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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...

Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


Who killed cinema ?

 


Patrick (H) Willems

Cinema is dead. It died 1962, I think it was in October--Aki Kaurismäki

 


 



Cinema is not dead ,  long live cinema ! Best of 2023 :

  • Past Lives

  • Oppenheimer (Not really , actually the most overrated film I have seen in a long time. I did not like it when I saw it originally  , but given critic reviews gave it another try  before finally adding this verdict)

Among other things as someone pointed out the most annoying thing about this film : "The constant loud as fuck music during conversations made it feel almost like I was watching a never-ending movie trailer". 
  • Killers of The Flower Moon

  • Poor Things

  • Zone of Interest

  • The Holdovers

  • Anatomy of a Fall

  • All of Us Strangers

  • Anselm

  • Fallen leaves


2024 Update : Mediocre at best , barely alive. Nothing that can compare with films from the list above.

2025 Update : Even worst . The only good film I have seen from this year production is Blue Moon.

"Critically acclaimed" :

One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson.  A big disappointment from one of my favorite contemporary American directors.

The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany -A big mess 

It Was Just an Accident -To be completely honest I saw this film 3-4months back , and I do not remember the story.



Patrick Replies – Who Is Killing Cinema?

Knives Out Ruined Cinema - Here's Why

How To Analyze Movies – Film Studies 101

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