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minabasejderha
I consider myself old-fashioned, in that I'm an old-fashioned leftist. Vive la révolution!
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Candyman (2021)
This is being review-bombed
It's a good film. And I enjoyed it quite a bit. Peele was one of the screenwriters, but he was not directing on this one. Up 'til now, I was basically only familiar with his comedy, but I will be giving Get Out and Us a watch some time soonish.
As for what else I said, this is almost certainly being review-bombed by people with petty disagreements with Peele's politics, as with the politics of the film more broadly. They seem to think the *coughs* 'woke' racial message of this film is something the film added. And that's correct. The 1992 film DID add the woke racial message to Clive Barker's story, which was instead about social class in England. But the 2021 film definitively did not. If you don't remember, watch it again. You must have missed it. Regardless, if you are upset that the film is about a ghost of a man who was lynched and now seeking revenge, you have the 1992 film to blame.
This film maybe does has a more nuanced take on issues of housing discrimination and gentrification (my field of study) than the original, but that's because the actual historical and sociological writing on gentrification advanced in the last 30 years, and the 2021 film (surprisingly) kept up with current research.
Yes, the film is racially conscious. Yes, it has interesting things to say on the matter. But no, it is not anti-white. There is a singular joke at white-people's expence, and it is just that the black characters are much more cautious than the white ones, and they consequently live longer.
What IS the film's political message, then? Well, a couple of scenes, one early on and one toward the end, depict the police as trigger-happy. The latter of the two depicts that they will lie and cover up each other's mistakes, and pressure witnesses into backing them up. This is called the "blue-wall of silence", a well-documented phenomenon that even some ex-police have complained about, saying they were bullied into playing along.
I would not say this is the "point" of the film, but it is a clear perspective that the film has. It is a secondary point to the main characters' stories. You can easily enjoy this movie even if you disagree with it's politics. If it helps, just tell yourself the police in this movie were bad apples.
Dark Phoenix (2019)
Try and view the movie on its own terms.
7/10, for me, means that it met my expectations and didn't disappoint me. This doesn't always mean the movie is better, just that it doesn't promise something and then fail to deliver.
It's fine. Not great, but not horrible.
This was not an ambitious movie. It is very psychologically close to Jean and is mainly interested in her. As such it never could have been a good sendoff to the X-men franchise, so don't expect it to be. (That would be Logan.)
I just watched all the X-Men movies in the past week (except Deadpool, which was a few months ago). So my memories of them are pretty fresh and neither hampered by nostalgia nor by its opposite. Since people may want to know how I think they compare:
1. Logan
2. First Class and Days of Future Past (tied)
3. Deadpool 2
4. Deadpool
5. X2
6. (First half of) The Last Stand (bear with me)
7. ***Dark Phoenix***
8. X-Men
9. (First half of) Origins: Wolverine (bear with me)
10. The Wolverine
11. Apocalypse
12. (Second half of) The Last Stand
13. (Second half of) Origins: Wolverine
I split up X3 and Origins because part of what makes them so unpleasant in my book is how some legitimately good things set up in the beginning are squandered by the end.
Apocalypse was bad (imho) because it did not earn its apocalyptic stakes (no pun intended). The potential end of the world feels rushed and uneventful.
This movie avoids both of those pitfalls. It doesn't blow its stakes out of proportion. Unlike Apocalypse, the world isn't ever about to end. It's more about the personal stakes and mistakes between the main characters.
And second, it doesn't really make promises (inside the movie) that it fails to deliver. So if you approach it on its own terms, it shouldn't feel too disappointing. The problem is, too many are approaching this like it ought to be the next Endgame, and it just never had that potential. It was never meant to be a grand finale. (Even if it was marketed as one.) You can see that from the movie's pacing.
The pacing, by the way, is weird. It doesn't feel like a normal movie. If this makes sense, it feels like the last two episodes of the penultimate season of a television show. It gets to the conflict early on and more or less sticks with it at an evenhanded pace, never particularly quick or slow, just steady. As such, it is not fast and happy enough to be a roaring good time, nor slow enough for its gloom to feel appropriate. And it clearly ends as though other films were to tie everything up (though we now know it won't happen). As such, it really shouldn't have been marketed as a finale to x-men generally, even if it is the last time we'll see these characters in this universe.
Some good things I want to say:
The movie mercifully avoids the mistake Last Stand made with Phoenix. In that movie, it basically is a stand-in for some people's fear of female sexual desire. In this movie, it thankfully avoids most of that subtext.
I like where X and Magneto's characters end.
Also, Beast and Mystique's makeup are excellent this time around.
There are plenty of really visually stunning moments. All of them are basically in the trailer though (and they are used misleadingly as well).
It has definite problems though:
For example, a certain character gets stuffed in the refrigerator, and I'm frankly tired of that trope.
It doesn't really engage with issues the way many of the other movies did. Last Stand even had commentary on gender dysphoria and ASD in the subtext, but this one is more interested I psychological problems than in sociological ones.
It does explore the ethical issues with Xavier's meddling in Jean's mind, but it leaves it underdeveloped compared to Last Stand.
The last two lines in the final battle are just terrible. The villain says a stereotypical thing, and the hero says the opposite statement while offering no evidence or reason to assert this... and the movie just expects us to agree with them because it's the statement of the two that isn't upsetting. Just.... ugghhh. It would have been so much better if those two lines were cut.
So yeah, it is not perfect. But try and view the movie on its own terms. It is a relatively slow-moving, psychologically motivated action movie.
Remember, enjoying movies is more fun than not enjoying them. Just try to have a good time. It's decent enough for that.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)
Been on a Kaiju kick lately (3 of 3)
[8/10] - "Exceeded expectations"
While I ultimately feel that *Kong: Skull Island* is a better film, this one had me thinking a lot more about its themes, which is a significant mark in its favor.
I was honestly surprised at the thematic depth that this movie attempts. However, not all of those themes are.... helpful, even if their heart is in the right place.
The heart of the film is in its environmental stance. The Titans used to keep a harmonious balance in the world, and seem to be more in touch with natural forces. They are now awaking in response to human nuclear activity.
On the other hand, the villains of the film are eco-terrorists, so it seems like the film is perhaps ultimately portraying people who take environmental issues seriously enough to take direct (rather than electoral action) as insane extremists who we shouldn't listen to. This seems therefore, to disapprove of intentional efforts at radical change, while not suggesting a viable alternative. It seems instead to just say 'trust nature and it will sort itself out', which... is just misguided. The problem with environmental catastrophes is that the dynamics between the laws of nature have certain loopholes and cycles which, once triggered, are self-sustaining. Trusting nature would mean leaving these cycles we've triggered to their own devices.
Let's get more concrete though. From here forward, there are the serious spoilers though, so LAST SPOILER WARNING.
The eco-terrorists wake Ghidorah, a three-headed hydra, who in turn wakes many other titans. They are hoping the titans will hold the human population in check and thereby keep us from causing an extinction-level event. However, what they don't know is that Ghidorah isn't from earth, he's an alien. He is therefore an invasive species who none of the other creatures have natural defenses from. He dominates all other titans (except Godzilla, who was the undisputed apex predator beforehand) and commands them to destroy senselessly and indiscriminately, to remake the world to his liking. Rather than trying to restore balance, Ghidorah throws the natural order of the titans out of balance even further.
So essentially, our lack of knowledge about what is and is not natural is our hubris, and in trying to undo humanity's affect on the environment, they cause a different one. This might have been a perfectly admirable message. We don't know a priori what is and is not a balanced ecosystem.
But in order to make this point, this movie propagates certain myths about biology that are... unhelpful in getting people to be smart about environmental issues. For the curious, I recommend Richard Lewontin's CBC lecture series (and his book by the same name) *Biology as Ideology.* He is an actual biologist and makes these points better than I do.
Assumption 1: In nature, hierarchy is natural in every species. All animals respond to an "Alpha" leader, to which all others are subservient.
So... I don't want to go too in depth on the actual science here. This comes from a study of wolves that the author later said was wrong when he did further research. But no one listens to his newer research because it doesn't serve the useful purpose of justifying power structures, patriarchy, and toxicly masculine behavior. It just doesn't appeal to them if it doesn't make them feel good about how they want to act.
This movie propagates that same (stupid) "Alpha-male" myth. (This doesn't sink the movie for me either, after all, *How to Train Your Dragon* did the same (stupid) thing, and I still love that movie.) Basically, the natural order is maintained because the Titans have a pecking order. They don't fight each other unless the pecking order is disrupted. They actually seem to be in a kind of symbiotic relationship with each other when that is the case. And yeah, some animals are like this: like chickens. But this movie claims ALL animals are like this, which is definitely false.
It doesn't exactly make any specific claims to how humans should organize in light of this claim about Alphas, but that question is also never asked, so perhaps the movie doesn't even feel the need to defend its ideological view of human society.
There are mildly related questions about whether the titan research organization (and other relevant science) should answer to the military, vice versa, or if they should be independent of one another. It answers in the negative to the first, but never decides between the latter two. It says that the military only understands how to struggle for Alpha status with these creatures, whereas scientists are capable of coexistence.
Assumption 2: There is a natural order to the environment that always seeks to, and otherwise succeeds in, restoring itself. The more extreme version of the view is that the entire world is a single organism, and that we should understand certain creatures or climate processes as analogous to a human immune system. Humanity, in this analysis, is a virus, parasitizing the earth.
But this conception of Nature is an ideological abstraction. It has no actual scientific basis. Granted, it can be a helpful metaphor in certain contexts for motivating people in certain ways, but it is not "true." (Much like how you don't have to be a gender essentialist in order to grant that 'male soul in a female body' is a useful metaphor for how someone feels. And therefore it could be effective, in a poetic sense, in getting someone to empathize with you. Not all trans people are gender essentialists, but many grant that the language is helpful if not taken literally.)
There is no natural "balance" to the environment. So we shouldn't fetishize it.
The "environment" is a word we use to describe a dynamic system with internal antagonisms. It can't be described in monolithic or teleological terms. There are sustainable systems and unsustainable ones, sure, but we shouldn't fetishize what is natural. Malaria is natural, after all. (Although Kingsman made this mistake too, so it doesn't automatically make the movie bad.)
Also, viewing humanity as an unnatural force, a virus seeking to take over from without, is... maybe a helpful metaphor. But it forgets that viruses are natural too. This is the problem with all rigid and reductionist materialisms, is that it still implicitly separates the subject from this organic and determined object. Much like how you can't step outside of history in order to see and point at the abstraction, "history," determining itself, you can't step out of nature in order to see the abstraction, "nature," determining itself. We are humans, our knowledge is always partial, and so we cannot think from the standpoint of "nature," we cannot think from a standpoint outside "nature." We can only approximate. That is our actual pretension. Even when we condemn ourselves for being unnatural, we do so from a privileged perspective.
A better message that the film could have had is that this concept of "balance" is hopelessly abstract, a dramatic simplification of how nature works, and that our abstraction is our hubris.
But no, it's the fault of Aliens. They don't belong here, and so they are toxic. (I'm assuming the possible racial interpretation isn't the most helpful, since it falls apart when you assume, as the movie does, that every creature from Earth has a right to be there.) The movie more or less directly states that without Ghidorah, the natural state of the world reasserts itself.
Coexistence with the Titans is all well and good, but we need to accept our existence in the universe and our agency within it. We only have our partial knowledge and partial agency. We can only act as ourselves to try and live sustainably.
The movie is ultimately optimistic about the natural balance once Ghidorah is killed. Nature thrives and reclaims areas where they have destroyed cities (something that was more or less implied in the first Godzilla movie as well). The credits suggest that it keeps happening after this movie too.
Now that I am through the criticisms... I do want to say, I like the movie. I had a good time. The monster fights were fun. AND just because I disagree with the particulars of its environmentalism, I appreciate that the movie takes a stand and tries to be about something.
All movies are about something, but many try and squirm out of this into a neutral position. This movie embraces its themes and enjoys having a message, which I definitely appreciate. It is a lot more sincere than billing yourself as "harmless, mindless, politically neutral entertainment" while still implicitly holding up the status quo.
Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Been on a Kaiju kick lately (2 of 3)
[8/10] - "Exceeded expectations"
Kong was surprisingly good. Not amazing, not something I think everyone should watch at least once (or I'd have given it 9 stars), it doesn't speak to me in an extremely personal way (or I'd have given it 10), but it is very good. I would recommend it for any monster movie fan and any fan of Vietnam War movies.
It wasn't really doing the standard King Kong story. Much of the "Kong protecting a blonde lady from dinosaurs" plot is left out completely, though smaller story elements remain. The new elements they added to replace the old story cast the original story elements which remain in a fruitful new light. It ultimately isn't much like the 30s film or Peter Jackson's remake at all. Instead, it was more like the 70s monster movie stylistically. However, in terms of its themes, it is a clear student of *Apocalypse Now*. In all seriousness, you will definitely enjoy this movie more if *Apocalypse Now* is in your recent memory.
The movie takes place immediately after the retreat from Vietnam. As such, the moral status of that war linger in the subtext throughout the movie. As a direct result, this movie's interpretation of the Skull Island natives is much more charitable than any other version. They are thoroughly sympathetic characters rather than the almost farcically mindless "savages" from Jackson's version. The filmmakers also don't project a fetish for whiteness onto them like the 30s version does.
Vietnam figures into the film in a second, more important, way. In the wake of our defeat (by a less "civilized" enemy), the American military's masculinity has been wounded and humiliated. Their attempt to destroy Kong in order to prove to themselves that their "civilization" is still powerful is the film's heart. I was worried, from the trailers, that the movie would just be a hyper-masculine contest between "Man" and "Kong," but it instead completely re-frames this in a more self-aware and critical light.
In the 30s, when industry and civilization seem to have conquered nature, it was appropriate for King Kong to be a story of the tragic defeat of natural force at the hand of machines. But after Vietnam, it is appropriate for the story to have significantly more doubt about our own control over the world. This movie turns this doubt into a legitimately compelling anti-colonial allegory.
Godzilla (2014)
Been on a Kaiju kick lately (1 of 3)
[7/10] - "Met expectations"
I admittedly don't have as much to say about this one as I do it's two sequels.
This is mostly because I've heard most of my thoughts voiced better by other people. For example, I agree with Bob Chipman that the movie would have been better if it had focused on Ken Watanabe's character rather than the rather generic main family. While Godzilla is strangely absent from the movie, this wouldn't have been an issue had the main cast been more interesting.
I will say, the movie is an example of really solid filmcraft. The cinematography, while dark, is also (usually) adequately clear. Godzilla almost always looks fantastic on screen (I actually think he looks better here than in the sequel).
And there is one sequence I want to shower with praise, when the bomb-team is skydiving into the Kaiju battle. I've always felt that a Kaiju series would be best if its creatures were portrayed as Cosmic Horror, much like the Great Old Ones in Lovecraft. While this would have created an excessively delicate racial subtext in the Kong film, with Godzilla, I think it is appropriate. The skydiving scene, more than any other, captures the Lovecraftian angle. Not only is Ligeti's "Requiem" a suitable callback to the Cosmic Horror in *2001: A Space Odyssey*, but the cinematography has an amazing way of creating scale. The broad skyline shots, where they skydivers are mere specs and trails of red smoke, are interspersed with POV shots by the skydivers. Their POV is limited by their goggles, and we only see the monsters fighting in brief flashes of light. When we drift close to Godzilla, we get the first proper sense of his might and our own insignificance in his presence. The goggles too serve as an excellent visual metaphor for the ways in which our human perspective limit what we can see and understand. By constraining the sight of the audience, they communicate the constraints of our comprehension.
It was just a magnificent sequence. I can't say enough in its favor.
{MILD SPOILERS FROM HERE FORWARD}
One of my general criticisms is only in the light of seeing its two sequels, in that it seems like the Godzilla movie's are a little trigger happy with the nukes. ...Like... I get it. Godzilla is almost always about nuclear weapons on some level or another, but their overuse makes them feel a bit anti-climactic. Not to mention, I feel like their destructive power is ultimately underwhelming considering how few people they actually kill. The sequel's use of such WMDs would have been more satisfying if the nuke in this film had been successfully deactivated and if everyone had sighed with relief. Then the actual use of them in the sequel would have more weight.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Stage Play on the Screen
I'll start by saying this movie is worth seeing at least once, at least to see what it is doing. It is shot much like Hitchcock's *Rope*, though not exactly. It isn't all one shot, but there are many shots that flow from scene to scene. The catch? Those scenes are not always chronologically continuous. This is a fact you very well might miss if you are distracted or have something inhibiting you (the theatre I watched it in first however many years ago had abysmal audio, so this was me the first time).
This may sound disorienting, but if you change the way you are viewing the movie, I think it will help. Don't look at it as a standard movie: instead, view it as a stage play whose stage is an entire neighborhood, mostly one building, and which was mostly captured as it was being performed by a cameraman. This means that the actors moving in and out of scene have the same flow that a stage play has, and this also explains the presence of the drummer that you randomly see in the background performing the soundtrack to the movie. (Yes, the soundtrack is mostly a drummer; it works really well somehow.)
There's only one tiny wrench in this, the movie has all sorts of elements that are generally assumed to be hallucinations or imaginings of the main character (Keaton). In different scenes where he is alone, we see him using various telekinetic powers. Occasionally, we actually see his younger self as Birdman (an action-movie role from his younger days) in person, although usually he just antagonizes him via voice over. Some of the few hard cuts in the movie that do not follow an actor from one room to another are used to establish that the telekinesis in the previous scene is probably just Keaton throwing stuff around the room in anger.
How to reconcile this is... well, difficult. It certainly plays with the tension between stage plays and movies. In neither is everything you see always taken literally, but in stage plays it is much more figurative (hence the bending of time and space from scene to scene). But on stage, you usually can't perform the kinds of special effects (characteristic of movies) that we are being asked not to take literally. (I'm trying to stay spoiler free, so I'll not say what I'm thinking right now.)
This is where we should look at the themes of the movie, because these formal elements in conflict that I mentioned mirror the thematic conflict between cinema and theatre. Long story short, the premise of the mov... (movie? . . . stageplay? . . . ) ...of the story is that Keaton is a has-been actor, known (very well known) for superhero movies he did ten or twenty years ago, all based around a character named Bat*coughs* I mean, Birdman.
Sound familiar? Okay, good. Well the inciting incident in the story is that he is trying to reclaim his career as an actor in general, and with it his artistic street-cred, so to speak, by writing (adapting), directing, and starring in a play. It is based on a novel by someone who encouraged him to be an actor when he was a child. Therefore, this isn't a move of cold calculation, trying to get famous again after years of not being as successful as he was as Birdman and therefore being artistically inauthentic, although he is certainly accused of this. But it is instead a very real attempt to reconnect with his younger, artistic self, before Birdman, which he sees as the inauthentic detour of his career and as not what he wants to be remembered for.
The conflict is, he seems to be finding that the film world doesn't translate to the stage world. He seems to be hitting the problem that there may not be such a thing as an "actor-in-general" but only two separate things called "stage-actor" and "screen-actor." On multiple occasions, this film criticizes the spectacles that saturate Hollywood and the celebrity culture it grows in the Petri dish of its award shows. Edward Norton plays his foil, someone else who finds himself on stage more than he does in his natural life, yet a stage insider, rather than a film one.
The film isn't all anti film culture, however. In many ways, film has its last laugh when we see that the kinds of things that make the theatre-world fall in love with you and fawn over your talent are superficial as well.
The formal conflict inherent in how the film is delivered therefore mirrors the thematic content that is being delivered, which is almost always the optimum result.
In other words, I have a lot of respect for this movie. I rate it 9 stars because that is how I say I think everyone should give it a fair chance.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Movies about movies
Like all of Tarrantino's films, he's really making a movie about movies, or about a type of movie. Inglourious Basterds is by far my favorite, and it's about war propaganda films.
I realized a long while ago that there were two important, yet distinct, types of ways to enjoy this movie. There are those who get excited at the prospect of seeing "our boys" kick Nazi @$$, and there are those who realize that is exactly how a propaganda film wants you to feel. It's more harmless today, since the actual Nazi party is a thing of the past, but it is important to realize that this film is trying to make get us to realize that we have selected a category of person and we generally tend to glorify subjecting them to horrific levels of violence.
Much like with fairy tales, it is important to ask when watching a movie "Why does the movie think violence against this person is justified?" Why is it okay for Rumplestiltskin to be ripped in half, or the witch in Hansel and Gretle to be burned alive? Why is it okay for Omar to fill the collaborating French interpreter with as many bullets as they do to the higher ranking members of the Nazi party?
To counter the inevitable person who thinks I'm reading too much into it, recall that the film premiere at the end is a fictional Nazi war propaganda film, where Zoller slaughters close to 250 people in front of a laughing, cheering, and energized audience. Hitler laughs at dying Americans in much the same mood that we might have earlier laughed when Donowitz bashed in a soldier's head with a bat.
Again I am impressed with Tarrantino's ability to write lengthy dialogue scenes about topics as mundane as glasses if milk and King Kong which are nerve-wrackingly suspenseful due to their context.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Purity of essence
I've watched this multiple times before. Once as a child, a few times in university, and this was the first time since. Every time I've enjoyed it more than the last.
One of the times I watched it was for a joint event I organized for the MTSU Cinema Club and MTSU ACM Siggraph. The plan was double features that thematically paired a classic film with an animated film. I paired this movie with The Iron Giant, the theme being Cold War science fiction and paranoia.
I had a disagreement at the time with the faculty advisor who felt I was essentially trying to turn Siggraph into Cinema Club, though no other officers of the club felt that way, nor did members. The event was actually quite a success. I'd have done more of them, but the advisor went behind the backs of the officers and canceled its advertising. As I'd said at the time, the point was to show that animated films could handle complex thematic material that we are comfortable admitting is in classic movies. I at one point nearly shouted at him that if it had been a purely cinema club event, I'd have paired Dr. Strangelove with Inglourious Basterds, the themes instead being black comedy and American xenophobia.
And for years I couldn't get that movie pairing out of my head. So last night, finally, my partner and I watched them together. Both movies try and explore, in hyperbole, the ways in which we Americans have caricaturized the people's with whom we've had political strife.
My major complaint about the film is one I shared with my partner, though she was the only one to verbalize, there are essentially no female characters. Well, there's one. Scott's character is sleeping with his secretary, and so she is in one scene. I'm uncertain where one could have been, given that the plot essentially all takes place in a few "boy's clubs".
The best actor in this movie is certainly Peter Sellars, though George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden were excellent as well. Sellars plays multiple roles with different accents, costumes, and hair. (The first time, when I was a child, I didn't even notice they were all the same.) But the main reason I keep coming back to this movie is the morbid humor.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Better after University than before
My first time watching this title left me feeling lackluster. I was a teenager, and I had a relatively narrow experience-set. All I knew was the first part felt like a fake nature documentary, the second was fascinating and compelling, and the third was confusing and pointless.
During the intermission, I had an disagreement with my mother back then about the Hal 9000 character. I felt like it would be too obvious for Hal to end up being a villain and there was something I couldn't put my finger on that made Hal seem trustworthy to me. My mom's point was that a movie from the 60s was unlikely to try and subvert our distrust of robots. At the time, I felt like the movie bore out her prediction.
---
Fast forward a decade or so. It was 9.3.18, and the Belcourt in Nashville was showing the new 70mm restoration of *2001: A Space Odyssey* (overseen by Christopher Nolan, they said). The only 70mm I've had the pleasure to see before was Hateful Eight, so I jumped at the chance. Coming along with me was my closest friend, who hadn't seen it in a long time either.
This time around, I was armed with a lot more knowledge and worldly experience that came in handy. The funny thing though, I came away from it with basically the same feeling about Hal. I honestly think he was perhaps one of the most trustworthy characters in the film and I firmly believe he did what he did in self-defense. After all, the crew he worked with, that "claimed" (ingenuously) to think of him as just another crew-mate, were prepared to murder him (or lobotomize him) on the mere chance that he might make an error. Obviously, it would be monstrous to treat a human that way, but Hal realized he'd never get justice since they would never see him as having emotions and true personhood.
Hal didn't become a murderer because he was a robot who was too tied town in logic to have a heart, he murdered out of desperation, fear, and self-defense. It was a cold and calculated self-defense, but no more so than that of the humans who planned to murder him, nor more so than the apes at the beginning of the movie, murdering each other for a watering hole. Hal became a murderer because he was *TOO* human, not because he wasn't human enough.
So the film seems to be saying something about violence and human nature, or the state of nature at least (nasty, brutish, and short). It was appropriate that my partner on this outing was in the middle of a book called *Sex at Dawn* which talks about the connections between societal structures and our assumptions about the state of nature. But 2001 doesn't take a fully Hobbesian view. For Hobbes, it is just in nature that we are doomed to violence. The contract is supposed to save us. But this film seems to suggest that while our violence has become more sophisticated and civilized, it is still violence. Murder never changes, to alter a phrase.
As for the end, I still feel mostly lost with that. perhaps it will suddenly make sense to me on future viewings. the important thing is that this movie was more than just eye candy for me this time.