Film Analysis With Luke

"I’m trying out a new defensive strategy for movie watching: I’ve started watching movies while playing Destiny or games on my cell phone a rough draft viewing. Neither of us get hurt this way.   Movies and humans cause me pain and I’ve never much enjoyed it. Why can’t all pain be like watching a scary movie? In Armageddon, Owen Wilson says prior to lift off:        'I got that "excited/scared" feeling. Like 98% excited, 2% scared. Or maybe      it's...' x "Sarah once asked “which characters/story does the author not care about? Can you tell sometimes?” Impressionism, with all its cutting, allows constant caring (Vines and 5second movies are semi-good examples of impressionistic media)."  

“Most AI movies occur at a special moment, a transitional period where the AI switches from the dominated to the dominator, slave to master, or at least at the conflict point. Ex Machina is quite explicitly about this moment...”

“The first Jurassic Park worked because you respect both sides: Dr. Grant, Goldblum, Hammond (heck even Newman) all have interesting personality. The dinosaurs as well: the feigned cuteness of the black spitty one, the clever hunting of the raptors, the gargantuan ferocity of the T-Rex. Each was memorable in its own way. Jurassic Park was nature trying to escape the control of man, with respectable gents on both teams. But Jurassic World didn’t have this because…”

" You’re 17-24, you have no clue what’s what in life, you see Leo’s great adventure and you will be all but forced to say “I want that, that seems wayyyyy better than anything I’m experiencing or probably will experience” and so, in an existential act of emulation, you..."

  "Spike: he did “Being John Malkovich” so he’s got some street cred, but Charlie Kaufman wrote that and Spike wrote “Her” so you can definitely feel the difference: “Her” is sloppy and the non-protagonist characters are pretty 1D. I’m being harsh on this movie for a variety of reasons that mostly stem from Spike expecting the viewer not to think."  

"My grandfather was a part time political analyst, part time alcoholic janitor, and  every once in a while he had something insightful to say. One gray summer, day he explained his “Political Complication Theory (PCT).” What follows is my best attempt at explaining said theory using my own words."

"When you’re 16, figuring out where to take a girl on a date or how to properly hold her hand can cause Noah’s-Ark-levels of anxious pit-sweat. But you grow (or at least most people do) and learn and move onto other things. The “other things” that you focus on can be seen as a sort of “skill tree,”...

"Here’s something that feels wrong to say: introverts may be biologically more evolved than extroverts. A 2012 study by Harvard’s Randy Buckner(1) found that introverts typically have a thicker prefrontal cortex, the magical part of the human brain that..."

"One of art’s primary concerns is communicating with the viewer because otherwise it ends up as mostly masturbation with a paintbrush. Some movies bang you over the head with concepts and morals and cheap jokes- they are the obnoxious people that yell when you’re only three feet away. Then there are movies like “The Master” that..."

“On the surface, “The Prestige” is about a competition between two rival magicians. This is what 99% of people see when they watch this movie. What it’s really about is man’s dual nature of work/ego/Yang/Prestige self and the family-man/vulnerable/Yin/caring self. Nolan uses Hugh and Bale to…”

"Communication - a sort of spiritual connection between Object A and B - depends on both objects and, hence, being a good reader of difficult texts takes a rather intensive reshaping of the way one thinks and processes information. Over time..."

"Tarantino’s Death Proof discusses gender power in relation to being death proof. In the first half, men are in control. Examples:the catty alpha female is hurt by..."

"Crazytown is where way too many things are solipsistically linked to my consciousness. Dogs bark? Refrigerator is left open? Can’t find the remote? All are linked to hidden meanings within my consciousness, putting my subjective experience as the driving node for all occurrences. And, although I don’t necessarily feel..."

"Tragedy, when’s its necessary, or not even necessary but part of the changing season, isn’t really tragedy. When it’s just part of the story instead of it being the whole story, we can breathe a little easier, hope a bit more hopier.  Cianfrance’s movies never feel tragic, never too..."

"It's the adventure, the worlds, the overly talented protags that make me hopelessly hopeful. Everything and everyone has 4 more notches of creativity and zest and structure and I just want it so badly. Real life pales in comparison but to me, Anderson’s movies are more real than life."

I talk about three movies and briefly how they affect one's perception and judgment on the Penn State tragedy. I weigh in on whether I think JoePa was at fault.

I discuss a paradigm hat.

A hero born of....stress. How we all have a little dark knight in us.

Today we talk about "Selma" and all the non-politically correct things that it entails. Is it okay for movies to lie. Who's cooler: MLK or Malcolm X? Do I, in fact, have a third nipple? All this and more...

Today we talk about why fighting with your significant other is so healthy (and exciting), how a good tiff is like a massage, and whether we still want families anymore.