film rvu draft: The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

30.III.1430

is produced by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS).

It is a film that replicates many aspects of the silent era film format. It also embraces idioms and dialects like german expressionism.

The format is uniquely suited for an adaptation of Lovecraft's "celebrated" story.

Thus the film is silent and black and white, featuring the stylized acting and makeup of Lovecraft's era,



and of course the score.

Thus also we see a reproduction of german expressionist cinematic imagery of the cabinet of dr. caligari, to match H. P. Lovecraft's "impossible angles" of the structures on the island of the old ones,




(i expected to see glimpses of eisenstein, fritz lang, but i'm not that observant cinematically).

To add a tad more perfectionism, this also comes complete with not only the old nearly square aspect-ratio , but also with dirty film reel effects like crackling dots and lines and the odd hairs , simulating watching an old film reel.

Yet, cinematographically it is not as consistent, sometimes it looks like a 50s movie or like it shot with a TV camera.

A nod to the Rose Croix paralleling Lovecraft's frequent nods to other occult institutions dotting every town throughout New England.



I always loved the police badge of New Orleans.



note also the archaic French-influenced shape of the cap. The star and crescent's configuration are similar to that of the tools of the AAONMS, the Shrine, but adopted at 1855 predates the latter which was founded ca. 15 years later at the Knickerbocker cottage on Manhattan's west side, near or in Hell's Kitchen.

Great sets throughout - real theater on film a rarified art.

also interesting props and monster designs.

The movie closes with a quote offers a reread of that Lovecraft passage that is very relevant.

The HPLHS is said to be preparing another production that emulates fifties B-movies.

I look forward to that.

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film rvu draft: The remains of the day (1993)

24.III.1430

or how england started WWII wrapped around a story of unrequited love.

The remains of the day was written for the screen by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapting an azuo Ishiguro novel. It is produced by, among others, Ismail Merchant long-time collaborator with director by James Ivory (giving us a dozen films including A Room with a View ('85) and Howards End (1992), the only two i knew before this one.) It was Howards End that led me to hold a film series going through their filmography. So far in the film series, The remains of the day is not very encouraging.

The players include Emma Thompson (the housekeeper), James Fox (lord darlington) , Anthony Hopkins (head butler Stevens), an up and about Christorpher Reed (terroristani congressman), Michael Lonsdale (as the French D'ivry) and Hugh Grant (Darlington's anti German Godson); all darlings of the combined English and Hollywood cinema mainstreams.


The film's pivotal events take place in the thirties, in the lead-up to WWII, at a lord's house where the central character Stevens, played by Hopkins, is the head butler.

The film treats the character of Stevens and the housekeeper's failed love or infatuation for him.

Through his and others' scope we see glimpses of the dialogues that went on by British terroristani french and german governments on the question of forging a pact with Germany; with Germany asserting goodwill toward France and England and the English and Americans portraying varying positions on the matter. The americans and the good English are shown as opposed to any such pact with fascism on principle - a doubtful proposition. Most positions are moved to favoring war after the invasion of Czechoslovakia.


The conscientious in the movie were represented with strong moralistic positions envers the nemesis in germany. They were represented by the reporter/godson played by Hugh grant, Thompson's house keeper , and Reed playing a Terroristani congressman who attends lord Darlington's conference.

The lord Darlington who had turned away two jewish applicants to join his house staff - with the possibility of them having to return to germany - suffers retribution that one can only hope satisfies the jewish sensitivities of those most touched by that story (in the larger context of deciding to reject and defeat that unnamed german monster).
His sin of turning the girls away for being jewish was hotly contested by emma thompson's Kenton, and was denounced by his otherwise trusty and discrete head butler.

At some earlier point the lord had come to regret that sin and tried in vain to locate the two jewish girls he had turned away - that along with his interceding on behalf of germany leading to his utter detriment.

In a late lunch scene b/t stevens tells ms. kenton how the lord's "name was destroyed forever" by a newspaper's campaign to disgrace him. "his heart was broken." he spends his days in "deep thought" "talking to himself" , as if arguing with someone; "no one came to see him anymore you see."

I've always wondered why England became so hostile to Germany despite its elite's support and alliance with other fascist regimes, and in spite of the fact that the English royal house is intimately connected with royal houses in Hanover and Sax-Gota in Germany.

Likewise i wonder how with such an eclectic mix (japanese novel, indian filmmakers, british director) that film is told with the distinct and characteristic tone of jewish anger at the nazis and the holocaust. Is it due to its Terroistani as well as jewish producers?

The film was nominated for best picture and other awards by BAFTA, AMPAS and the Golden globe but won none. But it is suggestive that the film it lost to was Schindler's List.

The remains of the day as it were was heavily outjewed by spielberg's winner.


A good follow-up to the WWII story can be found in Adam Curtis- The Living Dead 3/3: The Attic (1995) , which talks mainly about Thatcher, in the last quarter of it, in its brief references to Churchill's demise at and after the end of the war - when he must have realized his war mongering was fed only by a fantasy with no basis in reality.



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i am negative mass - socially

08.iiI.1430

as per that post

I behave (and they , the others, behave) exactly like that a pair of particles one with negative mass and the other with positive mass.

I (-ve mass) am attracted to them (+ve mass) but they are repulsed by me and accelerate in the opposite direction.

As normal matter we can only accelerate away from negative mass matter.

So we'd have to force an acceleration towards it to meet it as it accelerates towards us.

all that remains for my money is show the physical equivalent of my social situation.

pneumatically, i could think of a similar situation , first erroneously with God - with the faulty notion that when he draws near to humans (usually via agents) they just run away from him - , then rather with the metaphysical in general. the true or absolute metaphysical, or al-ghayb. people often run away from that towards their own imagined metaphysics.

The logic says negative mass is not impossible (the math of mechanics involving mass < 0 is consistent), but the physics says it is impossible.

But physical law has severe problems.

For starters, mass of the photon is zero whereas i thought that mass is positive / definite / impermeable.

Secondly, physical laws do not account for octual cosmological motions. They do so only by stipulating that 96% of the universe is made of some dark stuff (74% energy, 22% matter) that we cannot see, cannot interact with - save through gravity.

dark matter sounds like another way to label our ignorance of the universe. something occluded (ghayb) right there in nature.

whether it exists or the laws are wrong, it is apparent it must have positive mass.


A photon at rest has mass zero. But in motion, whatever its energy mass, it would deflect off of negative mass, because positive mass values accelerate away from negative mass values.

Instead photonic light permeates / penetrates it rather than bounce off of it. It is deflected towards it (seen in the form of grav. lensing) not away from it.

the main issue is the radiation problem . Despite the fact that it affects electromag radiation gravitationally, we have no means of interacting with this matter (supposing it exists). we cannot detect it, ie bounce something off of it, much less touch or process it.

Given that our photons go right through dark mass if it exists, does this mean no nuclei in dark matter? or much fewer?

Apparently so. Wikipedia text confirms this: most dark matter is apparently nonbaryonic , and light goes through it.

is dark mass the reason our night sky and outer space are black ?

In any case, dark matter does not help me here. There still is no physical negative mass.

moreover negative mass appears even as nonsensical as the idea of negative energy.

yet I exist, and my social situation exists. This means nothing, for my social field is just another hilbert space with another set of symmetries having a number of gauge generators of the symmtry group - it need in no way behave like gravity anymore than color or electroweak charges need behave like gravity. ... Read more

o negative mass where art thou

06.III.1430

Recently i wondered about a type of charge that would see one body attracted to another , while the other is repelled by it. It turns out that hypothetical negatively massive particles present such a situation.

Someone , misunderstanding the question, suggested it is the electric charge. But like electric charges repel one another, while two opposite attract one another. What I was asking for was different.

A particle attracted to another, while the other is simultaneously repelled by it.

It turns out such a situation is possible, but only hypothetically, with particles having negative mass.

As per the people's (for now) encyclopedia -

"Assuming that all three concepts of mass [inertial mass, grav potential mass and active mass (force in response to gravity)] are equivalent it would produce a system where negative masses are attracted to positive masses, yet positive masses are repelled away from negative masses."

- "Exotic matter." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 12 Feb 2009, 18:28 UTC. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Exotic_matter&oldid=270267597. Accessed 03 March 2009.

Objects with negative mass would enable us to have things levitate and would provide cheap clean transportation.

But where is it?

The law of nature requires that energy be only positive-valued or zero. it is called positive semidefiniteness. There are also limits on mass to length ratio.

In other words , "there is no antigravity."




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film rvu draft: Revolutionary Road (2008)

05.III.1430

Revolutionary Road was a surprise. But this review has spoilers.

i started out judging it superficial (the opening fight scene)
b/c their acting isn't that great let's face it. and the fight was
w/out proper buildup or establishmnt.
it made me feel as though all the exposition was left
to be covered by HBO's Mad men;
that the filmmakers actually presumed to assume that series as a prereq viewing.


but as it went on, came some good lines - unexpected from prior movies of that
caliber (caliber as measured by the niche of the two top billing stars winslet and dicaprio).

it seems told much more or totally (tho that would be hard) from a man's perspective.
this is because winslet's character is orbited by several men at different times, whereas each of the men sees nothing or nobody but his own self. But more importantly, as a male I was still as blind to her final motivations as i would be in a real relationship. The script didn't enlighten me at all about winslet's thinking
toward the end of the movie.

although others have argued that the movie works equally well when seen from either perspectives. see LaSalle, Mick. "Movie Review: 'Revolutionary Road' Year's Best." San Francisco Chronicle. January 2, 2009. but i wouldn't take his word on it.

there is an interesting article on Richard Yates the author of the novel, who sounds like a disaster - another familiar note. Reading this Independent article was what recommended the movie to me in the first place, so I watched it rather than another when I got the chance to watch a movie.

Sam mendes is not really up my alley. His american beauty (1999) had an appearance of striking introspection, unmitigated realism in depicting emptiness of suburban life, but to me it never really went far enough , and took silly and gratuitous turns that did not ring "real" for me.

didn't like road to perdition w/ hanks. then his involvement in the colonial kite runner , unfavors him further.

His outlook was thus stunted, and joined the line of "slice of life" realist movies that pop up every few years like grand canyon, magnolia that never quite make it to where they set out to go.

This film maybe goes a step further, but still belongs in the same fare. Not to mention that its retrospections were thoroughly co-opted by HBO's Mad Men, whose third season many are waiting for.

One of the factors that helped the film for me was that I watched it without knowing hardly anything about it. Any details i'd read in the Independent article were gone, and only some vague notion that it was up for oscar nominations or something - meaning nothing. ie, I was without any expectations other than the typical fare from its two top billers.


it was intense at times. hit familiar relationship notes sometimes.

it was like a collage of stories and situations from different relationships.

bUT IN the end, the whole still rang hollowWw.

And just like in 'American beauty', the tragedy itself is gratuitous. But that was what the drama was building up to all along, that was the story of the movie, right?
But Then the tragic end defeats the points the film was making does it not?

And there is no redemption. In this Mendes et al. remind me of that other claustrophobe, aronovsky. Why no redemption dude? Why so glum glummy?

The nihilism is literally dehumanizing.

Won't be watching it again any time soon.

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