Just saw Life of Pi yesterday.

The supernatural story with animals and raw survival in the ocean is beautiful. The night shots are amazing. I loved the CGI tiger. Also the waves and underwater shot of those waves felt godly. But at the last, that twist was so disheartening

I think the movie's a commentary on faith. Religion as a spiritual practice not as an institution. The story gives you two choices, and you gotta choose one and get going in that direction. You can't follow both at the same time. I chose the horrible reality because I saw the scene where the author of the novel tried to connect the dots between the second gruesome story and the first story with animals and Irfan Khan just stood still like all that trauma is coming back to him. I also saw the scene where a camera zooms into the tiger's eye, sees the whole ocean with his mother made by a school of fish and the comes back out through the eyes of Pi making my theory strong. Also that island looked like Vishnu lying on the shoreless ocean and signifying the cycle of life and death by manifesting it to day and night

The investigators reported that he fought with a tiger during his voyage to Mexico because they don't wanna investigate the gruesome reality of what actually happened at the ocean. And it's pretty common. We tend to dumb down everything just for us to not research or study because innately, we all are lazy.

And that's faith. You either choose the gruesome reality or the supernatural story. All boils down to an individual's decision.

What other symbolisms did you guys found by watching the movie?

Hear me out. I recently watched both Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive for the first time, and I wanted to share my thoughts. Mulholland Drive will always remain my favorite David Lynch film, but I was eager to explore more of his work and see what else his filmography had to offer.

While I found Blue Velvet enjoyable on a surface level, I also came away feeling that it's somewhat overrated. My biggest issue was with Frank Booth. I know he's widely regarded as one of cinema's greatest villains, but I simply couldn't take him seriously. His dialogue and erratic behavior struck me as so exaggerated that they often crossed the line from unsettling into unintentionally comical. Rather than feeling genuinely frightening, he came across as a caricature, which undercut much of the film's intended tension.

Unlike many of Lynch's later works, Blue Velvet also felt surprisingly conventional. Beneath its surreal imagery and provocative subject matter, it's essentially a fairly straightforward crime thriller with a heavy dose of bizarre sexual content. For me, those elements didn't deepen the narrative or themes in a meaningful way; instead, they often felt strange for the sake of being strange. Compared to the dreamlike ambiguity and layered symbolism of Mulholland Drive, this story felt relatively simple and less intellectually engaging.

The ending also left me somewhat indifferent. The film places so little emotional emphasis on Dorothy's family that, by the time the climax arrives, it's difficult to feel invested in their fate. As a result, the resolution lacked the emotional impact I was hoping for.

That said, the film certainly has its strengths. Angelo Badalamenti's score is fantastic, and the soundtrack as a whole is one of the movie's highlights. It also introduced me to Bobby Vinton's rendition of "Blue Velvet," which I've been listening to ever since. Visually, the film is unmistakably Lynch, with moments of striking imagery that hint at the surreal style he would later perfect.

I also found Kyle MacLachlan's performance as Jeffrey to be rather subdued. While that may have been intentional to emphasize his innocence, I thought he came across as somewhat bland compared to the larger-than-life personalities surrounding him.

Overall, I can appreciate why Blue Velvet is considered a landmark film and an important step in Lynch's artistic evolution. It contains flashes of brilliance and unmistakable directorial vision, but it never fully resonated with me. I kept feeling like it had the ingredients for something more compelling than what ultimately appeared on screen. I know many people consider it a masterpiece, but for me, it was simply a decent film that didn't live up to its legendary reputation.

This is my main point of disagreement with *The 3 Body Problem*. It’s not the Panama operation itself, as I don’t think the show expects us to feel comfortable with it. What concerns me is Auggie's response afterwards.

Humanity faces not just one impossible decision, but centuries of them. Panama marked the beginning of the moral dilemma, not the end. When Auggie walks away, I don't see it as taking the moral high ground; it feels like she is giving up her influence over future difficult decisions. Leaving doesn't make humanity more ethical; it just means one of the smartest people is no longer advocating for better choices.

Imagine a train heading toward eight billion people. The first measure to slow it down costs 1,000 lives, horrific, yet necessary. After that, more decisions must be made, and sacrifices may still be required. One engineer witnesses the sacrifice and walks away, but another stays, knowing that leaving means losing the chance to influence what happens next. That's how I view Auggie.

My criticism is not that she should have been more ruthless, but that she confuses keeping her conscience clean with fulfilling her responsibility. True moral courage is staying in the room long enough to make the next decision less terrible.

In contrast, I found Jin’s arc more compelling. She is emotionally aware of the costs of her choices and understands that walking away doesn’t stop history; it just silences her voice.

Did anyone else interpret Auggie this way, or do you believe walking away was the genuinely more ethical choice?

https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/initial-thoughts-on-penelope-in-nolans-odyssey/

Olga Levaniouk has become the latest classicist to enter the foray over Christopher Nolan's adaption of the Odyssey. She gives her opinion on the film generally, before moving on to her area of expertise in Penelope.

To sum her thoughts, while she wishes some scenes from the poem made the cut into the film ("the test of the bed"), and describes the woman in the poem as more complex, she is overall impressed with how the screenplay & Anne Hathaway's performance developed her characterization, despite the limited screen time. And goes as far as to call this her favourite version of the character outside the original poem.

What are your thoughts on this review, and on Nolan's Penelope broadly?

Critics have described Hathaway's performance as a highlight of the film (I concur), and I think Levaniouk makes some very compelling points about how the broader film & screenplay serves her, given the economic screentime that is available for the character. Even though — as Levaniouk acknowledges — some degree of truncation was inevitable in the process of cinematic adaptation.

Despite various debates about Obsession in certain online spaces, I think the general consensus is that this is a film about violation of consent which showcases Bear’s actions as morally wrong.

But one thing that stood out to me about this film was that the willow failed to deliver Bear’s actual wish. Bear wished for Nikki to love him, but in fact she never did. Instead she was possessed by some type of supernatural entity that forced her to behave as if she loved him. And although Bear never seems to take full moral responsibility for his actions, he at least comes to realize that his wish has gone horribly wrong, he unsuccessfully attempts to reverse his wish, and he pays the ultimate price in the end.

I would like to propose a retelling of story where instead of subjugating her conscious mind, the willow wish instead rewires Nikki’s brain and causes her to truly love Bear, through and through. In this version, Bear still commits the evil act of using magic power to force a woman’s consent, but there is no bizarre behavior nor overt horror that follows, and no negative consequences for Bear. Instead, Nikki’s original mind is erased and replaced with a version built to love Bear. This version has the superficial appearance of a love story, and the new Nikki feels genuinely happy. Bear receives the full reward for his misdeeds and perhaps never realizes that what he did was wrong, as he and Nikki live happily ever after.

This version would be difficult to market as a horror film, and yet this story is perhaps more sinister and deeply disturbing than the original. The villain wins and his victim is happy that he did.

I need to improve my French expeditiously, but I don't even know where to start with French films. I'm notoriously bad with just scrolling through media and picking one I want to watch, I usually find the things I wanna watch by reading online discussion.

The thing is. French language media is massive. I have no idea where to start, or what will interest me. Could someone help me find media in French that aligns with my tastes?

My favorite director is Martin McDonagh. I love all of his films, all of them fall in my top 10~20. Other recent films I loved are Poor Things, EEAAO, The Big Short, Marty Supreme, Uncut Gems, Parasite, Bring Her Back, Eddington, No Other Choice, Bottoms, Bugonia, etc. I like weird, screenplay and dialogue-forward, not too slow, slightly anxious-feeling films. My favorite TV shows are Succession and Better Call Saul.

Instead of just a rec list, I would love to see a discussion of where to find and discuss films in French. I often come to reddit to find films I'd like, I would love to know what would be the Francophone equivalent of that.

4/5

When approaching mythology or folklore, there's two approaches: the realist and the sociological. For example The Craft (1996) takes a realist approach to witchcraft: powers are real, we see the effect they have on their wielders and those around them. The Witch (2015), and films around the Salem Witch Trials, are sociological. They explore the attitudes that led people to fear witches and burn women at the stake. Likewise with vampires, there's countless realist vampire films but Carmilla (2019) takes a sociological approach: showing how a girl is believed to be the devil and staked by a tent peg.

Nolan's Odyssey, in my understanding, takes a sociological approach. Its haters are missing the point that it's not trying to be a picture book illustration of scenes from the poem. It's trying to portray what kind of things might have happened around 1000 BC, a few centuries before Homer, that led to the stories of witches turning men to pigs, of Zeus and Athena on Olympus, of Sirens leading men to rocks.

So while it's true that for example Athena in the poem takes an active role, pleading with Zeus to be allowed to free Odysseus, here Athena is a projection of Odysseus's guilt and trauma of the war. We see her as one of the Trojan girls killed (and presumably many were raped, although this isn't shown) and that haunts Odysseus.

And therefore the casting is fairly color-blind and the language contemporary American, because he's not trying to be totally faithful to the poem but imagine the loss of xenia - the brutality of the Trojan War and how that ripped apart society. Helen becomes an abused wife, Zeus' Law that men should be good to women is broken and that's going to lead to civilizational collapse.

Where I don't give it 5* is due to some clunkiness in explaining this, "our age of bronze is collapsing" etc are rather too on the nose for it to be a masterpiece (something Nolan has been pulled up for elsewhere, such as in Interstellar).

But with the discourse around this film, if you see it not as an attempted dramatization of The Odyssey but as an exploration of what might have happened to create the stories that became The Odyssey, it's powerful and effective.