Motto

i am always scared of simple things, and this is so simple that it freaks me out!

Thanks to all the wonderful people i met at The Vancouver International Film Festival! You all inspire me in this reality and in a creative sense!

Happy Belated (Wish i Knew Ya)

It was John Lennon's birthday on October 9th. I was reminded of this song by having the iPod in my car set on 'random/shuffle' (of all 5417 songs on it) on that exact date. This song came on while driving home in the rain:

As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and class less and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

If you want to be a hero well just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

Friday Marathon

Sunday Marathon

VIFF FTW

[dis/sect] - NOT 'disect' (<-this is not a word in the english language)

[recur] - NOT 'reoccur' (see above!)


brought to you by Ian Miller

(40ish year old married volunteer, that reads every night and his father got him the Oxford dictionary that he keep by the bedside)

epic weekend coming up!

SATURDAY (above) and SUNDAY (blunts+viff+tacos)

True G.O.A.T.

Alexander Karelin Story from Sports Illustrated May 13, 1991

A Bruiser and a Thinker: Soviet Greco-Roman wrestler Alexander Karelin is a rare combination of massive physique and imposing intellect
by Nicholas Dawidoff

Sports Illustrated
May 13, 1991

During and early afternoon in Pittsburgh, Alexander Karelin, 23 years old and the most dominating wrestler in the world, is relaxing on a hotel-lobby couch. It is a substantial piece of furniture, and that is a good thing; the 6 ft. 3 in. Karelin's 290 pounds demand it. He has come to Pennsylvania from the Soviet Union for an exhibition match. Nobody passing through the lobby is paying him much attention. "Men of my size are usually not flexible," says Karelin. A mischievous expression spreads across the vast plain of his face.
He rises and walks to a chandelier hanging perhaps eight feet above the floor. Lifting his right leg straight up above his head, he gives the chandelier a slight nudge with his size-15 sneaker. Now everyone has noticed him. "What's that man doing?" a woman screams. Karelin pads back to the couch, wiggles both of the ears that protrude like funnels from the sides of his head, looks up at the chandelier swinging gently back and forth, and grins like a schoolboy.

"I didn't like myself before I began wrestling," he says later over a meal of pizza (nine slices) and apple juice (six large glasses). "Wrestling helped

me to be at ease. Occasionally, I still wish for the privacy of being a little fellow nobody sees. Teenagers sneer, 'Look at this guy! The legs! The ears!' And older people see my face and say, 'My god! Look, quick! A criminal!' "

Karelin sighs, uncrossing his mammoth legs. "I'm also a favorite of drunkards and others who seek to prove their strength by confronting me," he says. "Of course, I am grateful for my strength. It makes me self-sufficient. When I bought a refrigerator, I carried it myself up the stairs to my apartment on the eighth floor. Always, though, I am conscious that I am not a typical man. I can win a wrestling competition with a decent enough score, but because I am not typical, I must win in atypical ways."

For wrestlers, the world championships, which are held in non-Olympic years, are as prestigious as the Olympics. Taking his place among the family of Soviet heavyweight champions -- a venerable lineage as prized as beluga caviar -- Karelin was the Greco-Roman gold medalist at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and was first again at the '89 world championships in Martigny-Ville, Switzerland. But it was last October, at the world championships in Rome, that Karelin gave a performance of such strength and skill that he became that dearest of commodities in a land of scarcity. Karelin became a Russian folk hero.

The world championships were a three-day double-elimination tournament. In his first match, Karelin faced Bulgaria's Rangel Gerovsky, a canny opponent whom he had barely beaten in the '88 Olympic finals. Karelin was nervous. Yet once the five-minute bout began, things proceeded as they always do for Karelin, who has never lost in international competition (including last weekend's European Championships in Aschaffenburg, Germany). He quickly built a 6-0 lead, and then with slightly more than a minute gone, he locked Gerovsky's right arm in a bar and drove it against the Bulgarian's shoulder.

Despite his size, Karelin's appearance is deceptive. His complexion is milky and his limbs don't have exceptional definition. "I think of him as a cougar," says Jeff Blatnick of Niskayuma, N.Y., the 1984 Greco-Roman superheavyweight Olympic gold medalist, who was thrashed by Karelin in an international meet three years later. "A cougar looks calm, maybe even a little fat, until he's ready to attack. Then everything ripples."
Karelin is so strong that the muscles in his legs and arms bulge to slightly obscene proportions when they are driving a man to his back. At this they are most effective. Gerovsky was pinned at 1:35.

Over the next couple of days, Karelin made a mockery of the tournament. Slawomir Zrobek of Poland was pinned in 1:07, Andrew Borodow of Canada in 1:21. Hidenori Nara of Japan lasted only 26 seconds, and Hungary's hulking Laszlo Klauz descended with a thud at 2:58. Beyond dispatching these opponents with alarming haste, Karelin was also dulling their will. In truth, they felt fear, and what they feared in particular was the move that has come to personify Karelin. His reverse body lift sets him apart from other heavyweights for two reasons: Nobody else can do it, and nobody can stop it.

In Greco-Roman wrestling, a competitor may not attack his opponent's legs, as is permissible in freestyle wrestling. Confined to upper-body grappling, Greco-Roman emphasizes throws and encourages body slams. The reverse body lift has long been employed by lightweight Greco-Roman wrestlers but was not considered a viable ploy for a heavyweight. "Normally, for a heavyweight, it's simple to defend," says Blatnick. "People who weigh 280 pounds just don't get lifted that way."
Karelin begins the move on his knees, alongside the hips and facing the feet of his opponent, who is lying prone on the mat. He reaches across, joining his hands around the man's hips, and hoists. After raising his opponent off the mat with his arms, he gathers his legs below, giving himself the leverage to complete the lift. When Karelin reaches his feet, the two wrestlers resemble a plus sign, with the opponent held snug at Karelin's hip, facedown and parallel to the mat. Then Karelin arches and hurls the unlucky man head over heels onto his back. Severe impact. Finally, Karelin descends onto the man's body. More impact. At the least it is five points for Karelin. At worst, broken bones or a crushed face for his opponent.

"When it happened to me, every hair on the back of my neck raised up," says Blatnick. "I was doing everything humanly possible to prevent him from lifting me off the mat. I weighed 265 pounds. I was in good shape. I was scared -- intense fear. I

don't like flying through the air like that. I kept thinking, 'Don't get hurt. Don't get hurt.' With him, it's almost a victory if you don't get thrown."

That was the prevailing feeling in Rome. In his early matches, Karelin used arm bars, half nelsons and gut wrenches, but never the reverse body lift. Each time he tried it, his opponents turned off their stomachs toward Karelin. That move effectively countered the lift, but in doing so his opponents also exposed their shoulders. Karelin had only to flick them onto their backs for the pin. Mike Houck, the U.S. Greco-Roman team coach, was observing this, aghast. "I was watching top heavyweights roll over for him instead of getting lifted," says Houck. "They get to a point where they are so totally dominated that that's it."

In the final, Karelin faced a former world champion, Sweden's Tomas Johansson, who was a bronze medalist in the 1988 Olympics. From the start, Johansson was less than enthusiastic about the day's business. "I do not like to seem immodest," says Karelin. "But if I am asked, I must be truthful. Yes, I see fear in the eyes of most of my opponents. In the match, Johansson tried hard to resist it, and when he couldn't, he allowed himself to be pinned rather than submit to the lift. This move not only involves losing points, it involves losi

ng face. Tomas, he did not want to fly."

Johansson landed on his back for good at 2:50. Not only had Karelin pinned all of his opponents but he also had gone through an entire world championships without giving up a point. Almost unheard

of. Afte

rward, as the Palazetto resounded with glee, Karelin removed the straps of his singlet, tucked them into his waist and cheerfully struck a series of bare-chested poses of the sort that most Italians see only when they visit Michelangelo's David in Florence. "Sometimes we look at him and we ourselves are surprised," says the Soviets' Arsen Fadzaev, a six-time freestyle world champion. "He's like a statue."

With those achievements comes suspicion. Although Karelin has passed every drug test he has taken, some skeptics insist that such a physique must have been created with steroids. Others speculat

e that he owes his size to growth hormones. The latter group has given Karelin one of his many nicknames: the Experiment.

"It's normal," says Karelin. "It's human nature to be jealous when somebody is very successful. I've been through every single official doping control. Even when I don't have to, I volunteer because nobody believes I'm a natural man."

"In this respect, the wrestler's grapevine is pretty reliable," says USA Wrestling associate director Greg Strobel. "Nothing's been said about him."

"He is simply

unique," says a Soviet Greco-Roman coach, Vichislav Mironov. "To look at him people say, 'Oh sure, we know what they did to him.' Wrong! He is from Siberia and that's important. They grow them like that there sometimes. The harsh climate endows people with special strengths."

Novosibirsk, 1,750 miles east of Moscow, is an industrial city of 1.4 million people who endure wintertime temperatures as low as -50 degrees F. For months its snow-covered sidewalks are traversed by men and women swathed to anonymity in wools and furs. Days are short and grim. Gray buildings line streets that eventually give way to the endless pine forests that long ago gave this brooding part of the world its name: Siberia, the Sleeping Land. Dostoyevsky put it differently. He called Siberia The House of the Dead. Today, within some of those gray buildings are more than 100 universities and research centers, an opera house admired internationally for its architecture and its programs, a ballet company and a circus.

"Even in our country they say that Siberia is bears and nothing else," says Karelin. "But in Siberia we have a different perspective. Winter is the best time of year in Novosibirsk. Red happy faces. Children on skates or sleighs. The whole city is under a blanket of snow with the sprinkled crystals on top shining the light of a thousand colors. My great-grandparents came to Siberia against their will. Before and after the Revolution, progressive intellectual people were sent there. Novosibirsk is no ordinary Russian city. It's full of very intelligent aristocratic people. Look at me!" He laughs.

While Karelin's forebears were displaced intellectuals, his parents have struggled along with the rest of the proletariat. His 5 ft. 7 in. father, Alexander, is a truck driver, and his mother, 5 ft. 6 1/2 in. Zineida, worked for many years in an office. Long before her only son was born, Zineida knew he would be an unusual man. Karelin weighed 15 pounds at birth.

As a child, young Alexander hunted fox and sable on skis, and swam for a local club. More than once, wrestling coaches spotted him, slouched self-consciously but still looming over his peers, and asked him to give their sport a try. But not until he was 13 years old -- and already taller than his father -- was Karelin tempted. He did not enjoy wrestling at first, and was thinking of quitting when he met Victor Kusnetzov.

"I was then a big boy and nothing else," says Karelin. "Two straight lines -- no muscle. I could do one pull-up. That coach gave me affection for wrestling."

"I singled him out right away," says Kusnetzov, the only coach Karelin has ever had. "You don't meet many boys of that stature."

At 15, Karelin was competing in a junior tournament when his right leg snapped. It was March 8, International Woman's Day in the U.S.S.R., and his mother was in the countryside. She hurried to the hospital. "She cried, she raged as only Russian women can," says Karelin. "She burned my wrestling uniform and insisted I quit. But as I recovered, I had this feeling that I could not leave a sport to which I'd given my leg."

Because his leg was useless for some time, Karelin spent many hours training in an old wooden rowboat on a nearby lake. His soft palms blistered and bled on the oars. "Sometimes I'd wonder why I was there and think of leaving," says Karelin. "It's so romantic on that lake, and I'd be thinking of girls."

As his leg healed, Karelin was also refurbishing his spirit. He became a voracious reader of Turgenev, Strindberg, Dreiser, Marx (who irritated him) and, his favorite, the brilliant satirist Mikhail Bulgakov. He listened to opera and ballet music, especially Mussorgsky and Stravinsky, and spent hours with the poems of the peasant genius Sergei Esenin. He began to write his own verses and to think of his sport in more elevated terms.

"Wrestling's like a poem," says Karelin. "Everybody's reciting the same thing, but each thinks about it differently. How each line or each motion should be interpreted is entirely personal. Perhaps nobody will believe this but a wrestler. Sometimes I have dreams of moves nobody's done before. I awaken and try to master them. Then I go to tournaments and win with that move. Sometimes those dreams are utterly fantastic. Things nobody can do. It was this way with the reverse lift."

A year after his injury, his body sturdy as a pine stump, Karelin went back to wrestling. Everything came quickly. In 1986, he lost only once, 1-0, to the world champion, 6 ft. 5 in., 280-pound Igor Rostorotsky. The next year he was the world junior champion and was named to the Soviet national team, where he became a candidate for the Olympic Greco-Roman superheavyweight berth.

The idea of defeating Rostorotsky consumed him. Each morning Karelin would rise, drink half a gallon of milk and leave the house for runs through the Siberian forest. Often he ran for two hours in thigh-deep snow. "Then you are wet with sweat and snow and thoroughly exhausted," says Karelin. "You come home, crawl into bed and sleep soundly. This is typical Siberian fun."

For months he and Kusnetzov honed the reverse body lift. Karelin tried it for the first time at a tournament in Canada, and soon it was part of his repertoire. "It was frightening when I used it," he says. "Americans are such emotional people. They seemed not to believe I was real."

Back in the U.S.S.R., after several victories over Rostorotsky, the Soviet sports committee chose Karelin for the '88 Olympic team. In Seoul he was in for a surprise. The Soviet team captains select the person who will bear the flag and lead them and their fellow Olympians in the Games' opening ceremony. This lofty honor is usually accorded to a veteran performer. Among the athletes the captains discussed in a meeting in South Korea were swimmer Vladimir Salnikov and hammer thrower Yury Sedykh. Then wrestling captain Mikhail Mamiashvili raised his hand. "We have somebody here who is certain to be a gold medalist," said Mamiashvili. "Though he has not yet been a champion, I promise you Alexander Karelin will win."

Karelin was chosen, and he proved Mamiashvili right. He faced difficulties only twice in Seoul. When the subtleties of laundry proved elusive, the larger members of the Soviet women's volleyball team offered to do it, all but adopting him in the process. Then, in the superheavyweight final, behind by a point to Gerovski with only 30 seconds left, Karelin reverse-body-lifted him for the gold. He has not been seriously tested since.

Karelin's impassive face and behemoth build belie his character. He does an impeccable imitation of Stravinsky's clown Petrouchka, has been called Sasha (short for Alexander) all his life and can do a passable jitterbug. "We were at a party," recalls Mironov, "and through the night nobody invited him to dance. They all thought he'd be a big lug. One woman finally did, and he was the best dancer out there. He knows music; he moves fluidly, gracefully. Everyone was astonished. With his face you'd think children would fear him. But Sasha has children around him everywhere he goes. Sometimes 15 pile onto him at a time."

When Karelin extends his arms, they measure seven feet from hand to hand, and he is agile enough to do splits and backflips. So there are rumors that he may seek a new challenge, perhaps freestyle wrestling or even American football. Freestyle is far more popular than Greco-Roman in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and some wrestling observers fear that the International Olympic Committee may dispense with Greco-Roman. "He may never show his full potential in Greco-Roman because he may never be truly tested," says America's Duane Koslowski, who lost to Karelin in Seoul. "He could make millions in the movies, and makeup wouldn't even be necessary."

Karelin isn't impressed. "A regular Russian 23-year-old likes vodka, women and cards," he says. "I'm more practical than that. I want to look into one thing and be the best at that. Greco-Roman is an original Olympic sport. I like the idea of being a classical man, of belonging to a classical tradition in music, painting and literature."



Karelin is indeed a practical man. He has an undergraduate degree in automotive mechanics and is pursuing a masters in education. As with many other Soviet athletes, his successes have brought him privileges. He commands a considerable salary, which provides for his own apartment -- a rarity in the U.S.S.R. -- and two cars, rarer still, and he has met Mikhail Gorbachev. Much as he enjoys these perks, what he savors most is the time for reflection that financial security affords him.

"This is a highly talented man," says Larisa Mason, a graduate of Leningrad State University who lives in Pittsburgh, where she served as Karelin's interpreter during his visit. "His knowledge and his feeling for poetry, literature and music are incredible. He is witty, full of puns and constantly embellishing his language with passages from books and music. And he is a big teddy bear, too."

Karelin reads, he says, "to know about people," particularly the Soviet people. Tolstoy, he says, "is not relevant to Soviet life today," so he doesn't read him much. Solzhenitsyn, whose novels are filled with brutal critiques of Soviet human rights atrocities, is more to his liking.

"Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is an interesting book," says Karelin. "The only problem I had with it is that a lot inside me was ruined by trusting in the society where I live. After reading this, I had nothing left. I wondered, Are there no white spots in our history, only black? My whole country is in perpetual funeral."

Of the many writers he loves, the mordant Bulgakov -- "He is sarcastic but his outlook is not bleak; he is like me," says Karelin -- and the poet Esenin seem to touch him most deeply. Esenin was briefly married to the American dancer Isadora Duncan and later wed a granddaughter of Tolstoy's. Despairing at Russia's direction after the Revolution, he became an alcoholic. In 1925, at age 30, Esenin slit his wrists in a hotel, wrote a final poem in his own blood and then hanged himself. "I love my home," he once wrote. "I love so much, so very much. Gnawed as it is with griefs willow-rust."

There has been talk that Karelin, like Sergei Beloglazov, the six-time world champion and two-time Olympic champion bantamweight who now coaches at Lehigh, will one day leave the U.S.S.R., never to return. Others conjecture that he will soon move west from Siberia to a more cosmopolitan Soviet city (he now spends a good deal of time in the Black Sea port of Alushta, near the Spartak training center). However, both suggestions are a misreading of Karelin. Like Bulgakov and Esenin, he is foremost a patriot, a man whose every athletic endeavor is a demonstration of pride in and affection for the people, if not the government, of his homeland.

That homeland is not a happy place these days. The word Gorbachev has used is razval, which means disintegration, collapse. It is, as Bulgakov wrote of 1918 Russia, "A time and a place of suffocating uncertainty." Until a year ago, Karelin's mother was a Communist Party member. Her son forced her to resign.

"I don't believe in socialism as is," he says. "I can't. I believe in myself and the people around me. I'm surprised the Soviet people are as optimistic as they are, after what they've been through. When I return there from the U.S. or Europe, it's very depressing, but it's also inspiring to see these people who are resilient despite the constant pressure of life. The situation gets worse and worse and worse and they don't break. They endure. I want to help these people. I don't think about a political career yet, but perhaps I'll grow into that."

Karelin's best friend is a tiny man named Kalunia, who grew up as an orphan in Novosibirsk. "The strongest man is Kalunia, whose gentleness and consideration are as pure as life," says Karelin. Not long ago Karelin visited the orphanage where Kalunia was raised. In his hand Karelin carried some chocolate. When the door was opened, he found the small building crammed with 160 children, all delighted to see the famous wrestler. He put the candy behind his back, embarrassed.

"I didn't want to be the rich man spreading trinkets," he says. After talking with the director of the orphanage, Karelin backed out of the building. Later that day he returned, with money. The director wept.

"When I'm on the first-place pedestal and they raise the Soviet flag, I don't see the Soviet government behind the flag," he says. "I don't hear the system when they play the national anthem. My heart responds because I'm thinking about the people who raised me, the people who love me and whom I love. People ask me, Why don't you move from Siberia? There's something about that place. It's where my heart is. I don't want to be anywhere else."

AJs, Love @ 1st sight

I have never bought Air Jordans nor owned any in my life.

When i saw these i fell in love with the shoe for the first time!

Probably will never even get them, if i do i won't wear them!

Jordan Spizike Black Stealth

"Religions?"

1. Theravada Buddhism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (99%)
3. Secular Humanism (97%)
4. Liberal Quakers (87%)
5. Nontheist (73%)
6. Mahayana Buddhism (69%)

FIBA WC 2010 (Turkey)

Just finished watching one of the greatest basketball games i ever saw! It was the match up of Turkey vs Serbia. The older i get the more i start to realize how important strategy and intelligence is of an advantage in sports. Teams played to win. Coaches coached. All players played their roles and their strengths to their advantage vs the opposition.

The crown was fantastic! This was the all time biggest basketball game of Turkey history. In semifinals of World Championships! Versus tough young Serbian team! Winner plays Team USA in the Finals! On Home turf - in Istanbul, Turkey!!!

p.s.

he is a great player with flair, control and cold blood running through his veins:

Milos Teodosic

Titleslav

Blogislav. Thisisslav. Funislav. Atislav Mikeyslav.

Personal Inception

i can be what ever i want to be!

what i am proud of being now.

i should be proud of what i will become

as i am proud of what ever i am right now.

its about me and my perception of life.

'instituo-ui-utum iam'

Tour De Vancouver Stage 4

The Last M. by N.S.

My personal most anticipated movie of this summer/year will be skipped for probably the whole eternity of my life.

Yes, life is that short!

After some research i decided to completely skip the Mr.Night-Shilamaya-Yo-Mama-Is-A Piranyah's movie and let those few hours of my saved life be filled by "Avatar: The Air Bender" Tv Series instead!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417299/

Youth is Beauty

We're only young and naive still

We require certain skills

The mood it changes like the wind

Hard to control when it begins

The bittersweet between my teeth

Trying to find the in-betweens

Fall back in love eventually

Yeah yeah yeah yeah

Can't help myself but count the flaws

Claw my way out through these walls

One temporary escape

Feel it start to permeate

We lie beneath the stars at night

Our hands gripping each other tight

You keep my secrets hope to die

Promises, swear them to the sky

The bittersweet between my teeth

Trying to find the in-betweens

Fall back in love eventually

Yeah yeah yeah yeah

As it withers

Brittle it shakes

Can you whisper

As it crumbles and breaks

As you shiver

Count up all your mistakes

Pair of forgivers

Let go before it's too late

Can you whisper

Can you whisper

Can you whisper

Can you whisper

The bittersweet between my teeth

Trying to find the in-betweens

Fall back in love eventually

Yeah yeah yeah yeah

The bittersweet between my teeth

Trying to find the in-betweens

Fall back in love eventually

Yeah yeah yeah yeah

CLaarkamp1287
1 year ago 17 "likes"
" It's sad that this is probably one of the five best films ever made and 99.999999999...% of the world's population will never watch it because of its run time.

Oh well, that doesn't stop me from making an effort to pimp this movie out as much as I can so I can finally convince someone to watch it. People don't know what they're missing. "

Vancouver State of Mind

a Big Thanks to Joseph Lin for doing the work of finding this:

VANCOUVER - (Olympic State Of Mind) Noble & B.Diamond Ft. Various Artists from Hitstape.com on Vimeo.

Toni Sabas 5 серпня о 1:27

i thought of you guys when thinking of this.

is there anywhere a "Vancouver State of Mind" song?
first album i ever got was Ilmatic by Nas. Been listening to a ton of him lately. Realize how beautiful 604 is. You guys agree with me i assume.

but yeah

Vancouver State of Mind???

The BOOM a.k.a. The Movie: I N C E P T I O N

Inception: 9.2/10 bananas

CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!

NEVER WAKE UP: THE MEANING AND SECRET OF INCEPTION

• By Devin Faraci
• Published 07/19/2010
• The Devin's Advocate

This entire article is a major spoiler for Inception. Please do not read it until you've experienced Christopher Nolan's film for yourself.

Every single moment of Inception is a dream. I think that in a couple of years this will become the accepted reading of the film, and differing interpretations will have to be skillfully argued to be even remotely considered. The film makes this clear, and it never holds back the truth from audiences. Some find this idea to be narratively repugnant, since they think that a movie where everything is a dream is a movie without stakes, a movie where the audience is wasting their time.

Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he's ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.

I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn't an extractor. He can't go into other people's dreams. He isn't on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he's being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.

She asks him that in a scene that we all know is a dream, but Inception lets us in on this elsewhere. Michael Caine's character implores Cobb to return to reality, to wake up. During the chase in Mombasa, Cobb tries to escape down an alleyway, and the two buildings between which he's running begin closing in on him - a classic anxiety dream moment. When he finally pulls himself free he finds Ken Watanabe's character waiting for him, against all logic. Except dream logic.

Much is made in the film about totems, items unique to dreamers that can be used to tell when someone is actually awake or asleep. Cobb's totem is a top, which spins endlessly when he's asleep, and the fact that the top stops spinning at many points in the film is claimed by some to be evidence that Cobb is awake during those scenes. The problem here is that the top wasn't always Cobb's totem - he got it from his wife, who killed herself because she believed that they were still living in a dream. There's more than a slim chance that she's right - note that when Cobb remembers her suicide she is, bizarrely, sitting on a ledge opposite the room they rented. You could do the logical gymnastics required to claim that Mal simply rented another room across the alleyway, but the more realistic notion here is that it's a dream, with the gap between the two lovers being a metaphorical one made literal. When Mal jumps she leaves behind the top, and if she was right about the world being a dream, the fact that it spins or doesn't spin is meaningless. It's a dream construct anyway. There's no way to use the top as a proof of reality.

Watching the film with this eye you can see the dream logic unfolding. As is said in the movie, dreams seem real in the moment and it's only when you've woken up that things seem strange. The film's 'reality' sequences are filled with moments that, on retrospect, seem strange or unlikely or unexplained. Even the basics of the dream sharing technology is unbelievably vague, and I don't think that's just because Nolan wants to keep things streamlined. It's because Cobb's unconscious mind is filling it in as he goes along.

There's more, but I would have to watch the film again with a notebook to get all the evidence (all of it in plain sight). The end seems without a doubt to be a dream - from the dreamy way the film is shot and edited once Cobb wakes up on the plane all the way through to him coming home to find his two kids in the exact position and in the exact same clothes that he kept remembering them, it doesn't matter if the top falls, Cobb is dreaming.

That Cobb is dreaming and still finds his catharsis (that he can now look at the face of his kids) is the point. It's important to realize that Inception is a not very thinly-veiled autobiographical look at how Nolan works. In a recent red carpet interview, Leonardo DiCaprio - who was important in helping Nolan get the script to the final stages - compares the movie not to The Matrix or some other mindfuck movie but Fellini's 8 1/2. This is probably the second most telling thing DiCaprio said during the publicity tour for the film, with the first being that he based Cobb on Nolan. 8 1/2 is totally autobiographical for Fellini, and it's all about an Italian director trying to overcome his block and make a movie (a science fiction movie, even). It's a film about filmmaking, and so is Inception.

The heist team quite neatly maps to major players in a film production. Cobb is the director while Arthur, the guy who does the research and who sets up the places to sleep, is the producer. Ariadne, the dream architect, is the screenwriter - she creates the world that will be entered. Eames is the actor (this is so obvious that the character sits at an old fashioned mirrored vanity, the type which stage actors would use). Yusuf is the technical guy; remember, the Oscar come from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and it requires a good number of technically minded people to get a movie off the ground. Nolan himself more or less explains this in the latest issue of Film Comment, saying 'There are a lot of striking similarities [between what the team does and the putting on of a major Hollywood movie]. When for instance the team is out on the street they've created, surveying it, that's really identical with what we do on tech scouts before we shoot.'

That leaves two key figures. Saito is the money guy, the big corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game. And Fischer, the mark, is the audience. Cobb, as a director, takes Fischer through an engaging, stimulating and exciting journey, one that leads him to an understanding about himself. Cobb is the big time movie director (or rather the best version of that - certainly not a Michael Bay) who brings the action, who brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the humanity and the emotion.

The movies-as-dreams aspect is part of why Inception keeps the dreams so grounded. In the film it's explained that playing with the dream too much alerts the dreamer to the falseness around him; this is just another version of the suspension of disbelief upon which all films hinge. As soon as the audience is pulled out of the movie by some element - an implausible scene, a ludicrous line, a poor performance - it's possible that the cinematic dream spell is broken completely, and they're lost.

As a great director, Cobb is also a great artist, which means that even when he's creating a dream about snowmobile chases, he's bringing something of himself into it. That's Mal. It's the auterist impulse, the need to bring your own interests, obsessions and issues into a movie. It's what the best directors do. It's very telling that Nolan sees this as kind of a problem; I suspect another filmmaker might have cast Mal as the special element that makes Cobb so successful.

Inception is such a big deal because it's what great movies strive to do. You walk out of a great film changed, with new ideas planted in your head, with your neural networks subtly rewired by what you've just seen. On a meta level Inception itself does this, with audiences leaving the theater buzzing about the way it made them feel and perceive. New ideas, new thoughts, new points of view are more lasting a souvenir of a great movie than a ticket stub.

It's possible to view Fischer, the mark, as not the audience but just as the character that is being put through the movie that is the dream. To be honest, I haven't quite solidified my thought on Fischer's place in the allegorical web, but what's important is that the breakthrough that Fischer has in the ski fortress is real. Despite the fact that his father is not there, despite the fact that the pinwheel was never by his father's bedside, the emotions that Fischer experiences are 100 percent genuine. It doesn't matter that the movie you're watching isn't a real story, that it's just highly paid people putting on a show - when a movie moves you, it truly moves you. The tears you cry during Up are totally real, even if absolutely nothing that you see on screen has ever existed in the physical world.

For Cobb there's a deeper meaning to it all. While Cobb doesn't have daddy issues (that we know of), he, like Fischer, is dealing with a loss. He's trying to come to grips with the death of his wife*; Fischer's journey reflects Cobb's while not being a complete point for point reflection. That's important for Nolan, who is making films that have personal components - that talk about things that obviously interest or concern him - but that aren't actually about him. Other filmmakers (Fellini) may make movies that are thinly veiled autobiography, but that's not what Nolan or Cobb are doing. The movies (or dreams) they're putting together reflect what they're going through but aren't easily mapped on to them. Talking to Film Comment, Nolan says he has never been to psychoanalysis. 'I think I use filmmaking for that purpose. I have a passionate relationship to what I do.'

In a lot of ways Inception is a bookend to last summer's Inglorious Basterds. In that film Quentin Tarantino celebrated the ways that cinema could change the world, while in Inception Nolan is examining the ways that cinema, the ultimate shared dream, can change an individual. The entire film is a dream, within the confines of the movie itself, but in a more meta sense it's Nolan's dream. He's dreaming Cobb, and finding his own moments of revelation and resolution, just as Cobb is dreaming Fischer and finding his own catharsis and change.

The whole film being a dream isn't a cop out or a waste of time, but an ultimate expression of the film's themes and meaning. It's all fake. But it's all very, very real. And that's something every single movie lover understands implicitly and completely.

* it's really worth noting that if you accept that the whole movie is a dream that Mal may not be dead. She could have just left Cobb. The mourning that he is experiencing deep inside his mind is no less real if she's alive or dead - he has still lost her.

Are you suffering from Pandorum?

Pandorum: 8.1/10 bananas At first it looks just like any other spaceship/survival sci-fi flick thats bound to have many loop holes in the story, but it a well made movie. simple yet very entertaining. Why do so many retards did not understand this film?

by ultra_pro (Sat Mar 20 2010 16:47:16) Hey guys, what the *beep* This film has NO plot holes, you simply have to listen to what is said. Sorry I am not having a dig at anyone in particular but some of the retarded posts on this board just amaze me. How can people not get this film? To clarify a bunch of points and facts about the film (in no particular order): The very first thing you see is the flight crew with Gallow hearing the msg "You're all thats left of us" and "Gods Speed" etc.... This clearly explains that the Elysion was Humanities last hope Second, Bower explains that when you wake from extended hyper sleep you experience amnesia. This explains why he has no memory of Payton or the other members of his flight crew or his wife Third: it is explained that the flight crews were supposed to rotate, 3 members monitoring the ship while the 60,000 other passengers from various walks of like (obviously the best and brightest picked to colonize Tanis) stayed in hyper sleep. The flight crews are awake for two years and then they wake up the next team who take over. So Bower and Payton (really Gallow, we find out later) rightly assume that they have been asleep for 8 years when they wake up as bowers tattoo says team 5 (bear in mind WE NEVER SEE PAYTONS TATTOO Until he regains his memory of being Gallow) When Gallow hears the msg at the start of the mission he suffers from Pandorum, kills his flight team and looses his mind believing himself to be a god because humanity is gone and he is in charge of the ship. So he awakens SOME of the passengers, kills many, sends the rest into the hold when he becomes bored and then goes BACK TO SLEEP. Meanwhile the people he woke up proceed to evolve thanks to the serum they all took that is explained to greatly increase evolution to allow the humans to adapt to Tanis quicker, and they become the monsters we see when Bower awakens. It turns out the ship had been on its way to Tanis and then stuck under the ocean on Tanis when it crashed, obviously it had no one to land or dock it and so it lay stuck for a total mission time of 900+ years. The woman explained that "This ship was designed to outlive our childrens children" in other words the Ship was incredibly well built. But after the crash the reactor began to fail, so over the course of those 800 years (the journey to Tanis was said in the film to be 120+ years) on the ocean floor, the ship began to randomly awaken or release members of the various different passenger sections because the ship was steadily loosing power and loosing the ability to maintain the 60,000 stasis pods. And because the hunter humans had become cannibals, they would hunt and kill anyone who awoke. So it would stand to reason that only the strong would survive for long on the ship; the female, the dude with the spear and the cook. Eventually Bower gets his memory back and remembers that his wife had in fact left him and that Payton was not the guy he remembered. We also realize that Payton is really Gallow, and that his Pandorum combined with the loss of memory from the 800 year hyper-sleep meant that he had forgotten who he was and his personality split until he fully regained his memory. He must have killed the real Payton, we can assume a member of Gallows flight crew attempted to wake the next crew but failed, was killed, and Gallow took his tube. So after all of this, if someone can come up with an actual plot hole that is so massive they can't work it out with reasonable assumptions based on known facts from the film or with a little thought then I'm a dutchman. I went into this film expecting another *beep* film like Event Horizon but I was pleasantly surprised, this film is one of the best scifi films from Hollywood in years and I would love to hear anyones plot holes (totally none confrontational, I was just amazed to hear people got confused watching this film)

Mr.Polanski you did it again!

The Ghost Writer : 9/10 bananas

This is a very good movie, that must be enjoyed slowly without any distractions!

Do not watch the trailer if you would like to not know much about the story!

But definitely do NOT read the post below, taken from the imdb.com forums. It's a very good explanation by someone that has read the original book and seen the movie

The Complete Truth (Absolute Spoilers!!! Total Timeline of the plot) by ngszehin (Thu Apr 29 2010 13:21:49) After watching the film yesterday, I immediately read and finished the book last night. All clues come clear now and I must say I am ought to watch the film once again to enjoy the plot. Here is my Step-by-Step theory of the plot. It is a bit long. Please let me know how you think: 1. Ruth was recruited by Emmett as a CIA agent. 2. Ruth and Emmett decided to get Adam as a puppet in British political circle because of his great acting skills and other characters. But they didn't prepare to let him know the truth all along. 3. Whether Adam joined the party at 75 or 77 (before or after meeting Ruth) is not that important. The purpose is to trick the audience that Adam was lying intentionally. 4. With the help of CIA, Ruth's always been able to provide great advices to Adam and help him to rise in the Party as a star as quick as possible, and finally became the PM. And then Ruth influenced Adam to make all the decisions in favor to the USA. 5. During the process, Adam thought the reason of his success was because of his passion and because of the smart advices from his wife, not knowing the secret behind her. 6. After stepping down, Adam was going to write his memoirs with the help of Mike. Ruth (and the CIA) originally supported that because it might extend Adam's popularity and his influences in the world's politics. 7. After some in-depth research, Mike had a theory (perhaps no proof yet) about Ruth being a CIA (perhaps after investigating the background of Emmett, or perhaps from some other means, but it doesn't really matter). He tried to tell the theory to Rycart, an enemy of Adam, but no chance (he felt that he was being watched and his phone was being tapped all the time after asking too many questions). Therefore all he could tell Rycart on the phone was that "it's all there at the beginning" (of the manuscript). 8. Since most people would interpret that as "the beginning of the book", i.e. Chapter 1, which is all about the family tree. Thus, even if the CIA overheard it on the tapped phone, they won't find anything there and won't realize that Mike had found out the truth. So he thought he would be safe for a while, and at the same time had a way to leak the story to Rycart or the world. 9. At the same time, Mike tried to expose this theory to Adam, (since they were friends, and Adam was in fact out of the loop and didn't know that he was a puppet all along, so Mike thought that it was for the sake of Adam to tell him the truth), but Adam could not believe it. They had a fight. 10. Mike planned to visit Emmett and ask for proof (perhaps to prove the case to Adam, and perhaps to Rycart) more questions. He set the GPS and go. Whether he did go or not doesn't really matter. Emmett could have known it because of the encounter or because of how Ruth overheard the fight between Adam and Mike. No matter what, Emmett sent someone to kill Mike, dumped him on the beach, as if he was drunk and drown. 10. The reason why they (the CIA) need to put the body back on the island but not anywhere else (or even simply made it disappear) because they want to trick Adam (instead of the rest of the world). If mike suddenly disappear, Adam would feel suspicious and try to dig for more. 11. However, Adam stills started to feel suspicious about the case, and so he started to stop taking Ruth advices (as told by Ruth during the dinner with The Ghost). 12. Ruth and Emmett don't know exactly what Rycart knew already. They only knew that the clues was in the manuscript. At the same time, they need to finish the book anyway, so that's why they hired Ewan (the Ghost Writer with no name) . That's the start of the story (both the film and the book). They knew that Rycart was desperate to read the manuscript, and so the lawyer deliberately gave a wrong package for Ewan to hold, so that Rycart would sent someone to steal it. That way, it would trick Rycart to waste some time, and also exposed how eager Rycart was. But the most important of all, it added the suspension for the audience. 13. They wanted Ewan to study the real manuscript with high security and find out exactly what Mike had put in there. That's why they paid such a handsome money for a job which basically just to retouch a finished original. 14. Things turn bad for Adam during that time, and Adam started to act against Ruth advices (went to Washington instead of UK). 15. Ruth stayed in the house and cried, perhaps because she really felt that it was the end of the whole operation (since Adam found out the truth and started to ignore her). But the audience and Ewan at that time thought that this was solely due to the problem of their broken marriage. 16. The following act of how Ewan and Ruth talked and ate and cried and slept together were just for Ruth to let Ewan feel that Ruth is trust worthy, and would expose to her any secret that Ewan might have found already. 17. The existence of Amelia was to trick the audience to have sympathy on Ruth and trust her more. At that stage, Ewan and the audience were still thinking that there was a secret behind Adam but not anyone else. 18. There could be a slight chance that the photos under that draw and the pre-set GPS were all set up by the CIA to lead Ewan to approach Rycart (and tapped them all the way), so that they know what exactly Mike would have told Rycart. Of course this was a bit too risky for the CIA to plan like this, so even myself don't find this convincing. 19. Ewan found Emmett and asked him questions. Emmett sent someone to kill Ewan after their conversation, because he realized that Ewan had reached the knowledge level of Mike and could no longer be kept around. 20. Ewan escaped, talked to Rycart, and then picked up by Adam. On the plane, the reason why Ewan had to tell Adam about "everything" because Rycart instructed him to do so (and try to see Adam's reaction). In the book, the conversation on the plane was taped by Ewan. But not in the film. 21. Adam felt angry after the conversation because Ewan told him that Mike sold him out to Rycart, but not because of the CIA content. He knew the theory about CIA from Mike directly anyway, just didn't know that Mike also told the theory to Rycart. And that's why he wanted to "have a meeting" with Ewan after going home. Perhaps also about the secret of his wife. But we would never know, because... ... 22. Adam was then killed at the airport. In the book, there is a slight chance that Adam knew the killer and approached him proactively, giving a sign of a chance that he in fact what to kill himself anyway (but I don't think that's the case). In the film no hints for that. 23. After Adam was gone, Emmett and Ruth accessed the situation and felt that Ewan and Rycart didn't really get the real truth (about how Ruth instead of Adam is with the CIA). The false "truth" was how Adam being a CIA would buried with his death, and the interest of the investigation is gone. So therefore there is no immediate need to erase Ewan. They allowed him to finish the book first. 24. At the launch, Amelia casually mentioned about "it's all there at the beginning". Ewan heard that from Rycart before, but this time when he put his mind on that again he figured out something that he had never thought of --> the real truth is exposed by putting all the first words of each chapter together. 25. I admit that I have no idea why Ewan need to tell Ruth about his founding. That is somewhat suicidal. However the effect of the ending was stunning. Sound of a car crash and then flying papers, without showing exactly what had happened --> and that's the thing. It could be an accident, it could be a planned act by Emmett, it could be an immediate response by Ruth / Emmett after knowing the secret is cracked, or it could even be Ewan killing himself after knowing no where he could hide from this. But we never would know what really had happened. That's the dirty part of politics / CIA, and that's the beauty part of this ending. 26. However, I like the ending of the book more. "Ewan" in the book didn't inform Ruth about his knowing, and simply left the party and went home. He immediately fled to stay in hotels in the next few weeks to avoid the CIA. Soon after that there was a news about how Rycart died in an accident (supposed to be killed by CIA as well). He knew he would be next, so he wrote this book (the book that we are reading) in the hotel, and passed the manuscript of this book to Kate (his former girlfriend who never appear in the film), and asked her to expose everything by showing this book to the public if anything happen to him. The reader assumed the "Ewan" in the book got kill eventually, and that's why we have a chance to read the book. It made a lot of sense. 27. For that, the book ends with this: "This puts me in something of a dilemma, as you may appreciate, now that we reach the final paragraph. Am I supposed to be pleased that you are reading this, or not? Pleased, of course, to speak at last in MY OWN VOICE. Disappointed, obviously, that it probably means I'M DEAD. But then, as my mother used to say, I'm afraid in this life you just can't have everything." 28. The ending echos very well with the starting sentence of the book (now I realize) : "The moment I heard how McAra (Mike) died, I should have walked away. I can see that now.. ..." You see, basically when the Ghost Ewan write the book he already KNEW that's the end of his life. 29. The name of the book is "The Ghost". Which I guess is better than the name "The Ghost Writer" because The Ghost means the ghost writer itself but also indicates the puppet show that Ruth playing Adam with, or how the PM of Britain in fact was a puppet controlled by the USA. But I got the strongest feeling about the name "The Ghost" when I watch the ending of the film and see how the body of Ewan got crushed and papers were flying to the sky as a symbol of how "soul" of a ghost was broken into pieces and flew off everywhere. I also get another feeling about "The Ghost" when I reached the end of the book and feel that I am reading a book written by a person who is already dead, while his job was to write something on behalf of another dead person. The feeling of "everything's all gone" is weird and sad. 30. That's the end. Cheers.

Smart People

1 Day Ago

#29

rat sauce 89 Running Like God Stars: rat sauce 89 FTP: Unfortunate 89 Join Date: Aug 2008 Posts: 912

Two quotes that really inspired me when i made my decision Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs "Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." -Steve Jobs reasons14 Registered User Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 571 I'd rather make 50k a year and enjoy my job than 90k and hate it. At the end of the day, money isn't everything. I know a lot of depressed rich people who have fucked up lives, poker players and normal job workers alike. "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." — Confucius I've always found a sense of comfort in the above quote, which is why I decided to become a music education major...a major in which I might be able to make 40k/year tops. Luckily I have poker atm and can make 40k+ a year until it "dies out". I'll still be teaching private lessons and doing gigs in the mean time. I don't think i'll have that hard of a problem getting a job if/when i want one considering my mom and my sister are both orchestra directors. You really have to weigh how easy/hard it is to get a job if you have the need to go back. From the sounds of it, you won't have that hard of a time. Yeah, you might have to take an initial pay cut at first, but you'll be fine for sure. I think if you don't do this, the lingering thought about how it could be different will remain in the back of your head. Again, money isn't the be all end all to everything, It's a tool that allows you to gain materialistic needs in your physical life. I think you know you would be happier with making a little less but having more freedom, or you wouldn't be that likely to be posting this. Society, media, friends, whatever, all have a warped perception that money equals happiness. Don't let any social discrepancies or the "invisible crowd" influence that you really want.

two hundered thousand miles

iRob says (3:29 AM):

3 reminders

1- craig valentine

2-school

3-jacky's guitar

Movie Reviews

Dear John: 5.5/10 - very unrealistic love story with horrible acting by main actors.

Brothers: 7.8/10 - starts off slow, but that a good feel for what is the difference between the normal world and 'war world'. characters grow on you as you watch it. well acted.

Unthinkable: 5.1/10 - barely watchable, if only to see what will happen next and how crazy can Samuel Jackson get.

Say Anything: 6.8/10 - older movie starring John Cusak.

Just a normal day. [VIDEO]

Just a normal day. [VIDEO]


i love this www.wimp.com site!
i hope they have a lot of videos!
because i am planning on watching it a lot!

Dark Intensity Remix

Tour De Vancouver

Today left at 14:00 from my house, met with Vic at 14:20 and we left on a bicycle tour.

The path we took is highlighted in red.

We took the Ontario Street route back home last time on the way from the ARG vs GER game. This time we took the Cypress Street route home. The hardest point of the whole trip, physically, was the highway part of the S.W.Marine Drive on the way to UBC. Also another tough part was from West 4th along Cypress all the way until maybe around 37th. Many uphills that forced us to gear down very low in order to make it up without having to get of the bikes.

I did not know if i would be able to complete this, but i pushed through and with some of Eminem's new album was able to push myself.