Who’s trying to simplify anything? I’m not talking about absolute stereotypes, I"m talking about averages. The average man is taller than the average woman, but if I said ‘Men are taller than women’ you wouldn’t assume I meant that every single man is a hulking giant and every single woman is a pigmy. There is a huge contingent on Mubi that’s consistently reactionary about any kind of cultural drift they don’t agree with, and I find it similar to the reaction of religious conservatives to secular culture, and it is very conservative.
A conservative idolizes the past and a progressive idolizes the future. The trend on Mubi is to idolize the past. Whether it’s Glenn Beck’s idyllic past of a flawless Christian nation or Mubi’s idyllic past where everybody and their mothers appreciated great art and interacted as well informed political human beings, it’s just different natures of the same beast.
Of course it doesn’t apply absolutely to every single person, that goes without saying. I’m talking about the area where the dart marks appear the most dense. Any time you’re talking about human beings a large standard deviation is implied.
@Wu Yong
Fine. “The government of the Federation in Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “The government of Iran”, and “The role of government proposed by many members of Mubi”. I think intent there was pretty obvious.
@DFOOO, Brad
Those are exactly the kinds of movies I’m talking about, where they have a modern premise but the characters are pulled toward conservatism on the implied premise that human intent can not trump human nature. A progressive sees human nature as something that can change, and a conservative sees it as a constant.
@Ari
Both the democratic and republican parties in America are extremely conservative, just one is liberal in the social sphere and one is liberal in the fiscal sphere. And even there they’re pretty damn close to each other, they just appear wildly different because they talk up the wedge issues so much.
And both parties are equally guilty for eroding civil liberties, it’s just that only one of the two parties admits it.
No, you don’t need to care about a film’s subject matter to like the film. It helps, because it makes it easier to find a personal hook. But if the filmmaker is talented (And targeting a general audience instead of a specific one), the filmmaker should be able to find a story to tell about the subject that’s interesting to any open minded audience.
Well, depends on the poor person. Some poor people have never had the opportunity to improve their situation, they are poor by chance. Some poor people have had chances to improve their situation and have done nothing about it, they are poor because they made bad decisions.
Mike is born to a poor family. He is poor, and it’s not his fault. He has the opportunity to go to a city college and gain a certification so he can get a job. Instead, he sits around and plays video games. Now he is still poor, and now it is his fault.
Veterans who fought in the army and then came back and were unable to get a job are poor because of an unfortunate situation. Thirty year olds who spent their college years drinking and partying are poor because of bad choices. We need to make a distinction between people who’ve had a choice and people who haven’t. I’m perfectly willing to be taxed to help the poor people who didn’t have a choice.
I’ve been putting 16% of my paycheck into a 401k, deferring gratification for forty years. Forty years later, shouldn’t I get that gratification?
As for democracy, the value of democracy isn’t the leaders that get elected, the value of democracy is the ease of kicking them out. In a monarchy you might get a great leader. Then, later you might get an atrocious leader, and then what do you do? Your options are really a full blown civil war or just keeping your mouth shut and trying not to get guillotined.
I am troubled by the large amount of people who vote emotionally based on the public narrative rather than a thorough understanding of the issues. But then again, I haven’t actually met anyone in person who votes that way, I think it’s mostly voters old enough that their opinions are no longer malleable.
I agree that educational systems need to place more emphasis on critical thinking and debate, all this standardized testing has made it more and more about fact memorization, and all the political debate over education has been about manipulating what the facts are. (Texas board of education gets to determine the textbooks for everyone — ugh).
Children need to be taught the tools to think for themselves, but otherwise, people just don’t need to be shepherded, and their own personal decisions ought to be respected.
Actually Wu Yong, for five years I worked a part time job where I went around to retail stores and physically scanned all the items on their shelves. I got down on my knees to reach low shelves, laid down on the floor to reach the bottom one in some cases. I started out at $9/hour and ended up at $12.50/hour. I woke up at 5 AM every day to get to work at 7 AM, sometimes walking to the bus station in -10 degree weather before the sidewalks were shoveled. Some shifts lasted ten to twelve hours, and depending on the store either my knees hurt from kneeling or my back hurt from standing up all day. At the time the only rooms I could afford were in college areas where my roommates were 20 year olds who blasted loud music until 2 AM.
In the meantime, I was working on a Masters degree. Now I make a lot more money. Coincidence?
I think Jazzaloha is getting at the kind of scifi people would call ‘Hard scifi’, like might be generated by Asimov or Dick.
Speaking of Dick, Minority Report kind of does, but it’s buried in the sort of morality that derives directly from knee-jerk emotional responses, and that keeps the issue from being that deeply explored. (I’d probably say the exact same thing about AI — damn Spielberg).
2001 does this mostly using cinematography instead of dialog, which is admirable. And I agree about Children of Men.
If other media than film are allowable, then Battlestar Galactica and Mass Effect (Though Mass Effect is more like 24 in space).
I disagree with the inclusion of The Matrix in this. It’s more on the level of Inception for me — a lot of complicated techno-magic exposition derived around the needs of the story they want to tell.
Good films, yes. There are plenty of films out there today that you could understand perfectly well without the visual component, especially mainstream films, and especially if you use those headsets for blind people that describe the scene for you.
_My point here is that I find it suspect to try to excuse one group for being poor over another and feeling the need to assign blame. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter who is to blame. What matters is that there are people out there struggling and it’s our duty as a society to have a safety net. _
There I agree. I only differ in that, once you’re in the safety net, I think it’s your responsibility to take the initiative to climb back up to the wire.
You had a part time job in which you worked 12 hour shifts?
That doesn’t really add up… But alright.
Length depended on the store. Small clothing stores were 3-4 hours. A CVS or a Shaws was 5-8 hours. A Sears was 9-12 hours two days in a row. I ended up with an average of about 30 hours per week. (But, right after Christmas it got up to 50-60, right before Christmas I had barely any work at all.)
You wouldn’t do that job in that retail store now, would you?
Because it’s not necessary for you to. But it’s necessary for someone to [in this system]. To devalue that work merely because you have a perception of wasted opportunity is not only misanthropic, it’s borderline fascistic.
Right, and the reason I don’t have to do that job now is that I got myself an education. Everybody right now who is working a crappy job has the opportunity to either get a better job, or get themselves the education to get a better job. If they choose not to do so, they stay right where they are. It doesn’t take Ivy League prices to get a professional certification, and anyone can get an education loan who didn’t destroy their own credit rating by living beyond their means.
Do you even know what fascism is? Fascism is, if they quit the job they get murdered.
What you’re saying is an insult to every person who has ever been born poor and worked their way out of poverty: You’re devaluing their accomplishments by attributing them to blind luck. If somebody is born poor and ends up doing well for themselves it’s because they worked hard.
Is it harder for people born poor than people born rich? Absolutely, and that’s a serious problem, but equalizing education is going to solve that problem a lot faster than dictating wages and handing things out.
Despite its fantasies about itself as a land of opportunity, the U.S. today has less class mobility than any western country in the world.
A: Statistics?
B: Again, education gaps. We need better education available to everyone, period. Education is a prerequisite for democracy.
But if we start breaking down anecdotal narratives of, the dishwasher has a chronic illness from birth defect, the dishwasher is a gambling addict, the dishwasher lives in a community where the $9500/year job is one of the only jobs available and the local education system doesn’t communicate well to his marginalized culture in order to inform him how best to budget his $9500 in a method that is sustainable and allows for savings toward educating himself further to gain a skill-based job that offers better, we’re talking about different issues despite their interconnectedness.
Small Q, are you implying a gambling addiction is the same as not having opportunities available in your community? Gambling addiction is something, IMO, the individual is responsible for. But you’re right, lack of information about opportunities is a big culptrit. Again, it’s an issue of education.
I’m also against people giving jobs to their friends and family members, that’s a serious problem.
Yep. In my experience, it’s usually the people who work the hardest that make the least money and struggle the most. People that I know who are rich or are well to do don’t know the meaning of actual work.
You’re talking about people born rich. I agree. That has nothing to do with people who worked their way up to being rich.
Take two people born poor. One of them goes to medical school, sweats long hours on little sleep and completes their degree. Now they get a cushy situation because they invested their time and energy into acquiring skills. The other one now works harder and makes a lot less money, because he didn’t invest his time into acquiring valuable skills. He works harder, but provides a lot less value. Shouldn’t compensation have more to do with value than just ‘sweat quotient’?
The purpose of this thread is to take what the previous poster said, and make it really about what you feel like talking about.
For instance,
Poster A: “It’s really important to eat a lot of fruit, because fruit has vitamin C.”
Poster B: “That’s true, and it just goes to show how low our culture has sunk that we don’t eat enough vitamin C. Nobody takes the time to stop and smell the roses anymore, pretty soon we won’t even leave our homes.”
Poster C: “I can’t take the time to stop and smell the roses. I don’t keep flowers inside the house because my cat would just eat them. I love owning a cat, but it can be a hassle. Cats are so much better than dogs.”
I’ll start:
I love hiking in the mountains. Drive up to New Hampshire with a group of buddies and just spend the whole day surrounded by nature. The only problem is I’m a mosquito magnet. Anyone else into hiking?
In general I do think power should be decentralized, but not in some of these cases. Education? Environment? Education is not ‘discretionary’, it is the most basic entitlement everybody in the country should get. And the environment? This is not a case where actions are insular: If you pollute the environment it affects everybody even outside the state.
Here’s the thing about taxes. Suppose you are the head of a department of the government. You are given $100 million, and you only spend $70 million. Do you: A) Give the extra $30 million back, or B) Find a way to spend it? If you give it back, guess what you’ll get next year. $70 million. But what if you need that $100 million next year? So, you spend that extra $30 million on something, anything. You expand your department and its overhead. Then next year you go back to the federal government and say you need more.
We have a fundamental flaw in the way we think of funding. If one year you get $100 million, and next year you get $95 million, you don’t think of it as receiving $95 million dollars, you think of it as a 5% cut. That is reactionary, and leads to the perpetually ballooning overhead described in the previous paragraph. Every single dollar should have to be newly justified every single year.
Given that is newly justified, yes, it is ridiculous that capital gains tax is 15% and regular income is 35%, and taxing should be done at a reasonable, progressive rate.
Also, we have a disturbing decreasing ratio of workforce to retired people and unsustainable systems that people have been planning their financial future based on. Social security was designed when there were 16 working people for every one retired person. Now there’s 2.5. It’s obvious this system is unsustainable if the cutoff and benefit stays the same, but touching it is political cyanide, so instead we’re just paying huge rates for a system that’s going to explode out from under us in a few decades, instead of making the sacrifices and compromises we need to stabilize a system that ensures the basic needs of elderly are met.
You know what happens when you cut funding to states? They raise property taxes and it becomes impossible for poor people to move into better neighborhoods.
But yeah, federal spending that is actually discretionary should be cut, and every department should have to publicly justify every penny they get every year.
I’m curious how you felt The Matrix was a metaphor for the internet. Besides the fact that the world is interconnected through machines, I don’t believe the social implications of the Matrix match the social implications of the internet. (Particularly I feel the ‘Dying in the Matrix means dying in real life’ thing was a contrived way to make the Matrix more dangerous).
@Balistik
My feeling about Gattaca is that it moves toward realism, then it moves further. Genetic scans being part of job interviews seems distantly possible, but even then people would have to prove their experience lives up to their genes. Just out of best interest, I think most employers would look at your proven experience more closely than your genetic scans, except that they will check the scans for specific red flags. (Which is a problem, it will blacklist people with genetic illnesses like Huntington’s).
The more short term implications of genetic scans is the impact on insurance costs. You apply to get health insurance, give me your genetic scans! Oh, you have a high risk of breast cancer? Okay, you pay more. Don’t want to hand over genetic scans? No health insurance for you!
I don’t believe Monsieur Verdoux wanted you to feel sympathy for him. It’s more it wanted you to feel bad about the situation that made him lose his love for humanity, but it also wanted to express love for humanity.
Yeah his films were simplistic, but why does every film need to stir you on a deep intellectual level? Sometimes it’s okay to just ride the emotional roller coaster the film set out for you. Deep and shallow films can both be great in their own ways.
Keaton’s on the other hand I find a little too emotionally manipulative. I don’t buy his lovable underdog character at all, and I don’t think it’s very apt at the physical comedy he attempts, though The General certainly has its moments its plagued by ‘MC single-handedly wins the war by accident’ syndrome.
Democracy without education is not democracy at all: It’s the plutocracy that marxists accuse it of being.
The trouble with this poster is, is there much I look at and want to say “Yeah, axe that entire program?” Probably not. There’s some research budget there that could probably be accomplished just as or more efficiently by providing incentives to the private sector, there’s ‘favor for favor’ pork projects buried in there, and there’s a lot of funding people aren’t willing to cut for fear of the ‘job destroyer’ designation on the election resume.
But it’s all buried very cleverly: It’d take an objective expert to find out exactly what’s in there.
Or maybe, change the system so coming in under-budget doesn’t diminish your future funding? For instance, say, for every dollar you give back to the federal government, 50 cents of that dollar gets added onto next year’s budget.
The thing about Clooney is, he would genuinely rather make serious films than ones that could turn a profit, but he also really wants everybody to know he wants to.
And, he wants to be considered a serious actor, but also wants to be known as light hearted and willing to joke about himself. He tries to accomplish by talking about Batman every time he receives praise, which is about as believable as Mitt Romney campaigning as a working man.
So yeah, Clooney does have artistic integrity. And he really wants you to think so.
There’s nothing wrong with his journey to success. He was first big on ER.
The annoying thing is that carefully sculpted attitude of his where he’s like “Can you believe it, somebody who played Batman is winning awards now! How ever so ironic!”
I liked some of their music, like the Paul’s Boutique album and some of their later singles. The music of theirs I didn’t like was songs like ‘Fight For Your Right To Party’ which sounded like just a lot of shrill screaming.
Buster is pretty sentimental too, I’m curious to hear the explanation for the ‘Existentialist’ comment.
I’ve only seen The General and Sherlock Jr, so maybe he gets really wildly existential in his other films. But those two are just about an unaggressive man of childlike emotion and intelligence trying to prove himself. I suppose Sherlock Jr has that long hero fantasy sequence, but The Kid has that big ‘Bureaucracy is stooped’ dream sequence too.
Intelligent analysis of a film comes from experience, not from technique. Technique is something that happens afterward, when you want to discuss it with other people, especially if you’re a critic. When I’m trying to privately sort out my own impression of a film, I just sort of think about it really hard, and reflect on how I felt and what I was thinking while watching it.
Sometimes it’s just a ‘click’ moment. The amount my ability to analyze literature improved in my junior year of high school was stark and even measurable: I took the SAT once and got 650 verbal. I took it again six months later and got 760 verbal. My ‘click’ moment for films happened at some point in the first Mubi DC. It’s just an issue of gaining the right experience that guides your thinking in the right direction.
Last week I partook in ‘Slow Art Day’, which is a worldwide thing that I observed through a meetup group at the Museum of Fine Arts.
The idea of ‘slow art day’ is that you go to an art museum with a list of five or six specific pieces of art to look at, and you spend ten minutes looking at each of them, then reflect on the pieces of art and how that was different than the usual museum trip where you look at a lot of different pieces very briefly.
It’s really interesting the different way you notice detail of a painting or sculpture rather than just the general impression.
Here’s an example:
A conventionally shaped Buddha statue, covered with stickers which range from cute anime characters to corporate logos, to price tags, to violent headlines, to images of guns. To me it represents the way all that information is blended together in an undifferentiated stream that all feels the same. I would have found it far less interesting if I hadn’t taken the time to analyze it.
If we’re counting Q1 2012 as the American availability date, then Once Upon A Time in Anatolia and Turin Horse stand out above the rest.
Then Cabin In The Woods, Hunger Games, Chico & Rita, anything after those would be stretching. I haven’t seen much I like this year that wasn’t internationally released last year.
It’s okay, decently entertaining. A heavy helping of Sorkin glibness makes it a little more interesting but keeps it from engaging you on anything more than an amusement level.
Oh, absolutely. Kids have their entire social lives structured for them, then their parents wonder why they don’t have any social skills.
Also all this new anti-bullying campaign boils down to ‘If anyone teases you, run to an adult.’
We’re going to see a serious spike in the number of frivolous lawsuits ten or twenty years from now, because we will have a giant spike in the number of 20-30 year olds who have no coping skills and whose first instinct for any conflict is to run to somebody else to handle it for them.
I should have been a small claims lawyer.
I’m a math person so I found the saber metrics angle interesting. It’s ’Let’s not do what our instinct tells us, let’s analyze what actually produces a win’. They apply that and beat the people who recruit emotionally. Moneyball also brings up the oft-ignored idea in sports of random variation. If somebody wins five games in a row or has a few good games, everybody says "What is making this team so HOT?!‘, when most of the time it’s probably just a statistical anomaly, and then when they predictably regress to the mean, people say ‘Why aren’t they getting it done anymore?’
In statistics there’s this idea of family-wise error. That is:
You might see an unlikely trend, but instead of asking ‘How likely was that to happen’, you need to ask ‘How likely is something this unlikely to happen?’ Moneyball gets at this notion, though it sort of downplays it to focus on the drama. It does mention it enough, though, to get the idea across that the Athletics weren’t a bad team at the start of the season, they were just on the negative end of standard deviation.
The formula for standard error in things with two possible results is: SE = ~.5 * root(games squared). So, for a full baseball season, the standard error is in the realm of 6-7 games. So out of all 30 teams in the league, odds are one of them will win 13 fewer games than they’re supposed to, and commentators will say “They had a terrible year” when maybe they just had really bad luck.
Moneyball could have spent more time on that angle, but it did spend enough to get the idea across.
By 1940s standards Casablanca was very cool. It’s got the most punchy dialog of any film I’ve ever seen.
“I am SHOCKED! SHOCKED that there is gambling going on here!”
This is a good list of ‘cool’ films but seems inconsistent about which group it’s cool to. Depressed teenagers? Rushmore, Fight Club, check. Boutique art film fans? Blow-up, Breathless, check. Mainstream culture fans? Shaft, Rebel Without A Cause, check.
Sculptures in Science fiction films about 1 year ago
The statues on the moving stairway in A Matter Of Life And Death.
I guess if Lost counts as science fiction, that has to as well.
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Conservative Liberalism about 1 year ago
@Santino
Who’s trying to simplify anything? I’m not talking about absolute stereotypes, I"m talking about averages. The average man is taller than the average woman, but if I said ‘Men are taller than women’ you wouldn’t assume I meant that every single man is a hulking giant and every single woman is a pigmy. There is a huge contingent on Mubi that’s consistently reactionary about any kind of cultural drift they don’t agree with, and I find it similar to the reaction of religious conservatives to secular culture, and it is very conservative.
A conservative idolizes the past and a progressive idolizes the future. The trend on Mubi is to idolize the past. Whether it’s Glenn Beck’s idyllic past of a flawless Christian nation or Mubi’s idyllic past where everybody and their mothers appreciated great art and interacted as well informed political human beings, it’s just different natures of the same beast.
Of course it doesn’t apply absolutely to every single person, that goes without saying. I’m talking about the area where the dart marks appear the most dense. Any time you’re talking about human beings a large standard deviation is implied.
@Wu Yong
Fine. “The government of the Federation in Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “The government of Iran”, and “The role of government proposed by many members of Mubi”. I think intent there was pretty obvious.
@DFOOO, Brad
Those are exactly the kinds of movies I’m talking about, where they have a modern premise but the characters are pulled toward conservatism on the implied premise that human intent can not trump human nature. A progressive sees human nature as something that can change, and a conservative sees it as a constant.
@Ari
Both the democratic and republican parties in America are extremely conservative, just one is liberal in the social sphere and one is liberal in the fiscal sphere. And even there they’re pretty damn close to each other, they just appear wildly different because they talk up the wedge issues so much.
And both parties are equally guilty for eroding civil liberties, it’s just that only one of the two parties admits it.
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Do You Have To Care About the Film's Subject Matter to Like/Love or Appreciate a Film? about 1 year ago
No, you don’t need to care about a film’s subject matter to like the film. It helps, because it makes it easier to find a personal hook. But if the filmmaker is talented (And targeting a general audience instead of a specific one), the filmmaker should be able to find a story to tell about the subject that’s interesting to any open minded audience.
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Movies about small towns about 1 year ago
God’s Country
Fire Walk With Me
There Will Be Blood
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Pulp Fiction is the Greatest Film Ever, Anyone who doesn't agree is a Republican about 1 year ago
The poor are not poor because they are stupid.
Well, depends on the poor person. Some poor people have never had the opportunity to improve their situation, they are poor by chance. Some poor people have had chances to improve their situation and have done nothing about it, they are poor because they made bad decisions.
Mike is born to a poor family. He is poor, and it’s not his fault. He has the opportunity to go to a city college and gain a certification so he can get a job. Instead, he sits around and plays video games. Now he is still poor, and now it is his fault.
Veterans who fought in the army and then came back and were unable to get a job are poor because of an unfortunate situation. Thirty year olds who spent their college years drinking and partying are poor because of bad choices. We need to make a distinction between people who’ve had a choice and people who haven’t. I’m perfectly willing to be taxed to help the poor people who didn’t have a choice.
I’ve been putting 16% of my paycheck into a 401k, deferring gratification for forty years. Forty years later, shouldn’t I get that gratification?
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Movies about small towns about 1 year ago
Pleasantville
Sunrise
Groundhog Day
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Pulp Fiction is the Greatest Film Ever, Anyone who doesn't agree is a Republican about 1 year ago
As for democracy, the value of democracy isn’t the leaders that get elected, the value of democracy is the ease of kicking them out. In a monarchy you might get a great leader. Then, later you might get an atrocious leader, and then what do you do? Your options are really a full blown civil war or just keeping your mouth shut and trying not to get guillotined.
I am troubled by the large amount of people who vote emotionally based on the public narrative rather than a thorough understanding of the issues. But then again, I haven’t actually met anyone in person who votes that way, I think it’s mostly voters old enough that their opinions are no longer malleable.
I agree that educational systems need to place more emphasis on critical thinking and debate, all this standardized testing has made it more and more about fact memorization, and all the political debate over education has been about manipulating what the facts are. (Texas board of education gets to determine the textbooks for everyone — ugh).
Children need to be taught the tools to think for themselves, but otherwise, people just don’t need to be shepherded, and their own personal decisions ought to be respected.
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Pulp Fiction is the Greatest Film Ever, Anyone who doesn't agree is a Republican about 1 year ago
Actually Wu Yong, for five years I worked a part time job where I went around to retail stores and physically scanned all the items on their shelves. I got down on my knees to reach low shelves, laid down on the floor to reach the bottom one in some cases. I started out at $9/hour and ended up at $12.50/hour. I woke up at 5 AM every day to get to work at 7 AM, sometimes walking to the bus station in -10 degree weather before the sidewalks were shoveled. Some shifts lasted ten to twelve hours, and depending on the store either my knees hurt from kneeling or my back hurt from standing up all day. At the time the only rooms I could afford were in college areas where my roommates were 20 year olds who blasted loud music until 2 AM.
In the meantime, I was working on a Masters degree. Now I make a lot more money. Coincidence?
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Sci-Fi Films That Boldly and Daringly Explore Its Sci-Fi Ideas about 1 year ago
I think Jazzaloha is getting at the kind of scifi people would call ‘Hard scifi’, like might be generated by Asimov or Dick.
Speaking of Dick, Minority Report kind of does, but it’s buried in the sort of morality that derives directly from knee-jerk emotional responses, and that keeps the issue from being that deeply explored. (I’d probably say the exact same thing about AI — damn Spielberg).
2001 does this mostly using cinematography instead of dialog, which is admirable. And I agree about Children of Men.
If other media than film are allowable, then Battlestar Galactica and Mass Effect (Though Mass Effect is more like 24 in space).
I disagree with the inclusion of The Matrix in this. It’s more on the level of Inception for me — a lot of complicated techno-magic exposition derived around the needs of the story they want to tell.
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Do you have to have eyes to watch a film? about 1 year ago
Good films, yes. There are plenty of films out there today that you could understand perfectly well without the visual component, especially mainstream films, and especially if you use those headsets for blind people that describe the scene for you.
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Pulp Fiction is the Greatest Film Ever, Anyone who doesn't agree is a Republican about 1 year ago
_My point here is that I find it suspect to try to excuse one group for being poor over another and feeling the need to assign blame. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter who is to blame. What matters is that there are people out there struggling and it’s our duty as a society to have a safety net. _
There I agree. I only differ in that, once you’re in the safety net, I think it’s your responsibility to take the initiative to climb back up to the wire.
You had a part time job in which you worked 12 hour shifts?
That doesn’t really add up… But alright.
Length depended on the store. Small clothing stores were 3-4 hours. A CVS or a Shaws was 5-8 hours. A Sears was 9-12 hours two days in a row. I ended up with an average of about 30 hours per week. (But, right after Christmas it got up to 50-60, right before Christmas I had barely any work at all.)
You wouldn’t do that job in that retail store now, would you?
Because it’s not necessary for you to. But it’s necessary for someone to [in this system]. To devalue that work merely because you have a perception of wasted opportunity is not only misanthropic, it’s borderline fascistic.
Right, and the reason I don’t have to do that job now is that I got myself an education. Everybody right now who is working a crappy job has the opportunity to either get a better job, or get themselves the education to get a better job. If they choose not to do so, they stay right where they are. It doesn’t take Ivy League prices to get a professional certification, and anyone can get an education loan who didn’t destroy their own credit rating by living beyond their means.
Do you even know what fascism is? Fascism is, if they quit the job they get murdered.
What you’re saying is an insult to every person who has ever been born poor and worked their way out of poverty: You’re devaluing their accomplishments by attributing them to blind luck. If somebody is born poor and ends up doing well for themselves it’s because they worked hard.
Is it harder for people born poor than people born rich? Absolutely, and that’s a serious problem, but equalizing education is going to solve that problem a lot faster than dictating wages and handing things out.
Despite its fantasies about itself as a land of opportunity, the U.S. today has less class mobility than any western country in the world.
A: Statistics?
B: Again, education gaps. We need better education available to everyone, period. Education is a prerequisite for democracy.
But if we start breaking down anecdotal narratives of, the dishwasher has a chronic illness from birth defect, the dishwasher is a gambling addict, the dishwasher lives in a community where the $9500/year job is one of the only jobs available and the local education system doesn’t communicate well to his marginalized culture in order to inform him how best to budget his $9500 in a method that is sustainable and allows for savings toward educating himself further to gain a skill-based job that offers better, we’re talking about different issues despite their interconnectedness.
Small Q, are you implying a gambling addiction is the same as not having opportunities available in your community? Gambling addiction is something, IMO, the individual is responsible for. But you’re right, lack of information about opportunities is a big culptrit. Again, it’s an issue of education.
I’m also against people giving jobs to their friends and family members, that’s a serious problem.
Yep. In my experience, it’s usually the people who work the hardest that make the least money and struggle the most. People that I know who are rich or are well to do don’t know the meaning of actual work.
You’re talking about people born rich. I agree. That has nothing to do with people who worked their way up to being rich.
Take two people born poor. One of them goes to medical school, sweats long hours on little sleep and completes their degree. Now they get a cushy situation because they invested their time and energy into acquiring skills. The other one now works harder and makes a lot less money, because he didn’t invest his time into acquiring valuable skills. He works harder, but provides a lot less value. Shouldn’t compensation have more to do with value than just ‘sweat quotient’?
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Do you have to have eyes to watch a film? about 1 year ago
Yes, I have chosen to DISREGARD the intent of the original poster and rail against the visual blandness of popular film.
Now, somebody start a Marxism/Capitalism debate!
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Hijack this thread! about 1 year ago
The purpose of this thread is to take what the previous poster said, and make it really about what you feel like talking about.
For instance,
Poster A: “It’s really important to eat a lot of fruit, because fruit has vitamin C.”
Poster B: “That’s true, and it just goes to show how low our culture has sunk that we don’t eat enough vitamin C. Nobody takes the time to stop and smell the roses anymore, pretty soon we won’t even leave our homes.”
Poster C: “I can’t take the time to stop and smell the roses. I don’t keep flowers inside the house because my cat would just eat them. I love owning a cat, but it can be a hassle. Cats are so much better than dogs.”
I’ll start:
I love hiking in the mountains. Drive up to New Hampshire with a group of buddies and just spend the whole day surrounded by nature. The only problem is I’m a mosquito magnet. Anyone else into hiking?
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Is Paul Ryan's Budget Tantamount to Social Darwinism? about 1 year ago
In general I do think power should be decentralized, but not in some of these cases. Education? Environment? Education is not ‘discretionary’, it is the most basic entitlement everybody in the country should get. And the environment? This is not a case where actions are insular: If you pollute the environment it affects everybody even outside the state.
Here’s the thing about taxes. Suppose you are the head of a department of the government. You are given $100 million, and you only spend $70 million. Do you: A) Give the extra $30 million back, or B) Find a way to spend it? If you give it back, guess what you’ll get next year. $70 million. But what if you need that $100 million next year? So, you spend that extra $30 million on something, anything. You expand your department and its overhead. Then next year you go back to the federal government and say you need more.
We have a fundamental flaw in the way we think of funding. If one year you get $100 million, and next year you get $95 million, you don’t think of it as receiving $95 million dollars, you think of it as a 5% cut. That is reactionary, and leads to the perpetually ballooning overhead described in the previous paragraph. Every single dollar should have to be newly justified every single year.
Given that is newly justified, yes, it is ridiculous that capital gains tax is 15% and regular income is 35%, and taxing should be done at a reasonable, progressive rate.
Also, we have a disturbing decreasing ratio of workforce to retired people and unsustainable systems that people have been planning their financial future based on. Social security was designed when there were 16 working people for every one retired person. Now there’s 2.5. It’s obvious this system is unsustainable if the cutoff and benefit stays the same, but touching it is political cyanide, so instead we’re just paying huge rates for a system that’s going to explode out from under us in a few decades, instead of making the sacrifices and compromises we need to stabilize a system that ensures the basic needs of elderly are met.
You know what happens when you cut funding to states? They raise property taxes and it becomes impossible for poor people to move into better neighborhoods.
But yeah, federal spending that is actually discretionary should be cut, and every department should have to publicly justify every penny they get every year.
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Sci-Fi Films That Boldly and Daringly Explore Its Sci-Fi Ideas about 1 year ago
@Jazz
I’m curious how you felt The Matrix was a metaphor for the internet. Besides the fact that the world is interconnected through machines, I don’t believe the social implications of the Matrix match the social implications of the internet. (Particularly I feel the ‘Dying in the Matrix means dying in real life’ thing was a contrived way to make the Matrix more dangerous).
@Balistik
My feeling about Gattaca is that it moves toward realism, then it moves further. Genetic scans being part of job interviews seems distantly possible, but even then people would have to prove their experience lives up to their genes. Just out of best interest, I think most employers would look at your proven experience more closely than your genetic scans, except that they will check the scans for specific red flags. (Which is a problem, it will blacklist people with genetic illnesses like Huntington’s).
The more short term implications of genetic scans is the impact on insurance costs. You apply to get health insurance, give me your genetic scans! Oh, you have a high risk of breast cancer? Okay, you pay more. Don’t want to hand over genetic scans? No health insurance for you!
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Sci-Fi Films That Boldly and Daringly Explore Its Sci-Fi Ideas about 1 year ago
dp
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Did you know there are people who don't like Charlie Chaplin? about 1 year ago
I don’t believe Monsieur Verdoux wanted you to feel sympathy for him. It’s more it wanted you to feel bad about the situation that made him lose his love for humanity, but it also wanted to express love for humanity.
Yeah his films were simplistic, but why does every film need to stir you on a deep intellectual level? Sometimes it’s okay to just ride the emotional roller coaster the film set out for you. Deep and shallow films can both be great in their own ways.
Keaton’s on the other hand I find a little too emotionally manipulative. I don’t buy his lovable underdog character at all, and I don’t think it’s very apt at the physical comedy he attempts, though The General certainly has its moments its plagued by ‘MC single-handedly wins the war by accident’ syndrome.
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Is Paul Ryan's Budget Tantamount to Social Darwinism? about 1 year ago
Democracy without education is not democracy at all: It’s the plutocracy that marxists accuse it of being.
The trouble with this poster is, is there much I look at and want to say “Yeah, axe that entire program?” Probably not. There’s some research budget there that could probably be accomplished just as or more efficiently by providing incentives to the private sector, there’s ‘favor for favor’ pork projects buried in there, and there’s a lot of funding people aren’t willing to cut for fear of the ‘job destroyer’ designation on the election resume.
But it’s all buried very cleverly: It’d take an objective expert to find out exactly what’s in there.
Or maybe, change the system so coming in under-budget doesn’t diminish your future funding? For instance, say, for every dollar you give back to the federal government, 50 cents of that dollar gets added onto next year’s budget.
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Last movie you saw and rate it about 1 year ago
The thing about Clooney is, he would genuinely rather make serious films than ones that could turn a profit, but he also really wants everybody to know he wants to.
And, he wants to be considered a serious actor, but also wants to be known as light hearted and willing to joke about himself. He tries to accomplish by talking about Batman every time he receives praise, which is about as believable as Mitt Romney campaigning as a working man.
So yeah, Clooney does have artistic integrity. And he really wants you to think so.
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Last movie you saw and rate it about 1 year ago
There’s nothing wrong with his journey to success. He was first big on ER.
The annoying thing is that carefully sculpted attitude of his where he’s like “Can you believe it, somebody who played Batman is winning awards now! How ever so ironic!”
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STOP THE LISTS! about 1 year ago
I liked some of their music, like the Paul’s Boutique album and some of their later singles. The music of theirs I didn’t like was songs like ‘Fight For Your Right To Party’ which sounded like just a lot of shrill screaming.
Sad. They were still producing pretty good music.
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Did you know there are people who don't like Charlie Chaplin? about 1 year ago
Buster is pretty sentimental too, I’m curious to hear the explanation for the ‘Existentialist’ comment.
I’ve only seen The General and Sherlock Jr, so maybe he gets really wildly existential in his other films. But those two are just about an unaggressive man of childlike emotion and intelligence trying to prove himself. I suppose Sherlock Jr has that long hero fantasy sequence, but The Kid has that big ‘Bureaucracy is stooped’ dream sequence too.
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A Discussion on Your Method of Analyzing and Understanding Movies about 1 year ago
Intelligent analysis of a film comes from experience, not from technique. Technique is something that happens afterward, when you want to discuss it with other people, especially if you’re a critic. When I’m trying to privately sort out my own impression of a film, I just sort of think about it really hard, and reflect on how I felt and what I was thinking while watching it.
Sometimes it’s just a ‘click’ moment. The amount my ability to analyze literature improved in my junior year of high school was stark and even measurable: I took the SAT once and got 650 verbal. I took it again six months later and got 760 verbal. My ‘click’ moment for films happened at some point in the first Mubi DC. It’s just an issue of gaining the right experience that guides your thinking in the right direction.
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How Learning to Look at Paintings Can Help One Better Appreciate Films about 1 year ago
Last week I partook in ‘Slow Art Day’, which is a worldwide thing that I observed through a meetup group at the Museum of Fine Arts.
The idea of ‘slow art day’ is that you go to an art museum with a list of five or six specific pieces of art to look at, and you spend ten minutes looking at each of them, then reflect on the pieces of art and how that was different than the usual museum trip where you look at a lot of different pieces very briefly.
It’s really interesting the different way you notice detail of a painting or sculpture rather than just the general impression.
Here’s an example:
A conventionally shaped Buddha statue, covered with stickers which range from cute anime characters to corporate logos, to price tags, to violent headlines, to images of guns. To me it represents the way all that information is blended together in an undifferentiated stream that all feels the same. I would have found it far less interesting if I hadn’t taken the time to analyze it.
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Best 2012 Releases First Quarter? about 1 year ago
If we’re counting Q1 2012 as the American availability date, then Once Upon A Time in Anatolia and Turin Horse stand out above the rest.
Then Cabin In The Woods, Hunger Games, Chico & Rita, anything after those would be stretching. I haven’t seen much I like this year that wasn’t internationally released last year.
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Moneyball : What do you have to say about it.... about 1 year ago
It’s okay, decently entertaining. A heavy helping of Sorkin glibness makes it a little more interesting but keeps it from engaging you on anything more than an amusement level.
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20th Century Fox ends film distribution! The beginning of the end of film??? about 1 year ago
A lot of digital film projections I’ve seen look noticeably pixelated. But that’s the only issue I have with digital, I am untainted by nostalgia.
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Moneyball : What do you have to say about it.... about 1 year ago
Oh, absolutely. Kids have their entire social lives structured for them, then their parents wonder why they don’t have any social skills.
Also all this new anti-bullying campaign boils down to ‘If anyone teases you, run to an adult.’
We’re going to see a serious spike in the number of frivolous lawsuits ten or twenty years from now, because we will have a giant spike in the number of 20-30 year olds who have no coping skills and whose first instinct for any conflict is to run to somebody else to handle it for them.
I should have been a small claims lawyer.
I’m a math person so I found the saber metrics angle interesting. It’s ’Let’s not do what our instinct tells us, let’s analyze what actually produces a win’. They apply that and beat the people who recruit emotionally. Moneyball also brings up the oft-ignored idea in sports of random variation. If somebody wins five games in a row or has a few good games, everybody says "What is making this team so HOT?!‘, when most of the time it’s probably just a statistical anomaly, and then when they predictably regress to the mean, people say ‘Why aren’t they getting it done anymore?’
In statistics there’s this idea of family-wise error. That is:
You might see an unlikely trend, but instead of asking ‘How likely was that to happen’, you need to ask ‘How likely is something this unlikely to happen?’ Moneyball gets at this notion, though it sort of downplays it to focus on the drama. It does mention it enough, though, to get the idea across that the Athletics weren’t a bad team at the start of the season, they were just on the negative end of standard deviation.
The formula for standard error in things with two possible results is: SE = ~.5 * root(games squared). So, for a full baseball season, the standard error is in the realm of 6-7 games. So out of all 30 teams in the league, odds are one of them will win 13 fewer games than they’re supposed to, and commentators will say “They had a terrible year” when maybe they just had really bad luck.
Moneyball could have spent more time on that angle, but it did spend enough to get the idea across.
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30 Coolest Films Ever about 1 year ago
dp
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30 Coolest Films Ever about 1 year ago
By 1940s standards Casablanca was very cool. It’s got the most punchy dialog of any film I’ve ever seen.
“I am SHOCKED! SHOCKED that there is gambling going on here!”
This is a good list of ‘cool’ films but seems inconsistent about which group it’s cool to. Depressed teenagers? Rushmore, Fight Club, check. Boutique art film fans? Blow-up, Breathless, check. Mainstream culture fans? Shaft, Rebel Without A Cause, check.
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