Saturday 24 January 2015

AGORA: Hypatia and being a Philosophical Woman in a Violently Religious Ancient World

By Christopher Barr POSTED ON JANUARY 24, 2015

“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies.  To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing.  The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.  In fact, men will fight for superstition as quickly as for living truth, even more so, since a superstition is intangible, you can’t get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, as so is changeable.”  
- Hypatia of Alexandria


AGORA, a word that means 'gathering place' or 'assembly', is a period piece film set back in the 4th century AD, Roman Egypt, that tells the story of a brilliant Greek philosopher and astronomer named Hypatia.  She was a free thinking woman that was a teacher and mentor; she was an inventor, mathematician and authority on the philosophy of Plato.  She lived in Alexandria, in northern Egypt off the coast of the Mediterranean, with her father Theon who was the director of the Musaeum of Alexandria, which was an institution for music, poetry, philosophy and science.  It also housed the vast number of texts in the great Library of Alexandria.  Hypatia would teach future leaders and scholars in assembly rooms.  

Alexandria, in its inception, was to become a multi-cultured metropolis where all types of people who seek knowledge and growth were to reside.  Philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and high priests were all to co-exist under the same sky directly above Alexandria, where writers and scientists would debate and pioneer thought.  It was a dream imagined by Alexander the Great where all knowledge could be stored in one place.  The intellectual city combined this wonderful mix-match of Roman, Greek and Egyptian architecture to erect its monuments and build its temples.

When the Christians arrived they soon began to mock and defile the pagan gods which forced the Pagans to take action.  The Pagans ambushed the Christians, causing many deaths, leading to a massive bifurcation of the city where Pagans and Christians stood apart.  This social unrest began to challenge the Roman rule as the Christians began to take over, gaining more and more power. 

Hypatia was a non-believer; she was a woman of science and philosophy and was quite frankly thinking about more important things than fake gods that scared Christians were forcing people to believe.  When the Pagans instigated the battle with the Christians, they ended up finding themselves barricaded in the Library of the Serapeum, a massive temple where the documents and texts from mostly all the worlds thinkers were held.


While taking refuge behind the walls of the Serapeum, Hypatia continued thinking about the widely believed astronomical, geocentric Ptolemaic system that the Earth was the center of the Solar System, a theory that philosopher Aristotle believed to be true as well.  This model she felt was widely flawed but she was still baffled by the possibility that the Earth was in fact moving.  She considered the 3rd century astronomer Aristarchus of Samos’ Heliocentric hypothesis that the Earth and the planets, which Hypatia at the time called ‘wanderers’, actually circled the Sun.

Soon an envoy of the Roman Emperor declared that the Pagans would all be pardoned, however the Christians would be allowed access to the library to do with it as they wish.  Hypatia and a number of others furiously scramble to gather as many important scrolls and texts from the Library as possible before fleeing.  Christians ended up overtaking the library, destroying statues and burning all the remaining works of philosophy, science, literature, poetry and mathematics scrolls that were unavoidably left behind.  A body of knowledge that one could only imagine about the possibilities of even furthering an understanding of our species, how we live our lives and the elements that form the world and space around it.  Civilization itself stood still that day as all that knowledge was destroyed out of fear of difference, fear of oneself, fear of loneliness, fear of abandonment and fear of change.  Paganism became outlawed and the Ancient World ended giving birth to what we now call - Modern History.   


“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.” 
– Hypatia of Alexandria

As the years past, the Christians began to dominate Alexandria where even the current Prefect was converted to Christianity.  Their power grew and they wanted to impose their Christianity onto other communities within Alexandria.  Jewish people at this point became their new rivals and sadly remain so to this day in various forms of disagreement.  The Jewish people believe their God of Abraham is the true God were the Christians are saying that Jesus is the true son of God.  The battle back and forth, as these ludicrous futile arguments go, leads to violence against each other.  Christians kill some Jews, Jews stone some Christians, Christians take up swords and kill more Jews and round and round we go.  These two groups among too many on this planet, fight over wanting to be number one, the sad thing here is, they both claim to be peaceful as they cowardly kill one another because these incredulous, hypocritical believers loathe opposition to their insane way of thinking.

“All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.”  
- Hypatia


While all the men fight in the streets over piety, Hypatia continued work on her theory that the Earth not only revolves around the Sun but it doesn’t do so in a perfect symmetrical circle.  She also was trying to prove the Earth was in fact moving even though everyone on it wouldn’t necessarily feel it moving.  Clearly here she wasn’t considering what we know now about gravity, but her insight into the physics of the planet was ambitious.  The Christians figured that the world must be flat because if it was a sphere which was being suggested, then why aren’t people and animals falling from the top of the earth down the side and then sliding off it?  It seems a bit silly these days, to even consider such a thing, but we were all born into a planet where all these questions had answers.   To Christians, the Book of Genesis is their scientific text that explains how the Earth came to be.  All Christians and certainly many Christians to this day believe that God created the Earth and the Stars.  They believe the geocentric model is the center where God placed his blessed children, and thinking otherwise is an act of heresy.

Hypatia didn’t believe in any of it and today we know now she was more or less correct in not believing in it.  Her purview was still understandably limited by the senses and the capacity of the mind with such a minute amount of cosmic information.  She continued to prove that the Earth was moving and that the motion would not affect a falling object on the Earth itself.  The Christians ended up forbidding Hypatia to teach at school anymore because of their objections against heliocentrism.

While being subjugated by the Christians, Hypatia still focusing on her work, discovered an astrodynamic theory that the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical motion, not a circular one.  This explains why the Sun sometimes appears closer to the Earth than other times.  This oval orbit placed the Earth in various distances from the Sun and thus explained why the seasons changed.

The Christians, reading straight from their bible that a woman should never be in a position of power over a man, declared Hypatia a witch, a godless woman and inciting religious turmoil, and vowed to kill her.  Hypatia, a lover of wisdom and the endless possibilities of human thought, was kidnapped on her way home by a group of Christians.  This mob of mad men tore her clothing off, stripping her naked in front of an increasing heathen crowd.  They dragged her naked into the Caesaruim, which was a temple and then converted to a church, and grabbed sharp pieces of any wood or rock they could find and they then began to fillet her alive.  Once she was dead, like a pack of wolves, they pulled her limbs apart and took her dismembered body parts to the edge of the city and burnt them.  

The core of all this isn’t necessarily religion, the core is fear which at its feet spawns violence, through the rationalization of rejecting fear and weakness, violence in the mind becomes reasonable if one wants to protect the very structure of their being.  This is the madness found at the heart of most all religions.  It promises so much and is never able to live up to those promises, thus moving the believer into a psychotic disposition that must force its fantasy into the world and oddly, in this person’s fractured mind, validate it.  Here they would have believed that they were doing God’s work for him and would have excused themselves of all blame, which would relieve any guilt, which would make them feel better about themselves and ultimately this would result in an avoidance of fear. 


Alexander the Great would have been profoundly disappointed to what eventually happened to his great city.  This city was to be a place of enlightenment yet that act of barbarism blew out the candle of Alexander’s dream of a more knowledgeable, informed future.  Instead of human growth, understanding, respect to all the living, silly superstitions manifested into real world consequences was how these men chose to solve what they perceived as a problem, a problem that we all know too well today.  Thankfully Christianity has matured to the point that in the developed countries this type of thing doesn't regularly happen.  All Hypatia wanted was to learn and teach what she had learned to a group of open-minded people in a city that welcomed difference and thrived on change.


Hypatia’s achievements are even more exceptional because she was able to study the stars in a very male dominated ancient world.  She was a humanist, a person that looked beyond gender, allowing her mind, equal neurologically to anyone else’s, to expand without the weight of everyday banality and religious dogmatism truncating it.


“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.  To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”  
- Hypatia





Wednesday 21 January 2015

American Sniper: Propaganda and turning an American Psycho into a War Hero of the People

By Christopher Barr POSTED ON JANUARY 21, 2015

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.  If you know neither the enemy not yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” 
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Just because war is hell doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.” 
- Chris Kyle


American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, is a war movie about a man with a talent for precision sniper shooting that is deployed to Iraq after the September 11, 2001 attacks.  Chris Kyle finds out about his deployment while at his wedding in the midst of celebrating his union with his, soon to be annoying, complaining all the time, wife. This scene happens in so many action movies that here it comes off as hollow.  Chris Kyle was responsible for killing 255 people, 160 of which were officially confirmed by the Department of Defense.  This movie is a celebration of all those kills and never discusses the moral cost of killing so many people.

The movie, lacking pathos and insight, is based on Chris Kyle’s bloodthirsty, unapologetic, zero regret, autobiography American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.  The very fact that it is an achievement worth celebrating really shows how far down the rabbit hole Americans truly are.  This marksman perched himself of a roof and picked off ‘the evildoers’ one by one.  He became known as the ‘Legend’ by his fellow Navy SEAL brethren and soon by most of the military forces.



Where to begin with the propaganda oozing from this six time Oscar nominated movie.  American Sniper is a commercial for going to war and killing terrorists without ever really knowing why or caring to know why for that matter.  It’s a jingoistic and xenophobic thoughtless movie that’s only wish is to hypnotize the herd-coward mentality of the American, certainly more in the conservative mid section, people into unconditionally believing in its message of blind patriotism.  Socrates warned his fellow Athenians about sheepishly going alone with the majority and without asking yourself ‘why am I going alone with this’.  Clearly in America, Socrates’ philosophical legacy is a forgotten piece history.




American Sniper, directed quite sloppily by Eastwood, holds no responsibility for telling a story that truthfully represents the world it is depicting.  If the movie was a fantasy or a comedy, exceptions can be made, but here, if they are dealing with honor in a real world scenario, then they owe it to their audience to be as forthcoming as they can about the historical record.   Instead the so-called ‘evil terrorists’ are shaded in black and nameless, faceless as they scurry around dilapidated buildings to kill ‘American freedom’, who they would have you believe, are good by virtue for simply being Americans.

Chris Kyle, in his autobiography, had no remorse and saw ‘the enemy as savages and despicably evil’ also saying his only regret was that ‘he didn’t kill more of them’, that he had ‘fun’ killing and that ‘if you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and there male, shoot’em.  Kill every male you see’.  This is the great American Hero this movie is celebrating.  They should all be ashamed of themselves but the problem here is the filmmakers and actors are drinking the same FOX News, patriotic we-are-the-greatest-country-in-the-world bullshit as well.  Chris Kyle, a man with no imagination to speak of, was a sociopath that became a cardboard cut-out poster boy for the American Military Petroleum Complex.  He was trained to shoot the enemy so they could win a war that they started in the first place.  These so-called savages would have been just fine if the mass of the military power of the United States didn’t invade them for unsubstantiated reasons so they can take the poor country’s resources, specifically the oil.

There is no doubt that people in various parts of the world are subjected to horrible living conditions.  There are people living under strict religious and governmental dictatorships, but to say that the world power is there to help them and instead is actually there to rob them is the most immoral of deceptions.  Even the poor soldiers, along with Chris Kyle, don’t even know better because they were born into the lie of the American Dream, and that God is on their side so they must be right in this fight for liberty and freedom.

American Sniper is a cowardly boring movie.  It’s praying on the stupidity/patriotism of its simplistic audience rather than challenging them like much superior films like Three Kings and The Thin Red Line or even Hurt Locker for that matter.  Sadly a movie like American Sniper exists and is taken seriously by backward thinking Americans because these same people are unable to accept that the war in Iraq was a failure, it allows them to ignore the consequences of invading a country with no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in 9/11.  Their fabricated livelihood is hinged on this massive lie that American is great and anything she does is in the spirit of the Christian God.  Otherwise they would have to except they are culpable for electing a government that is responsible for massive war crimes.  More Iraqi people were killed during the American invasion, starting in 2003 then Saddam Hussein was allegedly responsible for.


Like Zero Dark Thirty, but much worse, American Sniper turns Chris Kyle, a dehumanizing racist murderer, into a hero and the war in the Middle East into a virtuous fight for freedom to suit its own ideology.  Zero Dark Thirty was a convoluted mess about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden while justifying torture methods to get him, which have proven to yield little to no intelligence but don’t tell that to lawyers vindicating it to the President’s ear.  That film come off as complicated so all the simple people couldn’t keep up and then wrapped it’s story, ‘based on true events’ apparently, by capturing and killing the alleged mastermind of 9/11.


Like religion, American Sniper and movies like it have a purpose and that purpose is to string the lie along, so those who rule over us all can get away with murder by calling it an act of righteousness.  This movie transmogrifies real life into propagandized entertainment; it codifies truth to shape its narrative but ultimately at the expense of objectivity.  The problem is the movie remains one-sided throughout and leaves a message of morality and justification as it runs its credits.  The movie doesn’t bore us with all the political ramifications of invading a foreign land, or that many of those so-called terrorists are simply defending their land and their families.  The movie is quite clearly scared to death at the possibility of humanizing the Iraqis, people that have dreams for the best life possible for themselves and their families, not unlike any other place in the world.

American Sniper and the marksman on the trigger side of its crosshairs see the world in demarcated terms of good and evil.  The problem is the main character and the movie never see, and actually never want to, is the relativity of good and evil.  They turn their murderous cause into a virtue and then call it a 'true story' about the fight for freedom for the greatest nation on the planet.

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” 
- George W. Bush


Thursday 15 January 2015

2015 Oscar Nominations: Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel both Score High with 9 Nominations Each

By Christopher Barr POSTED ON JANUARY 15, 2015



What happened with The Lego Movie for the love of god?  The 87th Academy Awards, with only white actor nominations, ignoring female writers and filmmakers, have been revealed with a number of expected nominees, some snubs, some surprises and a lack of diversity.  Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel lead the race with 9 nominations, followed by The Imitation Game with eight, and American Sniper and Boyhood with both six.

In terms of surprises, the biggest has to be Marion Cotillard for best actress and the much welcomed Laura Dern for best supporting actress for Wild.  The biggest shocker was that the quite original The Lego Movie wasn't nominated for best animation feature, a category it deserved to win let alone get a nomination.  This omission is truly baffling to the point of conspiracy, who had it out bad for this wonderfully fresh and fun animated film?  David Oyelowo's work in Selma as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the best performances all year and was deserving of a nomination.  Gone Girl pretty well got shut out, especially in the directing and adapted screenplay categories, Gillian Flynn was considered a lock for adapting her own novel, it was nice to see Inherent Vice get Paul Thomas Anderson a nomination for adapted screenplay.  Jennifer Aniston was expected to get recognized for her work in Cake but was left out.  This I must say I'm not that surprised about simply because the best actress category is way too crowded as it is with talent.

I was a bit surprised that American Sniper, which seemed out the blue, got six nods and Nightcrawler got pretty well left out.  I was surprised that Bennett Miller was nominated for best director for Foxcatcher, a film not nominated for Best Picture and Ava DuVernay wasn't nominated for directing Selma.  I was hoping that Rene Russo was going to make the cut in the best supporting actress category for her wonderful work in Nightcrawler.  It was nice to see the director and writer of Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy get a nomination for original screenplay but Jake Gyllenhaal not getting nominated is a bit surprising, seeings his performance could be easily listed as one of the great performances of the decade so far.  I'm glad that CITIZENFOUR got its much deserved nomination but what happened to the wonderful doc on the fascinating life of the late great film critic Roger Ebert, Life Itself?  

The Oscars will be telecast live on ABC, Sunday February 22nd.   
birdman-michael-keaton

BEST PICTURE
American Sniper
Birdman  Should Win
Boyhood  Will Win
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

BEST DIRECTOR
Wes Anderson – The Grand Budapest Hotel
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu – Birdman  Should Win - Will Win
Richard Linklater – Boyhood
Bennett Miller – Foxcatcher
Morten Tyldum – The Imitation Game

BEST ACTOR
Steve Carell – Foxcatcher
Bradley Cooper – American Sniper
Benedict Cumberbatch – The Imitation Game
Michael Keaton – Birdman  Should Win


Eddie Redmayne – The Theory of Everything  Will Win

BEST ACTRESS
Marion Cotillard – Two Days, One Night
Felicity Jones – The Theory of Everything
Julianne Moore – Still Alice  Will Win
Rosamund Pike – Gone Girl  Could Win
Reese Witherspoon – Wild

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Robert Duvall – The Judge
Ethan Hawke – Boyhood
Edward Norton – Birdman
Mark Ruffalo – Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons – Whiplash  Should Win - Will Win

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Patricia Arquette – Boyhood  Will Win
Laura Dern – Wild
Keira Knightley – The Imitation Game
Emma Stone – Birdman
Meryl Streep – Into the Woods
inherent-vice-joaquin-phoenix-3
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
American Sniper – Jason Hall
The Imitation Game – Graham Moore  Could Win
Whiplash – Damien Chazelle
Inherent Vice – Paul Thomas Anderson  Should Win

The Theory of Everything – Anthony McCarten

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Birdman – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo  Should Win - Will Win
Boyhood – Richard Linklater
Foxcatcher – E. Max Frye, Dan Futterman
The Grand Budapest Hotel – Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness
Nightcrawler – Dan Gilroy

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Ida (Poland)
Leviathan (Russia)  Will Win
Tangerines (Estonia)
Timbuktu (Mauritania)
Wild Tales (Argentina)
citizenfour-edward-snowden

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
CITIZENFOUR  Should Win - Will Win
Finding Vivian Maier
Last Days in Vietnam
The Salt of the Earth
Virunga

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Big Hero 6
The Boxtrolls
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Song of the Sea
The Tale of Princess Kaguya

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
The Grand Budapest Hotel  Should Win
The Imitation Game
Interstellar
Into the Woods
Mr. Turner

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Birdman – Emmanuel Lubezki  Should Win - Will Win
The Grand Budapest Hotel – Robert D. Yeoman
Ida – Ryszard Lenczweski, Lukasz Zal
Mr. Turner – Dick Pope
Unbroken – Roger Deakins

BEST FILM EDITING
American Sniper
Boyhood  Will Win
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Whiplash

guardians-of-the-galaxy-nebulaBEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

Foxcatcher
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Guardians of the Galaxy  Could Win

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
The Grand Budapest Hotel  Should Win
Inherent Vice
Into the Woods
Maleficent
Mr. Turner

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Grand Budapest Hotel – Alexandre Desplat
The Imitation Game – Alexandre Desplat
Interstellar – Hans Zimmer  Could Win
Mr. Turner - Gary Yershon
The Theory of Everything – Johann Johannsson

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Begin Again – “Lost Stars”  Will Win
Beyond the Lights – “Grateful”
Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me – “I’m Not Gonna Miss You”
The LEGO Movie – “Everything Is Awesome”  Could Win
Glory – “Selma”

dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-yellBEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Guardians of the Galaxy
Interstellar  Should Win - Will Win
X-Men: Days of Future Past

BEST SOUND EDITING
American Sniper
Birdman
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Interstellar  Should Win - Will Win
Unbroken

BEST SOUND MIXING
American Sniper
Birdman
Interstellar  Should Win - Will Win
Unbroken
Whiplash

BEST SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)
The Bigger Picture
The Damn Keeper
Feast
interstellar-wes-bentley-anne-hathawayMe and My Moulton

Single Life

BEST SHORT FILM (LIVE-ACTION)
Aya
Boogalo and Graham
Butter Lamp
Parvaneh
The Phone Call

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
Joanna
Our Curse
The Reaper
White Earth

neil-patrick-harris-oscars