Movies that change the way you see life

Originally Posted by Tagonist

I wonder why this thread hasn't been curbstomped yet by the "dude - SO overrated" "only idiots think that this film is any good" brigade... o_Ô

Maybe too easy prey...

Because the majority of things listed are so blatantly laughable, there just isn't any point to it. Besides which, no one here is really saying they're brilliant cinema or even good movies. Just that they had a personal impact on them. If people were coming through, talking about how the Matrix completely revolutionized film, or that the Butterfly Effect was a deep commentary on social issues... yeah, I'm sure you'd have people crawling down your throat. But feel free to be inspired by whatever drivel you like. Depressing as it is as a commentary on how much you people think, it's hardly flame worthy.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Throwdown

The most important movie that really changed my life was prolly The Punisher.

These two quotes by far-

Candelaria: "Vaya con Dios, Castle. Go with God."
Frank Castle: "God's going to sit this one out."

And

Frank Castle: "It's been five months since my family was killed. I don't see ONE man in jail."
Police Chief Morris: "Obviously you're upset..."
Frank Castle: "Upset? Is that the word? I used to get upset. When I got a flat tire, when a plane was delayed. I used to get *upset* when the Yankees won the series. So if that's what upset means, what am I feeling now? If you know the word, tell me because I don't."

You're... kidding, right?

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Originally Posted by Throwdown

What makes you think I'm kidding? the concept of the movie? or the lack of sentimental value the movie is portrayed in?

How I interpreted the quotes was...

Quote one the fact that most people take little effort to do things and rely on God to bail them out or GIVE THEM THA POWA to do things. It showed that you need to take initiative to get things done for yourself.

Quote two by showing that you might think that you have it hard, there is always someone else that has it worse and you shouldn't take what you have for granted.

Sure many quotes from movies could be interpreted all different ways but this is one the that "changed the way i see life".

And you needed a movie in which Frank Castle goes rogue to avenge his dead family to teach you this?

Though I see your point about it not having to be a remotely decent movie to have an effect. I concede that. But seriously, mate. The Punisher?

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Throwdown

Sure maybe I didn't need a movie in which Frank Castle goes rogue to avenge his dead family to teach me this, but it did and that is why I posted it.

Yeah, no I get that. But I mean...

This...



...is your philosophical inspiration. That doesn't bother you at all?

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Originally Posted by LeHah

Oh blah blah blah. Question my validity all you want - but questioning a director/screenwriter on it is paramount to you being stupid. "I disagree with what you just said despite the fact that your opinion is in complete agreement with someone who's made many blockbuster films and is a respected person in the field of cinema! What do either of you people know?!"

The director who goes out to change the world is going to end up disappointed in his career. I can count the number of people on one hand who have changed the world through cinema and it takes two hands to count the films made. What does that mean? That the overwhelming majority of films made are not as good or intelligent or mind-blowing or (stupid slang term for "amazing" here). This is very easy to defend - since very few movies affect large populations of people on a permanent basis. Star Wars would be one. Can we name many other movies that have the longevity or popularity as that? Hell no.

Yeah, I know I derive all my philosophical truth from the guy who made the Fifth Element.

I agree with you on this, LeHah, I don't think Film can change the world, it can just influence people to consider things in a different manner, no different than a book. It won't save someone's life, but it can impact it in a positive or negative fashion.

But to say that Luc Besson is the final word on cinema theory because he made some cash with his films? Come on. That's lazy logic and you know it.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by LeHah

Like I'm going to start waving around Georges Bataille everytime some jackass on the internet thinks he knows something? God knows if I did that, I'd've rubbed my dick off years ago from all the constant jacking off.

Yeah, but it'd be really erudite intellectual masturbation. Gotta give it that much. Some weird mix of Bataille and Besson? Like a commentary on the concept of experience between the spiritual and the physical, only it has Bruce Willis in it?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by LeHah

Thats not an individual error. The weakness of Besson's analysis is exactly that he is content with a single aspect - the inclination of rejection of transcendental form. This is what reduces it to negative observations which have only to be situated in time or history for us to get a positive view. The collective relationship between production (the film) and expenditure (the result of the film - critque, income, etc) is in history - Baudelaire's experience is in history, after all. Postitively, it has that perceise sense which history confers upon it.

Film may be assenting to life even in death but those are unquantifiable abstracts in which none can weigh their costs upon.

So really the difficulty doesn't lie in the concept of the production, but in the ephemeral nature of the result. It is, like all creative endeavors, incapable of hanging anything on itself beyond that mean which people infuse into it. It is, as a concept, a hollow thing, until someone prescribes meaning based on their own understanding and experience/history. Besson isn't wrong, Film won't save your life. It isn't a firm construct by any means, just a hollow vessel for projected meaning. Which is well and good, but what about the sort of Geertzian or Barth models, which would say that a meaning of different things to different people is almost Marxian in its ability to reflect their social standing?

Too broad, perhaps. But the irony of it being truly panem et cricenses in the truest sense, at best a distraction (What up, Pirates of the Caribbean?), and at worst, straight propaganda (What up, Hero?).

But let me go all Althusser at the end and say if Film is just a hollow concept, something to be read into and prescribed meaning by the viewer, it can be a saviour. You just need someone desperate enough to be saved by Ray Romano doing the voice of a Mammoth and bam. Transcendental conceptualization in a cartoon box. Film isn't lacking, the person sad enough to be saved by it (or religion, or philosophy, or politics) is.

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Originally Posted by LeHah

The contradiction of modern film, especially of industry film, consists of the fact that it is the negation of art from the standpoint of art or the negation of art which itself is again deconstruction art; this contradiction especially characterises the Terrence Malick philosophy.

For modern film, and hence also for Malick, the non-material being or being as a pure object of the intellect, as a pure being of the intellect, is the only true and Absolute Art, that is, Film and not movie. Even matter, which some turn into an attribute of the divine substance, is a metaphysical thing, a pure being of the intellect, for the essential determination of matter as distinguished from the intellect and the activity of thinking – that it is a passive being – is taken away from it. But Malick differs from Besson's earlier philosophy by the fact that he determines the relationship of the material sensuous being to the non-material being differently. The earlier filmmakers and producers of the 1970s held the true divine being to be detached and liberated from nature; that is, from sensuousness or matter. They situated the toil of abstraction and self-liberation from the sensuous in themselves in order to arrive at that which in itself is free from the sensuous. To this condition of being free, they ascribed the blissfulness of the divine, and to this self-liberation, the virtue of the human essence through film. Malick, on the other hand, turned this subjective activity into the self-activity of the Absolute Art. All film, then, must subject himself to this toil, and must, like pagan heroes, win his divinity through virtue.

Only in this way does the freedom of the Absolute from matter, which is, besides, only a precondition and a conception, become reality and truth. This self-liberation from matter, however, can be posited in Film only if matter, too, is posited in him. But how can it be posited in him? Only in this way that he himself posits it. But in Film there is only Film. Hence, the only way to do this is that he posits himself as matter, as non-Film; that is, as his otherness. In this way, matter is not an antithesis of the ego and the spirit, preceding them, as it were, in an incomprehensible way; it is the self-alienation of the Art Form. Thus, matter itself acquires spirit and intellect; it is taken over into the absolute essence as a moment in its life, formation, and development. But then, matter is again posited as an untrue being resembling nothingness in so far as only the being that restores itself out of this alienation, that is, that sheds matter and sensuousness off from itself, is pronounced to be the perfect being in its true form. The natural, material, and sensuous – and indeed, the sensuous, not in the vulgar and moral, but in the metaphysical sense – are therefore even here something to be negated, like nature which in theology has been poisoned by the original sin. The sensuous is incorporated into reason, the ego, and the spirit, but it is something irrational, a note of discord within reason; it is the non-ego in the ego, that is, that which negates it. For example in Besson's nature of Film it is the non-divine in Film; it is in Film and yet outside him; the same is true of the body in the philosophy of Kubrick which, although connected with me, that is, with the spirit, is nevertheless external, and does not belong to me, that is, to my essence; it is of no consequence, therefore, whether it is or is not connected with me or you or anyone. Matter will remain in contradiction to what is presupposed by philosophy as the true meaning inside film.

No argument from me on that point, as matter will always stand in contradiction--if not direct opposition--to philosophy. It's the argument of the knowable versus that which is unknowable. It is, at its heart, the argument to the proof or disproof of the Divine (given reverential capitals here on account of a desire to avoid using specific deities). So do we take this towards an argument of truth? Is there more "truth" in the experience of the static observer in the static moment of the static viewing? Or is "truth" the extended, shifting experience of the whole (history) in relation to a static object (film)? Or maybe it's not a matter of what is the true nature, but rather the intention? Do we weigh the belief of the creator of something higher than the people who experience it. If a man makes a statue to fight communism (fuck you, Terry Goodkind), but it is taken as an endorsement of communism and turned into a propaganda tool by what it was meant to destroy, what has he really accomplished.

It's an interesting conundrum, especially in non-documentary film. Because it truly doesn't offer anything beyond a fictional encapsulation of an event that is, for all intents and purposes, a falsehood. Is belief in a beautiful lie, to be reverential to what Marxian philosophers would view as a form of social control (rich men making movies about inner city poverty, glorifying it to keep more people under the thumb of the bourgeoisie; he'd have a field day) something to be treated with respect, or scorned as a distraction, a vice no different from laudanum?

In short, do you respect the reverential dreamer or scorn him for a lack of logic and true-sight. The Grecian debate. Laud the blessed madman or lock him away, as he's unsightly and lacks pure logic.

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Originally Posted by LeHah

Any man who poses such a question is worthy to dine at my table. Any man who answers such a question is a fool.

I don't know how you could answer that question without making yourself utterly asinine.

Though I imagine we've made this thread theoretical enough for the moment. I almost feel I should just blurt out "The Big Lebowski" to make it seem more legitimate.

Jam it back in, in the dark.