Everybody read some Stanislaw Lem and get your brain turned ON and have fun at the same time.
I honestly recommend it to Metl especially. 

which scifi movies do you think have been been nourishing the spirit and intellect?
If a movie has 2 out of 3 components (the atmosphere/quality and the plot/setting components, lifted from books) I see it as a great spiritual and intellectual nourishing opportunity. But then they add crap and the total is wasted, like Matrix was.

It's like when somebody was making pancakes. He makes a proper dough from recipe and fries em (whatever word it is) like he has seen his mother do, and then instead of jam decides to get creative instead and adds a pile of shit on top. Then he puts it on the platter, gives to you and says "enjoy!".

Now, maybe some people can say it was the function of the whole pancake exercise to be shit anyway, I say it could have been a great pancake experience marred by shit. 

Calm down.

There's a big difference between mainstream media, be it films, books, television (to a degree) or music.

Cinema is always marketed to the masses, expecting it to be intellectual is like complaining because your bacon sandwich didn't arrive with caviar sprinkled on top.

The author you linked looks like he's written some good stuff - (I can't buy it out here (no Amazon)) but it's not mainstream media and to compare the two is a bit short sighted. Maybe.

Twelve fat cunts sat in a boardroom, all of which have a secure salary and pension, deciding what is the next year's entertainment. Be it qausi-intellectual or pure pap, the decision rests with the same groups.

I don't watch films any more unless I'm under the influence, so could be my opinion is null and void. 

does the pile of shit has to include the pancakes if 99% of the population can't tell them pancakes being there in the first place anyway. Having never even tasted them.

Oh how awfully low is the bar set.

At the same time, the visual effects are extremely refined and millions after millions are spent to do them.

It's the same with the manned space program. Billions are spent, elaborate techniques are developed in decades of hard serious work, thousands of careers are devoted and many people burned out. And the guys plant a flag on the moon and leave. There was never any thought behind any of it.

All that effort wasted. Such a shame. 

If The Matrix hadn't had the blue and the red pill, if there had not been the multiple worlds, if Neo abruptly would not have woken up from the slime in one of the great scenes of scifi cinema, and if there would not have been many of those great things about the movie that had been borrowed from elsewhere, I wouldn't complain. It would have been generic crap throughout.

What I'm just saying is that it could have been so much better so much easily but for some reason held back so much. I don't understand why, and it makes me angry too.

At the same time it of course poisoned the well for all future movies handling the themes, as they will be always compared to Matrix (even though Matrix took things from books).

Of course, all my posts have been exaggerating just to make the point more clear to everyone. 

"What I'm just saying is that it could have been so much better so much easily but for some reason held back so much. I don't understand why, and it makes me angry too. "

It makes me angry too. I can't believe it was so popular and made so much money and yet was a horrible shit pancake. Imagine what could have been if they had made a GOOD movie. Ye gods!! The universe may have ripped itself in two. 

At the same time it of course poisoned the well for all future movies . . .

And it wasn't before?

Good films are few and far between. 

good mainstream new releases are few and far between. But there's heaps of good stuff out every year, you just have to look for it since it's not really advertised.

And if you're willing to go back and see older stuff, the list grows exponentially. 

I'm not sure how the space program is an analogy, but it is simultaneously depressing and hilarious how much effort goes into making such complex, elaborate and downright amazing expressions... of base stupidity.

You'd think that somewhere in the technical /artistic process of creating all this amazing CGI, which undoubtedly requires... THINKING... someone might wonder, "But why is the script retarded? Why is the idea retarded? Why is the intellectual level of the whole thing so retarded?"

Western culture post-1950 has some real problems. There's a huge gap between stupid shallow bullshit for goddamn idiots, and pretentious solipsistic deliberately boring shite. In my view there needs to be a sane middle ground, where the content can appeal to a fairly wide segment of the population, but there is actually some depth/intellectual content to the material. Lovecraft is a good example. 

that middle ground would be 70's cinema :) 

Why is the intellectual level of the whole thing so retarded?

Because the guy with the money likes it / doesn't give a shit knowing it'll sell. 

Willem:
I find your lack of passion regarding art admirable.

Tronyn, Nitin:
Yes!
Serpico for one. 

Not all 70's, but;

Taxi Driver

Wicker Man

Scanners (the second two following the aforementioend downcline)

Robocop (as above)

Terminator

The Thing 

And Total Recall.

I recently read Ubik, which was good as well. 

the 'de-xionized' version of matrix 2 + 3?

condenses the last 2 movies into 1 movie of about 3 hours removing almost all the non-matrix scenes.

i tell you, the movie is better off that way, and the story is pretty much unchanged. (which goes to show just how useless all the xion scenes were) 

Rhetorically, that sounds remarkably close to the writings of Alan Bloom, the late neo-classical anti-empiricist who railed against the Enlightenment and Romantic Ages for throwing the arts out of their symmetrical mannerisms and for rejecting the sublime.

You asked me a few weeks ago if I was turning leftward, well I should ask you if you are turning rightward (Bloom was the Dean of the younger generation of Neocons).

If you had to choose to watch a movie that was a travel tale through Europe, what would you prefer, a Dogma movie, or Beerfest, and more importantly, which would be more revealing of the human condition? 

Of course, in one sense, you are simply discussing standards, and those I believe to be too rigid for your own long term sanity, but I also share some of that concern despite my ltaste for raunchy comedy. Personally, I despise MTV, and the chic-hop set it glorifies. 'The Hills' in particular make me think that the Manson Family didn't take it nearly far enough. 

"I find your lack of passion regarding art admirable. "

And I find the height of your horse particularly impressive. 

Remember what I said before about how most Matrix bitching is basically meant to let the bitcher feel smart and better about themselves? To give themselves a perceived mental boost above the general populace by decrying something that they enjoyed and thereby elevate themselves to new levels of sophistication and taste?

Remember also how I said that it didn't apply to you guys? I take that last part back. Well done. New monocles for everyone!

I can only pray you guys find some films that might feed your incredibly well rounded and advanced tastes. None of this Hollywood pap will do, of course. We'll have to begin scouring the indie community to find anything of true value and, even then, most of the film makers there are dumber than you but maybe -- just maybe -- one or two can rise above the sea of drek and provide you with the smallest of intellectual stimulations. If only for a fleeting moment while you try and hold back from projectile vomiting up the bile they've been feeding you with for the remainder of the film.

It's a shame that you need to exist in a society where people create films like the Matrix. I feel a wave of shame come over me when I consider that your massive brains and finely honed predilections prevent you from letting go and simply enjoying a filler story with some great visuals interspersed - even for 2 hours. Asking you to let go and not analyze the story from every angle while watching Neo kick Agent Smith in the face and not think back to the plot hole you so keenly discovered in the first 15 minutes of the "film" is way too much. I'm able to do it but I completely understand that you are not.

You are patrons of the arts. Lovers of fine things and consumers of artistic vision. The Matrix is not made for minds such as yours but, luckily, enough people enjoyed it provides the ideal platform for launching your cerebral campaign against it allows you to beat down the lower life forms while attempting to show them that if they would just raise their heads slightly they could see above the edge of the gutter and marvel at the stars shining above.

Your work is noble and necessary and I wish you good luck and godspeed, gentlemen. 

Also, could you guys take this to the film thread so I can ignore this crap like I do everything else posted in that pit of pretension? Thx! 

oh come one, this is an elitist mapping forum, surely you're not surprised that topics other mapping also elicit elicit behaviour :) 

you know what I was trying to say. 

#146 - roflmao.

#148 - yes please. 

Oh, sometimes it feels as if your point was that Matrix is sanctity uncriticizable. But it's probably not that. Also I don't think you can really mean that people who criticize a certain movie are always just pretentious, that there can be nothing to criticize.

You missed my point (I see the analogies can easily be taken that way). I'm not saying "easy" movies should not be done.

Just that it's a shame that Matrix had so much more potential than the average film that was then wasted.

There have been movies that have changed a lot. Think about Star Wars. It went for some consistent vision. They probably did a million "stupid things" in the movie in my view but the overall vast gritty extremely immersive, detailed, innovative and fascinating sci-fi world idea was done full on, not half heartedly. No expense was spared there. They respected the audience in that regard and expected them to go along. It's a tour de force of scifi world imagination.

Matrix could perhaps have had many of those same things with the plot mechanics of the whole reality, illusion/disillusionment, power and control. It started out that way but it was ultimately not pursued. 

actually I don't think Star Wars was all that great. The story is good, but the background universe makes absolutely no sense.

Willem - I dunno what your exact outlook is, and I'm not sure if any of your comments are aimed at me, since I think I disclaimed such an outlook by saying I've enjoyed some patently dumb (but self-aware) slasher flicks and that my attitude is "make a smart movie smart and a dumb movie dumb" - but you seem to think it's not legitimate to enjoy better art more than worse art, or even to argue that there is such a division. Well, I'm finding more and more that my enjoyment of films is based on whether they leave me much to think about afterward. This is why I think The Dark Knight is going to be good, because like Batman Begins it has a strong underlying theme (in this case anarchy) but it also looks to have spectacular action sequences. Compare that to something like The Fantastic Four, which is probably similar in budget and quality of special effects/stunts, and you can tell there is a qualitative difference. The latter is empty and brainless, and I could barely sit through it once, as opposed to TDK which I will very likely buy and watch multiple times.