The sentiment pleases me

I haven’t seen this movie — heck, I never even heard of it before — but I was sent this clip and I rather liked it.

You see, no one’s going to help you Bubby, because there isn’t anybody out there to do it. No one. We’re all just complicated arrangements of atoms and subatomic particles – we don’t live. But our atoms do move about in such a way as to give us identity and consciousness. We don’t die; our atoms just rearrange themselves. There is no God. There can be no God; it’s ridiculous to think in terms of a superior being. An inferior being, maybe, because we, we who don’t even exist, we arrange our lives with more order and harmony than God ever arranged the earth. We measure; we plot; we create wonderful new things. We are the architects of our own existence. What a lunatic concept to bow down before a God who slaughters millions of innocent children, slowly and agonizingly starves them to death, beats them, tortures them, rejects them. What folly to even think that we should not insult such a God, damn him, think him out of existence. It is our duty to think God out of existence. It is our duty to insult him. Fuck you, God! Strike me down if you dare, you tyrant, you non-existent fraud! It is the duty of all human beings to think God out of existence. Then we have a future. Because then – and only then – do we take full responsibility for who we are. And that’s what you must do, Bubby: think God out of existence; take responsibility for who you are.

I don’t think Genesis can be turned into a good movie

Darren Aronofsky wants to make an “edgy re-telling” of the Noah’s Ark story for $130 million. I don’t know why; if you ask me, it’s a stupid story, on the order of wanting to do a live-action big budget remake of the Flintstones…and nobody would be stupid enough and unimaginative enough to do that, would they?

It does have potential as a bitter, nasty story: tyrant god kills everyone and everything on the planet in a massive, brutal catastrophe, leaving one family to salvage the entire worldwide ecosystem with a wooden boat; despite that, the first thing this family does when the boat lands is a mass slaughter of representatives of every species to propitiate their evil deity. Then Noah gets drunk and curses his son and all of his progeny with eternal servitude.

So it could be written as a grim, bleak, apocalyptic tale, but I don’t see much of interest in it…largely because the spectre looming over it is the fact that it isn’t true, and not just in a fictional way, but because we know it couldn’t have happened.

Also, the Christians (or at least, apologists for Christianity) are already girding themselves to hate the movie. Don’t you know, the Ark story is supposed to be uplifting and cuddly-cute, with all those animals?

First of all, the story of Noah has been told on the big screen before, most notably in John Huston’s superb film The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), in which one of the central episodes tells the story of the Ark with Huston himself playing Noah. The Bible features an all-star cast of Ava Gardner, Peter O’Toole, George C. Scott, Richard Harris, and Stephen Boyd. Huston’s retelling of the Noah’s Ark story is stylish and insightful. A real warmth and joy pervades the scenes in which Noah runs around the ark caring for and soothing the animals during their long voyage. This kind of warmth and humanity is notably lacking in Aronofsky’s coldly neurotic films.

I only vaguely recall that movie; it came out when I was 9. I do remember that it was cheesy and boring. Here’s the trailer.

Yeesh. A disaster movie about the obliteration of life on Earth is supposed to be filled with “warmth and joy”? Only by ignoring the magnitude of the events that occur in it.

These reviewers are very distressed at the possibility of a dark movie about an imaginary cataclysm.

Can we not see these demons in the much-lauded ‘edginess’ of Aronofsky’s films? Films like Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan are replete with masochism and bodily mutilation. Aronofsky seems possessed by a Manichaean viewpoint that sees the world and the flesh as fallen and subject to mortification of a kind usually only seen in medieval art and literature. Demented, self-flagellating figures are the villains in movies and books like The Da Vinci Code – but in Aronofsky’s films, they’re actually the protagonists we’re supposed to identify with. The madness and self-mutilation in Aronofsky’s films takes the place of any serious exploration of character or story and has only one motivation: to transgress life with violent images that abuse the human body.

OK. I will mention one name and one movie. Mel Gibson. The Passion of the Christ.

Maybe it will be a perfect fit to Christianity after all.

Stephen Hawking explains the universe

I shall have to turn on my television Sunday evening (7 or 8pm, depending on where in the US you are). Stephen Hawking will be on the Discovery Channel to answer the question, “Is There a Creator?” — I’m pretty sure he’s going to answer “no.”

He also tersely answers a few questions online.

Q: First, we wonder if you could comment on why you are tackling the existence of God question?

A: I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.

Q. What problems you are working on now, and what do you see as the big questions in theoretical physics?

A: I’m working on the question, why is there something rather than nothing, why are the laws of physics what they are.

If that last bit has you curious, here’s a teaser:

Essentially on “Is There A Creator?,” Hawking notes that on the sub-atomic scale, particles are seen in experiments to appear from nowhere. And since the Big Bang started out smaller than an atom, similarly the universe likely “popped into existence without violating the known laws of Nature,” he says. Nothing created the universe, so in his view there was no need for a creator. That is his explanation for “why there is something rather than nothing.”

Stephen Hawking explains the universe

I shall have to turn on my television Sunday evening (7 or 8pm, depending on where in the US you are). Stephen Hawking will be on the Discovery Channel to answer the question, “Is There a Creator?” — I’m pretty sure he’s going to answer “no.”

He also tersely answers a few questions online.

Q: First, we wonder if you could comment on why you are tackling the existence of God question?

A: I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.

Q. What problems you are working on now, and what do you see as the big questions in theoretical physics?

A: I’m working on the question, why is there something rather than nothing, why are the laws of physics what they are.

If that last bit has you curious, here’s a teaser:

Essentially on “Is There A Creator?,” Hawking notes that on the sub-atomic scale, particles are seen in experiments to appear from nowhere. And since the Big Bang started out smaller than an atom, similarly the universe likely “popped into existence without violating the known laws of Nature,” he says. Nothing created the universe, so in his view there was no need for a creator. That is his explanation for “why there is something rather than nothing.”

Game of Drones

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have dragged myself through George R. R. Martin’s latest, A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in his Game of Thrones series.

I’m done. No more. I’m not reading any of his books any more.

It’s terrible. Martin has taken the concept of the pot-boiler to an extreme — it’s a novel where nothing happens other than continual seething, roiling turmoil. He whipsaws the reader through a dozen different, complex story lines where characters struggle to survive in a world wrecked by civil war — one other problem is that I’d hit a chapter about some minor character from the previous four books, and struggled to remember who the heck this person is, and why I’m supposed to care — and again, nothing is resolved. Well, not quite: major characters are brutally killed, if they’re male, and graphically and degradingly humiliated into irrelevance if they’re female. I guess that’s a resolution, all right — perhaps the last book will be a lovingly detailed description of a graveyard, draped with naked women mourning?

And all the death and destruction accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t further the plot, it doesn’t change any situations.

There is still a mysterious, supernatural menace lurking beyond the great wall to the North; but don’t worry about them, they do absolutely nothing in the entire book. That’s the problem with the undead: inertia. They just kind of lie there.

The expatriate princess with the dragons was supposed to be a great threat, promising invasion. She decides to hole up in one city and dither with palace intrigues for the whole book, while everything falls apart around her. She takes a lot of baths, though, and I felt like her primary role in Martin’s mind is to provide nude scenes for the HBO serialization. The dragons? Pffft. Random SFX carnage.

The dwarf ping-pongs about from place to place, commenting cynically. We’re supposed to care about what imaginary continent he’s on in this chapter, or what city or boat or troop of rapscallions he finds himself in now. I didn’t.

There’s a war going on, you know, and one of the kings in this multi-sided conflict is marching his army off to attack a castle. In a snowstorm. Which leads to the army being mired down and starving. For the entire last half of the book. Those chapters would have benefited greatly if they’d just been left blank and white (blizzard, get it?)

In his afterword, Martin complains about how his last book “was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard.” I can sympathize. Writing over a thousand pages of dull, dragging, incestuously self-referential, soap-opera style narrative in which nothing happens must have been a torment. I understand he’s committed to writing at least two more of these overblown pop fantasy novels, but I don’t think he’s at all committed to bringing anything to a conclusion. George R. R. Martin has successfully penned himself into a lucrative writerly hell of his own creation. I have a recommendation that would spare him some pain: stop now. Roll around happily in your money, and enjoy a prosperous retirement. It’s not as if anyone expects anything to ever be resolved in your fantasy world, so just ending it now is the same as ending it at book #7. Or book #1, for that matter. I’ve reached an end that is as satisfying as anything I expect from this story, which is not satisfying at all.