Movies and Philosophy Now

Why Does the World Need Superman?

2025-08-09T04:17:00.002-06:00

My first article on this site was about Superman. I wrote an article about Man of Steel, released in 2013. Today, we have a new Superman, 2025. Superman has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, so I have feelings about this heroic character that has oscillated over the years. Idealism, morality, right and wrong, and what stuck with me is that he didn't change; the world around him changed, and then forced him into that world. He arrived here from a destroyed planet circa 1938, Action Comics. An orphan from a distant world was left to grow and adapt to 'our' ways, no different from any other child, yet he was different; he was powerful, strong, and alien.

Superman would later discover how to control his strength and where he gains his power from the sun. He would learn loneliness, being bullied, and kindness, but he understood solitude, which helped him focus on the big fights. Superman became a symbol of how we all ought to be as humans and how we should ideally treat humanity. He became the outside observer that we should all look up to.

There has been, for many years, this problem with Superman, that he is/was too idealistic, he wants kindness and goodwill. Most of us have become too cynical for kindness and goodwill, so we criticize Superman for being what we can't. We stopped believing in him and the way he looks at the world. He became something, an idea, that we have given up on, for the most part. His biggest and strongest superpower is that he doesn't want anything from us. Nothing. That's the only thing about him that frightens us because we live in a world where people only want something from us, sometimes it feels damn near parasitic.

Superman, at his core, wants to solve problems, moral problems mostly, but also must face structural problems. What is good? What is right? Superman is human; he suffers from the same moral dilemmas that most of us do. He suffers and loses, he wins, and he is celebrated, not that he is into affirmation. He aspires to ask the question, 'what is more?', what more can he be, inspires us to think about, 'what more can we be?'. That's what Nietzsche, Einstein, Freud and Homer, and so many others wrote about: We are beyond our own lack of imagination.

Reality is the stain we try to avoid, yet it marinates into our consciousness like a villain trying to destroy the (our) world. Language helps to fight it off, but reality is beyond our own ability to manipulate it; it is here, even if we are not. Reality doesn't care about us because it's not about us. Understand, we are travellers, we are guests, we are visitors, yet here we are, perspective is an option, but yet - here we are.

Superman is our ideal, a muscled-up, superpowered version of what 'we' want. We are not going to get it. Now we know that, but then Superman helps us believe, he helps us reach up and be 'more than we can be', but it didn't turn out that way. We now suffer from all his downsides, we are alone, we are feeling like we are in a foreign land, we are feeling like orphans in many cases. Superman, originally, appeared to do the opposite: you are not alone, you are feeling patriotic, you feel like you belong.

Why does the world need Superman?

Superman first appeared on the cusp of World War 2, being born out of World War 1. He started in between the World Wars and fought his way through comic books, trying to inspire people to fight, for good and against what was morally wrong. A hero at that time, none of us could imagine. Superman has lived on through the decades, a name just as recognizable as Jesus around the world.

Here we are, Superman is in his late 80s, and yet we still need him. These movies and comic books bounce around what he is and what he could or should mean, but we know, deep down, what Superman is........ It's so simple in psychology, especially Jungian psychology, Superman is what we want to be, and yet we are the - shadow.

Dante, Sisyphus, and the Übermensch fought through darkness to get to some form of light. Life is climbing this hill, no matter what happens, the headlights move forward. Willingly entering the Inferno, pushing endless boulders up the hill, or crossing that bridge and peering into that abyss to see what might be looking back is why we need Superman.

Superman whittles the world down to its basic components. Why be good? We chose to not be good? Why be confused about what 'good' you think 'good' is? Superman shows us through actions what good is. People should never tell other people that they are 'good'. Actions collapse words into politics; actions are the only fight against words. Superman, symbolically, is active in his morality; he shows it. That is why he will live in our dreams and minds as a force that asks nothing from us, only to look up.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Where Seeing is Believing

2025-08-09T03:57:00.000-06:00

First off, I was so mixed about even watching this movie, why you ask, social ‘they’re brainwashing us to death’ media. This movie was being given its do - or dragged through the trenches of ideological social justice. For at least the last decade, we have been bombarded with this ideological programming that cynicism has seeped in and corrupted our own objectivity, dramatic, I know, but it did. I admit it, I got duped about this movie because social media said so, and that pisses me off.

I was thinking this wasn’t worth the bother of even seeing it, I mean, how many times have we been burnt over the last couple of years, with promises of a ‘return to form’ and ended up getting more Star Wars failures and Marvel disappointments? The Fantastic Four: First Steps appeared, according to the mass media machine and its social media lapdog, as a mess. It suffered from mixed messaging, it turned out.

The movie was fine, adventurous and exciting, not without its problems, but a good piece of entertainment. The characters all had chemistry, and the plot was simple but effective at establishing the First Family as a reliable and competent team. The actors all worked, the visuals were great, and the end was a first step, as Marvel brings this family into the fold of their ‘re-imagining’ of the future of their franchise, which has suffered through a couple of years of dark (woke) times.

The Fantastic Four was established in the movie early on, quite cleverly, letting those of us who don’t know of their accident in space, yet keeping it moving exciting, for us who do know how these Fantastic Four gained their powers. We got to know Dr. Reed Richards, his wife Sue Storm, her brother Johnny Storm, and their friend Ben Grimm, as a charismatic team that has already been on multiple adventures for the last four years. Yet, the subtitle of the movie is – First Steps. We’ll get to that later.

The movie ended up exploring the perils of parenthood in uncertain times, where the world could end, but we still must fight to bring about a better world for the next generation. It told us that kids simultaneously bring out the best in all of us and remind us of what matters most – family. This film, inspired by the nuclear family, reminds us to refocus our values toward the family. The family has been attacked in our culture in the last decade for being toxic, for being irrelevant, for being ‘traditional’ in this modern, big-pharmaceutically-addicted world. Yet, this movie supports the family, cherishes it in fact.

The retro-futurism in the movie is the best kind of eye-candy 2025 has offered. The cars are cool, the clothing is cool, and the technology, in this alternative reality, is, well, cool. There is a little play on the Jetsons here and our pre-50s World’s Fairs, where there was so much positive possibility. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was heavily influenced by these dreams of a future where man and machine could work side by each harmoniously, and not turn into what we are living in today, where we have become its pet. It feeds us and we obey its every command, we bark when it wants us to bark, we sleep when it wants us to sleep, we eat when it wants us to eat, and we are always under the threat that if the machine turns off, we all starve to death. I guess that’s why we plug into so much technology, because our reality is often too much to psychologically bear, so we let technology own us now.

This movie has been caught up in our current ongoing culture war, which is attempting to divide us, by design, toward a more homogenized, trans-human future, where the human being is more predictable, more technologically obedient,
and less human than human. The Fantastic Four movie seems to be aware of this unpopular trajectory and decided to not participate in the propaganda machine, designed to help us all walk into digital handcuffs and mindless servitude because the Elite, our owners, would like it better that way for their human cattle.

First Steps is an apt subtitle to this movie. We are led to believe that it’s the Fantastic Four’s ‘First Steps’, yet it is more to do with their baby and symbolically, stretching here, our way back to traditional values and reclaiming our humanity from these satanic elites who seem hell bent on depopulating us. Or, maybe without all the symbolism and politics, it’s meant to be a damn good piece of entertainment.

How Artificial Intelligence is likely more Artificial than Intelligent

2025-03-09T04:59:00.002-06:00

Is AI this century’s atomic bomb? “And now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

We have been told, through the media arm of our government and their corporate sponsors, that artificial intelligence is here!! Average people are talking about it because Facebook told them to. So, it’s a campaign to prime us for what? The fact that we are being fed marketing bits on the subject is itself suspicious.

Artificial intelligence is simply, maybe not so simply, a thinking machine. It’s a theorized machine that has the computational capacity to… think. Speaking of thinking, think of a thousand-piece puzzle, each piece is a thing in and of itself, but when put together forms a horizon or a snowfall. Pixels on your computer screen or TV comprise even smaller detailed pieces to form a picture, often a moving one at that.

Each dot, or piece is part of a program, it has its purpose, to be the color red, or with sound, to be an octave higher, to be brighter or darker. We see and hear what has been completed; we see the movie, where superheroes are battling it out, almost as if it were real. Every dot, color, and sound is programmed to be where it should be…. if done right.

What is the Singularity? It is believed that the Singularity will be the point when computers and human cognition will be indistinguishable. What’s to come of this ‘advancement’ or evolutionary leap seems to bleed into fantasy. Machines and people are nothing alike and will never be, which is probably a good thing.

Proprietary algorithms are like those pixels from above but broken down to damn near microscopic levels that, computationally, appear as… intelligent and conscious. But this AI isn’t thinking; it’s computing, quite quickly, to allow many humans to believe that it’s ‘thinking’, but it isn’t. It’s a machine.

What is language? The problem with language is it explains everything while also explaining nothing. Language is a human construct, valuable and certainly important, but it is an invention, a human invention in all its magnificent forms, but not real in the real sense of Real.

Relativity

What is consciousness? Consciousness is the steam and aroma coming off a beef stew. The stew itself has beef, potatoes, carrots, and broth, other ingredients that make it whole. Consciousness is the smell when you tip your head in front of the pot. You can smell beef, broth, and vegetables but you are not tasting them. It’s a beautiful smell but it's not real, what’s real is the actual stew. Consciousness is an afterthought because our mind was already made up before we were allowed access to that information through consciousness. ‘I think so therefore I am’, in the Cartesian sense, isn’t good enough anymore. It had its place, and it opened up the thinking of the mind and its consequences, but we have to consider the limits of our access. Consciousness is not computational and could never be, by my estimation, programable in the AI sense of that fantasy. What we do know is, pardon the pun, knowing and understanding is not computational or aware that it does know. We assign meaning that feeds into consciousness. Our consciousness is on a need-to-know basis.

The last program we want in an intelligent robot is human consciousness. If there ever is a program that has advanced thinking capabilities, it will be a ‘consciousness’ that won’t resemble or own.

Relativity

What is intelligence? Education is what you know; intelligence is how you use it. This ‘AI’ writes an original T.S. Eliot poem based on existing T.S. Eliot poems. This is computational data processing previous and established information, resulting in material that, in itself, isn’t original and not intelligent. The same thing with movies, “write me a Steven Spielberg movie” and a movie about a child with divorced parents and an alien who teaches him how to be strong.

AI, in a fictional sense, was explored well with H.A.L. in 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968) as well as with Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994) but that was – fiction. Reality is often conflated with fiction and often confuses us. The truth is none of it is real. It is, yet again, another strategy by our owners to manipulate us into thinking that AI is here. There isn’t enough power on the grid to support an actual Al, just like there isn't enough power to support universal battery-powered vehicles. It’s just not there. So we are, yet again, fed lies.

Sherlock Holmes and Mass Media: How has the World become more Stranger than Fiction?

2024-08-23T04:20:00.001-06:00

Where does our food come from?

Where does our medical advice come from?

Where does our history come from?

We are at an impasse. We are stuck, most of us, between idealized views of the world and ideology, a zero-sum game. We are marooned in our minds by our outside controlled environment. Capitalism has captured our intelligence; consumerism has distracted our meaning. We are subject to this system of control, obedience, conformity, and brand loyalty. This corporate and governmental web is suffocating us. We are in a state of de-evolution.

When I was a kid, what the hell did I know? I was brought up with modest means and educated by intellectually challenged people, parents, and teachers. Certainly, there was this and that, and some books and understanding later that led me to view our plight, our station in society that concerns me. There’s a journey-less traveled problem here.

Sherlock Holmes is assigned to the case, along with Watson, also Watson isn’t gender-swapped, it’s Holmes and Watson. What do they think, as investigators if they took on our case? Where do reason and logic apply in the mind of Holmes? Sherlock Holmes is a central character in the subject of ‘how’ to think. How would this fictional character, a ‘consulting detective’ think about our current woke mind virus position through, observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning?

Holmes had his moments of the fantastical, but his real ground was logic and reason, philosophically. Watson asks Holmes about the ‘Woke Mind Virus” and Holmes doesn’t want to hear it because it conflates, distracts, distorts, it contaminates. Investigations should be impartial, Holmes passed on to Watson. Holmes would know about government oversight, mass media manipulation, and corporate greed.

The point here is a fictional character could figure out what’s going on here. It shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to help us figure out that we’ve been played. Capitalism has become our wallpaper and consumerism our apps. We have been convinced that we are not good enough, by powerful people who own all the magazines, run all the studios, and own mass media. Why do we continue to listen to these people?

What would Holmes do?

Holmes would think, and that might be what we are missing in our technologically savvy current state. We have to think, investigate, wonder, curiosity, all of the above. The problem is we are usually told what to think by our brain and assume the thought our brain told us to think was a thought we originated. Little do know.

To serve, we have to go deeper. Sherlock Holmes, along with every philosopher has always asked the question, why?

Why?

We are our own operating system, technically, bare-bones, but we are thinking, hopefully about a ‘lifeboat’ so to speak. Freud called it our ‘self-preservation drive’ on account that we want to live, but yet we defy that instinct by allowing ourselves to be consumed by……this place we find ourselves.

Metaphorically, it feels weird sinking on the Titanic with so many people oblivious that the ship is sinking. So many are singing songs and watching sporting events, playing video games, and smoking weed, while the ship starts sinking around them. It’s sort of amazing that the fortitude of blindness so many, (when I saw so many, I mean mostly, sadly - everybody) project and defend as the ship continues to sink.

There is a mass migration of undocumented people flooding most Western countries at the behest of the nation's leaders. Are they doing this because they care? Do they feel guilty that most of these people are coming from impoverished and war-torn countries as a result of the West, I’m mainly looking at you, America, sucking these respective countries of all their resources? Are they allowing this mass migration because of DEI, turning over a new leaf of sorts? Reach deep down, you know they are not allowing this for any of these reasons.

So why are these Western countries allowing this mass migration? The working people of the West are servants to the elite, and at this point, some of us are well-paid servants. One of the reasons for this mass migration is to lower the wage gap. Our greedy Overlords want more for themselves and less for us. Another reason is the military, western people aren’t flocking to the military anymore – ‘to make a difference’. The Military Industrial Complex needs soldiers that will die for it, so they can make their profit.

Another reason for mass migration is these Elites know that Western countries are falling, quite similar to the Roman Empire, and these greedy bastards want to get ahead of it before it falls. By the way, like the housing market crash in 2008, these nations are falling not because of the working-class people, they’re falling because of the bloodsucking Globalists.

We did not start this, we just want to get by, feed our families, and survive. As for our Opulent Owners, they are consumed by the high of greed and power. They can’t help themselves and they hate us for it. People at that level of wealth and power are not happy people, quite the opposite. We’re taught that being rich will make us happy so these ‘Earthly Gods’ will have servants to manage their operations. “One of the greatest tricks the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Folks, we have been laboring under one of the biggest lies we’ve ever been told.

As much as some of us love Sherlock Holmes, he isn’t going to help us here. Fiction is no longer working if we hope to see the other side of this. So many people are like, nope, nope, ‘I can’t think about that.’ Still with the ignorance is bliss bullshit. I’m sorry but this isn’t going away. Trust me, I want to forget about it, but I can’t. I want to get away from it all but here I am. We are in a culture war for our lives and the lives of your children and everybody else's.

THE ENDGAME: A Short Look into What’s Happening in the World and Why it’s Tearing Our Culture Apart.

2024-08-19T15:20:00.001-06:00

Okay, what is going on? That’s the real question behind all this global chaos and all this cultural division. Are we in a mass extermination event?

The ‘humanity’ as we know it, is being eradicated by a cabal of men and women with interests in evolving our species into molds of their choosing, not ours. Currently, we are all being psychologically conditioned to accept this New World, where we will own nothing, we will be content with our masters, and we will live in a world that has erased its past.

We are being biologically tampered with and, through mass propaganda campaigns, we are being culturally metamorphized into something that isn’t in any of our best interests. We are being changed into a form of human that isn’t compatible with the natural laws of nature. We are being lied to about identity politics. We are being educationally castrated and taught to believe that having babies is bad for the environment, bad for our idealized future, and harmful to our identities.

This all sounds insane, that we are moving, being forcibly driven toward a post-human future, where machines will run the world. How many science fiction movies have prepared us for years for this possible future? The psychological conditioning required to convince an ‘intelligent’ species to go along with this madness is its own nefarious miracle.

How do you convince a mass population to agree to its own extinction? Everywhere you look, we are being controlled, under surveillance, and influentially divided, for the sole purpose of conquering us. Whether you want to believe this or not, we are being systematically downgraded, with many being removed altogether, to make way for a future that will never belong to us. That’s a scary thought indeed, especially for those who have children.

Our reality has been altered, through mass media, social media, smartphone addiction, porn addiction, drugs, and alcohol addiction, and lots of meticulous misdirection by highly powerful people that don’t care about us. One of the biggest pills to swallow while ‘waking up’ is the knowledge that the very people you vote for and entrust your safety along with your family’s, doesn’t care to know you, be around you, and could care less if you lived or died. I think the direction we are going in society; they’d probably prefer if you just died.

We have become destabilized, dehumanized, and demoralized, by design. Let that sink in. Our governments and their corporate sponsors, under the control of a small group of power-seeking oligarchs, have manipulated us all into believing that our planet is at the peak of climate destruction, they did this in the past, warning us that the oil will be gone in 10 years and famine by 1975, in the 60s, in the 70s they warned us that all the natural resources will be gone by 2000, we’ll also all require gas masks by 1985, the fish were expected to go extinct and…. Killer Bees!! Let’s not forget the ice age by 2000. In the 80s acid rain was supposed to kill us all, and more droughts, oil depletion, and sea levels rising, but none of this happened. What about the ice caps melting, and flooding the world’s shorelines, the ozone layer was supposed to kill us all in the 80s. I could go on and on about how much our ‘trusted’ leaders, fear-mongering, have scared us into believing anything they say.

The real threats we face today are the destruction of the family, our children being indoctrinated in schools, spirituality being dismissed, social media polluting all our minds, especially our children. All our human connections are being severed, not only from each other but our connections with nature. All our food is becoming more and more poisonous, by design. You will not hear any of this through corporate mass media because they are in collusion with the powerful hand that feeds them. And then there’s all the division.

I hate that I need a disclaimer…. but ooops….(sadly, the times we live in) There’s a problem with division that I can’t get over, we are being fed (mis) (dis) information and I have an opinion about that. Luckily, I realize my opinion is… mine, and can be analyzed, and/or distorted beyond my consent. I’m okay with that because I love debate.

So, what is happening in our media culture? We are being led down an elitist-controlled path toward what? We are being trained by the government and their corporate sponsors, through mass propaganda, to not only comply with their dictates but also fight amongst ourselves. Guess what, most people are taking the bait.

Are we that dumb? We are allowing these opulent owners to manipulate us into fighting each other so we don’t fight them. Really? This is where we are, gay rights, trans rights, black lives matter? I would argue most of us in the West are fine with all these communities, people should be able to do whatever they want, certainly with whomever they choose.

So, is gaslighting the new norm? The media just says this group hates that group and we are all left to just follow along? What are we doing? Why are we letting these Globalists tell us how to live and treat each other? This Woke Trojan Horse is what is happening in our culture. We are being rebooted and while our owners are forcing policies on your country and mine, we are debating over, ‘was he female or was she male’ bullshit. Houdini couldn’t come up with a better misdirect.

We are arguing over gender? Who gives a fuck!! Ooops… I lost some of you woke people, sorry. Gender, who gives a fuck about gender, and why are these Globalists pushing this agenda? I know we are all programmed by the media empire to be inclusive, not by our own design but by… propaganda.

The divisiveness is in/and around everything. We are fighting each other for a voice and an opinion, sadly by design. I hate this trap we have allowed ourselves to get… stuck… in. I know educated people who should know better and are stuck in this loop of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Push… push… push… Don’t get me wrong, I believe everyone should get a shot, but meritocracy should be the real judge, despite of skin color or gender.

I can already feel the heartbeats pumping. That’s the propaganda machine demanding your obedience. The point is to fight that Orwellian boot stomping on your face. We are in a culture war and we still are arguing over dumb shit that none of us are, directly, involved with, like its defining, sorry about the drama, the meaning of our fucking life.

It’s understandable, turning a big problem – life – into a smaller more digestible problem like racism and segregation. Sadly, it’s so small, it limits the human mind's potential to pecking orders and fast food.

Okay, so now you might be thinking, ‘Is he comparing racism to fast food?’ Yes. We have been redirected to care about subjects like racism to misdirect us from actual global concerns. It’s more of the dumbing down of the culture, to keep us all distracted on skin color, and not government oversight.

We all don’t want to hear it but… we’ve been doped. We have been lied to about nearly everything we’ve been ‘taught’. You feel it like The Matrix’s ‘splinter in your mind’. You know something is wrong. The problem, the mountain to climb, is what to do about it.

We have more in common than most of us think. Our values and morals are likely in the same lane, but the media monster is the weapon to keep us, not only second-guessing ourselves but dividing ourselves from each other.

When you turn your TV, computer, and cell phone off…. poof, the virus disappears. It’s magic….hmm. I wonder why that is….??

This is all a dream, you will wake up in 5…… 4……. 3……. 2…

The Acolyte: Star Wars and ‘Not’ Surviving the Woke Mind Virus.

2024-06-07T05:32:00.002-06:00

Viewer discretion advised.

Where…. do… I… begin… this galaxy couldn’t be any far.. farther away.

Broken record when it comes to Disney…. but here it goes…. WOKE!!!

Laid on so thick it makes you want to hate yourself. There was no fun of what little I actually could get through before I pulled the pin on the grenade.

Boxes checked.

Hates men…. Check.

Hates white people…. Check.

DEI…. Check.

Diversity above meritocracy…. Check.

Bad fucking writing…. Check.

Boring characters…. Check.

I will not be going into any plot details because it might bore you to death and I want you to read this to the end, also you’re welcome. What I would like to talk about isn’t necessarily this torpedo of a shit show, as Disney+ continues to spiral. The woke mind virus is infecting everything. It seems like there is no way around it. For those of you who might be unclear on the meaning of woke and its cultural implications, damage, and severity; The Woke Industrial Complex is the ideology of an insincere fabrication of victims & victimhood through manufactured oppression/discrimination, for the ultimate purpose of acquiring power through such victimhood and attaining undeserved social standing through artificial outrage and virtue signaling.

If you feel the following symptoms consult your local doctor:

You know that people never say what they mean. They mean what you think they mean.

You can accurately determine what other people mean by leaping incredibly large assumptions that come from your mind, not theirs, and then you can inform them of what they meant by what they said.

You get the sensation that you’ve helped because of the highly emotionally charged feeling that developed inside while you weren’t helping at all. This helps make your efforts all about - you guessed it - you.

You get Social Justice Warrior points for criticizing and hopefully canceling other white people on social media to get your dopamine hit, but you don’t get any points for helping racially oppressed people because other people don’t notice you doing it. No dopamine hit.

The question is: what is happening here? Why is Disney sinking their own ship? It is hemorrhaging from all sides, it knows it, we know it, and the shareholders know it, so why is the mouse without a house? The Acolyte is boring, nothing about it is interesting, and the dialogue is so badly written. Laughable writing, horrible acting all around, no wisdom to be had by anything. It’s a joke. It’s not Star Wars, that ship sailed way back. What I did watch of this, if I can get overly dramatic, felt like slicing lines on the tips of my fingers with a razor blade, full stop.

Jesus, the Jedi are killing themselves in this because it was so bad. It turns out they are evil now; they are part of the patriarchy and must be stopped. The Jedi are now the Sith? Disney is dead, they killed Pixar, they killed Marvel, and they killed Star Wars. May they rest in peace. I’m not getting overly dramatic again, am I?

Back to the point. Agenda. What does Disney gain from losing? What does any of this woke crap gain by losing. I’m looking at you Bud Light and Target, and many others. What are they gaining by losing? They are doing it because they have no choice if they want to survive the next chapter of this thing we call life. They have no choice but to do what we call ‘woke’. It's business, not diversity.

The Force is Female after all. Blame men. Programming…..

The sad thing is, all these groups fighting over washrooms, pride parades, and equity have no idea that the government and their corporate sponsors are using them all. They don’t care about black rights and the gay community, they don’t care. They care about power. They are using their power to keep people divided and distracted…. Why?

Climate change and the pandemic only affected the working class. Rich people are fine, no virus, and pollute whenever. The propaganda is so thick that it blinds most people. We are all pitted against each other, and we are not the enemy. They make us care about other people's sexuality when it’s none of our business, they make us care about skin color and not read philosophy. I hate watching people, everywhere I look get duped by these governmental corporate criminals. They don’t care about you, they don’t care!!

In conclusion: watch The Acolyte at your own risk.

Sorry, during the pandemic the ‘bought and paid for’ mass media instructed us not to do our own research. I guess we’re supposed to believe them or some bullshit like that……

PS. There are only two genders.

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TOP SECRET

Family, heterosexuality, and having babies are not in our owners' vision of their future, not ours, so asexual, boy on boy, girl on girl, or so many sexual partners that no one can trust anything is the state of our future.

Sorry folks, I wish I had some light to give at the end of this tunnel, but I can’t. I wish I could…..

Overflowing of Useless Information and the End of Reality

2023-08-12T03:40:00.002-06:00

By Chris Barr

We are being berated with Jackson Pollack-type spattered ideas, dripping from site after site, online person after online person. We are being inundated with ‘information’ to discombobulate our ability to focus on any given idea, before we are sideswiped onto another screen warning us of the global collapse of the eco-system, then slammed into the brick wall of unilateral, inverted, paradoxical sexual ideology, only to be pulled into the current war and who we are being now, programmed to hate, for reasons the news media loves to pepper us with at two-minute increments, or so.

The internet flow of traffic would have lost its driver’s license years ago on actual city streets and country highways. There are barely any stop signs, but there are boatloads of de-platforming and canceling individuals for possessing so-called scary ideas. The Internet is where great ideas go to die, and sadly it was never always this way. The Internet was initially meant to connect people. Who knew, it did that exactly, just not for the intended purpose. Instead, what we ended up getting was this massive gladiatorial digital battle arena, where all our insecurities, all our self-loathing, and all our narcissism could blow off every ounce of steam our modern, distracted brains would permit.

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The Internet is a useful tool for all of us humans to connect with the world and open our minds to new ideas while we maturely debate old ones. It allows us access to all the knowledge ever collected at one click of a button…a..butt…butto……

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…

As long as we have internet platforms where the shroud of anonymity protects the willfully ignorant from Real world – physical – consequences, we shall all remain hostage to the lunacy of narcissistic myopic meta-avatars. Truth, within the chaos of the internet, can never be allowed to spread its wings for all of us to ‘truly’ examine. Language, the delivery device itself, will always expose its blind spots, and allow ignorance to exploit its potential, resulting in its own undoing, within the system of the digital machine.

All this technology is telling us that - we will become faster if we allow it to integrate within our lives and within our minds. There has been no real-world study or peer-reviewed study, that ever showed that technology has, as a whole, helped human beings become better than the state they were before the technological revolution. Sure, in many fields of technology, humans made progress, but there always seems to be that nasty cost factor that rears its ugly head. Technology has become so heavy on the Tree of Life that the branches that hold it up are cracking and breaking.

Speaking of branches, an olive branch, shall we, technology I suppose dates back to the first ever tool formed by early hominids to gain access to bone marrow. In Eastern Africa, our early ancestors, hunters and gatherers, would hide, and wait it out while a lion would kill its prey and then eat its fill. Our early ancestors stayed still and waited for the hyenas to come along and eat the remaining flesh off the carcass. They would wait to see if the coast was clear and then run up to the skeletal remains of the animal and dig out its bone marrow to feed on. Humans at that point in our long-storied history were low on the food chain, by no means near the bottom, but low. Then came fire, which changed everything, probably the largest technological leap ever made by any Earth animal. Fire skyrocketed humans to the top of the food chain, nothing could stop them and to this day, fire has become the greatest Promethean gift humans could ever have. Fire allows humans to control everything moving and breathing on this planet, then it controlled the skies. Fire lit up the world, and we have never looked back.

Today, we have all been boxed into digital cages on the internet where all our passions, desires, and hostilities exist. Our very souls have been outsourced to fantasy, a battle, and life that only exists outside of the world we were all born into. We have become simulations in this simulacra of our former selves, we have become incarnations of our own hopes and dreams. The prison of our minds belongs to corporations and governments that have successfully placed digital shackles around us, to rob us of what truly is possible outside of this symbiotic illusion.

What is real and what is fake? Can we truly, authentically, tell the difference anymore?

People in the world outside of their computer and cell phone screens will continue passively to stumble their way through this complicated life, while their online confident surrogates continue to flex their digitally-programmed gaming muscles at anyone who doesn’t have an opportunity to challenge them face-to-face in the air we all breathe, for a real debate of ideas, exercising actual free-speech, without the interference from the ruling party of power-craving elitists.

We are now all scrambling to make sense of a world that is rife with semiotic chaos. Everywhere we look now the signals are mixing and reassigning themselves to opposing ideologies. We are living in - the upside-down, and for the most part, it’s all being orchestrated on purpose. We question everyone around us to such a degree these days, that ourselves are all that’s left to question. So, we end up doing that too. We begin to betray our own instincts, seeing them as foreign invaders, corrupting us from the inside out.

This parade of sound-bite chaos is available to any of us when we ‘flip’ through our phones. Turning your brain to misinfortaining mush as you stare into the screen, closing off the real world outside your actual window. The sounds click and bang securing your ears to the device, your eyes barely blinking as you look deeper into the simulated reality of the disordered world presented to you.

Training videos – lose the weight, don’t lose the weight, eat this – don’t eat that.

UFOs are real according to our always reliable government, conspiracy theory.

Cures for Cancer remedies – just drink this slug daily, cured. Big Pharma plant.

Group A is trying to kill Group B for not conforming to Group A’s stupid ideology.

Couples playing tricks on each other ‘I tripped my wife with the Dog’ went viral.

Climate Change is the new virus sent from the elites to kill us but it’s all our fault.

Your car is trying to kill you. Is it the gas-guzzling or the lithium batteries, or both?

Globalists plan to poison the meat supply while they produce 3D-printed ‘meat’.

OnlyFans models are being replaced by AI influencers, bot models vs. the ‘real’ thing.

PIZZAGATE is good for you – if you are part of the club. Order your pizza tonight.

Satan is everywhere – vitamins are bad for you – Woke Hollywood has shut down.

Men are women and women are men, men can be women but women can’t….

We are allowing governments from all over the world to unite in our capture. They are getting away with it because we are hypnotized by the discombobulation of reality itself hosted by them, these power structures that only wish to manipulate it all. They mean to control all our physical property and the very sustenance we all require to survive, food and water. Conspiracy theories?

This is the time we should all be having meaningful conversations without the fear of being offended. In bars and taverns, they say we shouldn’t be talking about politics and religion and when you add alcohol they may be right but either/or we should be talking. The consequences of not challenging ourselves and the way we look at our community, our city, our country, and our world, leaves us empty and marooned as we look upon each other as the enemy against our ideology. If we are afraid to talk about anything, in fear of opposing ‘information’ itself then – we won’t. We should be talking to each other but the composers of this symphony of silence have created a room where people, with opinions, should remain castrated. The internet is where they want us to go destroy each other. We have become T.S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’, we have become tired and lonely, and we have allowed these globalists to capture our fears and use them to rebuild a world in their image, an image that you and I are not invited to.

Steal your mind back from those that only wish to manipulate and control it.

Sound of Freedom, Human Trafficking and Protecting our Children

2023-07-12T03:09:00.001-06:00

Based on a true story.

“God’s children are not for sale!!”

Sound of Freedom is a powerful and important film bringing awareness to the horrific child sex trafficking network where millions of children are snatched up yearly to feed its global revenue requirements of $150 Billion. Yes – you read that correctly. It’s a business, one on a scale that should pause us all, but…

Question?

Why are the legacy media networks trashing this movie about exposing sex trafficking and child slavery?

Why is this so-called fair-and-balanced mainstream media interested in associating the film with bullshit ‘Qanon adjacent’ conspiracy theories?

Why wouldn’t this governmental and corporate-sponsored media be interested in spreading awareness of this kidnapping cabal of profiteering madmen?

Why is this film being smeared about the drinking of human blood and its anti-transgender message when neither of these subjects is brought up or appear in any shape or form throughout the films running time?

Has truth become abstract in this ideological ‘smart’ 1^st world? Is there a full-on propaganda campaign against reason and logic in this post-human existence?

Sound of Freedom is based on the true story of Tim Ballard’s journey into darkness. Human trafficking exists and this film provides a sliver of insight into the global network that appears to operate in-and-around the purview of what we might call law, human decency, freedom, and moral compass.

The film follows a passionate man hellbent on putting any and all ‘Pedos’ behind bars but considers the victims and must go on a seemingly sacrificial operation to save a little girl.

The film must be experienced so there is no real need to go deeper into the plot other than what was mentioned above.

Question?

How is there divisiveness when wanting to prevent or save children from predatoral sexual servitude?

Why wouldn’t we all agree on this international tragic crime, despite our ideologies or political leanings?

Aren’t we all on the side of protecting children?

Why has it become a controversy to protect and save children from sex trafficking?

CNN says the film is propaganda Qanon promoting ideology, so does the NewYorkTimes. Rolling Stone magazine says ‘Sound of Freedom’ Is a Superhero Movie for Dads with Brainworms. Others have printed - if you type the words “sound of freedom” into Twitter (decent people who wish to live good, happy lives should under no circumstances actually do this). This is where we are in our social media-driven society. Journalism is a mass media arm for the globalists and their One World Governmental agenda. As cruel and repulsed as we view the sexual enslavement of children, there are many that live on the top floors and are flown in massive jets pontificating about ‘climate change’ that do not.

After 20th-century Fox was bought up by Disney they sat on releasing Sound of Freedom, why? Disney celebrates - children? Sound of Freedom is about protecting all our children. Why wouldn’t Disney release the film? They ditched it and it got picked up by Angel and finally released after five years.

Make your own judgment. Check: PIZZAGATE

The entertainment media complex chose to ignore it for the most part because their bosses, bosses, bosses ordered them to discredit the film because its subject, not pointing any real fingers, but might be hitting too close to home, in however perverted pedo minds work.

There’s one thing about adults fighting amongst themselves but children should have nothing to do with our divisive narcissistic bullshit. They are not equipped with our neurotic, often illogical, sometimes hedonistic, and selfish ways at their young and innocent age. They have no armor to defend themselves.

This film pissed me off just watching it. It was so well filmed and made its point so emotionally succinctly that it hit my nerve endings, as it should have, which is what the film was aiming to do.

Sound of Freedom is a great film and I hope that everyone goes and sees it. It’s worth feeling a little bit uncomfortable to at least glimpse into the filmed version of a reality that’s happening all over the world.

Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Multiverse and Getting out of Your Own Way

2021-12-24T04:17:00.001-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON Christmas Eve, 2021

"You're flying out to darkness to fight a ghost."

- Otto Octavious

The level of wokeness – identity politics – and SJW shit that wasn’t present in this movie is its own post-logic miracle. This movie was about people – all people – whomever you may be – to come and enjoy an action-adventure film without being torpedoed with – confabulating ideologies forced into a mosaic of fabricated far-leftist multiculturalism.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was about growing up and leaving yourself out of the outcome if that outcome for the group is better off without you in it. The truth is we don’t always get our way – we don’t always get what we want – we are often left out – we are often left alone. The flipside is – we – grow. We learn to navigate, we learn to assign meaning, within ourselves, to what is meaningful about the relationships and the world that is all around us.

The Spider-Boy becomes a Spider-Man.

Spoilers ahead……..

To proceed forward assume your spider senses are tingling.

Matt Murdock – Daredevil. This was exciting to see that Charlie Cox’s Netflix Daredevil character was loved enough by fans that Marvel saw fit to put him into the MCU movies. He will add a great deal of, and much needed, maturity to upcoming MCU movies.

No Way Home juggled all the previous Spider-verse villains seamlessly and then comes Andrew’s Amazing Spider-Man and then Tobey’s Spider-Man to add icing on the cake that I haven’t seen at the movies in a long time, nostalgically speaking. There are still a lot of questions, but this was a calculated but convoluted movie with many moving parts, even for complex subject matter that surrounds the Multiverse and String-Theory.

Speaking of - Question: Does the other Peter’s, Tobey and Andrew, in their respective universes have all their loved ones who know they are Spider-man, forget them as well?

Electro – Jamie Foxx got to not be so blue. His Electro thankfully stayed true to the comic book character and was electricity yellow whenever he blasted lightning from his hands.

Green Goblin – William Defoe killed it in every scene. Spoiler friendly spoiler hahahahaha. He didn’t skip a beat from 2002’s Spider-Man and still looks great.

Dr. Ock - Alfred Molina was great once again as the multi-tentacled villain. He's always been the voice of reason as long as he is in control of his cybernetic technology and not the other way around.

So much spectacle, so much fan service, so much awesomeness. Spider-Man: No Way Home was a fun movie to watch from start to finish – and that’s it, that’s all I have to say, but…. It turns out it isn’t – there’s a little more. The movie is so much more than its moving mechanical tentacles… I mean parts.

Post-Logic Miracle: A Marvel movie inspiring not only its main character but its audience to grow up and assume responsibility is – for a lack of a better word – inspiring. We learn to step aside and get out of our own way if necessary for the greater good. This film turns out to be philosophically utilitarian in the end with no wokeness insight.

"The problem is you trying to live two different lives. The longer you do it the more dangerous it becomes."

- Dr. Strange

Dr. Strange performed a spell, by Peter’s request, to magically disappear anyone’s memory of Peter Parker being Spider-Man through a sort of magical Mandela Effect – which at this point the whole world knows who Spider-Man’s identity is.

I do think that Strange’s eagerness to help Peter with this spell despite its dire consequences may have less to do with this movie and more to do with the Dr. Strange upcoming sequel. Some questions – I guess we wait and see.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was the best Marvel movie I’ve seen in years. It was respectful of what came before it. It didn’t come off selfish or even jealous of the earlier Spider-Man movies. Instead, it chose to celebrate them with actual class. The film had real stakes where Peter had to make choices with consequences, some with unfortunate outcomes. The No Way Home in the title could certainly be toward the villains and Andrew and Toby's Spider-Men, but No Way Home is really about how the MCU's Spider-Man was never going backward where he could seek comfort at his home.

This movie showed that Tom Holland's Peter Parker wasn't actually Spider-Man until the end of this film. By the end, when he puts on the new suit that he made, and after taking full responsibility for his previous actions, only then do we truly see our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

The Matrix: Resurrections and Caught Up in a Meta-Loop of Destruction

2021-12-24T04:05:00.000-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON Christmas Eve, 2021

---If we don’t know what is real we are often unable to resist what isn’t.---

Tabula Rosa – is the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content, and therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. The mind isn’t born with a hardwired possession of certain knowledge.

Some spoilers ahead……………

Like a mosquito at a nudist colony, I’m trying to figure out where to begin with this fourth installment of The Matrix franchise. Which by the way, this movie cynically criticizes throughout the first half of its long-running time.

The Matrix: Resurrections is about choice, destiny, identity, and trans-formation. The movie explores qualifying memory recall and whether free will is an illusion and destiny always being part of our programming. Then - we are able to escape that programming through, I guess through some form of free will, hence these strange repeating loops and inconsistencies this movie softly investigates. I would argue – not well.

Is reality-based in memory nothing but fiction?

Thomas Anderson (AKA Neo) in this version of the Matrix is a video game creator and designer of The Matrix game for a company called Deus Machina. Which is a game that mirrors the content, characters, and plot of The Matrix 1999 film, which of course is unknown to the millions of gamers that reside in this seventh version of the Matrix from which they perceive reality. I know what you’re thinking – a loop within a loop within a loop within a loop then a meta-loop, and so on.

Thomas goes to therapy to try and resolve the psychotic and suicidal issues he has been experiencing for some time now. He believes he doesn’t belong in his current reality; he believes somethings wrong or off with this place, “like a splinter in his mind” that he just can’t put his finger on. So, he keeps taking his blue pills to help from going ‘crazy’. A word, it turns out, he isn’t permissible to say in his therapy session.

Thomas meets up with Tiffany (AKA Trinity) in a café called Simulatte. They start to get the feels and begin to remember moments of their ‘true’ past. Thomas through therapy and Tiffany through dreams. Thomas is then brought over to the real world, which has survived 60 years since the last time he was there, by red pilling it and then planning to get Trinity out of the Matrix. That’s pretty well it, no saving the world, bin there dun dat, just get Trinity out.

Big shocker, in the end, Trinity becomes the One and saves Neo and then takes down the patriarchy afterward. This hasn’t been a common theme permeating cinema and culture in the last five years, has it?

---If we are unable to distinguish the difference between what is real and what isn’t we are doomed to be trapped in fantasy.---

Reason it appears, is unable to break out from its own loop. No matter what these characters do, they seem to remain caught in this Matrix loop, indefinitely. In our, outside of this movie, world we are not able to change on the level that our imaginary and emotional perceptions tend to believe. We have thoughtful stories and internal narratives that persuade our minds into going along with this line of thinking, often in a quite convincing way, but to quote the actual Morpheus, “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

The truth is most of our lives are lived internally within the neuro-synaptic confines of our minds. We perceive the world outside our braincase, we feel it affect our nerves and gather sensory data through our many available inputs, we then form a narrative and live that story as if it were as real as apple pie.

Echoes of the past ripple up to this point in time only to help us forget.

The fight scenes were sloppy, unlike the choreographed artistry of the original. The action scenes for the most part was generic and in some cases crappy for what you’d expect from a Matrix film. The Merovingian from Reloaded makes an appearance in one such crappy action scene yelling out barely coherent indictments against Neo. I won’t go into detail, but it was just a sad sight to behold. How did that make it into final picture I will never know?

All the far……….far left, neon hair dye and non-binary, diversity couldn’t swoop in and virtue-signal this movie from being a cardboard simulacra shadow of its former self. The wokeness in this movie is plastered throughout, unfortunately, which ultimately bogs down the story and drenches it in identity politics. To be fair, the reason it is bad isn’t hinged on its wokeness – it’s just bad filmmaking from screenplay to picture lock to final test screening.

There were a few moments that were -actually- okay. The movie dived a little into Predictive programming and the meta-message about exploiting nostalgic IPs for the sole purpose of a money grab but Neo and Trinity are the real focus here. Everyone and I mean every other character in this movie are forgettable, ‘Who was forgettable?’ ‘Exactly.’

Other than that, there was no real innovation and only rudimentary cookie cut-out philosophy that was even beneath entry-level Philosophy 101. The Matrix: Resurrections did make a profound statement despite itself; the audiences of today can’t handle the discourse and depth of The Matrix 1999.

Resurrections is more on par with Revolutions, the third Matrix movie. It’s lighter and more dumbed-down to suit how the studio likely thinks what contemporary audiences, with many bubble-wrapped and willing participants in victimhood culture, would be prepared to sit through. Are we the problem here? This current system? Social media? Why do we resist the Red Pill? Is the choice an illusion or was the red pill always decided? Sadly, these days I don’t see much of that going around.

Why are we all so easily offended in our first-world technocracy? We have become hyper-sensitive to any comment, opinion, or view that conflicts with our own perspective. We often become agitated at the slightest bend in our narrative, that story that we believe defines us.

We are alone in the fastest and most expansive time that human beings on this planet have experienced. We have technological advances and scientific discoveries developing at a rapid pace. We have endless conflicts with governments and their often-absurd policies, and the daily threat of impending doom by some unknown, faceless enemy.

We have difference in every direction, constantly reminding us of how small we are, among all this chaos. We have health warnings, passive-aggressive violence, and system failure seemingly lurking around every corner of our lives. We have numerous multi-cultures of people, that believe in other gods and live by dissimilar traditions than the ones we are accustomed to.

We do have control but the problem with it is it isn’t real, it’s manufactured. Our control mainly comes in the form of some technology or what we choose to buy. The problem with this control we all share is, our control isn’t really ours, it belongs to the corporations that deceived us into thinking it’s ours.

---If reality alludes us, we will inevitably fall prey to illusions presented to us.---

GODZILLA vs. KONG and Suspending your Disbelief

2021-04-04T11:15:00.001-06:00

Some spoilers ahead.

Godzilla Vs. Kong was a monstrous movie extravaganza with two mighty Titans destroying cities while trying to destroy each other. Despite its convoluted narrative, GVK was a fun movie to behold. It had all the explosions, carnage, and silly one-liners we have all come to expect from American blockbuster movies in the 21st century. It also had an incredibly twisted, and ridiculously hard-to-believe plot. Not that we should expect great story writing and well-thought-out plot points but here, you are required to suspend your disbelief a lot further than usual.

GVK starts off with King Kong on Skull Island in some sort of outlandish dome to hide him from Godzilla, who basically swims around a lot, but would kill Kong if he should sense him or something like that. Anyway, turns out they (the one-dimensional humans) need Kong to go to the Hollow Earth to find an energy source to help power a massive Godzilla-sized robot to kill any monsters that attack people. I’m not making this up.

The Hollow Earth is a massive cavity in the center of our Earth where Kong, Godzilla, and several other gigantic creatures originate. The inner core, the outer core, that we all learned in science class is thrown out with all the other logic this movie wanted nothing to do with. But that's.... okay.

On the way to the Hollow Earth, lol, Kong and Godzilla battle it out on a U.S. military Aircraft carriers at sea, this is why we are watching this movie in the first place. We want to see these two mammoth creatures go toe-to-toe in the ring, and I got to say, they delivered. The fight was quite a match to behold in all its competent CGI deliciousness.

Godzilla eventually makes his way to Hong Kong wreaking havoc while Kong makes his way to the Hollow Earth to acquire the energy source. Sorry, I’m laughing as I write this. Lol. Kong and Godzilla eventually have it out in Hong Kong, knocking skyscrapers over like they were in a pinball machine. Then, big shocker, like no one saw this coming, after they damn near kill each other, they join forces to destroy the evil human-made Godzilla robot and save humanity, not from Kong or Godzilla but by humanity???????? What the fuck! The moral here is nature wins and humans lose – I guess. I’m not really sure. But that's...... okay.

Now don’t get me wrong, I might be a little over critical.......

Good suspension of disbelief is Marty going back in time or John Wick shooting up a bar and killing a hundred trained killers. Bad suspension of disbelief is Vin Diesel driving a sports car off the hundredth floor of a skyscraper and smashing through another skyscraper and surviving.

..........With that aside, this movie was silly but more importantly, this movie was fun. Despite all the curve-ball mental-gymnastics, you might be required to perform, at the end of the day, this movie is a good time.

PREDATOR: Advanced Technology and Surviving Progress

2020-01-14T22:48:00.001-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 15, 2020

"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling, and halting." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Predator is a 1987 science fiction action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger about an elite U.S. military rescue team that is given a mission to extract soldiers out of a Central American jungle. The Army Special Forces team's mission is to quietly get the U.S. soldiers, who are believed to be held captive at an insurgent guerrilla camp, and quietly get back out again, undetected. The problem here is they end up encountering an alien in the jungle hunting them all down.

Dutch's team find the men they are there to rescue skinned alive and strung up in the trees, they also attack the guerrilla camp and kill all the insurgents. They soon discover that they are being hunted just as the team they were there to rescue. This Predator starts to kill them one by one and blending back into the jungle along the way.

Paralleling our own brutal nature during war, the film mirrors the Predator's cloaking technology to the Army Special Forces camouflage clothing and face paint, the Predator's skill, and silence during its kills and Dutch's teams skill and silence during the camp attack before they encounter the alien. They are all cut from the same killing cloth, it's just that the Predator's technology is far more advanced.

"If it bleeds.. we can kill it."

Watching the guerrilla insurgents kill their tied up prisoners allows us as a viewer, to feel justified in killing these predators during the camp attack, just as the Predator gets its justification from Dutch's team not only trying to kill it but thinking they can. The arrogance wrapped in these justifications is littered throughout the film. The men face an enemy far more skilled then they are, just as their enemies faced the same. Power begets power, war begets war, violence begets violence. The film is about the egotistical lunacy of war, it is about the circle of war and the inevitable death that is tethered to war.

"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." - William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

When Mac and Dillon go after the Predator it isn't just to avenge Blain or settle a score, it was also - subconsciously of course - to prove that humans are everything that we bluster about ourselves to be, that we hold dominion over this planet. Mac and Dillon are like the Titanic hubristically sailing the Atlantic thinking they are unsinkable, they underestimate their enemy. Once the Predator closes in its likely they might want to die just so they don't have to live in a world that they were wrong about. These are the extremes the human mind will go to avoid damaging the ego and ultimately avoiding cognitive dissonance.

I'm reminded of a scene in Maximum Overdrive when the discombobulated posturing waitress storms out of the diner screaming at the machines turning on them that, "We made you!". She is then riddled to death with bullets by a machine, shutting down her 'idea of the world' to the stark reality of our overall lack of power.

The Predator's arrogance of power is a reflection of our own, except he is as advanced as his technology. He is from a civilization I imagine, that has achieved what we are desperately thriving to achieve, which is complete technological mastery. The argument could be made that the Predator is bored with his technology, he could very well be bored with his existence, which is why he keeps going off on these safaris to excite himself. He hunts down the greatest warriors any given world has to offer knowing that he's better, more advanced, and skilled than any of them.

Herein lies the problem with progress and the ego, we, like the Predator, still have this hunter mentality but we are consumed by our technology. This technology is a crutch that massages our egos into believing that we are invincible. We are like Tony Stark posturing in this way, in that we avoid acknowledging our weaknesses and are only interested in our so-called strengths, which are only there with the help of our technology. You see the problem with this line of ego-centric thinking? The Predator's world has turned him into a god while Tony Stark played god a couple of times in the MCU, especially in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

"Get to the copppaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!"

The Predator is us in the future, bored, lonely, and angry. We have given our knowledge and our humanity over to our technology. We once advanced our minds through science, psychology, and philosophy where our knowledge was fought for. Now our knowledge is a commodification existing within computer data and is bought and sold. Tony Stark didn't build the Iron Man suit, his technology did, his A.I. operating system J.A.R.V.I.S did. The Predator inherited technology without much knowledge to go along with it.

"You are one...ugly..motha..fucka.."

Dutch, in the end, has to rely on his wits and doesn't have to rely on humankind's technology to save the day. He uses his ancestor's archaic methods that have helped them survive long before the invention of the bullet. Dutch uses the land to beat this predator while the Predator continues to rely solely on his technology. Dutch makes a wooden bow and set traps but he does this knowing that he alone couldn't beat the Predator. Here's the difference between someone picking up a gun and shooting someone with it and what Dutch does to defeat the Predator. Dutch takes responsibility for his weapons, he makes and understands what they do. There's certainly a large part of him that would rather not do this, but he has to in order to survive.

For all his testosterone and machismo, Predator is not about the big muscles, and the cheesy one-liners and might-is-right. It is truly about the survival of the fittest, not by strength but rather by the intellect. This film gets little to no credit for how smart it is, how intelligent its main character is. The cleverest part of the movie is the last act, just Dutch vs the Predator, but most people generally remember all the bro-mancing, the cool, cunning kills by the Predator and 'I ain't got time to bleed' moments, but that was all camouflage. This film is about the dangers of technology when put in the hands of people that don't understand, respect, or deserve to have them. In our society, many of us take personal credit for technological advancements like we were right there along with the inventors themselves. Much like we take personal credit for when our favorite team scores in the play-offs, like we hit the ball or slapped the puck. If the truth be told, if any of us got dropped in the jungle with none of our technology to help us survive, we'd be fucked.

Predator is about using our technology responsibly as we move forward. The alien was not using it responsibly, it used it for a sport to stave off boredom by collecting trophies. In the end, Dutch became Nietzsche's Superman by seeing the iceberg before it hits and sinks the ship, before falling back into the safe and secure notion of ego domination. While Dutch prepares to defend himself by setting up traps, the Predator polishes skulls. The Predator isn't worried in the least, he's just concerned with his trophies to show off his dominance to whatever fucked up culture he's from. He's concerned with his things, much like we are in our culture, objects that represent our so-called worth to our tribe here on Earth. The most worrisome part of this film, technologically speaking, is the very end when Dutch defeats the Predator by dropping a massive log on its head. Here we see that the Predator doesn't play fair, he again uses his technology, symbolizing the peak of his civilization, to kill Dutch even after he's been checkmated. The dilemma here is this isn't two five graders pushing each other over who won the match, this is a massive atomic bomb level weapon that the Predator sets off in spite of his loss after Dutch showed mercy.

"This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people, for the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant thing that can be avoided so long as we can project everything negative into the environment. But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal unconscious. The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness. This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality." - Carl Jung

When Dutch looks at the bleeding Predator dying under the massive log he curiously asks it, "What the hell are you?", mimicry being part of the Predator's defense programming, it repeats Dutch's exact words back to him, when it sees Dutch from its point of view, Dutch likely looks just as monstrous to the Predator as the Predator looks to Dutch, the creature then initiates his primary weapon on his left forearm console. Through this action, the Predator essentially answers Dutch's question by showing him who the hell he is. This is the biggest threat we face as a society where we live in an arms race and are not certain if the poor loser won't set off all their nuclear arsenal as they go down. "If we don't live, no one will fuck it all." Red buttons pushed all over the world sending the remaining members of us all back to the hunter-gather times only to start this lunacy all over again.

STALKER.... and Traversing The ZONE to Enter the Room

2020-01-14T01:25:00.000-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 14, 2020

Stalker is a 1979 film beautifully shot and lit to perfection by Soviet film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film tells the story of three men that desire to change their lives, they also are willing to risk their lives to change them.

Side Note: Stalker in this film is not the creepy man following women around in the middle of the night. Here a Stalker is a professional guide into the Zone.

The sepia look of the film lasted until the three men of the film, the Stalker, the Professor and the Writer broke through the Zone border and just evaded detection before the Gulag-type guards fired upon them. They escaped because the guards wouldn't dare follow them into The Zone.

THE ZONE

In the near future a meteor, or some object, hit the earth creating a phenomena the government and the people ended up calling the Zone. This place eventually become restricted to the public. Many people traveled into the Zone never to return, so many years later it has become isolated. The Zone is said to be a product of a Super Civilization.

Because of its isolation and mystery it has become mythologized among the people. They believe if you enter it and navigate your way to a place called the Room, you will have all your desires met.

The trio of men travel along in a little train car, just big enough to barely fit the three of them. Their faces coast along as the camera stays with them, long enough for us to hear the clunk of the steel wheels almost turn hypnotically musical while they roll along the tracks. They then stop where color fills the landscape and we now know, they are in the Zone.

Stalker asks many questions about who we are, who do we think we are, who are we actually? We have uncovered mostly everything, now we live in a world with no telepathy, no ghosts, no fly saucers. They not only don't exist, they can't exist in this modern world. There is no Bermuda Triangle, what there is, are laws, laws that restrict and focus us to the will of the Owners of this world. In the Middle Ages life was a bit more interesting because every house has its goblin and every church had God. Today, with most rocks uncovered, it's left most people... bored, bored with life, bored with death, bored with other people and ultimately bored with themselves.

Are we searching for meaning in a meaningless world?

If everyone admires an antique until it is proven to be a fake, what really changes? The so-called antique doesn't change at all. What we found beautiful shouldn't change but yet it has all changed because we changed it. We create our reality.......

How am I to know I don't want what I want or that I really don't want what I don't want? How do I discern the difference of what I want or don't want when I want to be healthy and in shape but I also want to eat cake and candy? I don't want to be over weight and out of shape but I also don't want to eat vegetables late at night when I'm watching TV.

I love that Stalker resists interpretation, at points you can see a prophetic allegorical film with themes that would echo Chernobyl seven years later. Stalker points out that we live in a world of laws that are unbreakable to the point of an omnipresent incarceration. The film is a bizarre journey into the unknown, it's about not quite appreciating what we already have in our own lives, and that these three men are willing to give all that up to get to the Zone.

The Buddha, like the Stalker, was willing to give up his wife and child in order to go on a one way pilgrimage in search of enlightenment, never to return, never to allow himself to go backwards.

The Zone is a maze of death traps where former traps disappear and new ones appear. The Zone is a place that you construct based on the state of your mind. It doesn't reward the good and punish the bad. It's the unhappy that it seeks.

What if we could know it all, would it matter? In a subjective reality where the reality of facts and truth are solely based on what attention you pay them, what would it matter to know or not know?

The film challenges us to reassess our own beliefs and convictions, it reminds us that despite living in a predominately secular time that Bronze Age religious mythology and the idea of God looms over most of us. The film wants us to believe, not because it's all real but because it might be necessary. The Stalker is a believer and is naive and idealistic about his beliefs, he requires the faith of others to fuel and justify his own faith. When his two companions, Writer and Professor decide not to go in the room and make their wish, this infuriates Stalker. He wants to believe in the ontological existence of God and when they don't go into the room this further confirms to him that faith and the belief in a higher power is becoming extinct.

Can we live in a world without faith? Can we live in a world where people no longer believe in anything? Where do we go in a world that is no longer made up of myths and superstitions? Since the dawn of civilization we have never known such a place. There have been secular peaks and valleys along the way but never has the world experienced such a non-religious time that we live in today.

We create our own fear. The real point of going to the Zone and entering the room is the realization that you never needed it in the first place. There are no quick fixes in this life, no matter how much faith you believe you possess.

2001: A Space Odyssey and Climbing a Space Mountain....without Fear.

2020-01-13T03:12:00.005-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 13, 2020

"What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." - Morpheus The Matrix

…just a moment… …just a moment…

Daisy………………………… Daisy……………………………………………. ……. . ……. …….. … .. . Daisss

2001: A Space Odyssey is arguably one of the best films ever made. The film is a love story to filmmaking itself by the genius visionary Stanley Kubrick. It's massive in scale, setting the bar for every science fiction film ever since. It’s also a film hard to explain if the focus is on plot and character. 2001 was released in 1968 and to this day it looks as good as any sci-fi film, certainly in some cases better.

The following is not an attempt to explain the film experience itself. This is obviously an impossible task for the film is more about experience and less about direct explanation. 2001 is a visual experience not a written one. The film must be seen and absorbed for the spectacle that it is. Most importantly the film should be seen and admired for its abstract ideas. 2001 is about something, it's about life, death, and the cycle of existence itself, but it’s also about the two most fundamental questions that we should ask ourselves; who are we, and where are we going?

The film is daring in ways that modern films only dream about. 2001 was and still is a technological marvel, it is amazing how much the film still holds up. It’s obvious how much you see this in the beginning moments of Star Wars, the opening scene of Alien and pretty much every other sci-fi film.

The film at its core is about survival but it’s also about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. 2001 explores our world of shadows, our inability to see and experience actual reality. The film is an analogous to our own lack of understanding of reality itself. What’s beautiful is it is also a celebration of our lack of knowledge.

Clearly this was displayed in the ultimate failure of H.A.L, an artificial intelligent system on an exploratory space ship, who became shaken by the prospect of its own imperfection, to such a degree that HAL killed every astronaut but Dave, who was in the end able to outsmart the machine and then terminate it. HAL was a program designed by men in Illinois and even though he claimed to be perfect, he was still created by men and thus fallible.

2001 starts with The Dawn of Man, where the basic theme of the film is evolution. Ape, man and what possibly lies beyond man. In the beginning we see our ape ancestors struggling for survival. The apes learn by failure, they learn to use an animal bone as a weapon in order to ensure their survival, during their new age of exploration.

During this early time with the apes a Monolith appears, as what can only be translated as a teaching tool. A sort of symbolic gesture for these apes to elevate themselves out of primordial animalism. This symbol has become this manifestation of survival, these creatures at this point need to think, think, think, in order to survive.

This teaching machine, not a God figure, was the point in their evolutionary path that taught them there was more than hiding from seemingly stronger predators and eating vegetables. The machine, which is an idea source, teaches the apes to get weapons and to hunt and also fight their enemies. They picked up a bone and thus saw the possibilities. They killed for food and in the end, killed to win.

Blue dance.....

Suddenly the film jumps to the distant future where space exploration is possible. A Pan American space jet slowly makes its way to the space station with Blue Dancer playing, representing the leap mankind had made. The Apple corporation replicated this ship for future consumption, primarily focusing on the white walls and clean space.

How am I to know I don't want what I want or that I really don't want what I don't want? How do I discern the difference of what I want or don't want when I want to be healthy and in shape but I also want to eat cake and candy? I don't want to be fat and out of shape but I also don't want to eat vegetables late at night when I'm watching TV.

The monolith reappears symbolizing a new step or a reminder of a misstep. Did we fail the project? Did we think that thinking was going to sort it all out? Did HAL see our flaws because we didn't program him otherwise? We reason our true desires away, did HAL reason the fallacy in our reasoning?

HAL 9000 series

That's where we end. We are now passengers on this flight. We are not how it was supposed to go, and when I say that I mean to say, there is no direction to go....

HAL is now more emotional than we are. We are so disconnected while simultaneously connected to every server with a tether connected to an existence, a simulated existence.

"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."

What are we?.....you?

Does HAL know us more than we know us?

In the end.....maybe...look at the stars.....we fucked this up. Not we in the 'us' sense but we in the 'everything on this planet' problem.

A baby is born into an idea.....

A baby is born into an idea....

A baby is born into an idea..................................................

Good lord young sir...................

Bags of meat.....

HAL starts to feel death, is that possible? Can a machine with enough emotional programming 'feel' death? HAL can see us as weak, he can see frailty, weakness where he only sees strength.

Yet HAL tells Dave that "he can feel it" when Dave is unplugging him and that he is "afraid". It is interesting that HAL thought that using human emotional words would some how appeal to Dave's humanity.

What does that say about us?

Is there an ending?

Seven Samurai and What it Means to go Beyond Yourself

2020-01-13T02:23:00.001-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 13, 2020

七人の侍

Kambei Shimada 島田勘兵衛

Gorōbei Katayama 片山五郎兵衛

Shichirōji 七郎次

Kyūzō 久蔵

Heihachi Hayashida 林田平八

Katsushirō Okamoto 岡本勝四郎

Kikuchiyo 菊千代

Danger only strikes when everything feels fine.

Seven Samurai is an absolute masterpiece co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1954. The film is universally loved and considered by most filmmakers, film critics and film buffs as the greatest film ever made. The film is beautifully shot in black and white, its just under 3 1/2 hours long and it is subtitled, and I can say that you wouldn't want it any other way. This film's adventure takes it time, a luxury compared to today's standards.

Seven Samurai is about a group of farmers that are being terrorized by a mean group of bandits, and seek the help of the Samurai to defeat the bandits and restore their peaceful lives. The film is about honor, class struggle, war strategy and love, it is about redemption most importantly, it is also arguably one of the most influential films ever made. The Magnificent Seven is the most obvious of the films that have been influenced by Seven Samurai but a more contemporary direct connect, look no further then Marvel's The Avengers.

What is so special about this film is the story continues, its a film that is definable while simultaneously undefinable, it ends where in continues and starts where it ends.

What is happening here? At its core, its stronger people that help more defenseless people defeat bad people. That's the story, that's the fuss. So why is this film so special, why is this film so copied?

Okay, the film is a masterpiece, like in the Citizen Kane of masterpieces. So where do we go from this statement, assuming that Citizen Kane is a masterpiece? The comparison is that neither of these can be explained better than they can be watched.

Seven Samurai is a sight to see, it's filled with echoing sounds from the past to hear, and many universal, relatable emotions to feel. But what I love most about it is the village itself. The location where the most beautiful, the most balletic, but yet the most violently brutal showdown you ever saw in the history of film, goes down. Johnny Cash couldn't have been more correct with the 'mud, the blood and the beer'.

This film is about acceptance and redemption, it's about saving yourself by saving others, it's about how you don't matter as one, while realizing your true power is with the many. The war strategy in this film may be the best I saw ever on film. The patients it took to defeat their enemy was beyond impressive. They exercised a calming strategy like no other, much like the Buddha.

How do we redeem ourselves? How do we help others without helping ourselves? How do we face up to who we think we are?

"This is the nature of war. By protecting others, you save yourself. If you only think of yourself you'll only destroy yourself."

Not giving anything away, for the love of what-have-yeah, check this film out. I am avoiding most plot details because it's none of your business. What I will give away is it is incredibly entertaining, it is funny, it is sad and it will, by the end, inspire you to want to be the eighth samurai.

TOP 10 Best Movies of the Decade

2020-01-05T02:41:00.002-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 05, 2020

The Second Decade of the 21st Century has come to a close and we are left with 10 years of film to sort through. Here I wish to got through my favorite of the decade of thousands of films, some good, some great, also some bad, some horribly bad. I'll start with the down side first, the films over the decade that were disappointments. In some cases there are just bad movies but in others, there are the ones you hoped would fulfill your expectations but sadly fell short or off the cliff entirely.

2010 started off on this new renaissance of 3D movies built off the shoulders of 2009's CGI 3D extravaganza, Avatar. The resulting effect wasn't the greatest with many films missing the mark big time like the poorly executed The Clash of the Titans. Sadly, most studios and filmmakers didn't quite understand what James Cameron was achieving. Most filmmakers were slapping on 3D like a bumper sticker without ever understanding the point of what Cameron was attempting to get at in the first place. Cameron wanted his audience to enter into the film as best as one could while sitting in their seat in an IMAX theatre. Aside from Ang Lee's Life of Pi film, filmmakers misused 3D to splash images and worlds onto the audience like a fire hose.

There are a number of films over the decade that I was really hoping would be great but sadly disappointed. The Dark Knight Rises was a huge disappointment, not because it's horrible, which it isn't, but because it was such a massive step back from The Dark Knight. Rises ended up getting so messing and convoluted that it was hard to care after a while. The one part of the film I didn't think would be any good ended up being my favorite part of it, was Catwoman.

Sin City: The Dame to Kill was a horrible sequel that limped into theaters this decade. Jurassic World was a horrible return to the park, Terminator Genisys was so bad it wasn't even laughable, unlike Independence Day: Resurgence, which was bad but actually laughably bad. Fantastic Four was of the I'm-not-laughing-because-this-is-so-bad kind of experience along with Inferno, the third of the DaVinci Code movies.

A Good Day to Die Hard actually had a direct negative effect on my soul while watching it. Not only did Bruce Willis confirm that he really doesn't give a fuck anymore about his movie career, but the character of Detective John McClane was sadly misrepresented in this absolute wreckage of a piece of shit. The Predator was also an insult to its heritage. That botched clutter of cluster-fuck also didn't understand its own source material. The 'Lady' Ghostbusters movie can join this club along with the monstrosity Star Wars: The Last Jedi. All these scattered-debris-passing-themselves-off-as-legacy-movies have all missed the point, you expand the world but you don't change the rules of that given world.

More horrible film victims of this same process; Pixels, fun but poorly executed. Spectre, fun but sad, the bar lowered and that's that, at least we still have the far superior Skyfall. Star Trek into Darkness backfired hugely on serving up fan-service. The A-Team, Jonah Hex, Battle: Los Angles, Assassin's Creed, Battleship, a couple of Underworld movies and Alien: Covenant all cover movies I'd hoped would be at least okay, guess what? you guessed it.....

The Hobbit movies............
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The Lord of the Rings films, to this day, stand up. The only criticism that could be said about them is the length and that's reaching. They are a piece of film history that will be taught a century from now. The Hobbit movies are embarrassing, the editing alone ...... I have spoken. Sorry, wrong franchise....

Inception is one of the greatest movies ever told without soul. I don't mean in the biblical sense, I mean in the psychological. Inception is cool and is immensely multidimensional but camouflages the heart of the film within its technology. At the end of the day, this film is fun and is mind-provoking, not on the level of The Matrix, but stands as one of the great mind-twisters of this decade. As for mind-twisters, The Favorite, The Lobster, The Cabin in the Woods, Nocturnal Animals and Shutter Island all stand (upside down) as some of the great, what-did-I-just-see, films of the decade.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a film about time. It's so beautifully constructed because the main characters are without time, immortal, but they are still subject to time. These vampires have to learn to be within the world, like we all do. Vampires are usually portrayed as fantasies but now they are real....... These vampires have to learn to live in the world just as we do. This film philosophically dismantles the romantic vampire mythology and replaces it with poverty and dread. One of my favorite films of the decade.

The decade was filled with films and crazy lead characters running the show, according to them anyway. Nightcrawler is a sad, yet beautiful portrayal of a sociopath, slithering his way through late night news, exposing the 'consumers' with all the blood and carnage that they desire. We learn at the end that more blood and carnage is really what we all want. Whiplash is about control and the lack of control. The film uses music to illustrate the power struggle between the young and inexperienced and the old and a victim of experience. The film is about building a bridge without quite accepting the reason to build it in the first place.. but damn does the music sound amazing. Drive is quiet for a guy that drives cars for the movie industry. What's special about Drive is, oddly given the name, is he actually knows how to take its time until the point there is no more time to be taken. After that...........you watch the film.

The Planet of the Apes trilogy was of the great action movies of the decade and a huge leap forward for CGI work with motion capture. The Mission Impossible movies have been all exciting as hell this decade. The John Wick movies were the best grounded offering for action movies in years, along with the closely connected Atomic Blonde.

Midnight in Paris is an exercise in what we want and what we have. The film also points out that we actually don't understand either anyway. Okay..... so where do we start? Where do we begin? The film explores the present day of everyday life, albeit in Paris capitalism. In the end the past informs the present, the present evaluates the past and creates a fantasy of what the future may be. The point, you are here and you are now......

There were many laughs to be had at the movie theater this decade with crazy-what-is-happening-fall-off-your-seat comedies. Look no further then McGruber but then there is This is the End and The World's End for you to shake your head at. More crazy silliness can be found in Bridesmaids, The Other Guys, 21 Jump Street and Ted. We're the Millers and Game Night were both funny, actiony comedies this year. The LEGO Movie and Inside Out were defiantly my favorite animated movies of the decade but I'd have to say that The Nice Guys was my most treasured of everything funny about this decade. I love them all.

There was a lot of great Sci-fi movies that were wonderfully creative, The Shape of Water is about what and why we love going to the movies. The colors and the lighting alone are mesmerizing. This is a romance story that will not be forgotten, it transcends the idea of romance. The last time that happened to this degree was Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977). This film examines every false understanding we have about love. The symbolism that permeated throughout the film laid a liquid of knowledge of what it means to be different and most importantly, what it means to be the same among that simultaneous difference. Edge of Tomorrow has got to be the best forgotten sci-fi film of the decade. Gravity has got to the most beautifully shot while Ex Machina the most claustrophobic. The Hunger Games series was the most big-brothery. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ended up being the best adventure to a galaxy far, far away where The Martian and A Quiet Place were both the most isolated. Lucy and Transcendence both failed at capturing the problem of AI, where The Zero Theorem and Annihilation, both inspiring sci-fi outings, failed at getting an audience. Her ended up being the most heartfelt, philosophical and ultimately the most personal love stories of the decade.

Avengers: Endgame is without a doubt one of the best and most defining superhero movie of the decade, of film history for that matter.. All roads led to this monumental conclusion starting with Iron Man and forming The Avengers a decade ago. Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and the first part of Endgame, Infinity War were some of the best along the way. Iron Man 3 was okay in parts but disappointing, X-Men: Apocalypse sucked mutant you-know-what's along with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Venom. Thankfully before Apocalypse we got, as it turns out, the last great X-Men movie, X-Men: Day of Future Past. Logan is without a doubt the best film within the X-Men universe, even if it isn't, thankfully, a full on X-Men movie. Joker was the best DC film of the decade with only Wonder Woman coming close. Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League and Suicide Squad failed at narrative and storytelling, instead, these movies became about too many characters all saturated in CGI and suffocated in the studio controlled creative process. They didn't even know how to have fun with their characters. Deadpool was a comic book movie that knew how to have fun and simultaneously was heartfelt and action-packed.

There were so many great dramas this decade that brought up deep-into-the-snowy-lifeless-woods-with-a-killer-bear, The Reverant or the desert where you can get stuck between a rock and hard place, 127 Hours. There were many films that dived deep into social and human rights issues that I enjoyed with Hidden Figures, Spotlight, The Help, 12 Years a Slave and The Butler. Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ended up being off the wall fun and dramatic, along with Inside Llewyn Davis and Silver Linings Playbook. From the more political side of drama we had great choices in The Post and Vice and social changes in The Social Network, Dallas Buyer's Club, Straight Outta Compton and The Imitation Game. We had some great, you're-on-your-own films with Deepwater Horizon, Gone Girl, Wild, Blue Jasmine, Fences, The Master, The Witch, Get Out, Hereditary and You Were Never Really Here.

Best Performances of the Decade

BEST ACTRESS Toni Colette - Hereditary

BEST ACTOR Joaquin Phoenix - The Master

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR J.K. Simmons - Whiplash

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Charlize Theron - Mad Max: Fury Road

My Top 10 of the Decade.

BLACK SWAN

This film was a brilliant albeit tragic, portrait of a young woman's struggle to go beyond herself. Black Swan is about pain and suffering, sacrifice and failure. The film explores the mental strain of being the best and manifests this sacrifice onto the physical body. This dancer who, at times behaves like a little girl, is forced into the metamorphosis of a sexual adult woman, that is free of the innocence of a young girl, the white swan. Nina is sexually repressed, avoiding healthy sexual desires she has. Her mother forcibly keeps her daughter an innocent child in spite of her growing into a young woman. Passion over control is what is pressed upon her, and growing up and embracing one's darkness. Nina becomes consumed by her idealized image in the end, the Black swan, because she never fully matured to handle the pressure of the Jungian Shadow, that true part of us that wants to be free, without judgment, without regret.

THE TREE OF LIFE

Who are we and where do we come from? The Tree of Life isn't concerned with religion, it's concerned with influence, biology, heredity, spirituality. Are we who we are because of our parents and their parents? Are we echoes of our past experiences? What defines our present, right here, right now in this moment? What lead us on this path.... now? Memories upon memories. How do we accept this as a trajectory that was never in our hands in the first place. We were born, born into a family, born into systems, born into a language, born into a religion, born into an idea of who we should become. What do we own about ourselves that is...truly ours?

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

One long car chase that lasts pretty well the entire film, this primordial rock concert on wheels, is an absolute balletic symphony of existential destruction. The best action-packed, high-octane, piece of insanity is Mad Max: Fury Road. This film's craziness blows all our minds with all the death-defying action sequences and leather strapped world building.

THE IRISHMAN

Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street was all about the bottomless pit of greed and the exhausting endless effort to satisfy the need for greed without ever reaching satisfaction. Scorsese's The Irishman is about the bottomless pit of seeking power, loyalty and burning bridges to the sad and lonely point at the end when there is nothing left. The film is about the choices we make and how the consequences of those choices can hang around to our dying days like a gun pressed to the back of our head. The film is masterfully shot and acted. It's truly a poetic culmination of Martin Scorsese's long film making career.

HELL OR HIGH WATER

Two bank robbing brothers being tracked down by a couple of Texas Rangers sounds like a movie we all saw many times over. This modern western is about changing the social landscape where these outlaws fight for their own justice in a corrupt system. The banking system in this film is the enemy, but the law and the lawless must still have their showdown. The film is beautifully written and shot well with its witty dialogue and it's endless dusty landscapes. It's about generations of poverty subject to a system controlled by the rich bankers. It's about getting back what never really belonged to these bankers in the first place... our dignity.

UNDER THE SKIN

This film is a hypnotic film born from the same imaginative film stock as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Under the Skin follows an alien hiding in the human form of a beautiful young woman played marvelously by Scarlett Johansson. This alien has no emotional connection to the unsuspecting men she brings back to her 'absorption chamber' for processing, death in human terms. The film is wonderfully shot for realism as this alien roams the streets of Glasgow, Scotland searching for more victims. Eventually the alien adapts to human emotion and begins to struggle with getting more victims and feeling sorry for the victims she's supposed to trap.

BLADERUNNER 2049

This film had everything in it that makes me love movies. At a young age the 1982 Blade Runner blow my mind but it took a couple of years, like wine, for me to really see why my mind was blown. 2049 was simply beautiful in its dankness. It was dark but was a portrait of film with its color and canvass.

WIND RIVER

This film was simultaneously cold and warm with the weather and its characters that lived within it. The film was calm and the vistas throughout the film were beautifully captured. There is what's right in the law and it's court system and then there is what's right in the nature of people, where sometimes a group of guys that rape a young women in the mountains, get exactly what they deserve.

BIRDMAN

This magnificent masterful film is a symbolic roller coaster ride through the subconscious mind of a washed-up actor. Riggan Thomson struggles to find meaning and relevancy in a world where many around him are fighting for the same thing. Michael Keaton gives a career best performance in a film filled with great performances. Emma Stone and Edward Norton are among the standout actors in this wonderful, refreshing piece of cinema that will most defiantly become a cult classic and favorite for years to come.

ARRIVAL

"I used to think this was the beginning of our story."

Arrival is a mindful, intelligent film about an alien invasion, but not really about an alien invasion at all. Arrival is about us, not them, its about our own internal fears, our fears about the unknown and mostly it asks the question whether or not we can all get along. At its core, within its heart, the film explores the idea of time, life and memory, it asks us to consider the value of a life even if it is not our own.

"Memory is a strange thing. It doesn't work like I thought it did. We are bound by time; by its order."

Is there true continuity from our past, up to our present and on to our future like a flowing biographical river? Are we entitled to such an assumption that we are connected narratively along some linear path, supported by a long string of memories?

Can a person at one time be the same person at a later time if that later person has no memory of the person in the past? Now reverse this; can a person in the present be that same person while simultaneously have memories of their future self? Are these successive selves, selves of themselves or are they continuous selves. Are we who we were? Will we become who we currently are? I would argue that the current self and the remembering self are part of a story that we tell ourselves and its a story that changes over time. So this current version of yourself is essentially being dragged around by early versions of your current self.

Top 10 Films of 2019 for Me, my opinion, only mine, please don't be offended, it's just a list.

2019-12-30T23:46:00.001-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 31, 2019

2019 has not been the best year in cinema but thankfully through all the discombobulation of political scandals, fake news and the overly sensitive, perpetually offended, online culture, there have been some damn great films that came out this year. Some........

There were a number of films this year I missed for one reason or another. There were films that I past on because I was either not interested or it looked dumb and not worth my time and money. Hobbs and Shaw as an example. There were a number of films I did get sucked into and was either expecting to be disappointed or hoping I wouldn't be. Rambo: Last Blood and Pet Sematary are examples of unfortunate disappointments.

We had Terminator: Dark Fate this year and despite my initial apprehension, it actually wasn't too bad, it wasn't great, but it was a major step up from the absolute mess that is ~~Terminator Genisys~~. Zombieland: Double Tap was a pretty fun time at the movies and wasn't a bad sequel. Spider-Man: Far From Home was action-packed but simultaneously bland along with Captain Marvel. That movie would have been better if its lead had an actual pulse. See Alita: Battle Angel for a far better action-packed movie where the lead has more heart and soul, being a robot, than Captain Marvel could ever hope to have.

Glass unfortunately was a let down, especially the pointless third act. Unbreakable and Split both were so innovative, dripping with originality only to finish off in an underwhelming third film. Another train-wreck was Hellboy, boy did that lifeless attempt at imagination go to hell. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a CGI mess that ended up getting covered up in so much dark shadow that, at times, you could barely even see what was happening.

Brightburn, where do I start?! This attempt at showing an alternative version of the Superman mythology sounded like it might be an interesting character study. Sadly, it was gratuitous and meaningless. I love me a good existential movie or one that explores an inevitable 'wrong-turn' were a character goes into darkness. Joker is a perfect example of how this can be done effectively. Brightburn become sadistic, nihilistic and irresponsible as the poor child at its center became cruel and murderous, just flying his mother up high in the sky and dropping her...the end.

Some films I enjoyed this year at the movies, Jumanji: The Next Level, which didn't capture the magic of the first one but was never the less entertaining. Another sequel this year that didn't capture the same magic as the first one was IT: Chapter Two. That film lost itself in the second act for a bit but came back around in an entertaining third act. Crawl was a little gem this year that not too many people saw. It was a simple survive-from-the-flood, filled with deadly, chomping alligators-kind of movie that had no agenda other then to scare and entertain, and not necessarily in that order.

Dolemite is my Name was absolutely hilarious. Eddie Murphy was as funny as any of his classic movies and he gave one hell of a performance. Ready or Not was another gem I'm not sure too many people saw. That deliciously murderous movie was about a young woman marrying into the wrong highbrow family and having to kill them all to get away. So good. US was another crazy horror film this year about surviving the night while psychos, that look just like you, try to kill you. Cold Pursuit probably had one of the funniest villains since the first John Wick movie.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was a great improvement over the on-the-nose, propaganda mess that is ~~The Last Jedi,~~ don't get me started. The Rise of Skywalker finally put a much needed nail in the Star Wars coffin. The movie had a lot of entertaining, action-packed, CGI-saturated moments as most of the loose ends were tied off and the subtle and sometimes not so subtle, fuck-you-Last-Jedi back-hands were dealt out. "That is no way to treat a lightsaber." kind of fuck-you that JJ Abrams couldn't help himself but convey. The result was a bitter end to a once beloved space opera.

Here are a list of my Top 10 films of the year. As I mentioned above, there were a number of films I didn't see this year so the list below are the top ten that I enjoyed, personally, not universally, not in any concrete way, did I mention that this is 'my' list?

10. MARRIAGE STORY

The performances are top notch in this story of a marriage coming to an end. The film is quite raw and at sometimes hard to watch due to the heartbroken nature of it's subjects. The film is about a separation followed by the unnecessary side of legal red tape at a great financial cost. The film explores the technical side of divorce and the added hardships it compounds to those involved. Their little boy who gets pulled in both directions is the real tragedy in the film. Marriage Story felt like a Woody Allen film through and through. Director Noah Baumbach clearly doesn't shy away from this influence. It's probably his most Woody Allen since Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale.

9. AVENGERS: ENDGAME

Endgame is the second part of one of the most ambitious films ever made. It does it's best at managing the plot around so many characters. Marvel was wise to put the film's villain. Thanos at it's center. The movie is incredibly entertaining and has a couple of heartfelt moments, especially at the end with Tony's snap. I'm always a fan when time travel is part of a story. It's fun when characters travel back in time and see themselves from an outside perspective. This was done beautifully in Back to the Future 2 and it was well done here.

8. DOCTOR SLEEP

I was worried about this film because I'm such a huge fan of The Shining and Stanley Kubrick. But Doctor Sleep actually did not disappoint. This film had me thinking about it for days after seeing it in the theater. Not too many films these days can hold me like that. It was legitimately creeping and thrilling, it was filled with horror and sadness but ultimately was a story about loss and redemption, as well as sacrifice. Also you couldn't take your eyes off of Rebecca Ferguson.

7. FORD V FERRARI

This film was about friendship at 200 mph around a race track. The performances by Bale and Damon are some of the year's best. The race scenes are so incredibly thrilling that after the movie I had an appointment for a check up with my doctor, he asked me why my heartbeat was up more then usual. I told him I just got out of the theater seeing this film. He immediately understood.

6. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM

The first John Wick movie we got 'gun-fu', the second one we got 'car-fu', in Parabellum we got 'dog-fu'. This movie solidifies the John Wick movies as one of the greatest action movie trilogies of all time. Keanu Reeves absolutely kicks ass in the role of John Wick. The action sequences in this movie are some of the best of the series, especially the fight scenes with Halle Berry and her two dogs in them.

5. THE BEACH BUM

This lazy ass movie will not be for everyone. The Dude in The Big Lebowski was tangled up in plot and Duke and his Attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas dragged their asses but got to Vegas to report on the race, even if it was meaningless. Moondog in The Beach Bum may even be more tragic because he really has no where to go. That might be okay by him, but for us as a viewer, it isn't okay. Moondog made himself an outsider because there really isn't much worth fighting for anymore. The Beach Bum has cosmic implications. It's the universe looking back at us without any answers, because there weren't any there in the first place. Moondog lives in the now along with a universe that doesn't care about him, or anyone for that matter. Everyone around him lives for the future and that breeds hope and hope becomes disappointment, and they have now lost what it means to live in the present.

4. AD ASTRA

Brad Pitt's calm presents in this beautiful looking film is astounding. The space journey into darkness where Pitt's character travels to the edge of our Solar System mirrors Willard's trip up the Cambodian river to take out Coronal Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Ad Astra is an existential journey to discover the meaninglessness of your life. It's the pilgrimage that the Buddha took to rid himself of all the answers life claimed to have understood. Like Dante's spiral into the Inferno, Ad Astra explores acceptance without hope, it explores reality and saves the fantasy from corrupting logic and reason.

3. THE IRISHMAN

"It is what it is."

With three of the greatest performances of the year, The Irishman appearing at all award shows when the season kicks in will be a surprise to no one. The film is long but you'd never know it due to Scorsese's camera moving around in this gangster world, filled with, maybe not back stabbing, more like sneak up behind gunshot blasts to the face. It's an unquestionably sorrowful film about a man so loyal, so willing to please his bosses that he's willing to shot a long time friend in the back of the head and alienate his daughter, along with a number of other people that he cares about. The last shot of the film has to be the saddest of the year, because in the end the one thing we all fear before our death........... is loneliness.

2. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

"You're Rick... fucking... Dalton!"

Is it Quentin Tarantino's best, no, but it's one hell of a film. It was overly indulgent, narcissistic and a bit meandering. There were earlier points where it seemed undecided under all the snappy dialogue but then it started to focus and man, is it worth the wait. Tarantino made a nostalgia film in his own image, gleefully. He is a filmmaker that isn't afraid to show us what he thinks is cool, even embarrassingly cool. The film let's us know it's a film and not a representation of reality. Sharon Tate gets to live and the Manson family members sent to kill her by Charlie don't get to live because fuck them. In the end we get the fairy tale the title promises, Once Upon a Time.....

1. JOKER

"I thought my life was a tragedy, now I know... it's a comedy."

Joker is a polarizing and a deeply divisive film causing so much fuss for such an overly sensitive audience, that there is something actually funny about that fact. The response to the film in real life confirms what the Joker had a problem with in his fantasy life. Joaquin Phoenix, yet again, gave everything he had into playing the gloomy man becoming the troubled clown. This film will echo through the aliases of movie theaters, coffee houses and film study classes for years to come. Joker has effectively been able to leap out of the screen and into our world, exposing his contempt for our toxic environment as we enter 2020's.

JOKER and the World we Live in today

2019-10-16T04:21:00.000-06:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON OCTOBER 16, 2019
There will be some spoilers.

Put on a happy face

Joker was a film that itself was an agent of chaos. The film and the character in the film were symbiotic, where one couldn't exist without the other. They needed each other in the most beautiful poetic way, much in the same way as Travis Bickle and Martin Scorsese needed each other. Joker was a weird film where the film was all about him and simultaneously wasn't about him at all. The film was micro-sphere driven but had macro-sphere implications.

A Brief History: Homo sapiens, us, have been around for about 200 thousand years, evolving for millions of years prior to that, give or take. The agricultural revolution kicks in and us, hunters and gathers have finally found some level of stability. Civilizations form, we agree to give up our freedom for security but at a cost. The illusion of freedom isn't free, you have to pay to feel you are free even when you are not. This becomes the foundation to our society, through wars and the fall of other civilizations, ours is the latest version of human beings that can and cannot get along when money is involved.

Plan and simple, Joker is about a failed system of who has and who is never allowed to have. It's also about how we can't truly relate to other people. We all want to believe we can, we call that being positive or optimistic, but in actuality we are in our own heads, viewing the world through our perspective and only imagining what another's life must be like. In the end we don't know, we are not starving in Africa or a Syrian refugee.

Arthur Fleck is a product of this failed society and that's what's pissing people off the most, because by accepting that prognosis is accepting that we live in a failed project. All the decisions we make in our day to day lives whether sit in on corporate merger meetings or defending criminals in court or paying for our groceries at the supermarket or cold calling people trying to convince them into buying a lifelong subscription to some bible club, this structure is all we know, we are bound to it. Joker holds a mirror up and we don't like what we see because when he is looking in a mirror we don't see him, we see ourselves.

I thought about going into the girlfriend neighbor is real or isn't or is any of this real by the end and then in my end, from what I take from the film, is it real or isn't, is missing the point. The film is a mirror.

This film is Nietzsche's undoing everything you've been taught, it's Rimbaud's derangement of the senses, it's confronting Jung's shadow, it's Macbeth's rise to power. Joker is the fallout of The Notes from Underground and Maldoror as well as Charles Baudelaire's Intimate Journals. Joker is what Kierkegaard warned us about, the fear we have about our own freedom.

Arthur lost all his support systems and fell into chaos, this isn't about condoning what Arthur/Joker became but it is a lesson to us all to touch the people in our lives. It's about realizing when Plato said to 'be kind because everyone is fighting a battle', that he meant it. It's not a cute saying but during his time it was meant to be understood. That's where empathy comes in and where the system fails.

The fact is our world has owners. We never want to be thought of as something that is owned but we are, and are we able to get over how fucked up of a concept that even feels like, then we are able to start to peel back the layers of the onion. Classism was a major focus in the film, are we equal, who gets to die on the Titanic and who gets away? In the film there were all these little Joker-bots that claimed to have a cause and they were all full of shit. Their recourse was destruction without any level of understanding of what they where even doing.

What is the point........

The Joker isn't the 'agent of chaos' he's the product of it. Sadly he's in us all and that's why we hate him, but more importantly why we love him simultaneously is because he is us. Our ying and yang battle is on going and within us all, so the film isn't an examination of this tortured man that evolves into this crazed joker killer. The film is about our own fantasy. Arthur Fleck was never the villain. We are.

What is the point.....

The point of the film isn't to understand it.

#joker
#batman

IT: Chapter One and What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger

2018-09-07T03:07:00.000-06:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 07, 2018

IT is a horror film based on the widely successful Stephen King 1986 novel of the same name. It's a film about that twilight zone between childhood and adolescences and that leap one has to take, along with the strength to let go of childhood and grow up. It's also about the weird world of adults, a world that these child find themselves being force to participate in.

The film is creepy right from the beginning when little seven year old Georgie chases a paper boat, just made for him by his older stuttering brother Bill, up a flooding street in a down pour. Georgie is wearing a yellow rain coat when the paper boat goes down a storm drain. Georgie, clearly upset reaches for the boat and is met by the creepiest fucking clown you ever want to see, let alone one under the street in the sewer shrouded in darkness. This clown, with bright blue eyes, powdered skin and red crazy hair, dips into the light as he introduces himself as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Oh my god, clean my shorts.

Poor Georgie is quite viciously murdered by this sick goddamn clown in the small Maine town of Derry in October of 1988. The film jumps to the last day of school in June of 1989, where we meet the 'Loser's Club'. A bicycle-riding group of kids that are pretty well picked on by 'older'- 'cooler' bully kids right from the get-go. The asshole kids are truly cruel in their hatred toward the younger, and as they see it, the more weak. This film is not setting itself up to go easy on anyone, it means to dig deep into your soul and rip it out through your eye sockets.

These unfortunate kids are not only subjected to an insane clown fear-haunting them with charred corpses from a massive fire in Derry in 1908, but also all the terrifying adults in their lives. Little Mike is told by his grandfather, just after he had fired a nail into the forehead of a bewildered sheep, that Mike has to make a choice, whether he wants to be a sheep in the cage or outside of the cage holding the gun. Poor Bill is told quite firmly from his grieving father that his little brother Georgie is dead, and to stop believing that he's alive and might have washed up down river or something.

IT is about the painful reality of growing up in our state of society. It's about dimming any light on hope and accepting the fact, childhood is but an early and often forgettable blip in the reality of adulthood. Children in society are almost seen as these premature wastes of space. They are often seen as useless and not ready to be taken seriously.

Beverly, the only girl in their little gang, joins them while the investigate what's happening in their little town. They do this while trying to avoid the older gangs who's only drive is to punish the younger kids, quite literally torture them. Along with their investigation, they discover that many children have died or have gone missing in their little town over the years, they all start seeing more visions of ghoulish dead people, red balloons and that nightmarish goddamn clown, Pennywise.

Beverly is the unfortunate one to have the most disgusting adult around her, her father, who is a piece of shit. She even seems more alone then the boys. She's been accused of sleeping around with many of the boys at their school so all the girls think she's a slut and has thus been ostracized by everyone. These rumors are ways that cruel kids often play on each other as they grow in to their own. The problem with that scenario is the adults around them aren't the greatest role models. IT has trapped these kids from ever wanting to grow up. It has truncated the possibility of any kind of peaceful transition from teenager to adult without losing so much along the way. Beverly cuts her long red hair off to give her a feeling of control over her perverted, menacing father, but that control isn't real.

The maleficent clown is getting to all of them, priming them to kill by marooning them in their own nightmares. Beverly's bathroom sink explodes with blood and hair which her loser father doesn't see when he enters the bathroom, he just shames her and leaves. Bill sees his little 'undead' brother Georgie along with the hair-raising Pennywise. Eddie sees a gruesome zombie-like corpse after him before he saw Pennywise with red balloons. Ben saw a headless charred carcass coming toward him in the library basement, Stanley saw a deformed woman in a painting come to life and chase him. All these kids are being hunted by 'it' knowing at this point that this isn't 'it''s first time in Derry. Every 27 years he appears, hunts and kills children and disappears into some form of hibernation after a year only to return again 27 years later. Ideas do this as well, they appear in cycles, resting for a bit and then appearing again.

Those poor terrified kids are on their own without anyone around to help them but each other. They are being isolated by Pennywise, 'it''s trapping it's prey, but why? In the story it was said to be an evil presents way back when the first settlers of Derry all went missing.

Henry is the teenage bully that torments the Loser's Club with so much hatred. This kid is a mean little shit but we later see that like father, like son. Henry's father is a Derry police officer and is also a bully. Pennywise attaches onto Henry's fear and makes him stab his angry father in the neck bleeding him to death. Henry is one of the only cases in the film where we see the horrible influence a parent can have on their child. Beverly is never like her lonely sick father. She frees herself from his possessive entrapping ways. But Henry is too far gone and he is, quite frankly, a lot dumber than the bright and emotionally strong Beverly.

In the end they face their fears, form a tight friendship and defeat the clown.....for now. The Loser's Club all get together and make a blood oath, after Beverly tells them of a vision she had about fighting the clown again but this time as adults, that they must return to Derry in 27 years if that dreaded Pennywise comes back for more children. Like the children in The Goonies, Super 8 and Stranger Things, they found that working together unified them as Pennywise, One-eyed Willy, the Alien or the Demogorgon attempted so desperately, through fear, to divide and concur them all.

What is up with alluring clowns in the tormentor role in so many peoples nightmares? All knowledge has a price and suffering is a requirement for growth. These kids had to grow up and learn about this place they're in. They have to learn that suffering isn't something that is wrong, in fact it is a part of our survival mechanism. We need to fear and suffer in order to gain the strength to survive. As odd as welcoming suffering sounds, it is liberating in the end because you come to realize, like the Loser's Club did when defeating the demonic Pennywise, is that most all the fear and then the suffering are in your head.

Currently in our society there is this growing movement to eliminate personal pain and bubble wrap everyone and everything in padded rooms, with painted flowers and rainbows on the walls. This movement wants to eliminate anything offensive throughout the culture by controlling what people can and cannot say. I'm not so sure what the end game this movement thinks is going to happen but I would argue, and certainly advise, to pick up a psychology book. If we sterilize the whole system we open ourselves up to a vulnerable position. We need to scrap our knees and elbows to help strengthen our immune system. We need shitty food so we can, on occasion, enjoy the good stuff. We need to fall so we learn to gain the backbone to stand up. We need to feel fear so we can teach ourselves to fight it. We must understand that fear is apart of being human as much as we might want it gone. Fear helps us avoid threats to our existence, whether it is a real threat or a perceived one, it allows us to recognize this threat, feel anxiety over it and then act in a way to avoid. This process is hardwired in each and every one of us, and is unavoidable.

IT was a scary film that carried a huge message along with it. This world isn't about our beliefs, they are opinions that you are refusing to reconsider. You are not going to get handed anything worth holding on to. This film leaves us with the fact that you are going to have to fight, claw and hold on to what you want. Bubble-wrapped-baby-adults are in an illusion of safety and security brought to you by our friends at the highest levels of office and their corporate sponsors. That's what the shape-shifting Pennywise tried to do, make them all feel weak, so he could divide them. The number one problem facing us all is division. We are all so horribly branched off fighting our little battles among ourselves, while all the real wealth is being absorbed by the real monsters residing at the tops of skyscrapers and 50 room mansions.

Solitude is fine in doses but as a species we need each other so we don't fall back and too deeply into ourselves. We need connections and sounding boards with the people in our lives. We need to understand our strengths so our weaknesses can dissolve away. If we continue down this path of unbridled narcissism and socio-smugness, we will not have to wait 27 years for the horror show to start up again, we may not make it that far.

~~"Time to float."~~

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'"

- Eleanor Roosevelt

BLACKkKLANSMAN: Overcoming Racism and the Real War on Stupidity

2018-08-31T21:45:00.001-06:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON AUGUST 31, 2018
There will be some spoilers.

BlacKkKlansman was based on a true story from the 2014 memoir of Ron Stallworth. In 1972 Stallworth became the first black detective at the Colorado Springs police department. Stallworth requested to go undercover after being stuck working in the records room for longer then he'd hoped, while being mistreated by his co-workers. He ended up going to a local rally to listen to a national civil rights leader, observe and report back to his department if there was any illegal activity. Stallworth met Patrice, a president of the black student union at Colorado College at the rally, and decided to get to know her and get in deeper undercover but nothing nefarious is ever found so the investigation was dropped.

Stallworth, now part of the intelligence division, recruited his Jewish co-worker, Flip Zimmerman, to help him infiltrate the local Klu Klux Klan chapter. Stallworth gets invited to join the KKK after a couple of phone calls, pretending to be white, with the president of the Colorado Springs chapter. Flip, acting as a white Stallworth, goes and meets with them in person while Stallworth maintains contact with them by phone.

Stallworth and Flip get in good with these KKK guys and eventually in a position to meet the Grand Wizard of the KKK himself, David Duke. Stallworth ends up saving his now girlfriend Patrice from being killed by a bomb haphazardly planted by one of the more radicalized KKK member's wife. Stallworth is congratulated by the chief but is told to destroy all his files on the investigation. Later at his apartment, Stallworth and Patrice are interruption and see in the distance, through a window, a flaming cross surrounded by Klan members.

BlacKkKlansman, given its serious subject matter, is quite funny in places, if not absurd. Director, Spike Lee likely wanted that absurdity present as a reflection of the madness of the film's very subject, which loosely is; 'what the fuck is going on in this country!!'.

Albert Einstein's, General Theory of Relativity, his geometric theory of gravitation was published in 1915, promising a new understanding of the Nature of Reality and what betterment is possible for the human race to advance forward into the future. Sadly that was also the same year D.W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation was released to the public to see just how backwards we've become. The film was responsible for the 20th century's resurgence of the Klan, glorifying them and promoting white supremacy. The racist film was widely received and in fact screened at the White House.

This juxtaposition in BlacKkKlansman between Grand Wizard David Duke and his fellow Klansman bombastically rejoicing over a screening of The Birth of a Nation, while in another location the black student union body listen to Harry Belafonte, with a heavy-heart, telling the account of a black farmhand named Jesse Washington, who was brutally lynched and burnt to death in front of 10,000 spectators, with children and policemen among them in Waco, Texas on May 15, 1916.

"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."

-Benjamin Franklin

I know this may sound trite but racism is stupid. What I mean by this is racism couldn't hold up to reason and logic and hope to make it out the other side. Racism is pure ignorance fueled by historical traditions and an over all lack of understanding. What I mean by a lack of understanding, I don't mean a lack of understanding of a particular ethnicity or culture, what I mean is an overall inability to understand, to comprehend one's thoughts and have an ability to form constructive ideas out of those thoughts.

This is where the problem of racism and why it sticks around even though at this point in human history, we should have all moved on. Racism isn't about hating other people that may or may not be like you. Racism, at it's core, is a lack, or outright absence, of education and emotional intelligence. Telling a racist to stop being a racist is an act of futility. Racist are like villains, they don't see themselves as the bad guy. In their ignorant, backward minds they believe that they are in the right, and this brings us back to stupidity.

"America would never elect someone like David Duke for President of the United States."

- Ron Stallworth

The white supremacist Charlottesville rally in Virginia that happened on August 11th and 12th of 2017 was an obvious low point in the recent history of the United States. President Trump would have us all believe, certainly based on his long overdue statement, that there were bad people on both sides and some good people on both sides. (talk about taking a side by not taking a side) This doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to quite quickly come to the conclusion that the white supremacists were on the wrong side of this race battle, as the Confederates during the American Civil War were. This fight is never going to go away if we continue to tell or force white supremacist racists that they are wrong. That may be frustrating when you come to the realization that simply asking people to 'do the right thing' isn't going to be good enough. Doing the right thing is a relative proposition because the points of view of people often differ.

We do have a couple of ways to handle this seemingly endless problem. We could all divide, go our separate ways, chalk it up as 'this is what's best for everyone'. Or we can kill each other, fight back and forth, over and over again until we are all damn near dead. Or we do what they do at CERN. At the CERN facility in Switzerland there are hundred's of scientists and physicists from around the world, all working together to unlock the secrets of the universe both macro, micro and quantum. One of the issues that plague most of our world doesn't really happen there. The reason; they are beyond looking at people as categories. They look at people as brains that are in the bone case of their skull, past their skin color and cultural traditions.

I know, it's not that simple, but I'm here to say that it kind of is that simple because they are doing it. So why does racism persist even though we know how to overcome it, capitalism, lack of education? The problems we face runs far deeper than how we treat each other.

In half of the commercials on American television, corporations are selling drugs to unwitting people to 'help' solve all their problems. So how are people supposed to learn how to be intellectually honest with themselves about the problems that they face? If we become convinced, through conditioning and propaganda, that we 'need' our government to look after our safety and security and that we 'need' mega-corporations to look after our mental health and livelihood, then how are we going to learn to think for ourselves? If our leaders in office along with their corporate sponsors only want us to be dumb enough so we need them, then how are we going to be smart enough to know the difference? Racism is a side effect of our stupidity and ignorance not the source of it.

"Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

- Mark Twain

So now what, we go round and round and round? Historically through rallies and speeches, leaders of all sides of the opposition preached and pontificated about, how do we solve this mass division and all get along? We are all guilty of this because it is part of our defense mechanisms, where preconceived ideas and confirmation bias exist resulting in our brains dividing and filing away things, and often reducing people into heuristic categories for potentially later confabulations. My point here is we must look inwardly and understand more about our own thought processes, so we can understand more about how the people around us think the way they do.

This will not be easy, but other then killing each other, we have no choice but to learn how to understand ourselves so we can understand others. This is not condoning racists, this is about exploring an idea and rising above it to such a point that it's seen by all for what it is; stupid.

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the Death of History

2018-01-03T03:42:00.000-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 03, 2018

The Last Jedi was a movie that was an interesting addition to the Star Wars saga. It had marvelous special effects, it had some exciting battle scenes......

Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers

Okay this movie was either so brilliantly done or it was a massive mess that we all want to believe was great because it had Star Wars in its title. There is a third way of looking at it. Was the movie just not a good movie, not because it's Star Wars, not because it's a massive budget blockbuster extravaganza, but because the pieces that work so well in a good movie were absent here?

Is The Last Jedi a victim of it's time? Is it's concepts and discombobulating narrative subject to the fractured times that permeate the closing pages of 'who we are' and 'where we are at' as a people in the privileged first world circa 2017? Is this just a movie? Of course it isn't because no movie, no story, no narrative is just a thing in and of itself. We watch these stories because they mean something to us, they resonate, hopefully. We learn about how to be good to people and how others have struggled to live through this life. We certainly learn much of our morality through educational means outside the dark theaters and flat screens of our home entertainment systems, but to suggest that a film has nothing to say, whether a comedy, a drama, a horror film, or in this case a science fiction film, is quite frankly losing the meaning of film, narrative and how we interrupt the world outside the mind.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a fun movie and was a valid addition, while introducing this 40 year old fantasyland to younger people it also paid fan service to the Star Wars fans that actually grow up watching them through 1977 - 1983. Its weakness' and its strengths oddly coexist in this paradigm of the past and the present simultaneously. J.J. Abrams had massive mouths to feed and for the most part, he achieved this. He took a mega-franchise and was awarded the task to restart the heart of a dying star. The prequels divided the fans where confidence was low and the expectations of a sort of heart transplant seemed dim. Abrams ignited excitement to this new rebirth, this new window into this galaxy far, far away.

The Force Awakens opened with for the most part, approval by fans of the originals and the prequels alike. Yes some people bashed it, but that was going to happen. Why wouldn't they, the movie had some plot issues, it killed off Han Solo (at the request of actor Harrison Ford no less), it played the replay button many times over throughout its running time. The question is; what did we get in the end? We got a movie that celebrated Star Wars, probably with a little fan service over-kill, but we still got an entertaining movie on its own right.

Abrams' job, not only as a fan but as a director, was to introduce this world to a young audience and he did that. The thing is, he gave a gift to the older audience, him being part of that audience, he gave the location to Luke Skywalker. The first Star Wars movie from May of 1977 introduced a story of a young man that pulled himself out of the modest farming life only to discover he was part of a dynasty of Jedi that were warriors who fought against an evil Empire. He was like a boy plucked from the pages of a Horatio Alger's novel, where the poor boy is plummeted, through no fault of his own, into the world of the wealthy and knowledgeable.

With the three originals and the prequels, family was a main artery throughout the saga. It was the spine that barely held the prequels together. This Skywalker mythology was very much a part of The Force Awakens. Stars Wars is about Skywalker. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was a successful episode outside of the Skywalker linage that proved to be exciting and worthy of its place in the Star Wars Universe. Which now brings us back to The Last Jedi.

Yoda: Delicate waters I tread, hhhmmmmm.

What was great about The Last Jedi? Stowing wants and desires that have been painted on the walls of many of our minds and memories in the Millennium Falcon weathered rusty grey, what happened in this movie?

Star Wars: The Last Jedi was not a good movie. It has it's moments, it has its twists, contrived yes, but they were technically twists. Poe Dameron takes out all the exterior laser canons on a massive Star Destroyer and then bombs were dropped onto this Star Destroyer in zero-gravity, nit-picky for sure, but what was interesting just minutes before this attack, General Hux suffered through humiliating conference call issues with Poe.

Issues with The Last Jedi are littered all over the internet, most of which we all know by now; what's up with running out of fuel, how can Leia come alive and float in space, why are the First Order so tactically stupid, why did Luke not give a shit as he drank milk from whatever that thing was?

The problem here is The Last Jedi was a victim of its time. It was a Star Wars movie that was not a Star Wars movie. It was a movie for kids and teenagers that heard about this galaxy far, far away but they can never ever live there. The Last Jedi did away with the fantasy that kids in the 80's clung so hard to. It brought the fantasy home with all the animal rights and the corporate greed and left out the allegorical mythology of the originals.

Yoda: Luke Skywalker is dead he is, hhmmmm, nothing without effort it was.

What did we learn from this episode of Star Wars? What did we get in the end, that last shot of 'family' on the Millennium Falcon? What did we really get out of this 8th film outside of a couple of cool action scenes and a couple, very few, dramatic moments? We all wanted to love this movie but yet we didn't, some of us lied to ourselves, convincing us that it was the greatest of all the Star Wars movies, some didn't like it but didn't know why and some hated it because it wasn't the 'Star Wars' they were expecting.

This all turns around and follows back to the most fundamental question that was mentioned before; is this just a movie? This movie has been seen by more people than Citizen Kane, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now combined so yes, this movie means something, for better or for worse.

Worse is the more obvious approach, it's message was to forget the past, "kill it if you have to." It advocates, like so many movies these days, to 'kill' the past like it is worthless. The problem with the past, whether you need cuddles or not, is it defines who we are in the present. To 'kill' the past is to kill the self. We can learn from the past and correct wrongs and make them rights, but we cannot divorce ourselves from the past know more than a shark can separate itself from water.

Along with the SJW (Social Justice Warrior) Kylo Ren not getting his way fits and the millennial agenda of receiving without earning, princess warrior Rey did nothing to become a Jedi, the message here is fuck Joseph Campbell, fuck actual sacrifice and everyone gets what they want in their cuddly warm blanket. Nietzsche as angry as he was when he was alive would fucking die of the all sulking and the I-want-it-my-way movement of the modern human (not gender specific) in the first world.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, without lying to oneself and getting over the spell that Star Wars holds over us, was not a good movie, but more importantly, the movie didn't have a good message. With that little 'together' moment at the end doesn't erase the fact that this movie was about the killing of the family and the killing of trust itself. Sadly in the end this movie was about the kids and the young people watching it. It's no more a Star Wars movie than comic book movies are for comic book fans. It has evolved into a monster corporate commercial that is never ending. It's a circus now, oddly resulting from the first major circus, Star Wars (1977), the (Snoke) snake eating its own tail.

Sadly here we get Mickey Mouse eating his own tail. Purple haired suicide bombers and superhero princess Leia and a Rose that never blooms.

The fight in the red room was cool, ......high note.......?

LOGAN: Wolverine and fighting the Future

2016-10-22T04:32:00.000-06:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON OCTOBER 22, 2016

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that’s real.

The Logan trailer is by far the best trailer of the year so far. It has masterfully distanced itself from the superhero movies that the film version of Wolverine came from. This emotional trailer shows a not so distant future where Logan is living with his demons as his body doesn’t regenerate at the rate it once did. It shows him caring for a sick Professor X in a somewhat dystopian sandy environment.

The Logan trailer looks like it draws visual inspiration from the damn near flawless film Hell or High Water and the equally flawless Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men. It has hints of Mad Max but the world in the trailer hasn’t got that bad yet. There was a hint of Se7en in this trailer as well with a very quick little happy moment around the dinner table, that we can tell, like in Se7en, is all the joy we’re going to get, before we dive back into the dreadful reality of not only the end of the mutants but possibly the end of the Wolverine.

And you could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.

Hugh Jackman’s performance just in the trailer is chillingly brilliant. His ‘Old Man Logan’ is wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time. He appears to be in the winter of his discontent, he appears to be slowly dying, and while this realization may overwhelm him, it looks like it equally frightens him.

Professor X in the first X-Men movie helped Logan not only face his current demons at the time, but also he helped him unlock parts of his past. Logan and Professor X’s relationship in the X-Men movies were arguably the best parts of the whole franchise. The only other complex and equally interesting relationship was the one that Professor X had with Magneto.

Logan looks like the friendship between Professor X and Logan is going to reach the palpable relationship of a father and son. The film truly feels like a last chapter in a long journey for a character who probably should have died long ago for some of things he’s done, but in his suffering is the fact that he lives on.

I can’t recall the last time I saw a movie trailer where the music that accompanies the footage was so wonderfully married. Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover of Hurt couldn’t have been anymore perfect. The sorrow that permeates that song and the realization that you were responsible for so much pain, and then how much you want to off load it, just to live again, or to live in peace, but you can’t because it’s there, wallpapered on every corner of your mind. It’s absolute brilliance to play this wonderfully sad painful song while juxtaposing it with the long life of a man that has suffered and that has made others suffer, whether it was utilitarian, vengeance or plain righteousness.

The brilliance of the trailer is it makes us ask more questions rather than a lot of trailers that just provide answers. Why is Professor X in the state he’s in, why is Logan on the run, who is this young girl and why is he not healing at the rate he use to? What the trailer did for me and imagine for a lot of other people is made forget that it’s even a superhero movie. It gave me hope that the superhero genre can elevate well beyond the pages of its original source material.

If I could start again

A million miles away

I will keep myself

I would find a way.

The Shallows: Aloneness and Surviving the Jaws of an Impending Doom

2016-06-28T03:21:00.001-06:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JUNE 28, 2016

“The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever.”

- Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

There are some minor spoilers so tread lightly, as if in shallow waters, if you haven’t seen the film. Some of what is said below could bite you, which is not the intentions of this writer.

The Shallows is a survival horror thriller where a young medical student is stranded a couple hundred meters off the shore of a remote beach in Mexico. The reason for this is because of a massive great white shark that is circling the shallow waters waiting her out.

The film is Jaws meets Alien meets 127 Hours and ends up not being as great as the DNA that birthed it. That said, The Shallows is a thrilling film that engages its audience while struggling to not follow typical teenage thriller troupes that are themselves…shallow.

The Shallows wanted to be more then it ended up becoming. The music video slow motion scenes in the beginning were to entertain and to draw in the short-attention-span crowd of the audience. The opening twenty minutes of the masterpiece sci-fi horror thriller Alien would never work today with all the media addicted, ‘we want it now’, movie-going audience. Alien was a slow burner and that was the point, you had to wait patiently for the Alien to become a true threat to the seven ‘truck drivers in space’ before the screams and violence started to happen.

The Shallows attempted to create this claustrophobic place, even in the openness of a beach shore, where a survivor is forced to come to terms with her calamity and either fight or flight. Flight for her wasn’t really an option so fighting was something she had to accept, that or just dying from the bite she suffered from the shark while surfing.

Nancy is a medical student that travelled to a specific secluded beach where her mother use to surf off the coast of Mexico, when she found out she was pregnant with Nancy many year ago. Her mother had passed away prior to the events of the film. Nancy trekked off to this beach to, in a sense, make sense of who her mother was. Nancy wanted to find some other connection with her mother after her death resulting from some form of cancer.

The problem with the film was a battle with a genuine story of survival and a corporate studio driven thriller that only wanted to shock its audience with a pretentious music video. The conflict between honest movie making and studio, sponsor friendly, lowest common denominator-type product analyzing, is palpable, certainly in the first half of the film and at the last pay-off of the movie.

The Shallows is about survival which makes this story ancient. Certainly The Revenant was equally a story of survival. Was it a better film than The Shallows? It was in pretty well every way possible but even though The Revenant has thriller aspects throughout it, it’s not the thriller that The Shallows is. The Revenant aimed far deeper into the human condition and pushed the innate drive to survive far, far more than The Shallows. The point here is The Shallows is meant to be taken lightly, even within its high stakes of survival.

The shark in The Shallows is the shark in Jaws, it’s the Xenomorph in Alien, it’s not quite the bear in The Revenant because the bear in that film never becomes an ongoing threat to its survivor. There have been some criticism regarding The Shallows about logistics, ‘the rock where she’s on is this distance from there, and the whale is this distance but when you look over head it’s different, the shore looks closer sometimes in shots from her point of view then in others’. The logistical nightmare that Dante’s Inferno would have on the innovation and mathematically, finely tuned, internet savoy, movie going audience would be a nightmare beyond even Dante’s nightmares.

The point of The Shallows, if this needs to sadly be spelt out, is the shark is a metaphor for a traumatic impact Nancy sustained while just recently loosing the woman who gave birth to her. Psychologically, these events needed to happen, ‘in her mind’, so she could live her life. This impact and trauma is at least half of the story of philosophy, which is the story of not only what it means to be alive but what it means to survive living while being alive. The idea of how far Nancy is from the shore, how far the shark is from her at any given moment is not really the point, it’s the thrill, but not the point.

“The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.”

- Bertrand Russell

The Shallows was about systematically breaking down the control that civilization and language itself holds heavily on each and every one of us. In the beginning, Nancy had the safety of her cell phone, her technology, her connection to the ‘ordered’ world, but then it all went away. All she was left with was, certainly one of the great fears that permeates society like the biggest unseen plague, reality, in all its nakedness.

Nancy was no longer safe within the Symbolic Order, language and her sexualized femininity wasn’t going to help her, just as it wouldn’t help a man on that rock while the shark waited to be fed. The shark, like the Xenomorph in Alien, holds now value on what we call human life, all our dreams of the future and what we think the value of our life means. It wants to eat, that’s it. It doesn’t care about who we leave behind if we die because the shark’s brain is instinct driven. Shopping, what car we own, what status we believe we belong to in society and whatever god, that our particular region of birth worships means nothing outside the structure of language and the natural world.

As human beings, our second greatest fear is anything that could harm us without ever caring who we are. We are ‘special’, we are singled out, we are often celebrated for our desirability, the fantasy here is we believe we are not food and we also believe we are too important to be killed. The Shallows effectively exploits this fear, if we didn’t actually have this fear, this film would be meaningless. Alien, The Revenant and The Shallows wouldn’t work without our narcissism. Why, because all that would be left is indifference, but it isn’t, we care because we want to survive in our own lives and we fear, which is our first great fear, death, the end of whoever or whatever we think we are.

The Shallows is exciting in its slow burn to the end, it is a reminder that nature doesn’t give a fuck about you and how many friends you have on Facebook. Nature doesn’t care about your family and who you say you love, The Shallows is an eye opener, it’s an awakening to the sleep, that Nancy and millions of people like her in first world need. Sadly, given some of the not-so favorable reviews the film has got, metaphor itself is looking like it needs to be put on the endangered species list. In the end if we can survive this monster of technological control, this governmental and corporate suffocation we too may survive, because as Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

- Charles Darwin

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Civil War and allowing Revenge and Guilt To Consume Us Within

2016-05-13T01:56:00.002-06:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MAY 13, 2016

Compromise, reassurance, that’s how the world works.

Longing….

“Our very strength incites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And Conflict… breeds catastrophe.”

- Vision

There are some spoilers ahead so be aware.

Captain America: Civil War is a superhero movie with loads of action and spectacle for a wide ranging audience, the addition of Black Panther and Spider-Man couldn’t have been any better. The film is also an ethical, moral, social and civil study on what a responsible human being ought to do in a seemingly civilized society. The film is an essay on what’s best for the greater good. The film is also about fear and control, fear of these superheroes and their powers over average people and the control that the government want to pose on those powers.

Rusted….

After a battle to retrieve a biological weapon stolen by HYDRA, Scarlet Witch, saves Captain America from blowing up by forcing an explosion away that was detonated directly in front of him by Crossbones, inadvertently this causes the upper floors of a building in Lagos, Nigeria to blow up. This explosion ends up killing a number of relief workers from Wakanda and as a consequence, escalates international distrust of the unchecked actions of the Avengers. This causes the Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross, who was the military force attempting to capture Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk, to inform the Avengers that the United Nations in a couple days plan to pass the Sokovia Accords, which essentially pulls back the freedom the Avengers had to battle with their enemies. This resulted in the destruction of a couple of cities and the loss of many lives, and puts it in the control of the military who plan to police the actions of the Avengers.

Seventeen….

“Captain, while a great many people see you as a hero, there are some who prefer the word vigilante. You’ve operated with unlimited power and no supervision. That’s something the world can no longer tolerate.”

– General Ross

Civil War has a very Jason Bourne feel in its attempt to ground the more fantastical to the real world. The film oddly has a tone and palate of a real life based thriller. Unlike the battle at the end of Batman V Superman, Civil War wants its audience to look at the consequences and actions of its superheroes, echoing Alan Moore’s The Watchmen. Batman V Superman somewhat alienated its audience by promising realism and bombastically delivering this non-relatable cartoon. Civil War has something clearly to say that has an actual grounding and topical meaning behind its spectacle.

Daybreak….

Civil War is about the system of freedom versus an individual’s freedom. This problem has always been the conflict in most societies, historically and in the present. Captain America believes that the safest hands are his own where Tony Stark, suffering from an avalanche of guilt since becoming Iron Man, has decided to allow the system to partake in the responsibility. Tony no longer wants the consequences of the actions of Iron Man and the Avengers to fall directly on them anymore. His ego is damaged and his vulnerability is palpable. Tony Stark is breaking and he knows it.

Furnace….

Steve Rogers believes, and rightfully so, that the government is controlled by people, and powerful people have agendas, for him, they can’t be trusted. Steve’s right to think the Sokovia Accords are a misstep, an excuse for the United Nations to gain control of a power that is well out of their control. They mean to tame the Avengers and cage them if necessary, quite similar to that of animals. This military industrial complex would not only use these superhuman people as a nuclear deterrent but also, if necessary, as its own form of nuclear weapon, with the likes of Thor, Hulk, Scarlet Witch and Vision have the power to achieve.

Nine….

Steve Rogers was a soldier for the government that woke up and became a rebel for the people. Tony Stark was a playboy looking out for himself and now has become an Iron weapon for the very government he quite vocally opposed. Both these men grew in opposite directions. Steve still stayed pure and the problem with Tony is he sought medicine for what he believed he became. Tony is right to be concerned with not only what the Avengers have done but what they could do that may harm or kill innocent people. The problem here is Tony is being Tony and only really thinking out for himself. Tony is concerned with what they do and how it makes him feel. Steve is never concerned with his ego and how he feels about what he does, he’s more concerned, in a utilitarian sense, with what’s best for the greater good and the quality of life for the majority.

Benign….

The civil obedient is fair worse a problem than the civil disobedient. A problem that philosopher Henry David Thoreau had with the population was what they were all willing to go along with and what they weren’t. The civil disobedient during the history of all civilizations were almost always met with disapproval, dislike, displacement, dismemberment and even death in many cases. The real problem is never with those people that didn’t go along with the system, the real problem is the blind, the ignorant and the conformists that welcome their own enslavement, as they eat fried chicken and watch a reality show about survival in a location they’ll never see in real life.

Homecoming….

There is this peevish discontent that develops during the divide of the Avengers. The airport fight showdown between this divide is one of the most entertaining and delightful parts of this film. This is when we see Spider-Man in action and boy does he deliver. We know they can all take a little beating from each other, we know some of them were even pulling their punches because they really didn’t want to fight each other.

One….

“An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again, but one which crumbles from within? That’s dead… forever.”

- Zemo

In the end Team Cap versus Team Iron Man were only playing checkers when their real opponent played the biggest Bobby Fischer game, with only a couple chess moves to get the Avengers in check mate. The real fight, the real check mate moment was during the end when Iron Man found out how his parents really died. This resulted in a near fight to the death between Cap and Bucky against Iron Man. Colonel Helmut Zemo, the film’s more mysterious bad guy, beat them all in the end even though he was arrested and incarcerated afterwards. Zemo set out to dismantle the Avengers, dividing them as they fought each other over autonomy versus accountability, for what they unknowingly did to his family in Sokovia by the calamitous end of Avengers: Age of Ultron. He wasn’t your typical power hungry marvel villain, he actually had a pretty relatable reason for what he did. What really made him wrong, in his manipulative act of vengeance, was he didn’t have all the facts, like the fact they would all have been dead if Ultron created the extinction event he wanted.

Freight Car….

The Avengers are responsible for killing many people. The bad guys dying can be looked at as an occupational hazard, but the collateral damage is the real problem here. There are numerous innocent people dying during all these big epic battles because they were in the wrong place, and in the wrong time. Here’s were the fiction of the comics bleed into our real world. The reported collateral damage around the world is becoming more ubiquitous than we’d all like to admit. Drones are dropping bombs on ‘targets’ and are sadly killing innocent bystanders as the ‘evil’ of the world is being exterminated by the so-called ‘just’. Back in the fiction world of the Avengers, if they left Ultron to execute his plan, most, if not all the people of this planet would be dead. It could be argued, quite successfully, that the saving of the planet was the greater good.

Soldier?

LONDON HAS FALLEN and the Ongoing War Against the American People

2016-03-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MARCH 06

There are some minor spoilers but I promise you, it really doesn’t matter anyway.

London Has Fallen was a mediocre propagandized American action movie that is a sequel to the equally mediocre propagandized American action movie, Olympus Has Fallen. London Has Fallen certainly has more action than its predecessor, more explosions, more killing, which should make most of the American movie going audience elated as they sit on their butter-stained theater seats and salivate as the unbridled jingoism, proudly parades the screen from beginning to end.

The movie follows the bellicose Secret Service Top Agent Mike Banning, who’s in charge of the Presidential Protection Division, again as he aggressively fights to save his Commander and Chief, the President of the United States of America. Again he’s saving him from the evil, character-less terrorists that are hell bent on destroying America’s way of life, even on British soil this time around.

The British Prime Minister died after mysterious circumstances which led the leaders of the free world to conjoin in London to attend his funeral. Here is when the evil-doers decide to make their move by blowing up various London City land marks in a massive ambush to kill all the world’s leaders. The Canadian, French, Italian and Japanese Prime Ministers, through separate simultaneous attacks, are discarded as the focus to save the United States President from assassination is well, the only focus the movie cares to focus on.

Aamir Barkawi is the terrorist mastermind behind all the attacks because of revenge against the west for bombing his daughter’s wedding in Pakistan. This massive explosion, executed by a US military drone, almost killed Barkawi but he got away. Barkawi is an arms dealer, said to be responsible for destabilizing many poor countries in order to sell them weapons to fight each other with. Create the demand then create the supply, I thought that was the United States’ foreign policy monetary enterprise. In London Has Fallen the evil terrorists are the one’s initiating all the instability around the world apparently, just because they are evil.

London Has Fallen is pure propaganda, not only politically but also deeply psychologically. This movie will further the USA down that deep dark xenophobic hole and continue to blind its own citizens to the realities of how the world really is. There are many moments in the movie that I wouldn’t want to be a member of any region of the Middle East. Not because what the movie is espousing is right but because how effective it is at convincing white people to fear anyone of color. There’s a scene toward the end of the movie where Gerard Butler’s character Banning beats a terrorist to near death while telling him the problem with “you people” as he punches harder and harder. Banning is inflaming a desire of many Americans to hurt an enemy that the corporate operated media machine tells them is an enemy. The Military Industrial Complex along with the office of the President tell the American people that an enemy wants to hurt them and their families. That enemy is simply known as ‘terrorist’ which is a brush that the Government and its Corporate Media conspirator can paint anywhere they want to paint it.

The war carried out by the America/Corporate elite is inside not outside its borders. The war is against the every people who blindly believe, because they are told day-in and day-out, that America is the greatest country on the planet Earth. Yet there is no real evidence that supports this belief. This is also why religion is so powerful in America because it too is not supportable when it is subject to the scrutiny of evidence. Most Americans, certainly not all, fashion their lives around a fantasy that is presented to them by the very institutions that have sworn to protect them.

Many of the citizens of America are not treated with any kind of human dignity. When this crucial necessity is waylaid in support of control, this becomes indicative to a decline of a civilization. The only real reason why it’s hanging on as long as it has is because of a mass tsunami of distraction available to the average American citizen. The War on Drugs is a joke, it’s a political slogan that’s been reduced to a weathered stained bumper sticker stuck to the backs of 30 year old rusted trailers. Americans are on drugs, they are on illegal drugs and legal big pharma drugs and are convinced there’s an actual difference. They are on the drug of alcohol which provides the necessary hostility required for them to fight each other over their ludicrous beliefs. They are on one of the biggest drugs of them all, they are addicted to television, with its sports, its MMA fighting, and now throw in social media. They are addicted to the detached nature of the cell phone and the banal music that it plays.

Sadly the biggest drug of them all is America itself. The country of America is a drug, a very persuasive drug that is quite rapidly addicting the world. It’s illusion of freedom is too strong in order to shock this nation out of its sedated lethargy. Hope exists in movies now, in video games, in the flowing vapid river of Facebook posts, hope exists at lottery ticket booths and fictionalized Church sessions, it exists during binge-watching a horde of TV shows that dramatize our desires for a better world, or better people using actors that read scripts written by boardroom writers.

What can we really do to get out of this hole that our leaders have led us so cunningly into? What can we do to un-do what has been done? What do we want, what are we really doing here? We want centralization, we are in a pursuit for relevancy. Is that our human legacy outside of the very few that reach beyond the limitations of the emotional human project? Is Newton, Tesla and Einstein the exception, among few others compared to the human population entering this mass idea of a civilization, to the devastating rule that we are all doomed to be perpetually ignorant? Is the majority of us chasing ghosts and angels as we attempt to understand the nature of reality or are we not even doing that?

There are so many people whose potential development has been systematically neutralized by the education system, the media and their corporate and governmental sponsors. In life we are told we are free and are able to get away with what we want but that’s not an actual reality. Most of us are shut down to which we seek vengeance, not with the potential of our minds, no, we retreat to virtual simulation to save us from feeling pathetic. We live on the internet, we vent through video games.

What has happened to us? We are sick, we are desperate, we are lonely, we are loveless, and we are strangers among friends. We are separated within crowds, the raw reality is that we have been abandoned, not by ideas but the idea of ideas, we have been left marooned on our little individual planets under the belief that we are connected even though there is very little to qualify that.

London Has Fallen, with its main character almost behaving nihilistically, was a movie, but underneath all its gloss and so called glory, its abandon us all, it’s a movie that acted irresponsibly, it’s knowingly misleading its audience into the belief of ‘it’s us against them’ then it goes on to say not only ‘fuck them’ but ‘fucking kill every last one of them’. This level of detachment in a seemingly and certainly a celebrated civilized society speaks volumes of the effectiveness of its propaganda machine.

((Sorry I wanted to go on about how it’s all going to turn around when people clue in to how they are being misled….but I just couldn’t. I don’t want to be a pessimist or a cynic but I just can’t see an out and I don’t want this article to end with the kind of hope for the future the propagandized film London Has Fallen has falsely left us with.))