Validate Your Life

…and not watching movies. (This is in reference to non-fiction books, btw — and quality reads, not crap).

1. Movies leave you under a spell; an illusory haze so you cannot see. Books give control of the haze others are under.
2. Movies manufacture illusion without you knowing it, while books allow you to choose experience illusion, without decoupling awareness from experience.
3. Books enable to you to explain and teach about illusions and reality, placing you at “cause” instead of at “effect” where you are a victim of illusion. You’re in the driver’s seat reading and writing books.
4. Books clarify and provide understandings. Movies merely create suspence and foreshadowing. Movies are hollow, they foreshadow and build suspense, but they leave you empty with no treasure, no gem. Books have the gem. Books, sure, create suspense, intrigue, and connection. I remember countless “on the edge of my seat” reads of Sherlock Holmes and bawling at the end of Where the Read Fern Grows in early elementary school. And just in 2008, I was completely engaged and in awe of the adventure created by Jules Verne in around the world in 80 days. Those fiction reads provided massive suspense, BUT BUT BUT, unlike movies, the books also provided incredible value and understanding!! I learned so many lessons from those books above. For example, inductive observational skill from Doyle’s book (Sherlock Holmes), the touching experience of pet comraderie (from Where the Red Fern Grows), and the necessity of time, precision, and the cool collected travel making things happen skills of Mr. Fogg from Around the World in 80 days. Because I READ those experiences as books as opposed to watch what was blasted at me with pixels from a movie, I experienced them more wholistically and I acquired the lesson and understanding, with the entertainment and fun of a very absorbing and exciting read!
5. You think more clearly with a book because your brain gets neurological activity firing that is congruent with the logic of the book. Kind of like a “mental-cerebral” version of “if you smile, you’ll feel happy”. If you read a smart book, you’ll think more intelligently. Movies trick and obfuscate intelligence.
6. Books, you have total control over the pace, and “order you read”, movies (unless you fumble with FF and RW buttons, you do not have the same control.
7. Books, your vision is the movie and you are the director; movies lack that customization.
8. Books teach and entertain and create more cohesive thinking; movies, merely entertain with an inkling of “teaching”.
9. Both movies and books inspire, but books provide an inspiration that is more enduring beacuse it is “your own version” of the inspiration.
10. Finally, books don’t need electrical outlets, high-tech dvd players, surround sound and the like. Books are portable; you can bring them anywhere. Laptops are fixing that with movies, but with a book, you use your “built-in” surround sound, imax, widescreen mental imagery vision, which is infinitely more crisp, alive, and exciting than a movie screen.

I’m a former movie junkie (thousands and reruns) and have rediscovered the joy of reading!

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Tom Cruise Notes

“I eat life” LOL such a great quote.

“Every actor has their own voice and what turns them on and what they like. It’s not analytical; it’s instinctual. It is their own voice…[and that is what is needed to make movies]“. AWESOME quote because

“What I want in a performance is I want it to be spontaneous; I want it to be now. Not you know happening in the past. We try to work towards getting rid of the mechanics, the technique. Let’s find the spontaneity. With the power of my own imagination or my own ability to believe or my own creative idea of what I’ve created here it just happens, it just happens; it just goes. And I don’t judge it. And there’s times where as an actor where I’m working and I feel nothing and I don’t panic and go “oh my god I feel nothing!” I always take from the point of view of “okay well that’s interesting. I don’t invalidate. I don’t fight what’s going to happen. I din’t try to create. I’ve done my work. It gets inside of you see that it’s just there. And when youre there you just want to fly and play jazz.”

What I would say for the pearly gates questions: She would say (god is a definitely a babe, possibly androgenyous, but at the very least a babe), So SHE would say, “Wow, you rock! I could say that in a way that would take 10 years of detailed explanation, but I’ll be concise, you rock!” Because I know that she’d know all the details of my life and I’d remember most of them so having this long drawn-out explanation of what my life meant or what I did or didnt do would be redundant, so I’d be overjoyed if I got the rolling waves of heaven and She (god) jsut says “you rocked life, you rock!”

Surmised, I think that may mean, you do your work, your preparation like mad — THAT is your work, so then when it’s game time and you actually have a contract, salary, and acting Job, you can relax and know whatever you feel (or dont’ feel) is fully 150% totally valid! .

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Machinist
INteresting b/c He has to seperate himself from all “potential relationships” (the hooker gf, the “quasi-friends at the plant, etc” so he can do himself justice and turn himself in. His compulsion for honesty is was intuitively causes him to sever all those relationships subconsciously. The severings (chopping off arms, throwing dishes at the gf) were harsh and uncooth, but those relationsihps would hinder him in his commitment to do justice.

And that’s so interesting b/c in life he was a lawyer, the early references to various labor acts and rights in the factory allude to that. So he’s inherently living a contradictaion of agenda. If he tried to protect the guilty (or innocent) in life, then when he becoms the guildy after the hit and run, half of his brain has been trained to conceal his guilt and protect himself but then the moralistic self emerges after years and his commitment to personal justice seeps tshrough as he finally admits what he did and in a way “does himself justice”. Very GREAT allusions. At the end he was wearing a “justice brothers” t-shirt. The movie was about finding a compromise between the legal protect guilty or innocent and the emotional moralistic “what is right” doing good from a belief point of view. In the end he got to know “both justice brothers” — both complementary components of his psyche, moralistic honesty and judicial prudence. He suppressed the moralistic honesty part and it just seeped through in ugly ways.

Now that is siimilar to me in junior year. I severed ties with people and that was SOME part of me seeping through. I had to seperate myself from those people as a commitment to them would inhitibt whatever was seeping through from getting recognized. The question is “just what is that”? Couldn’ve been anger, dislike disgust, mostly it was knowing tons oabotu people emotionally and wanting to share it? to teach? not sure. but the schism that occured was similar int voialteit so that’s ggreat to know whatever needed to get out has! now i’m just mregingoete .

So most of hte movie was literally hallucinations. The french woman, ivan, all of that was hallucinations. Ivan representethe moaralistic “doing good” side of him maybe.

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Are they production? Are they for film or productions? Who produces tv or film? How do they handle copyrights or distribution?

Why would anyone want to know this? Or who the hell cares? I DO!! If you’re watching film and have half a brain to think about the process of “How the hell do I have this DVD or how am I able to watch this footage of actors in this theatre?” or better yet, if you’re life me and interested in the production, editing, acting, film creation process and steps, knowing who the heck who is who and and how all that production jazz adds up is not only inspiring and illuminating, but essential data! So conclusively this is very valuable information to understand for any connection with creating or to galvanize a greater appreciation of creating (or watching) great film!

I always wanted to know what the deal was with that whole seemingly messy or confusing smorgasbord of film studios that flash their little animation and brand before the feature title and credits roll. The research aimed at clarifying this obfuscation proved to be very rewarding!!

• Miramax — (Walt Disney)film production and distribution (originally in NY now purchased by Walt Disney)
• Touchstone Pictures (Walt Disney)– a film label of Walt Disney (est. 1984) it has the more mature themes of features released under walt disney; noteworthy productions: Dead Poets’ Soceity, Pirates of the Caribbean: Black Pearl.
• Walt Disney Company — one of largest media and entertainment corps on world
• Walt Disney Studios — centered around animation
• Warner Brothers (Timewarner)– film and tv production (subsidary of Timewarner! LOL cool!)
• New Line Cinema (Timewarner) — film production and distribution (subsidary of Timewarner)
• Icon Productions LLC (Mel Gibson)– film production (Mel Gibson’s film production company; founded 1989; started when mel was trying to finance hamlet); noteworthy productions: Man without a Face, Braveheart, What Women Want).
• Imagine Entertainment (Ron Howard) — film and tv production (Ron Howard and Brian Grazer; 1986; noteworthy productions: Arrested Development, Beautiful Mind)
• Dreamworks LLC (Paramount: Viacom)– film, tv, and game development, production, and distribution (started Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen; 1994; 11 years later sold to Paramount Pictures, under viacom,)
• 20th Century Fox Film Corporation (News Corporation) — film production and distribution (6th largest in america; located in Century city; started 1933).
• Paramount Pictures Corporation (Viacom) — film production and distribution (oldest running movie studio in hollywood (beating Universal by 1 month only! LOL!; located on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood; subsidary of Viacom)
• Plan B Entertainment — film production (started Brad Pitt, Brad Grey, Jennifer Anistion; noteworthy titles: Jesse James, Departed, Charlie and Chocolate Factory, Troy)
• Universal Studios — (subsidary of NBC) 2nd-longest running film studio on San Fernando (Paramount being the oldest.

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Alas, I cannot speak from the “literary front lines” of PDK as I have not read Androids nor Scanner, but have seen both film interpretations (Blade Runner and linklater’s). If I ever get around to reading PDK amidst the hundreds of other books on the to-read list, I think I’ll like Scanner the best, it was written almost 10 years later, maybe his writing craft more honed, but I didn’t realize how PDK owns (or net speack pwns!) the book-to-sci-fi-film area. He wrote minority report, too? So that’s scanner, minority, blade runner, total recall, paycheck– pretty big sci-fi selection. Sure, asimov set in motion the robot movies, but that’s only really “one big movie” (just a bunch of remakes, bicentennial man and i,robot some of the most recent). PKD spawned Totally unique films from his books.

Total Recall and Blade Runner are some of THE most epic film sci-fi renditions (save 2001). I loved all those movies, and gravitated to all of them, but only just now discovered that the common vein between total recall, blade, scanner, paycheck, and yes, even screamers was PKD. I’ve seen all of those movied and loved all of them and only just realized the common denominator is PDK. far out! That’s like doing problems over and over and then abstracting out to see a larger, framework formula. cool!

And talk about prolific. Prolific is an understatement for this guy. 121 published short stories and dozens of published books, nine of which were turned into Sci-Fi movies!!! Who else has done that? What other writer has achieved that much book to film coverage? Dickens? Not really, his works get clumped in that 18th century pile of the same flicks. It’s shocking at how unique all of PKD’s works are. Almost like multiple authors (or a multiple-brained single author) wrote the wide-ranging complex variety of works!

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On July 1934, the messages, inherent style, and defining parameters of American cinema dramatically changed. “Under duress at the urging of priests and politicians, Hollywood’s “Hays Office” established a Production Code, dubbed the Magna Charta of decency, that would forever, “systematically and scrupulously” regulate elements of film such as “sex, vice, violence, and moral meaning” (Doherty 1). While the post-Code era launched off what is known as the Golden Age of film, the pre-Code films exhibited a unique eccentricity. With an original unbridled salaciousness, moral creativity, and inventiveness, the pre-Code films were seriously from another universe. One of the largest impacts of this pre-Code film era, according to Mick Lasalle, is based in how Hollywood defined images of manhood.

In his discussion of the difficulties in defining manhood, Lasalle writes, “the concept of manhood is too imposing, associated with heroics and domination” (Lasalle 1). While his message of the ideal image of manhood possesses nebulous characteristics holds true, his mentioning of heroism is a bit askew. The heroic nature does not detract from, but adds to the vitality and admiration of any role.

Joseph Campbell writes how, after the stages of a heroic journey – introduction to ordinary world, call to adventure, reluctance, encouragement from the wise, passing the threshold, encounters tests and helpers, reaches the innermost cave, endures the supreme ordeal, seizes the sword, returns back, resurrects, returns with the elixer – the hero is imparted with an incredible gift. The elixer bears prescient knowledge, wisdom, certainty of purpose or “some lesson from the special world”. Campbell writes that the elixer could simply be awareness of the existence of a special world, love, treasure, or just returning with a good story to tell. But the point is the heroic journey brings back gifts — bounties of inveterate moral goodness — making the heroic nature of manhood is a very prosperous, admirable quality. Heroism is neither an obligatory process nor a debilitating characteristic, but its process is crucial; it is an honorable component of manhood.

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