Reviews

I'm not sure if I dislike the film or the reviews for this film more. Chinas filming industry is trying too hard to catch up with the west in visuals and Oscar worthy films. It comes across shallow and unconventional in its screenplay.

The film doesn't hold itself and it doesn't understand why the film was made in the first place. It was only shot to test viewers where cinema is in China and to destroy America. China is sucking the tit out of democracy and its bleeding for approval with It's nationalism. Nationalism is what makes this film terrible to watch.

I find China cinema terrible and not grounded in though provoking ideas. China is only doing it to catch up!!!!

Great Christmas comedy that everybody can relate with, especially if you're a family man. The one part that gets me every time is the ending when Clark looks up to the night sky with a big smile on his face and says "I did it". That sums up the whole film for me - just in those three words.

We are all searching for success, family, friendship, and trying to make sense of this life. But Clark is the symbol that defines all of that. Throughout our lives, we go to work; we pay our bills; we fall in love; we get married; we have children; we change baby diapers. And then eventually we get to that point in our lives where everything is in place - the perfect home; the perfect job; the perfect Christmas dinner with the love ones. Clark is at the point in his life where he has accomplish all the hallmarks of a 'successful' person. So epistemically, the pinnacle of all his success is to invite all his family to Christmas, to share his love and acknowledgments. And yes, bad things happen on the way, but if you do it out of love for the sake of family, usually good things come your way.

There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the soud of his footsteps.

The true reason that Jack has to die doesn't lie in the physics of surviving in very cold water, but in the inner logic of the story. Jack has to die because he exists in order to empower Rose and give her the will to live. And once that story purpose is fulfilled, he's gone.

I think we tend to fixate on the insanely iconic romance scenes and the sinking of the ship. But a big focus of the actual movie is on the theme of finding the will to live. From Roses perspective, it's as if Jack conveniently springs into existence precisely when she needs him to stop her from ending her life and reveal to her a better way out of her misery. The moment that Jack dies is also the moment when Rose finally commits wholeheartedly to not dying. Jack teaches Rose to keep the fire going within her to rekindle in her the desire to live.

Before the Titanic hits the iceberg, money, expressed as the classes onboard, seems all-important, especially to the people in first class. But when we're facing down death, all the riches in the world are suddenly revelled to be worthless. The move illustrates this perfectly when Cal tries to bride First officer Murdoch for a seat on the lifeboat. But Murdoch is about to die; so what use is money to him? Therefore if your ship is going down what does it matter what class you're going to die in? Near the end of the movie, we're told Cal commits suicide after losing much of his money in the Crash of 29. So because Cal cant understand that money really isn't everything, it's as if he never actually learns what the value of life is. When the older rose throws the heart of the ocean into the water at the end, she's again rejecting Cal's value system and the idea that wealth matters anywhere near as much as those inner, spiritual things that drive us. So Rose is giving the heart of the ocean back to Jack and recognizing the way that he resorted her heart to her - helping her find the fire within that she needed to live this long, full life.

Rose appears at the start to be the "damsel in distress' type. But it quickly becomes clear that Rose is our real hero - she's the one who undergoes a complete transformation, and this is her story. Jack exists to service Rose's story. Jack purpose in Titanic is to enable Rose's character growth. Jack has given her all the tools necessary for her survival, so his role in the story is complete. And that, essentially is why he has to die at the end. Not because he can't fit on the door but because the story has no more use for him. In the later story, the crew searching for the diamond tell us they didn't find anything on Jack and there's no record of him. The story gives us an excuse for this - Jack won his ticket last minute in a poker game. But it seems intentional that the movie plants the tiniest seed of doubt as to whether Jack was really on the ship after all. At the end of Rose's life. Jacks memory is completely erased from the world, except for the indelible impact he's left on her - so he's alive only in her heart. It's a bit of a stretch to read Titanic as Rose's romance with a guy who's totally imaginary - of course, many others interact with Jack. But the point is that jack has a subtle air of unreality about him... he feels like some fantasy of a sexy life-coach that every girl needs from time to time to help her reorient her heart in the right direction.

Jack is the piece of her that's missing. A woman getting in touch with her animus (Masculine Side) often involves finding strength of will and determination to act. These are things that historically, society hasn't really encouraged in women (espeically in 1912). But as soon as Rose merges with Jack, her animus, she becomes daring and holds, her own woman. In an incredibly accelerated timeline, she ditches her fiance and turns her back on her family and social class. Rose shows sexual agency, too, actively pursuing Jack in their romance. And after she has sex with Jack, Rose is assertive, holding and comforting him. When she arrives on the other shore, she assumes a new name in a new country. Taking his last name is a symbolic commitment to Jack, representing the idea that in her secret mind, she is forever married to him. But if we say that he's her animus her "marriage' to this piece of herself would symbolize a promise that she'll never abandon her own agency and will again. Jacks death can be read as the moment when her animus ceases to be something sperate from her - and the result is Rose Dawson.

So as much as our culture remembers Titanic for the romance, fittingly the deepest theme of this movie about so many tragic deaths is finding the will to live. In order for Rose to recapture her will to live, she needs to honestly face what's wrong in her life and cut that out. Committing to being alive means committing to living authentically as oneself.

Great movie that sill holds up all these years. RIP James Horner & Bill Paxton

The movie 'Speak' flew under the radar. It is a movie that honestly wasn't talked about when it came out. This isn't your typical teen angst movie, it's one of the most mature explorations I've seen of trauma from the perspective of a young person who isn't ready to come to terms with what happened.

Kirsten Stewart is excellent in this movie, especially considering how much weight this story has.

I found myself not thinking of the film as a series of shots. There are very few movies where you can't see the three-act structure while watching it. This is one of the handful of films where it didn't come into my mind. I was transcended in these characters throughout the whole movie. I love the Art Teacher.

Beyond cinema as therapy, the film contained meaningful insights into the potential of artistic expression in healing, the general alienation of being a freshman in high school, or the critical relationship of an individual's will and determination with the healing process. People should see this movie not because of its cinematic excellence but because it has an important and optimistic message.

Great Movie 🎥 🍿

You cannot substitute consciousness with intelligence, IQ, knowledge, intuition because consciousness is the substance of all of those things. You're focusing too much on the content and not the context. Science tries to create models of consciousness, but it's never going to work. You cannot do science without language and without concepts. It's a second order. You see the problem is you're trying to use a second order phenomenon to get at the first order. You got it backwards. The tricky thing about the implicit is that it cannot be pointed to because it holds all the pointers. Imagine if you were Mario from Super Mario. Now...can Mario use his finger to point at the pixels of the screen? No, because Mario is in a sort of dimension which is tangential to the pixels. Mario doesn't know about the pixels, he's made out of the pixels in the same way that my hand right now is inside consciousness. So my finger cannot point to consciousness because the finger itself cannot point outside it because it's made out of the pixels. No matter where Mario points, he's never going to be able to point out, because he's made of pixels. It's like your the fish, but consciousness is the water.

We have gone deep into the material world, even finding the so-called God particle, but we have never been more limited, more ignorant of who we are, how to live, and we do not understand the mechanism by which we create suffering. Our thinking has created the world as it is now. Whenever we label something as good or bad or create a preference in our mind, it is due to the coming into being of egoic structures or self-interests. The solution is not to fight for peace or conquer nature, but to simply recognise the truth; that the very existence of the ego structure creates duality, a split between self and other, mine and yours, man and nature, inner and outer. The ego is violence; it requires a barrier, a boundary from the other to be. Without the ego, there is no war against anything. There is no hubris, there is no overreaching nature to create profit. These external crises in our world reflect a severe inner crisis; we don't know who we are. We are wholly identified with our egoic identities, consumed by fears and are cut off from our true nature. Races, religions, countries, political affiliations, any group that we belong to, all reinforce our egoic identities.

The human condition is to love everything unconditionally. I belive 'Groundhog Day' explores that happiness depends on our capacity to love. There's a spectrum of beauty, and it is effortless to see the beauty at a museum or watch a sunset, but can you see the beauty of everyday life of the most mundane ugly things. To live the greatest life possible is just none other than to see beauty everywhere. Love is a universal property, it's fundamental. It's not a sexual attraction or a romance, therefore, Unconditional love is the absolute acceptance of everything even the bad things. The reason that the universe could say has love is because the universe accepts itself completely without judgement. It's not resisting any part of itself, it loves every piece of itself. It's a love so deep that you can't even imagine what evil is because you love everything so much that there's no more room left for evil to exist. Love is the ability to be conscious of the beauty of creation. This great movie makes me realise the beauty of creation.

The danger with beliefs is not you're going to hold wrong beliefs, it's that you hold beliefs at all. Therefore, when you fill your mind with a lot of ideas about what's true or what's false that than obviates the searching for deep direct experiences. You're not willing to let go because you're stuck in a paradigm lock. People like to think that they can represent reality with ideas without recognising their ideas are apart of reality. There are limits on what you can represent with ideas. Representation is not the real thing and as simple as it sounds a lot of highly intelligent people forget this. That's where a lot of stuff goes wrong because if reality was simple and not complex, and reality was intuitive and not counterintuitive than this strategy might work. Except, what humanity has discovered time and time and time and time and time again is that reality does not work in the way we assume. Reality is filled with very weird paradoxes and facts that are completely contrary to anything we assume and that many of our speculations that this is contrary to direct experience. Your speculation about reality are always suspect and could always be overruled by direct experience. The movie isn't perfect but it tries to open your mind to new possibilities.

Intelligence isn't how many books you can read or if you have a degree. Accurate intelligence is about how self-aware you are with your intuition and how loving you are to yourself and existence. Therefore, if your behaviour isn't changing, then you're not growing. Some people are so focused on technical knowledge but lack the big picture, and because of this, they're emotionally unstable and stuck in life. You can have all the technical expertise, you can be an expert in your professional field but have no idea of the big picture.

The term one-dimensional character is a character who lacks depth and who never seems to learn or grow. When a character is one-dimensional, he or she does not demonstrate a sense of learning in the course of a story. Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is a perfect example of a one-dimensional premise. It's a tedious, pretentious story without any solid context or substance to it. Where was the catharsis? Where was the hero's journey? If the film is about mindfulness, life, nihilism or other philosophical topics, please, explain that to the audience. A good movie is a movie that forces one to think beyond just being entertained. A good film has a compelling plot, relatable, and round characters that make you rethink about your behaviour in life.

The tragedy of evil is that in trying to stop it, you create it. So if you want to stop doing evil actions, you also have to stop seeing evil because to see evil you must project evil... therefore, you create evil. If you genuinely want to be moral, you got to make a counterintuitive move of giving up all morality. All of your moral rules give them all away. Only then you will truly be moral but if you go around touting your morality, and telling people how moral you are and how immoral they are, that immediately tells that you're not embodying your morality. A genuinely moral person would never do that because true morality is not based on rules, it's not a self-image that you adopt, it's not a list of 10 commandments that you follow. When you think you're so righteous and so moral, you will go and kill people in the name of your morality which is precisely what creates evil.

All persons have good reasons for why they do what they do and how it is right and proper. Thus, how can society trust reason? By definition, the idea always feels reasonable to the one who is reasoning. Everyone is self-biased to their chain of thoughts but what people don't understand is that reason is not a vehicle towards truth. Reason is a concoction of the mind to justify the egoic agenda, which causes all the evil in the world.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty portrays daydreaming and how excessive daydreaming can become counterproductive and damaging to one's well being. Daydreamers at times use daydreaming as a coping mechanism expressing in their daydreams what they fail to accomplish in real life. The film is about rebuilding the bridge between whats actual and whats not while becoming more present. During Walters journey, the energies from his fantasies become redirected towards reality and shows in a somewhat exaggerated way, how Walter begins to live life more passionately. Experience is really the only thing that exists and the only thing that is real, everything else is fantasy. It's a great movie if you want a big change in your life. Definitely worth a watch.

Regardless of whether you like it or hate it, I think the film explores how the Joker is the way he is because he can't be otherwise, literally. One of the greatest dangers to America itself is American culture. It's not terrorism that will destroy America; it's American culture that will ultimately be the undoing of America. The film looks to examine our distorted points of view or detachments from reality and show us that WE, as a society, have the same characteristics of the Joker. The Joker is a product of this materialistic culture we live under. Epistemically western culture is motivated by striving for money, status and recognition, which is focused on results and efficiency but that can have severe consequences because you're always judging yourself with the person next to you.

The movie Joker is what you get when you take American culture, and you take it to its pinnacle. When you exaggerate it to the extreme, you get someone like the Joker. But the critical hidden message is that we need to become more aware of our OWN double standards within ourselves. We need to start to empathize that we have the same mechanisms as the Joker has. So, on the one hand, I can criticize the Joker, but on the other side, I can also see why he acts the way he does, but more importantly see it collectively. Notice that trying to rid the world of evil only creates more evil. Everything you might criticize; corporate greed, different beliefs, religion, people you dislike, violence, war, mass shootings, even just hating this movie - We like to criticize things, but while we're criticizing, we're NOT really thinking about how we ourselves are part of the very same problem that is contributing to the cycle.

It is essential to let go of needs and allow for something new, something more peaceful, to take its place. The main issue for people is not to advocate any specific worldview or philosophy, but rather to show that death is natural to life and something that everyone has to face. It is when people find some way of reconciling with mortality that they can fully be present and not be too worried about the world around them. Our lives are brief and are at the mercy of forces beyond our control, which can suffocate consciousness and delude people into falsehood.

This is what you get when you take MODERN CAPITALISM to the EXTREME! PYRAMID SCHEME AT ITS FINEST! MONEY is all they want! The Epistemic nature to it all is SURVIVAL and COMFORT. Hollywood DOES not CARE about human behaviour or THE ARTS OF FILM! Nooooo....as long as it makes MONEY!!

Culture is an ethereal abstract thing you can't quite pin down, and yet it's such a pivotal player in our life. Culture is the context for almost everything you do especially everything we do socially with other people. Chris Mccandless understood that consciousness is purely a solo activity. You can't increase consciousness through culture. Your ability to self-actualize will only come down to your inner work. Consciousness will not grow in a group environment because it produces all the classic mechanical symptoms of a cult. Fundamentally society is trying to take consciousness, and trying to distribute it to the masses through a culture mechanism, and that always makes it mechanical. It suffocates consciousness, and that's the problem.

The most significant cult you got to be afraid of is not those little cults it's the massive cult. The superset of all cults which is almost entirely transparent to you and it feels just like reality. It feels like it couldn't be any other way.

Truth cannot be thought, believed, imagined, communicated, spoken, written, proven, or argued. It is challenging for most people to accept, especially many scientifically minded people. They tend to assume, "If absolute truth does exist, it must be possible to prove it or argue it, or communicate it." All those are limited, and the absolute truth is unlimited, it's total... that's what makes it so interesting. That's the power of the unknown.

Reality is non-dual, which means that all boundaries, all categories, and all distinctions ultimately collapse, they're all relative. There is no distinction between inside/outside, me/other, right/wrong, black/white, human/non-human, all of these dualities will ultimately collapse. Your mind constructs all these categories and distinctions. It is beneficial to see how most of the things taught in school, and adult life has just been categories that were constructed by the human mind. Many of these distinctions are purely conceptual, they're not absolute in any sense and that they ultimately all collapse into one unity.

The film looks to examine our own distorted points of view or detachments from reality. Like Patrick Bateman, we may be trapped craving the approval of others and denying ourselves the ability to distinguish fantasies from our reality. People are obsessed with how the others perceive them likewise in American Psycho Bateman achieves no catharsis, he's trapped in his own personal hell because he requires the recognition of the other yuppies to confirm his identity as a murderer. The irony is that Feynman's real crimes may as well be fantasy. The lack of acknowledging his reality drives Bateman further into madness and existential despair

It's about yuppie culture, the melding of identity, and the craving to stand out from a superficial homogenized society. Bateman's interpretation of the world is skewed by his inflated ego and his evident psychosis as well as presumably multiple mental illnesses. Bateman is a killer, but still, he's not the killer he thinks he is, as he goes insane he can't distinguish reality from fantasy. His over the top chainsaw massacre style killings may be an aestheticized elaboration on partial truths, ultimately the film doesn't care. The more significant point of the movies absurdity is that within his society Batemans not the psycho at all he's just one more normal guy amidst a horde of uncaring detached from reality, secretly discontented American psychos. Bateman is surrounded by like-minded superficial people obsessed with all the wrong things like making impossible reservations at Dorsia and the tasteful thickness of their business cards. Within the homogenized upper-class elite identities blur as everyone strives after a generic yet highly specific image of success.

Everyone we see in Bateman's company appears to be the same person. It's no wonder that identity is mistaken continuously and swapped throughout the film. The lawyer has mistaken Paul Allen or perhaps Batman has killed the wrong person becomes not only plausible but also an expression of the general confusion resulting from the loss of individual identity.

Meanwhile, although Batman tries like the rest to fit in, the emptiness of his lifestyle also fuels a craving to stand out. To escape the conformity that he on some level despises Batman leads a second life as a killer, where he's unfettered from the bounds of society. Although he actually wants to be seen as a murderer as someone different from the rest of society Bateman is denied even the satisfaction by every self-absorbed yuppie he meets. When he's seen stuffing a body into the trunk of a car, the witness is only interested in the bag.

This is a great movie. Look for the subtext under the dialogue.