As if box office is a proxy for quality. I seriously question whether your comment is made in good faith to begin with, are you intentionally misunderstanding me?
Their assertion that "It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good," just flat out doesn't hold under scrutiny. Why? Consider that there is a lineage of people who are essentially writing statements using a language "of the screen," people like Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, to name a few. No matter what the film is ``about," the person crafting the film must grapple with the same things: how do I order the events? How does this work psychologically? Is this coherent? Does this say what I want it to? And such concerns scale down to very practical problem-solving on the day-to-day so that the vision may be best served.
Whether you agree with the values the film espouses or not, it succeeds as a work of cinema, full stop. That's true even if it was never shown in a theatre. People who work in the film industry know that, which is why the Oscars isn't precisely a "what is the wokest film" contest every year. Therefore if you assert it's just "preaching" correctly that is basically reducing something that has enormous value in terms of craft into just "messages;" ironically, you are doing so because you can't see past "messages."
The obvious political stance of One Battle After Another notwithstanding, given how much the film succeeds as an exercise in using the language of cinema to tell a compelling story, it comes across (ironically) as idealogically motivated to say the movie isnt nominated in part for its merits with regard to craft and construction.
No doubt it appeals to people at the Academy in its persuasion, but if we were to strip it down to film technical aspects it would no doubt still be a frontrunner for film of the year.
Well are people not part of the universe. And not all people "care about what we do" all the time but it seems most people care or have cared some of the time. Therefore the universe, seeing as it as expressing itself through its many constituents, but we can probably weigh the local conscious talking manifestations of it a bit more, does care.
"I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans." This is probably not entirely true. People developed these notions through something cultural selection, I'd hesitate to just call it a Darwinism, but nothing comes from nowhere. Collective morality is like an emergent phenomenon
Don't really think so. I love Pynchon and there's not really a character I'm latching onto when I read that. McCarthy and Pynchon both fetishize a sort of violence. I find McCarthy's writing going there many times for shock value or aesthetic reasons and it makes me take him less seriously. Other people have mentioned Tarantino and I think that is apt.
to be fair Dennis and Carl could put out some amazing work, like the Carl produced all i wanna do or dennis penned Forever. But I don't think it negates your point just wanted to add to it.
I'd be pretty surprised if good verbal communicators aren't usually good writers. I think politicians persuade people not by the clarity, conciseness, or coherence of their speech, but by the substance of their speech. If communication itself could be abstracted from the substance of what is communicated, then it wouldn't be true I think to attribute the success of certain politicians to their ability to communicate so much as their ability to choose what to communicate.
A writer has to be interesting though, every piece of writing we consider well written has a quality of gripping the mind. I'd argue then, that politicians though they may not be in the habit of writing long academic style treatises or "interesting" articles, perhaps it can be argued in the past they largely did, still if they are in part elected on the basis of their speech, must possess the same ability in writing.
If you don't believe me then how is it that Trump's tweets are works of art, "I have never seen a think person drinking Diet Coke,"The Coca Cola company is not happy with me--that's okay, I'll still keep drinking that garbage.", etc... Crude, in bad taste, whatever you say. Another example is Obama, who honestly has a gift for writing in the conventional sense.
GPT-4 can answer test questions, but could it have come up with what Einstein published in 1905 if it had all the information about the world up to say, 1902?
Music is abstract. When we talk about visual art we can almost always be on the same page. If I say I need garden gnomes parading around a Bavarian village, the amount of variation between my internal idea and what a visual artist returns will mainly come from the lack of terms I use regarding aesthetic sensibility. Will they return something abstract or neoclassical? I would then be more specific etc...
For music we could present such an image but it would then suggest I'd argue much more possibilities. We could narrow down by genre you would suppose but even then there are too many possibilities: genre's are not as strong categories as are the stylized "era's" of visual art, I would also claim. Moreover, we can "port" a fundamental structure like a melody over all sorts of strains of music. In visual art, any motif is bound to be changed depending on the era and the style we'd put it in, that is, I think that in music, there are elements that are stronger in visual arts and elements that are weaker in music, and vice-versa, with regard to a description we could give in English. It's probably more natural and more possible to ask about what a sort visual representation should be than what a piece of sound should be.
It's interesting how we can generate images I'd argue in stunning faithfulness to some prompts but we don't seem to be very close to the same standard, for some prompts, at generating music.
I don't disagree. It's not a perfect analogy. The Mormon's I describe are a lot like Sedevacantists except that they aren't openly out "against" the official church.
Having been a seminary class president, scout, priesthood holder, just not a missionary or really active member, born and raised in Utah, I will tell you one interesting contradiction about Mormons is the extent to which they disown their past and at the same time still have many ideas from that time circulating around in a particular way. I would think it's similar to say how some Catholics may be down with the whole thing right now and yet still aren't "up-to-date" with the Catholic church's official position on things, for instance post Vatican II. Some not all.
I would doubt that this sort of prophesy is a genuine front-of-mind-concern today by the people running this operation at the church. Preparing for the second coming could be a more sincere answer coming from them, but if such an event were to occur I think it would make money worthless, so that doesn't make sense to me.
There is a segment in the 60 minutes piece where they clearly show a church document, which shows something like 1.3 billion dollars being invested from Ensign Peak, the church hedge fund, into City Creek, a mall in downtown SLC, that Nielsen (the whistleblower) says his boss showed him.
In Utah it was well known and a topic of conversation so to speak that the church had invested so much money into a commercial venture. There also a segment in 60 minutes about the church bailing out an insurance company they control using these funds. It can really get under your skin coming from Utah, where I saw kids from my high school go off to central Africa essentially to convince people to pay tithing to the church, which we'd ostensibly see as not so bad given that it will help people. If it is the case, and if you've ever met some rich boomer Mormon dudes I can assure you it doesn't take a lot of convincing, look how they run our legislature, that the church took people's money, made a hedge fund, and now starts businesses which benefit... only they really know the completely details of... then it does not take much to feel outraged.
But I also the think the church at the very highest echelons consists of what are probably some very distinguished people who've seen a thing or two or feel a higher calling, that also does not seem far-fetched. I'd imagine being in charge of all that money is really something, having a little bit of a persecution and chosen-people complex is also something, as usual there are interesting social dynamics with Mormons.
IQ is a number that measures something. We do some retrofitting to make it normal. In theory, 1 in 30,000 people will have an IQ of 160 or higher as you say. But I think that's giving too much credit to the measure, and to g. Which is just working memory times application of logic or something like that. I personally think IQ is intellectually bankrupt.
You are naive if you don't think your tax dollars right now are going to a million things in a million different ways that don't benefit you, and that it's not intentional. In the end such decisions aren't made by convincing people like you or me they work in our favor or the American people's favor. I won't try to convince you. You didn't understand what I meant by "you already know" and you didn't respond to anything I said, just kept parroting your line of reasoning.
Addresses the second question. It's impossible to answer your first. And if you're looking for short answers to those sorts of questions, well then you should already know ;)
Such a project will take care of our citizens. Maybe not "first" because technically it takes care of ALL people first, and therefore no one is "second." The US gov would be in a unique position to do it owing of course to the pool of talent and resources it can draw from. I don't have a clue where you live, but I live in the Mountain West and the water wars are constant issue on peoples minds. Not to mention, changing climate will induce immigration. Where do you think people will immigrate if they can? If your argument is about "American's first" with falling birthrates and neoliberal supremacy and whatnot, you're going to have a whole lot of new neighbors if their climate gets worse, because America first.
I have good relative pitch but my friends with a more "restricted" sense of pitch shall we say seem to be less open minded, have a tougher time appreciating some of the music I love despite its disorder or imperfections. I don't have any problem appreciating what they like.
Their assertion that "It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good," just flat out doesn't hold under scrutiny. Why? Consider that there is a lineage of people who are essentially writing statements using a language "of the screen," people like Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, to name a few. No matter what the film is ``about," the person crafting the film must grapple with the same things: how do I order the events? How does this work psychologically? Is this coherent? Does this say what I want it to? And such concerns scale down to very practical problem-solving on the day-to-day so that the vision may be best served.
Whether you agree with the values the film espouses or not, it succeeds as a work of cinema, full stop. That's true even if it was never shown in a theatre. People who work in the film industry know that, which is why the Oscars isn't precisely a "what is the wokest film" contest every year. Therefore if you assert it's just "preaching" correctly that is basically reducing something that has enormous value in terms of craft into just "messages;" ironically, you are doing so because you can't see past "messages."