Friday, August 05, 2005
Special, Unique Snowflake
I'm here in the mountains again. Just chilling. I've been reading and watching movies. The usual.
Taxi Driver is a classic movie. I don't really see why. I don't know. I just didn't get into it. It started out okay, but then got worse and worse. The climax was awesome, but the resolution felt kinda off.
Basically, the movie follows Travis Bickle, a taxi driver in New York. Travis feels like women are distant and cold. Actually, he's the one who is distant. He is completely disconnected from everything. He doesn't follow politics. He doesn't keep up with music. And he has no idea how to relate to women at all - he takes a date to go see a porn movie. When she leaves after 30 seconds, he really is surprised. He just doesn't understand.
After the break-up, Travis starts to gradually spiral down and down into madness. He starts buying guns, talking to himself, practicing using them. He wants to go to war with the "scum" of the city - the hookers, the drug-dealers, the blacks. Jodie Foster, in her first movie role (at least that I know of), plays a hooker who might be able to help him find redemption. The ending is...graphic and startling, but confusing. In the end, I guess it would be fair to say that Travis has changed for the better. I'm just not sure what Scorsese (who has a cameo) was trying to say, particularly about violence. Can terribly violent acts be good things? Do some people really need to die? Can violence provide redemption, of all things?
I don't know. It just wasn't clear to me. It was an interesting movie, and I can see why lots of people like it, I just don't know why it's considered such a classic. I guess I'm stupid.
Right now, I'm in the middle of reading The Question of God. It's a fascinating book. It basically takes the arguments of Freud and C.S. Lewis on various subjects and places them side-by-side, so you can see the arguments made by the devout believer and the nonbeliever. Naturally, I'm partial towards Lewis' views. But Freud does have some really good arguments, especially when it comes down to his specialty: psychology. When you learn the basics of Freudian thought, especially how children relate to their parents and stuff like that, it really can open up a new layer of things to analyze.
Like Fight Club. I just finished reading the book, and it's just as good as the movie. The writing style takes a while to get used to, but once you do it works perfectly. The structure is perfect. Unfortunately, if you know the twist ending, the book seems to make it extremely obvious. If you haven't seen the movie, I wouldn't be surprised if you guessed the end after reading some of the book. I had heard what the ending was before seeing the movie, but Fincher handled it so well I was beginning to have my doubts as to whether or not I had heard right by the end.
But anyways, the book and movie deal somewhat with the relationship between the main character and his father. And that's where Freudian psychology comes in. It really makes things interesting when you see how he relates to other people.
The book had at least one scene that wasn't in the movie. I can understand why it wasn't put in the movie, but I can't help but wish it was. It's so darkly funny it might have been worth wasting five minutes of screentime for. Also, the ending to the book was different. It was definitely darker and more pessimistic than the one in the movie. But I still liked it. It made me go, "Whoa."
Hm.
This is cool.
Quote of Da Moment:
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
--Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.
--Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Taxi Driver is a classic movie. I don't really see why. I don't know. I just didn't get into it. It started out okay, but then got worse and worse. The climax was awesome, but the resolution felt kinda off.
Basically, the movie follows Travis Bickle, a taxi driver in New York. Travis feels like women are distant and cold. Actually, he's the one who is distant. He is completely disconnected from everything. He doesn't follow politics. He doesn't keep up with music. And he has no idea how to relate to women at all - he takes a date to go see a porn movie. When she leaves after 30 seconds, he really is surprised. He just doesn't understand.
After the break-up, Travis starts to gradually spiral down and down into madness. He starts buying guns, talking to himself, practicing using them. He wants to go to war with the "scum" of the city - the hookers, the drug-dealers, the blacks. Jodie Foster, in her first movie role (at least that I know of), plays a hooker who might be able to help him find redemption. The ending is...graphic and startling, but confusing. In the end, I guess it would be fair to say that Travis has changed for the better. I'm just not sure what Scorsese (who has a cameo) was trying to say, particularly about violence. Can terribly violent acts be good things? Do some people really need to die? Can violence provide redemption, of all things?
I don't know. It just wasn't clear to me. It was an interesting movie, and I can see why lots of people like it, I just don't know why it's considered such a classic. I guess I'm stupid.
Right now, I'm in the middle of reading The Question of God. It's a fascinating book. It basically takes the arguments of Freud and C.S. Lewis on various subjects and places them side-by-side, so you can see the arguments made by the devout believer and the nonbeliever. Naturally, I'm partial towards Lewis' views. But Freud does have some really good arguments, especially when it comes down to his specialty: psychology. When you learn the basics of Freudian thought, especially how children relate to their parents and stuff like that, it really can open up a new layer of things to analyze.
Like Fight Club. I just finished reading the book, and it's just as good as the movie. The writing style takes a while to get used to, but once you do it works perfectly. The structure is perfect. Unfortunately, if you know the twist ending, the book seems to make it extremely obvious. If you haven't seen the movie, I wouldn't be surprised if you guessed the end after reading some of the book. I had heard what the ending was before seeing the movie, but Fincher handled it so well I was beginning to have my doubts as to whether or not I had heard right by the end.
But anyways, the book and movie deal somewhat with the relationship between the main character and his father. And that's where Freudian psychology comes in. It really makes things interesting when you see how he relates to other people.
The book had at least one scene that wasn't in the movie. I can understand why it wasn't put in the movie, but I can't help but wish it was. It's so darkly funny it might have been worth wasting five minutes of screentime for. Also, the ending to the book was different. It was definitely darker and more pessimistic than the one in the movie. But I still liked it. It made me go, "Whoa."
Hm.
This is cool.
Quote of Da Moment:
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
--Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.
--Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
# posted by Andrew Johnson : 8/05/2005 03:06:00 PM 
