays behind in London back to the opium with which he
kills himself in the end. The all-powerful loge of the
Masonry cannot be defeated. As some fundamentalist
Muslims say: the Free Masonry is the secret conspiracy
of power in the Western world set up especially to
cover up the self created shame of modern time and all
its aberrations. The pope condemned the Masons but the
honor had to be defended. The show must go on while
all fell down. Who is guilty after all? It were the
bad materialistic habits of everyone that brought
about the twisted reality of our standard time culture
because of which we suffer till today from the
individual and collective symptoms of the schizoid of
being estranged from the natural classical harmony
that was so carefully cherished in the eighteenth
century just before we introduced mean time. Napoleon
is still the symbol of the modern madman and Jack the
Ripper is the criminal Icon of that materialistic
predicament of modern man's failure of true
enlightenment. I consider it a great achievement of
the cinema to be able to picture this drama with such
a clarity. Although a very dark and bloody
performance, it still gives one, as a vedically
reformed christian, hope that finally we are able to
face the truth of our modern time troubles and
guilt-complexes. Only by analysis' like these, we can
cure from the ailment of the modern time estrangement
and its subconscious freak-outs. I would almost think
that Hollywood has understood the full scope of
The
order of Time.
Our compliments. (website)
Seen:
15 March. 2002. Director: Wes Anderson. With: Gene
Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth
Paltrow, Danny Glover, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray. How
does a postmodern family look like? The question is
answered in this movie stuffed with all the
ingredients of the modern ego wrestling with the
concept of selfrealization in a disheveled society.
Royal Tenenbaum a father of three children once was a
successful lawyer. But things went the wrong way. He
had to divorce early from his noble wife, an
archeologist. Their three children are child geniuses,
one in playwriting, one in business and one in tennis.
Their inventive father fails to educate and guide them
properly and they all three fail later on in life. The
girl sits all day in the bathroom smoking cigarettes
in secret, the business man is a compulsory neurotic
with two boys that look like him and even wear the
same clothes. The sportsman suffers from an identity
crisis not knowing how to continue his life and tries
a suicide. Tenenbaum tries every possible way to
reunite his broken family when he finds out that his
former wife after so many years has fallen in love
again and wants to remarry. He feigns a mortal disease
and swallows tictacs for pills with borrowed
healthcare equipment to deceive his family into
believing that he is about to die. It is a tragical
comedy set in the style of the sixties, the time when
all went awry, showing that living a postmodern life
is an artistic challenge at the one hand but an
emotional disaster at the other hand. The father gets
the blame for all the failures proving that, as
Sigmund Freud said, the alienation from the father is
typical for the modern and thus also postmodern
neurosis. Postmodernity is no liberation but just a
justification of the modern ego's developed. No one
finds any hold anywhere in life, in the story. No
individualistic talent can bring one together and
maybe it is only the cinema that can mend the broken
pieces in a happy end of having father alive and
mother remarrying. But in reality people do not find
one another back as easy or as interesting and
original as this brilliant story suggests. However to
the bone of misery, there is with this story still the
hope that genius and heart will be enough to reunite
the broken human family of intelligence. And indeed
that is not impossible if one recognizes the problems
of modern time as the problem of modern time itself.
(website)
Seen:
15 March. 2002. Director: Simon Wells , with: Guy
Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Mark Addy, Jeremy Irons. This
successful remake to a story of H.G. wells deals with
one central question: why can't we change the past?
Alexander Hartdegen, professor in mechanical
engineering, looses his wife and builds a time machine
to undo the unfortunate event. He fails though
discovering that she simply dies another way and that
life is smarter than him. He sees only one solution:
to go into the future. Doing so he finds out that the
earth exploiting the moon in the 21 century destroys
itself breaking the moon in pieces with nuclear
explosions destined to generate energy on the moon.
He, because of the grave accident, narrowly escapes
with his machine to see the evolution on earth
starting all over. He ends up 80.000 years ahead to
find mankind split in two parties: the innocent Eloi
living above the ground and monsters eating their
bodies living underground. Arriving there he
penetrates the underground world to destroy it finding
out that the evil genius behind it is another kind of
human being like himself living eternally with an
alien creature on his back. He is the evil God of that
new world and shows Alexander his life and desires.
One cannot change the past because one cannot change
ones destiny. He himself is part of his destiny and
Alexander is there to free the Eloi from their false
God and his carnivorous demons. So Alexander ends
sacrificing his machine being unable to travel back to
his own time, saying in favor of the love won 'It was
only a machine'. Some scenes of the old movie return,
like the changing showcase proving how much fashion
changes with the time. The rest is all new and
sparkling doing justice to Well's beautiful story
about returning to the original nature and the unity
of heart. Technological advancement has only one
purpose: to return to that new land where anew we will
appreciate the natural of man. In the defeat of the
darkness and demoniac the machine has to be
sacrificed. One leaves the cinema with the feeling
that still a lot has to happen, and indeed, so it is.
A classic on our timephilosophy. (website)
Seen:
7 March. 2002. Director: Pixar Animations. with: John
Goodman and Billy Crystal. Did you know that America
is populated with monsters out there to collect the
screams of frightened children? Presenting themselves
as monsters they process the screams of the innocent
to derive energy therefrom. Mike and Sully are in the
story two professional trained scaredevils screaming
the wits out of children they approach with space-time
portals. Privately they are good chums in fact afraid
of being contaminated by the innocent. The story shows
us how they live in a high-tech world in which the
monsters are the hero's of the community who with the
(former) status of astronauts do their job hailed by
the community. They are in competition. The fair and
the unfair compete as usual so that the fair monsters
may win. Mike and Sully make the best team but
accidentally transport a little girl called Boo into
their monster world. The little thing thinks it all
very entertaining and plays to her hearts desire with
all the nice monsters screaming 'Mike Wazowski' in
delight. They discover that having the kid laugh
produces even more energy than scaring her. Thus the
theme is set and do they have to suffer to accomplish
their new set goal. Hindered by the evil Randall, they
are banished to Nepal, to visit the terrible snowman
out there, a kind of colleague. But they manage to
return and defeat the schemes of Randall who has
invented a scream-sucking machine, a kind of
torture-instrument for non-terrorists, that would be
much more efficient. But laughter was the holy purpose
and best profit, and of course, the duty of America is
to make the world laugh about their monstrosity as a
world power. After seeing how successful Boo was in
convincing them with her innocent laughs of the real
energy one should live on in dealing with others, must
we say that we sincerely hope that America will be
able to put all of this humorous idealism into
practice and let the fellow man also outside of the
cinema and the comic book find trust and laughs with
them. If Walt Disney is the leader of this New Gospel,
so be it. We still remember Dinosaur
with which we also could find sympathy with monsters.
As a youngster I always believed in Donald Duck and
his nephews however naughty and impatiently screaming.
(website)
Seen:
7 March. 2002. Director: Robert Altman. with: Helen
Mirren, Maggie Smith, Emily Watson, Michael Gambon,
Kirstin Scott Thomas. What was wrong with the old
class system? In this movie the problem is worked out
in the form of a murder mystery: Sir William McCordle
together with his wife have invited their (foreign)
friends and family for hunting, diner and
conversation. The noble company gathers together with
all the servants. The servants live one level below in
the building. Everybody is the same kind of modern
troubled human being, grumpy, lusty, vengeful, idle,
conceited, and confused. Everybody is a kind of
victim, not just the host that gets killed by his own
neglected and denied son with a knife as well as by
his former wife with poison as she is now working as a
servant. There are more people with a motive to kill
him. He threatens to withdraw the allowance of an
aunt. He has the money and the power and everybody
hates him. He is the impersonation of the capitalist
in exploit classically bringing down the nobility of
the roman empire as in this case cultivated in
England. But what is wrong with the effort to keep the
culture? Why is everybody so unhappy and out of order?
Also the servants have a hard time controlling their
emotions and lust. The police inspector investigating
the murder is a weak character sending everybody home,
as he has their addresses! One knows that nothing will
be done afterwards and that the perpetrators can walk
free. This is a breach of standard to our
storytelling. Nobody is the hero and everybody is a
possible murderer and suspect. Everybody is guilty,
the system is guilty, and Altman does not get beyond
this. Very cunning and adept he poses the problem with
all his talent of filming and directing, but he does
not get above the problem. He is a pessimist seeing
everything going down. It is also a cliché to
accuse the system of the old class society. Still
everybody knows that there will always be a stratified
society. The matter is that of impurity in fact.
Everybody troubled by modern time excuses everybody
for his misbehaving. Altman shows it as a weakness of
justice and humanity and of course is the way out of
our cultural dilemma of class versus human equality to
be found in the proper concept of progress and not in
the abolishing of natural strata of age and vocation.
Being attached to ones class indeed can be a
hindrance, but of course there is more: one is
attached to killing animals, which does not make a
decent conversation at all. One is attached to
Greenwich standard time which does not make a natural
quality of consciousness and nobility. One is attached
to speculations on the possession of capital without
being of any sacrifice for any good cause and one is
out of control with the holiness, the sacrament of sex
and thus is one just as fallen a soul as anyone else
of the personnel e.g. Not being on natural time, not
being of respect for all living creatures eating them,
not being of charity and not being of continence are
the four major reasons why the nobility incapable of
transcendence out of attachment falls down. It is not
the class-system itself that is wrong, it is the lack
of progress in virtue of living through that natural
order of society that made the roman empire fell down
and also the european nobility find no justification
for its claim of class. Wake up thou slumbering
ignorants, since the sixties there is the pressure of
cultural integration and a vedic/islamic reform for
Christians that have to keep in touch with the
complete and progress of mankind. Nobility also should
be of a moral example. Although Altman just poses the
problem, offering no solution in a more or less
perverted godless 'seeing-no-hero' intellectual
interest in the subject, is it still a practical proof
and incentive for the right course and cause of
cultural integration. It is good to see how
Christianity suffocates in its own narrow-minded
selfhood not being able to continue in conceit.
(website)
Seen:
28 Feb. 2002. Directed by: Ridley Scott. With: Josh
Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana. This
raw war-movie filled with the toughest guys of the
american elite troops and the meanest african rebels,
concerns the drama of 4 Oct 1993 in Mogadishu,
Somalia, enacted under the Clinton government in the
context of african peace-operations. A little more
than half a day, was America at war with the rebel
factions of general Aidit. The Americans dared to try
to arrest the rebel general to prevent a further round
of meaningless bloodshed sacrificing their lives (in
total eighteen died) against a hundred or more dead
'skinnies', somalian rebel forces and civilians in the
hostile part of Mogadishu. The operation was intended
to be completed in half an hour, but it proved to be a
serious miscalculation. The Somali's saw the Black
Hawk helicopters and the colonne of vehicles coming
long before and awaited them armed to the teeth. They
managed to shoot down two Black Hawks, making a
battlefield of the whole town, and we all remember the
rebels dragging the dead corpse of an american 'hero'
through their streets (not shown in the film of
course). The problem was that out of human goodness
and sacrifice the Americans made the mistake to take
sides in the conflict so that they were dragged down
in the temptation of the wargame that the africans
were reveling in. The lust of blood and guts drips
from the screen and this time the rambo-fantasies of
America are real: a blunder not to forget. The
director said that he made the movie to show how
important it is for soldiers to keep together whatever
the political failure that is behind the confrontation
and indeed the hero, so proves this movie, is
certainly not made by the politicians ultimately
responsible. A soldier simply does his duty. No one
would be left behind is the heroic lead, and although
the mission failed apart from arresting a couple of
officials of which the movie tells nothing further, we
leave the cinema with a feeling of respect and
compassion for the fate of the obedient and
goodwilling 'only shoot on being attacked' soldiers.
That was the purpose. Not one wrong word from the
privates against the darn politics that led to the
debacle. The film is not really a propaganda movie,
nor a debating piece. So we are we hardly introduced
into the political complex of going for such a bad
karma in Africa killing all those devout african
Muslims in their righteous (?) defense of their
territory. The sequel to this movie would be the
heroic feats of the New York firemen trying to save
whatever from the muslim karma-rebound
WTC drama of 11 sept
01.
Bad karma can only be solved taking the consequence of
a natural evening of the balance. Escalation is the
never ending of hell of not admitting and seeing ones
own faults so that no other solution is found but
mutual destruction until the evil mind of revenge has
died and for all mistakes has been paid. An eye for an
eye - not nice a fact of our modern time karmic life,
but good to know. That modern time with its drama of
political erring in powerplay will continue this way
until we are tired of it, sure to know that the
classical of time is of a better respect to the
greater nature we have to find peace with.
(website)
Seen:
28 Feb. 2002. Directed by: Lasse
Hallström. with Kevin Spacey, Julianne
Moore, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. We see the life
of a man called Quoyle with a bad karma. His ancestors
were pirates at the cost of Newfoundland. Quoyles
father crushed his selfrespect out of the bad
familykarma and the movie is about Quolye wrestling
with it to get on top of his fate, the family curse
and the karma. First he leads a dull life as an
inksetter at the local newspaper. Not married suddenly
his life takes a turn as a spoilt woman finds a
willing victim with him to live out her abuse. She
simply uses the dull-minded but good-hearted Quayle.
Betraying him with other men she neglects her
daughter. Very soon she leaves the house for another
flame taking her daughter with her. Quayle is in ash,
literally as at the same time he gets the message that
his parents have committed suicide. Coming home with
the two urns he finds there a relative from Alaska
where the Quayle family lived. She too suffered blows
of the bad karma being raped by Quoyles father, her
own brother, but she manages to keep her secret for
herself for half the movie. The mother on the run
drowns crashing with her car and her lover in the
river, but his daughter survives being sold by her own
mother (bad karma again), But when the relative, an
elderly lady with a tormented, weathered face, takes
the helpless father and his retrieved daughter with
her to the ancestral grounds, he finds out everything
in the little village in the barren wilderness of
Alaska. Everybody knows one another there. Quayle gets
a job at the local paper to report on the shipping
news. He gains in self-confidence and also falls in
love with the schoolteacher of his daughter. He even
manages to get on top defeating a jealous colleague at
the paper and learns to cope with the evil spirit
hanging around the cursed family house where he stays.
In the end the house blows into the sea and Quayle
gets married after a few more lashes of bad karma.
Filmed with humor and humanity the movie charms
despite of the uninteresting surroundings and rainy
climate at location. The meaning of life is found in
getting rid of the bad karma, also other characters in
the story prove. One leaves the movie with a good
feeling reassured that whatever ones karma is, if a
dead man can reawaken (happens in the movie) and being
lost at sea one manages to return to the living (also
happens to Quayle), that then one can also with
forbearance get rid of a bad family history, wrestling
with and striving towards the light of the truth.
(IMD-info)
Seen:
28 Feb. 2002. Directed by: David Lynch with Naomi
Watts and Laura Harring. Mr. Lych, lover of
cinematographic surrealist puzzles, likes to take the
audience on a mystery tour. This time he follows the
new trend of filming afterlife experiences. With
The
Others
we saw a pretty straight forward story of a woman in
limbo who killed her children and with the
Sixth
Sense
we saw the trouble of a man accepting that he has died
in an accident (the movie that started this trend).
This time we see a lesbian lovedrama in limbo. Two
actresses in love with one another, called Diane and
Camilla, see their lives end in a love drama. Rita, a
real diva and smashing beauty is a bisexual
intelligent partyanimal doing it with almost everyone.
Thus she does it also with the director of the movie
she is making on a sixties music scene. He announces
to marry her, but sensitive Dianne who is not that
perfect with less boobs and less regular teeth dies of
jealousy. Angered she hires a hitman to secure her
beloved materialistic and soulless Camilla a deadly
car-accident. Then in hopeless desperation she dies
shooting herself, haunted by her accusing ancestral
ghosts, after looking at a blue key the hitman gave
her. That latter key she did not understand but it
returns as a triangular one afterwards to open the
blue box kept by 'the devil' of her blue love drama
limbo. She consequently has entered the afterlife
limbo to have a nightmare of her own fantasies and
repressed guilt despite of her dreaming effort to see
herself beautiful with regular teeth and a faithful
Camilla/Rita full of soul and feeling. She dreams in
the vital body of her afterlife limbo to be an
innocent perfectly beautiful girl called Betty,
arriving in the nice light of a beautiful Hollywood to
live out her dream of becoming a perfect actress
living in the apartment of her aunt. There she meets
with her afterlife Camilla, now called Rita. She
arrived in her vital body with a lost memory at
Betties apartment after the accident. Together do the
vital ladies of imagination try to figure out what
happened. Rita remembers a name - Diane: Betties name
in her material life, and together they go check her
out. To the guiltcomplex there is a sphere of suspense
with a bag full of money - they were in the business
for the sex and the money after al - and find a
stinking dead corpse of Diane. Betty does not directly
recognize herself in Dianna, but she helps Rita over
her shock of finding her former but difficult
remembered and betrayed friend dead. Then the dream
continues in which Betty tries to pick up the former
Lesbian lust with the beautiful Rita. They find
themselves confused and Lynch cuts the film up in many
cross-references through time to add to the confusion
of the limbo state. In flashbacks of scenes of
witnesses and accomplices to the drama we may live
through the complex nightmare of the suicide of
Dianne. Time is twisted into an endless loop of truth
meeting with denial. It is a masterpiece of filming in
which the innocent onlooker gradually realizes what
has happened and no doubt many a confounded soul will
never fully understand Lych's version of warning for
the state of limbo after a bad materialistic and
narcissistic 'Hollywood'-life full of repression,
denial, crime and perversion. Limbo is there to find
in selfconfrontation the truth that makes a next life
and rebirth into the endless cycle of rebirth, in
desire for the better life, possible. That escape from
limbo can only be if one has accepted what one has
done wrong so that one then is ready to take the load
of karma prepared from it for a next life. But we
westerners, not really traditionally versed in the
vedic and christian esotheric literatures about it,
run into a terrible confusion: if one doesn't believe
in such a thing as limbo and rebirth is the movie an
incomprehensible nightmare with no clear other purpose
but to baffle the audience. It is the same effect as
with the cryogenic nightmare of a vital attachment to
a physical body as shown in Vanilla
Sky.
With a mind of vedic reform one might realize that the
cinema these days is teaching us that we certainly do
have an afterlife about which we should be living very
precautiously and piously to maximize the chance of a
better life in the hereafter. What you do to others
now you suffer with yourself later. Only with truth
there is continuation, with denial there is the
endless loop of a nightmare limbo or a selfmade hell.
Watch and shiver. (website)
Seen:
21 Feb. 2002 on DvD. Directed by Chris Columbus; with
Robin Williams, Embeth Davidtz, Sam Neill . This movie
from 1999 never made it to the cinema in our town, so
we saw it on DvD. Robin Williams is always a guarantee
of poetry in the cinema with a soft human touch of
sympathy. This time we see him as house robot Andrew
(from android) coming into existence as a master over
time. Immortality is more a problem for him than a
solution. At first he discovers to be a unique robot
with a unique positronic brain possibly caused by
falling first floor, on the command of a hateful
familymember, out of the window. (he even suffers a
positronic trauma from it). But gaining in humanity
over the years and even generations acquiring a real
human appearance and even a nervous system and
sex-organs, he falls in doubt about his status as a
survivor wiser than the average human being. The theme
is very nicely worked out in this AI--forerunner.
Where the movie AI dealing with the same subject
concentrated on the problem of relating to a
selfdestructive mankind, is in this movie mankind
simply mortal and not more progressive or alternative
with a flying car or an android in the household.
Though less exciting and exotic than AI, does the
movie deserve more credit than given
by
the american
filmcritics.
Of course is immortality an important subject in
manipulating the length of our lives with implants and
other artificial help. It is a serious subject that
deserves proper meditation. This movie is the
meditation for it and stands perfect with all
cinematographic qualities of filming and acting as it
should. At the end of his adventures in positronic
emancipation is it the summit of Andrews development
to die together as an officially recognized equal
human with his human partner out of sheer sympathy:
life is only real if one accepts death as an integral
part of the human condition. The untouchable godhead
that Andrew would become surviving over time makes no
acceptable life among the humans that neatly fade in
and fade out of material life. One needs to be
recognized in ones humanity, that is the meaning of
living a human life. The true life is thus not in the
material persistence but in the persistence of the
spiritual soul of the human respect for the divinity
of the Almighty Time. From that soul is the quality
and meaning of life expected, not so much from
attachment to an eternal youth as a false and dead
fixation of matter. The story suggests that that is
the conclusion of a logical positronic brain
programmed to sympathize and act on behalf of the
human interest. The conclusion that it thus should age
and die like a human is surprising and philosophically
profound. This contrary to the more pessimistic
AI-conclusion that one (android or with implants) has
to live eternal as an android to find aliens only as
survivors to the meaning of being organic. This story
should not be considered superficial because of its
humorous presentation. It ranks for the humanist point
it makes. The humor gives the flavor to this
meditation and I pity the ones that do not appreciate
that. (all-movie-info)
Seen:
19 Feb. 2002 Dir.: James Mangold. Meg Ryan and Hugh
Jackman. A romantic comedy researching the opposition
of classical protocol and modern freedom in relations.
Gentlemen should stand when ladies leave the table.
The lady is an object of worship. That is how we
should relate to our becoming mothers to give them
confidence in our manly societies and theories of
approach and construction. Packed as a romance and a
bit of a time-travel sci-fi this theme is lightly
worked out with no heavy conclusions or emphasis. It
is always interesting to see classical decor and
behavior contrasted with the modern time. What has
happened, have we degraded or have we upgraded? What
is the fruit of freedom or the shadow? The count
stepping through a portal of time, a break in the
time-space continuum, is the inventor of the Otis
lift. He meets his nephew in modern New York, who
found a time- portal in his physics research, and
falls in love with the sweet girl next door that can't
find her laptop or something. They dine, they get lost
in the streets, they go back in time again etc. etc.,
It makes a happy end and good amusement. It is about
love after all and love conquers the influence of
time. Nice thesis, nice characters and a nice charming
movie. See no evil hear no evil. No pretenses further.
Just accept the theme and think about it.
(website)
Seen:
19 Feb. 2002 Dir.: Ron Howard. With Russell Crowe and
Ed Harris. Schizophrenia is a mental state in which
the subject cannot discriminate between reality and
illusion. It is incurable in that sense that the
symptoms, the delusions of some kind like
hallucinations or voices heard do not disappear. They
can be controlled though so that living with them
accepting them as thought-phenomena and not as
phenomena of the material world makes an acceptable
life non different from that of anyone else who gets a
headache or insomnia or rashes as a symptom. Man has
to learn to live with his symptoms as a token of his
human incompleteness, not fleeing in drug abuse or
self-invented worlds with false hypothesis, The
individual acceptance of that incompleteness and
modern life-mission is what this movie is about. It
describes the life of John
Forbes Nash jr.
a Nobel Prize winning mathematical genius who
disappears in a world of delusions shortly after his
marriage and being accepted as a college professor
because of a break through in mathematical research.
Without first realizing it himself he thinks himself a
world consisting of a little innocent girl appealing
to his heart, an imagined friend who talks to him when
alone and a secret agent who engages him in doing
service in recognizing patterns of secret info
embedded in newspapers and magazines. His genius is
highly sensitive to patterns and thus he easily can
uncover the conspiracies of the Russians communicating
about atomic bombs through innocent looking articles
in the papers. He writes secret reports and delivers
them at a postbox. His study is full of the clippings
that nobody may see as his work is classified. He
becomes paranoid as things go wrong with 'the
service'. After an accident and a conflict with his
'secret agent' he suffers from persecution mania and
is hospitalized. There he mutilates himself to get out
the nonexistent secret implant in his arm that changes
the numbers of his access-codes for delivering his
classified work. When his wife proves him that all
that work was a delusion of him showing the letters
retrieved from an old postbox that he thought to be a
secret address, he has to give up his false
assumptions of conspiracy. By intelligence he manages
to escape from the insulineshocks and further
hospitalization. Living withdrawn with his wife though
he stops with his medication and returns to his work
of delusion in secret service. But he manages to keep
it within the bounds of acceptance. Finding trust with
his wife - after a crisis of course - he manages to
live with his imagined personalities pushing them back
and continues to do his studies as a mathematician. At
the end of his life he has won the recognition of his
colleges and wins the Nobel prize. Analyzing the
delusions the conclusion of Nash himself is that
political engagement is a waste of time and energy if
not a source of delusions; and indeed little did he
realize in his time that the changing numbers of his
standard timekeeper at his wrist, his wristwatch, were
indeed representing the cold war politics of the day.
The abolishing of summertime after the war and the
reintroduction of it in the late sixties, just as the
regular incongruence of standard time numbers with
natural astronomical ones, correspond with his
delusions making them more real interpretations of the
politically manipulated post-war reality than he would
ever suspect from pure mathematics. As a 'secret
agent' he simply got involved. But trying to get rid
of the changing 'codes implanted in his wrist' he,
unconscious of the time factor (he does forget t0 time
his life getting delusional), missed the point of what
political time manipulation does to the
conditioning-sensitive minds of especially
pattern-sensitive geniuses like him. The movie is a
great contribution to unraveling the problem of the
aberrations of the modern mind of numbers with as good
as all politically oriented people. Creating a
political reality out of a problem of timekeeping
[numbers unstable, economies out of hand] is
the schizoid business of standard time - a practice
thus, as proven by this film, not very different from
the individual delusions of professor Nash who simply
naturally fills in the gap of his social
incompleteness in this state of mind. Ending up in
psychiatry with a delusional state sincere about
numbers is more heroic than than having a world war
out of political deceit, unconsciousness, manipulation
and paranoia. Therefore is professor Nash clinging to
his research a hero, is this movie a great success
proving that many people recognize themselves in it
and are the Oscar nominations for it wholly justified
because of the great importance of introducing this
story so nicely into the mainstream of cinematographic
narration. Still narration is the essence of human
self-knowledge and progress. It is essential that
humanity learns to recognize the patterns of causal
confusion and cures from its own mental aberrations in
the context of modern standard time and its political
machinations and perversions of numbers.. Our
compliments. (website).
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backgroundgraphic: Argotique