it’s been seven years…

since the new millenium started. and i know it’s probably asking too much, considering the cinema is really a child of the 20th century, and all that history just makes it statistically more probable that the lion’s share of the good films would have been made at that time.

but have there been any great movies since 2005’s Goodfellas? (which, i have to agree is a pretty great film).

as for good (meaning critically acclaimed or with some sort of impact on life in general) films I’ve yet to watch, here’s a list, in no particular order:

1. La Règle du Jeu by Jean Renoir
2. The Searchers by John Ford
3. Tokyo Monogatari by Ozu Yasujiro
4. Sunrise and Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau
5. Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl (yes, this is the Hitler propaganda flick, I wanna see this because they say it was such great propaganda… scary…)
6. Ghost World by by Terry Zwigoff (yes! a 2001 film! about a comic book!)
7. M by Fritz Lang
8. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir
9. Mon oncle Antoine by Claude Jutra (will probably catch this Canadian film, as well as the other Canadian films on this list when I head back there this year, they should be in the library.)
10. Jésus de Montréal by Denys Arcand
11. Un Zoo La Nuit by Jean-Claude Lauzon
12. Xiaocheng zhi Chun (Spring in a Small Town) by Fei Mu
13. Yingxiong Bense (A Better Tomorrow) by John Woo
14. Memorias de Subdesarollo by Tomas Gutierrez Alea (I actually saw this Cuban film in university, I just need to see it again)
15. Les Enfants du Paradis by Marcel Carné
16. The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswany
17. Das Boot by Wolfgang Petersen (again another film I’ve seen but need to see again)
18. The Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar) by Satyalit Ray
19. Bronenosets Potyemkin (The Battleship Potemkin) by Sergei Eisenstein
20. Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) by Ingmar Bergman
21. The Third Man by Carol Reed
22. Get Carter by Mike Hodges

I’ll post here once I’ve seen these films. And if you’ve any other films that you believe are “must watch”, please let me know.

un autre jour…

Looking through the posts on this blog, I realized that I had already done those little quiz things on this journal. So I’m doing one again this year. Here goes…

You Are 28% Emo

You’re definitely not emo, but you do understand emo people a little. You are introspective, but not to the point of driving yourself crazy.

Are You Emo?

Well, this something I already know. I think if I had taken this test at a much younger age, I may actually qualify for the label.

On another slightly related note, I just picked up A Checkered Past: The 2Tone Collection a compilation of the music I listened to back in high school. At the time, I wore the Doc Martens and the black jeans; I had a plaid shirt and an olive green bomber jacket; My hair was cut real short (though not shaved, too much drama if I went that far haha). When I was in uniform, I would be in a shirt and tie and brogues.  I stopped short of the hat (mainly because I couldn’t find a decent Trilby in the vintage shops on Spadina, hehehe)

We were the ones writing the school paper, and we were the angry, noisy, anti-Establishment voice. And we were also on the Honour Society and the Student Council. But mostly we would tap kegs, slamdance at school parties, and occasionally pick fights with the ginos for the prime spots in the parking lot.

I wonder at times if we’ve all sold out, if Shawn and Dylan are slaving away in an office right now, listening to a compilation album…

Because I may doing this now. But I haven’t sold out to anyone or anything. This is my life, and I got exclusive rights to how it goes.  Non Serviam, baby.

Heath

They finally find an actor who I think is decent enough to play the Joker…. and he kicks the bucket after one movie.

I never really got to see his other movies. Brokeback was dragging… and his earlier movie, something about knights in armour and whatnot was well, fluff… But I liked him in Brothers Grimm, and The Patriot. And to think he died in the middle of filming a Terry Gilliam movie.

Well, they say he ODed on pills. I really don’t know what was going on in the last minutes of his life, but I guess I’d like to thank him for standing out from the drek that populates many Hollywood studios nowadays.

Till your next life, buddy.

Cheers.

Ennui

I interestingly enough first came across this word during the times my friends and I would play the roleplaying game (RPG) Vampire: The Masquerade.  It was a trait a vampire possessed that essentially portrayed one as phenomenally bored with the passing of centuries of unlife.  Ennui, in game term, essentially left the character as one with an almost inhuman point of view, an annoyance with the ephemerality of the world around them, and a sense that, when one looks at it all, immortality isn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Why do I bring this up?

In a certain sense, I’m terribly bored with the way things are.  As a student of history (my university major) one realizes humans essentially just end up committing some mistakes (war, for one) over and over again.  The adage those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, rings true even in this day.  And well, it’s just so frickin’ boring.  Worse part is, these things have happened (and will probably continue to happen) in my life too.  Is it human nature to be perpetually stupid in that regard.  Is this the price for the blistering pace of progress?  That although we can innovate at frightening speed, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over in other areas?

Such an existence is marked by a lack of… I don’t know… discernment?  consciousness? honesty?  Or maybe life just moves so fast that we fall back on old patterns of behaviour when confronted with new situations.

I think some time to take stock and really see how I’ve been living my life.

duuuude…

John Cho, who played Harold in the critically acclaimed (yeah right! hehehe) stoner film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, has been cast as Hikaru Sulu in the latest Star Trek film.  Offhand, the new flick directed by J.J. Abrams (of Lost and Alias fame) and produced by the Lost team of Abrams and Lindelof, is well I dunno…

Couple of other casting bits:

• Chris Pine is Kirk.  Well I don’t really know the guy.
• Zachary Quinto (yes! aaaah!!! Sylar!!!) is Spock.
• Eric Bana is the bad guy.  His name as released is Nero, so he’s what? Romulan?  Will he have a fiddle?
• Karl Urban, Eomer from LOTR will play Bones McCoy ( “Dammit Jim, if you don’t shut up, I shall whack you with a sword!”)
• Winona Ryder plays Spock’s human mom, Amanda Grayson. (oooh. nice.)

So I don’t know.  From the get-go this Star Trek movie comes off as… nicely weird.

new year, not so new blog

So, i’ve rediscovered this blog, which places my introduction to the “blogoletariat” a lot earlier than I had thought.  I’ll probably be posting a lot more here, now that I know where it is again.  I’ve decided to make 3×5 my more laid-back counterpart to this blog, so I do hope you drop by here too.

Happy New Year, all.

quiet

i. have. nothing. to. do. today.

*sigh*

world views

i’ve been doing a lot of these little tests. mainly to decompress. there are a lot of little adversities going on right now and it’s becoming an almost monumental struggle to prevent things from blowing up into a full-on “emo fest”–which is never pretty.

Your World View

You are a happy, well-balanced person who likes people and is liked by others. You question whether many conventional views on morality are valid under all circumstances. You are essentially a content person. Sometimes, you consider yourself a little superior. You are moral by your own standards. You believe that morality is what best suits the occasion.

What Is Your World View?

world views are nice. they’re part of what allows you to deal with the many situations of life. if your life was an operating system… you can say that your identity is the kernel. you’ve got to have at least this for the OS to work properly. the thing is, a lot of us haven’t quite gotten to looking at their kernels yet. some people just get store-bought copy of windows and deal with that, crashes and all. this is what happens when you really don’t give life much thought and follow what the establishment, life’s Microsoft, prescribes.

the establishment are your parents, your religion, your school, society, the job market. depending on the circumstances of your life, you could either be running on bare-bones Windows 3.11 or are tooling on Vista, assisted by all the “resources” the “establishment” makes available to you. or you could still be stuck on Windows Me. (hahahah!) either way, you’re floating around with everyone else, happy an insulated in your little lives, as little cogs in the great machine, pieces of a overwhelming, but comfortable blanket of conformity. sounds nice, right? only if your running on XP SP2 or Vista. you can get by on 2000 SP4, NT, or even 98 SE, everything is stable… but it’s obvious your missing out. you’re still better off than the Windows Me people though… hahahah! you can upgrade your OS, after all the establishment wants you to… but that will cost you. and when you upgrade an installation, you’re often left with a lot of garbage from your previous OS… which eventually piles up and clogs things up, especially if you don’t have too much resources.

such is life when you don’t get involved in its details. and when things go wrong, you end up blaming the establishment for creating the circumstances of your life. the thing is, you had the OS installed.

i want my life to be like Linux. i want to be responsible for every module in it, even if it means i may have to recompile every so often.

i also want to define my own world view (yup, the entire piece is a bit circular but i was gonna get to this.), meaning i want a choice of which X server to implement. i want to see the world the way i want to.

i want to define my environment. the interface i have with the world and how the world interacts with me.

it’s a lot harder than getting your OS, your life, “installed” for you. but darn it, it’s worth all the effort.

the world shell

i watched the first episode of the series shoujo kakumei utena quite a while ago, and one bit of it still sticks out. the anime itself is interesting enough; swords and secret societies, arcane powers, rituals, but there was something more to it… anyway, on to that little bit. it is the oath of the Ohtori Academy Student Council, a group of remarkable kids in the school the anime is set in, and the main “secret society” in the series:

if the egg’s shell does not break, the chick will die without being born. we are the chick; the egg is the world. if the world’s shell does not break, we will die without being born. break the world’s shell! for the sake of revolutionizing the world!

this is a paraphrasing of a passage from the Herman Hesse novel Demian, which goes:

the bird struggles out of the egg. the egg is the world. whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. that God’s name is Abraxas.

life from death; creation from the ashes of destruction. rising… like a phoenix from its own carcass. but one must want to rise.

the world shell… it is the barrier that seperates you from yourself. i speak of seperation in terms of your unwillingness to accept the full majesty and greatness of who you really are. we all have our world shells. and they are our prejudices, our preconceptions. our defence mechanisms, our preferences, the way we speak, we act. the people we hang out with the way we look. all of this… materiality. this is our world shell.

when a chick is young, he needs the shell to survive; after all, there really is nothing wrong with sanity and conformity, is there? it is a safe path, and keeps us free from the “big bad world” out there.

the thing is, many people stay in their world shell. it’s not that they lack the strength to break free. it’s that they don’t want to. and they die, without ever being born.

fortunately life is intrinsically kind (although it’s very hard to feel that sometimes) and allows us to stay in the world shell as long as we want, how ever many lifetimes it takes us. time is meaningless to life, even though we may not see it as such.

then, something happens to the chick, the fledgling phoenix. it realizes that the world shell is not a cozy home, but a dark prison. and it attempts to tear out of this prison. how fast and how strongly it does so is wholly dependent on the chick, but every chick goes through this. the world shell is not home, it keeps us from it. so the young phoenix tears at the shell, clawing and fighting, exhausting great energy, struggling for a few lifetimes.

there are moments of great victory, where the young bird vigorously tears through the world shell and experiences that part of himself that is simultaneously him and not him, all and nothing… only to lose steam and crash… right back into the shell that envelops him in its layers of comfortable illusions. sometimes, in those singular moments when he doesn’t pay attention, he slides through the world shell and looks at the greatness of all that is… only to wake up, more confused than ever before.

and then, it realizes… that the shell, the struggle… don’t exist. not that it wasn’t totally real to the phoenix as it was going through it, but at the end of it all… but now that it has experienced struggle, now that it has traversed the heights and depths of the experience… it is over. and he looks at the world shell and it dissipates. he floats into the endless… and catches a glimpse of the self that is not the self. and flies away.

finally born.

truly alive.

interesting…

I started taking up French a couple of weeks ago.

And i just noticed, just like Spanish, the method for expressing age in French is to say “how many years you’ve had”. (e.g., Elle a vingt-huit ans – she has 28 years.) Unlike English where you simply say “I am…” or “He is…”
No wonder the English-speaking world is so messed up.

You are definitely not your age, among other things, really.

You are far more than any of that…