/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.5281144]

Searching for decent Philosophical films or documentaries like Waking Life... I liked the questioning of reality and such in Waking Life, although some of the theories seemed abit disjointed at time.

Tried /tv/, but there was no interest in this subject....

[Anonymous No.5281179]

Narrative Films:
2001 A Space Odyssey
Enter the Void
Tree of Life

Documentaries:
Koyaanisqatsi
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
Examined Life

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5281199]

I was going to say Examined Life. (I was able to follow everybody but Ƹ̵̡iƸ̵̡ek) So WR has some interesting socio-political thoughts put into it.

Waking Life seemed disjointed because the wanderer lead character is dead/in dreamland

[Anonymous No.5281201]

>>5281179
Ah thanks, seen the first four (Also enjoyed Powaqqatsi and the more recent Samsara) but I will definitely give the last two a watch.

[Anonymous No.5281604]

>>5281144
I Huckabees

[Anonymous No.5281612]

>>5281179
watch pervert's guide to cinema too
examined life is nice

[Anonymous No.5281626]

>>5281144
The Ister

[Anonymous No.5281637]

the matrix

[Anonymous No.5282530]

my dinner with andre

[Anonymous No.5282558]

>>5282530
Seconding this.

[Anonymous No.5282613]

>>5281199
>So WR has some interesting socio-political thoughts put into it.
Like?

[Anonymous No.5282618]

>>5281144
Groundhog Day

[Anonymous No.5282648]

>>5281144
Being-In-the-World is a pretty good doc on Heidegger/Dreyfus.

[Anonymous No.5282649]

>>5281144
>theory
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

[Anonymous No.5282656]

>>5282618
Seconding this.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5282657]

>>5282613
Like the titular Wilhelm Reich, and the failings of the Bolsheviks.
It's a great hybrid movie. Part documentary bio and part allegorical fiction parts.

[Anonymous No.5282673]

>>5281144
>waking life
Some parts I could empathize with but most of it felt like psycho babble and someone's high ideas.

[Anonymous No.5282680]

Just watch some nice reality TV, soak in the normal. Then wake up early, do some exercise, meditate and call mom. Then focus on what it feels like, focus. It'll give you more than a Waking Life analogue.

[Anonymous No.5282684]

>>5281144
if you really want to question reality even further study the laws of physical science along with theoretical physics or cognition/sensation and perception.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5282687]

>>5282673
It's the mind of a dead collage student

[Anonymouse !7tLDpBrPEk No.5282706]

>>5282687
> tfw cannot stop studying collage
> tfw a true student

[Anonymous No.5282717]

>>5282530
MY NIGGUH

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5282747]

>>5282706
Fockin' typo

>>5282673
It's the mind of a dead college student

[Anonymous No.5282760]

>>5281144
You know the right cloud shaped person is Caveh Zahedi and that his movies are pretty deep/edgy? His best are I don't hate Las Vegas anymore and Bathtub of the World. Watch those and then bump this thread for more, both on YT. The other good recommendation is Groundhog Day. Butterface accidentally name drops/gets it right in WR also, ignore the rest of her post.

[Anonymous No.5282767]

>>5282747
Such fucking high school level understanding you have butterface, stop 'enlightening' us with.

>the story was a dream
fuck you basic bitch

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5282778]

>>5282767
>But why you mad?
Didn't say it was all that deep, just saying the ideas that float around in it are from a college kid's head

[Anonymous No.5282790]

>>5282778
They are in fact pretty deep, you're the one colouring them "college" brown because that's all you're capable of. Do you see my point?

[Anonymous No.5282793]

>>5282778
Also,
>mind of a dead college student
Stay retarded

[Anonymous No.5282813]

>>5281144
You do realize that any film that tries to be philosophical is inherently failing, right? A film expresses its ideas through both its dialogue and also its images and oftentimes a film's cinematography is a bit too ambiguous to condense into concrete, philosophical language. You never see any "philosophical" music or art for the same reason. Writing is the only good way to truly express ideas since it is the most direct and concrete expression of the idea. A film is an artwork while a philosophical treatise is merely an elaboration of an idea. If you want good philosophical films, just watch the best directors. If you want to get at Freud and Psychoanalysis, go to Hitchcock. If you want to get existentialism, go to Bergman. They deal with philosophical ideas in the way that a film should deal with them.

[Anonymous No.5282826]

>>5282790
I disagree. Waking Life is pretty shallow. It's like a pleb version of Enter the Void.

Also, rotoscoping is cheap shitty animation.

[Anonymous No.5282843]

>>5282826
Waking Life
>2001

Enter the Void
>2009

Also,
>le pretentious frog director face

[Anonymous No.5282851]

>>5282843
Not sure what the date has to do with anything. They deal with similar themes, but I don't think one was imitating the other. Both are somewhat derivative of the Tibetan Book of the Dead though.

Also, people who call superior works "pretentious" are outing themselves as pseudo-intellectual fools. In other words, you're pretentious, dipshit.

[Anonymous No.5282866]

>>5282826
>not loving A Scanner Darkly

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5282873]

>>5282790
>Do you see my point?
Not too clearly till now. I assumed you thought they weren't deep. Beg pardon. However, the plot was simple enough. I put spoilers on for those who haven't seen it yet. Thought you were getting pissy about that too.
>>5282793
You haven't seen it?

It's a good film, and it doesn't even have to make sense. In retrospect I would have liked to have seen it go full surrealism, not just that end shot.
In order for a film to be considered for an Academy Award nomination you have to run in theatres for a week or two in the LA area. This film debuted on a Friday and was yanked the following Wednesday (By Disney money no doubt) only to come back for a day or two a month later. It *should* have had at least a nomination.

>>5282826
Hurt your tummy, did it?

[Anonymous No.5282889]

>>5282873
I just didn't care for it. I mean, Linklater is the first blow against it. He's just awful. Rotoscoping is the second because it's incredibly lazy animation. Alex Jones is the last straw. I can't take a "philosophical" movie seriously if it includes that moron. I can only hope they were mocking him by making him turn red and purple and shit. But I don't know if I can give Linklater that much credit. He probably included Jones unironically.

[Anonymous No.5282901]

>>5281201
No Baraka?

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5282902]

>>5282889
It is NOT lazy. And I already explained Jones away. This is just the shit on the mind of the protagonist. The director is just using this the present ideas. There's worse lauded, directors out there

[Anonymous No.5282910]

>>5282889
Jones is not very sharp and his paranoid rhetoric doesn't sit well with most non-paranoid people but that doesn't mean he's wrong. He's raging because there are powerful people in the world who don't care about him and people of his kind. There's nobility in his madness. Or would you rather him go back to being a truck driver or whatever?

tl;dr shut your whorish mouth

[Anonymous No.5282921]

>>5282902
Butter pls
We already concluded that your opinions on Waking Life are retarded

Clue train: the name of the movie is waking life but it's shot like a dream: Linklater's main point is that we all sleep through our life. Now for all that is decent on this gay earth -- stop posting.

[Anonymous No.5282931]

>>5282902
It is lazy. It's tracing. I say this as someone who has actually studied animation. It's a shortcut that takes all the artistry out of animating drawings. Read some Richard Williams.

I feel like explaining away Jones as "something that is on the mind of a teenager" is a copout. I mean the director chose him for a reason, and wasn't just "this is what the kids like these days", because that isn't even particularly true.
I'd be willing to accept that he's there for some sort of ironic reason and was too stupid to realize that he'd be mocked when he signed on to do the movie. The fact that his face turns all red and blue and shit is evidence in favor of this.

But Linklater is also sort of a bad director. I mean his "Before" trilogy is decent I guess (even if I don't particularly care for Ethan Hawke though he was great in Gattaca), but he relies too heavily on gimicks. Like filming a movie over the course of a decade, or the use of "trippy" rotoscoped animation, or remaking a 70s cult comedy. He might not be the worst director ever (Michael Bay easily beats him), but he isn't worth defending.

[Anonymous No.5282935]

>>5282530

This, and Mindwalk (it's on youtube)

[Anonymous No.5282936]

>>5282873
>and it doesn't even have to make sense
yet again you only reveal how little YOU understand, it's not the movie, it's YOU.

You're a typical egotistical retard, you start with the presupposition of "I KNOW" then you colour everything with that, fooling as many people as you can on the way for attention and ego-gratification.

[Anonymous No.5282941]

>>5282910
>that doesn't mean he's wrong.
At least 9/10 times he's wrong. Plus he's a fucking twat. He straight up lies. For ratings. It isn't noble, and I don't respect him or think he's doing good work. I'd much prefer him off the air instead of spreading his retarded "information". People can and should get their subversive ideas from far better sources. He's like the Zeitgeist movies, even though it might make you question things, you end up less educated in the end than if you never heard him at all.

[Anonymous No.5282942]

>>5282931
waking life was made on a shoestring budget. of course he couldn't pay for cutting edge cgi

[Anonymous No.5282943]

>>5282873
>It *should* have had at least a nomination
haha, this retarded, academy awards are the pits, it's a sign of prestige and honor for any director who's not involved in that masquerade.

[Anonymous No.5282950]

>>5282942
The Thief and the Cobbler was made on a shoestring self-funded budget and it is even in its unfinished state one of the most masterful and beautiful pieces of animation ever made. Why? Because the people who made it knew how to make good animation. Rotoscoping was a useful technique back before people understood who to make drawings appear to move in a naturalistic manner. It's training wheels. Well, the medium has grown up, and there's no more excuses for using training wheels other than it being too hard. If something is too hard, just don't do it, don't take the easy way out and halfass it.

[Anonymous No.5282953]

>>5282931
>going from Linklater directly to Bay
What's wrong with you?

Bet you haven't even Slacker. I agree with you on rotoscoping, and Linklater's latter gimmicks but he's still one of the better Yankee directors.

[Anonymous No.5282958]

>if an animation style takes minimal effort, that means it's worse than a style that takes a lot of effort

[Anonymous No.5282959]

>>5282953
I haven't seen Slacker. I'm aware it's the movie people point to when talking about him. But when you look upon the corpus of his work, it's mostly schlock.

And note that I said Linklater ISN'T the worst director because someone like Bay EASILY beats him for that title. I'm not putting them in the same category, I'm using Bay to show how much better Linklater is by comparison.

[Anonymous No.5282977]

>>5282958
It's basically painting on top of film cells. It's barely animation. It isn't all about the technical component of the medium, but rotoscoping is pretty much the "paint by numbers" of animating.

Want to see it in all it's glory? Watch the old Fleischer cartoons where they spliced rotoscoped animation of Cab Calloway into Betty Boop shorts. Still pretty obvious, but you might not know if you weren't looking for it. It's even more obvious how much lower quality this type of animation is if you watch the Ralph Bakshi's adaptation of The Lord of The Rings. Check this out and tell me something isn't off with with how the Orcs look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpmZyTK2dI

[Anonymous No.5282978]

>>5282977
You ever think maybe Linklater wanted it to look that way?

[Anonymous No.5282981]

>>5282978
Of course. It makes it "dreamy" and "trippy".

Cheap.

[Anonymous No.5282983]

>>5282981
If you don't like it, make your own movie your own way. Dismissed.

[Anonymous No.5282986]

>>5282981
it's better than glorious and unfinished and not making a living.

[Anonymous No.5283001]

>>5282986
That's just silly. You're suggesting the merits of a work are dependent upon its completion and revenue generating potential? I suppose you extend this logic to books as well? Would you suggest Dan Brown is better than Franz Kafka?

[Anonymous No.5283014]

>>5283001
are you the one that brought up thief and cobbler? i'm saying that it's good to do what you love for a living and get your work out there for people to see.

[Anonymous No.5283018]

>>5283014
Oh. Sounded like you were saying the opposite.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5283020]

>>5282936
Oh such bullshit. I did start with any presupposition. I am not being egocentric in anyway.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5283037]

>>5282936
Oh such bullshit. I didn't start with any presupposition. I am not being egocentric in anyway.

[Anonymous No.5283040]

>>5283020
>tripfag
>not egocentric
k

[Anonymous No.5283050]

>no mention of Terry Gilliam

[Anonymous No.5283054]

The Wiz

[Anonymous No.5283056]

>>5283050
>modern art
yuck

[Anonymous No.5283059]

>>5283018
but what i'm also saying is that linklater is doing both of these things

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.5283062]

>>5283050
Now there's a director!

[Anonymous No.5283065]

>>5283059
Then what was the comparison? Why the words "better" and "than"?

[Anonymous No.5283074]

>>5283050
that shit gives me ocd you asshole

[Anonymous No.5283098]

>>5283065
comparing waking life and thief and cobbler, linklater was able to finish what he started and get his message out, perhaps not beautifully but intact and progressed his career.

i'm not a huge fan of waking life or linklater (although i think he's done some good films). but as someone that's trying to do creative work, i know that you sometimes can't do everything as grandly as you want to and it's good to finish a project even if it's flawed.

[Anonymous No.5283559]

>>5283074

[Anonymous No.5283561]

How can a film be philosophical? How can it demonstrate logical formulae?

[Anonymous No.5285447]

>>5283561
Symbology

[Anonymous No.5285935]

>>5282941
>He's like the Zeitgeist movies, even though it might make you question things, you end up less educated in the end than if you never heard him at all.
As someone who has never seen the Zeitgeist movies but is told by a few people I know to, and who doesn't want to really watch them, please expand..

[Anonymous No.5285945]

The Fountain?

[Anonymous No.5285956]

>>5283561
By it's narrative, see Waking Life. Questioning the grammar of film, see Man with a Movie Camera. Or even questioning the ontology of film, see Stan Brakhage.

[Anonymous No.5286319]

OP here, thanks for all the contributions.

>>5282901
Yes, Baraka

>>5282684
I studied Physics at A-Level which was fairly enlightening, although we had a pretty crappy teacher. I'd like to start studying it again in my own time.

>>5282760
Yeah, I've never actually seen his films. I really enjoyed his part in the film as he explaines the beauty of books too (I have some idiot friends that scoff at me for reading...).

>>5283050
Enjoyed Brazil.

I was thinking about films which I've seen that I felt were philisophical.

Shane Carruth's Primer is a good example, and his latest film "Upstream Color" was excellent. It draws quite alot from Walden, and has a strong ecological theme to it.

Under the Skin was interesting in the way it observed human life from an alien perspective (would like to read the book too).