August 2009
51 posts
“I think everyone in the future is going to be allowed to be obscure for 15 minutes. You’ll have 15 minutes where no one is watching you, and then you’ll be shoved back onto your reality show. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong. ”
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Patton Oswalt | Film | A.V. Club
I don’t think I’ve ever pulled two separate quotes from the same interview, but this is really great stuff. He also talks a lot about how innovative television is today. Plus internet commenters, Taxi Driver, Dollhouse, Bob Dylan, Myspace, and Ireland.
“Because at the end of my life, I’ll go, “Oh, I enjoyed all those ice-cream sandwiches when I wasn’t arguing with anyone.” I’ll just quietly do what the fuck I want to do.”
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Patton Oswalt | Film | A.V. Club
Patton really is the closest thing we have to a 21st century zen master. Great interview.
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Bandslam's Bad Marketing... →
deadlinehollywooddaily.com
“Isn’t there a story here? Death by marketing? A movie that gets 80% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes — 90% from top critics — won’t see the light of day because Summit consistently made some of the worst choices, and their core audience summarily dismissed the movie without seeing it based on their sale…
I love it when bad things happen to stupid arrogant people. (The bad thing being the movie tanking, which I guess isn’t bad per say, just sad.) This guy should be ridiculed in a public square after begging for forgiveness and then tossed off a bridge.
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“If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.”
—Andy Warhol (via claytoncubitt)
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“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” —Poets’ Corner - William Butler Yeats - Selected Works
A.I. is such a solid movie borne from the venn diagram of Spielberg and Kubrick’s movie-making-minds. I even liked the alien ending this time which I remember simply abhorring previously because of the semi-supernatural pretty-bowtie-ending resurrection of robo-boy’s mother.
Now it has a surprising and somewhat sensible logic.
Robo-boy, who is as real as he is post-human, survives as the missing link between the humans and the aliens. Humans -> computers -> aliens. Evolutionary speaking, I can think of nothing more natural. (F Fermi)
Aliens to planet Earth, of course, and not to the universe as a whole. And, given their obvious superiority based on, if nothing else, their longevity, who am I to say that they can’t resurrect anything they want given some DNA and a memory bank.
I remember really wanting the movie to end as robo-boy falls into the sea, before he is even rescued by Gigaglo Joe. For some reason that seemed more poetic, a robo-suicide upon realizing that he’d never in fact be a real boy and that a cloned life wasn’t worth continuing. Now, the realization of their relationship, the distraught mother and her robo-son, seems just as satisfying and certainly more uplifting, although still a bit melancholy. And not just the relationship, but Robo-boy himself realizing that he is a real boy has meaning beyond the tragic doom I had previously sought. I must be growing up or something.
Anyway, I hope to at least see a super-toy-teddy-bear in my lifetime. That looks like it’d be fun to kick around.
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” —Poets’ Corner - William Butler Yeats - Selected Works
A.I. is such a solid movie borne from the venn diagram of Spielberg and Kubrick’s movie-making-minds. I even liked the alien ending this time which I remember simply abhorring previously because of the semi-supernatural pretty-bowtie-ending resurrection of robo-boy’s mother.
Now it has a surprising and somewhat sensible logic.
Robo-boy, who is as real as he is post-human, survives as the missing link between the humans and the aliens. Humans -> computers -> aliens. Evolutionary speaking, I can think of nothing more natural. (F Fermi)
Aliens to planet Earth, of course, and not to the universe as a whole. And, given their obvious superiority based on, if nothing else, their longevity, who am I to say that they can’t resurrect anything they want given some DNA and a memory bank.
I remember really wanting the movie to end as robo-boy falls into the sea, before he is even rescued by Gigaglo Joe. For some reason that seemed more poetic, a robo-suicide upon realizing that he’d never in fact be a real boy and that a cloned life wasn’t worth continuing. Now, the realization of their relationship, the distraught mother and her robo-son, seems just as satisfying and certainly more uplifting, although still a bit melancholy. And not just the relationship, but Robo-boy himself realizing that he is a real boy has meaning beyond the tragic doom I had previously sought. I must be growing up or something.
Anyway, I hope to at least see a super-toy-teddy-bear in my lifetime. That looks like it’d be fun to kick around.
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“The [senior adviser to Bush] said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
—The New York Times Magazine > Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush - Ron Suskind
It is extremely unsettling to think that that Bush was president for pretty much my entire twenties. Although I suppose that this quote is similar to how many twenty-something people think and act. Myself included.
Much like Tom Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.” I don’t believe I’ll ever forget this quote. For those in the older generations, I don’t think you understand how traumatic an experience it was to come of age in the age of George W. Bush.
(via sexartandpolitics)It is extremely unsettling to think that that Bush was president for pretty much my entire twenties. Although I suppose that this quote is similar to how many twenty-something people think and act. Myself included.
