First, CNN, then, ESPN, now BWI...IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DONT FIX IT!!!!!
- Thread starter Michael.Felli
- Start date
A
anon_xdc8rmuek44eq
Guest
Blame Facebook. Now we have 'Like' buttons for posts. And psuguy04 trolling every post where someone complains about the new format. It's working for him though - 8 Likes already!
Why? Does the new format make it more difficult for you to post off-topic bullshit for which you have no knowledge?
Besides, shouldn't you be busy with your trustee election campaign?
Idiot.
How many alums voting in this year's election? It ain't b/c of Michael Felli 2011 graduates, 2012 graduates, 2013 graduates and 2014 graduates aren't voting. It's b/c of people like you.
Maybe you should start worrying about the future.
Added bonus of the new format: It got rid of your self-absorbed, 10 page long signature.
Michael Felli, I adopted my signature in honor of the debate you and Lion de Nittany had some time ago concerning one of my favorite films of all time. Actually, I just watched it recently (three times) and am doing my own Kubrick retrospective. Tarkovsky is next. Can you identify the film from which my Avatar comes?
I never thought that I would agree with you on anything. I was wrong. On this issue, we agree
Yes. I remember that coversation well. And that LdN and I disagreed about a few things, mostly the alien black monolith.
I haven't a clue to what your avatar is referring to without trying to look it up.
Care to elaborate?
"I haven't a clue to what your avatar is referring to without trying to look it up."
"Care to elaborate?"
Sure. It is from the Andrei Tarkovsky film "Stalker." Stalker here has a different connotation that what we think of when we use the term. The child above is in the final scene.
"Care to elaborate?"
Sure. It is from the Andrei Tarkovsky film "Stalker." Stalker here has a different connotation that what we think of when we use the term. The child above is in the final scene.
" And that LdN and I disagreed about a few things, mostly the alien black monolith."
Michael, don't know if you've ever seen this Kubrick Interview before. Here is the link to the entire interview.
Excerpted from "The Film Director as Superstar" (Doubleday and Company: Garden City, New York)
Copyright ©1970 Joseph Gelmis, All Rights Reserved
This part might interest you:
The final scenes of the film seemed more metaphorical than realistic. Will you discuss them -- or would that be part of the "road map" you're trying to avoid?
No, I don't mind discussing it, on the lowest level, that is, straightforward explanation of the plot. You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.
When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he's placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny.
That is what happens on the film's simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.
What are those areas of meaning?
They are the areas I prefer not to discuss because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.
Why does 2001 seem so affirmative and religious a film? What has happened to the tough, disillusioned, cynical director of The Killing, Spartacus, Paths of Glory, and Lolita, and the sardonic black humorist of Dr. Strangelove?
The God concept is at the heart of this film. It's unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution -- chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.
Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization -- a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man's distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.
Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we're really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill -- as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?
Michael, don't know if you've ever seen this Kubrick Interview before. Here is the link to the entire interview.
Excerpted from "The Film Director as Superstar" (Doubleday and Company: Garden City, New York)
Copyright ©1970 Joseph Gelmis, All Rights Reserved
This part might interest you:
The final scenes of the film seemed more metaphorical than realistic. Will you discuss them -- or would that be part of the "road map" you're trying to avoid?
No, I don't mind discussing it, on the lowest level, that is, straightforward explanation of the plot. You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.
When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he's placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny.
That is what happens on the film's simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.
What are those areas of meaning?
They are the areas I prefer not to discuss because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.
Why does 2001 seem so affirmative and religious a film? What has happened to the tough, disillusioned, cynical director of The Killing, Spartacus, Paths of Glory, and Lolita, and the sardonic black humorist of Dr. Strangelove?
The God concept is at the heart of this film. It's unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution -- chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.
Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization -- a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man's distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.
Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we're really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill -- as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?
