In 2014 Ridley Scott made a very controversial, seems to be - religious movie - called "Exodus: Gods and Kings" about the life of Moses and his subsequent adventure of saving the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Religious people were mad about the movie, since it tried to show a plausible, realistic way the entire thing could happen. It didn't show God, for example, simply appearing in front of Moses as a burning bush. There was a burning bush and there was God. But before Moses saw those he got hit in the head very severely. So you have a possible explanation for why he saw God in the first place.
Short answer People are stupid. But seriously, even though we have a lot of talk about why Age Verification laws are bad ( for human rights ) and how we can fight against them ( EFF just made a comprehensive guide on the issue ) nobody seems to realize the underlying logical fallacy, or multitudes of them, that even brought us to this point to begin with.
An article by Troler about Libre Software made me remember an email conversation I had with Richard Stallman the other day. I suggested to have a sort of freedom ladder analogue, to encourage non-libre software developers to, at least, move closer towards user-freedom. I thought ranking software based on how close they are at achieving user-freedom. How close they are to being Libre. If they have source code published, but no license. This is still better than having no source code published at all. Stallman firmly stood his ground against my idea, claiming that anything less than Libre, anything less than software that grants all 4 essential freedoms to the user, is automatically not good enough. But then in that article by @Troler I saw something interesting. Maybe merely granting the 4 essential freedoms, might be not good enough, either.
News came to me via Mastodon( a Free / Libre Social Media platform ) that apparently Australian government just banned Social Media to a certain demographic of people and the consensus is that it is apparently a good thing. Social Media tends to be very bad these days. Due to enshitification and mass surveillance of platforms such as Facebook and Ex-Twitter you can give a pretty solid argument why banning social media all together will make things better. But I fail to see nothing else but an expression of age-discrimination in this ban, when not all people are banned, but only children.
Tony Scott's 2009 film The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remake of a 1998 TV movie with same name, which is a remake of a 1974 movie with the same name, which is an adaptation of a 1973 book, with the same name. Strangely enough, apart from Denzel Washington playing the hero and John Travolta playing the villain, the film also prominently shows John Turturro and Ramón Rodríguez which, the same year, also appeared in a Michael Bay film Transformens 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
In 1915, David Wark Griffith done shot a mighty picture The Birth of a Nation that glorified them horse‑riddin’ Klan men. By ’37, Archie Mayo stitched together Black Legion), a film about that very group, a splintered band of the same old Klan order. When the movie showed the Klan in a harsh light— a fascist lot—the real Klan sued. Fast forward to the turn of the millennium, the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) looked back at the madness of yesteryear and the even wilder present, and thought, “Let’s get them Klan members to dance.”
What can be said about Godzilla? It is an icon to name icons. Looking at IMDb, it is unfortunate, although expected, to find 2014 release of Godzilla has 10 times as much ratings as the original 1954 version. Even though some scenes do look pretty goofy, a lot of love was undoubtedly put into it. That love is not always felt when viewing with modern sensibilities. I attempt to remedy the poignant feeling by calculated and logical reasoning and arguments... or more so my own acuity of the work.
Between Transformers 5 and Alien RomulusIsabela Merced played Dora the Explorer in a 2019 James Bobin film Dora and the Lost City of Gold. And just because I'm starting to become a fan of Isabela Merced ( or maybe a simp, IDK ), I decided to finally take a look at this movie. And I gonna tell you that, that reboot they did in 2025 with a different actress playing Dora, is not interesting me at all, because you can't replace Merced. She is just too perfect.
I know that philosophy is not a science. Because it is about what we cannot know, as some smart people out there say. But I've got here a philosophical theory which I want you to debunk. The theory is something I truly believe in, and therefor I'm biased towards it. So I suppose you could be better at debunking it, since you are not me.
Quentin Tarantino told numerous times that the two places which gave the strongest reactions to his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds were Berlin and Tel Aviv. Why? Why reactions? Well... prior to Inglourious Basterds films about the subject of conflict between Jews and Nazis in World War II were largely serious pieces of cinema. Think Schindler's List. But as I pointed out in my review of Schindler's List, there was a considerable amount of effort on the part of Steven Spielberg to make the movie actually watchable. Tarantino with Inglourious Basterds made a movie that is not merely watchable, but outright enjoyable. He made a movie about this conflict where the audience are allowed to laugh. Taika Waititi's 2019 film Jojo Rabbit takes this premise and dials it to 11.
It is known that the best films from Alfred Hitchcock were done during the days of the code. The restrictions on nudity and graphic violence gave us iconic Hitchcockian moments like the shower scene in Psycho, where Hitch pulls of a totally kosher psycho-sexual ejaculation of ultra-violence. When the code gave way to the MPAA rating system, Hitchcock didn't really know how to react, producing mediocre films, giving way to directors like Brian De Palma who stepped into his shoes, to give us, more-modern Hitchcockian thrillers like Dressed To Kill. But by the end of the 80s, as De Palma stepped down from this Hitch-immitation role, and before Robert Zemeckis ultimately took this title with his 2000 film What Lies Beneath, there was also Paul Verhoeven and his psycho-sexual thrillers, like 1992 Basic Instinct.
I showed my movie Moria's Race in a gas station once. A woman came by, saw it and asked me "Is it AI?". I obviously cringed. Because it wasn't AI, it was CGI. And there is a difference. Well technically there was one AI tool that was used. The open-image-denoise denoiser that comes preinstalled with Blender. But it's not really AI. Or is it?
South African filmmakers, writer Brian Cox ( who directed some bad films himself ) and a director Ralph Ziman decided to try to adopt what appears to be a hentai ( animated pornography ) film from Japan ( with the same name ) into a cool-ass female-empowerment action flick. They even got Samuel L. Jackson ( an objectively good actor ) involved in the project somehow. Yet almost every decision made in the production of this film was a wrong decision.
Tony Scott famously didn't care about the time travel plot of Déjà Vu which freaked out the writers of the film. As they said, he cared more about the action and surveillance aspects of the movie. He famously cared a lot about surveillance, as visible from his previous Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration Enemy of the State. And that means, that a sort of sci-fi surveillance movie, marks Déjà Vu as the closest thing Tony Scott did to Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.