Yeah, there’s a few ambiguous lines there. I like it too.
It took me way too long to realize the title of the Star Trek TNG episode “I, Borg” was an homage to Asimov’s “I, Robot”. To be fair, I was 12 when that episode first aired, and I don’t think I had heard of his stories yet. But then I discovered Asimov’s novels when I was in high school (So not that much later) and read a bunch of his robot stories, although I don’t think I got around to reading the original I, Robot collection until college. But even then, I didn’t make the connection to the Star Trek episode until many years later.
Sorry about the double post, but someone posted this clip of the closing credits of Inside Out in the “What’s something unique about your pet?” thread. And I noticed something I never noticed before. I always just saw the Cat Emotions as just a bunch of cats doing cat things. I only just noticed that they all display the same emotions as their human counterparts. Cat Sadness mopes into the room. Cat Joy wants to play with the others. Cat Anger hisses at her. Meanwhile, Cat Disgust appears to be coughing up a hairball in the background. Cat Fear probably should be hiding under the console, but walking across the control panel is necessary for the gag.
God doesn’t see shadows.
So says Victoria Finley in her marvelous book, The Brilliant History of Color in Art. Icons are the flat-imaged paintings from the pre-Renaissance period, and the people in them don’t have shadows. That’s not because the painters couldn’t do shadows but they believed that since God doesn’t see shadows, they shouldn’t be included.
Really a terrific book, very well written, stunningly illustrated, and magnificently printed, with some of the images seemingly popping three-dimensionally from the page.
So God has denied himself the joy of Hand Shadow Figures?
Does that mean that God doesn’t properly appreciate the symbolism of Plato’s Cave?
I’m the last person to answer questions about God’s behavior.
Heck, Plato baffles me 112% of the time.
Plato was the first of the Big Time bullshitters.
In Goldfinger, Bond plants a homing device on Goldfinger’s Rolls Royce and follows him to an airport. The Rolls is being loaded onto an airplane. An attendant tells Bond that he and his Aston Martin are booked on the next flight to Geneva leaving in a half hour. Really, two car-carrying airliners leaving from the same airport, both to Geneva, 30 minutes apart? You can’t get that level of service now; I can’t believe it was available in 1964.
It just occurred to me that Robin Williams is imitating Julia Child in Mrs. Doubtfire.
Unforgiven (1992), directed by Clint Eastwood. I hadn’t noticed that the Schofield Kid’s near-sightedness is a nice metaphor for his youth and inexperience. In looking up the film in order to post here, I’ve also just noticed the irony of “Big Whiskey” (tiny town without much of anything) and “Little Bill Dagget” (easily the most horrendous character in the film).
He didn’t deserve that. To die like that.
Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.
That is such a great film. I was going to end my post above with a reference about Gene Hackman’s performance and, according to what I’ve read, his unwillingness to portray evil men. Consider, for example, the relish with which he delivers a line of dialogue that consists of a single word:
“Misfire!”
I mean, by the end, Clint’s character is the scariest of the lot, but scary is one thing and that level of… unwholesomeness is another.
Not bad for someone who was belittled by his acting teacher (look for it in the trivia section of IMDB).
ETA: Just thought of another great line of his:
“Innocent of what?”
But that’s the thing, Little Bill didn’t think he was evil. He thought he was defending his town from assassins, and men of low character. That he was an utter bastard doesn’t change his own impression of himself.
He wasn’t? I could be misremembering but I think the biggest violence Little Bill perpetrated was against hired gunmen. Not that he did right by the woman who was slashed, but the really nasty stuff was directed at people who were genuinely bad characters coming to his town to kill for money.
Well, “People he thought were hired gunmen”, at least. English Bob, while not a nice guy either, also had nothing to do with the bounty the prostitutes had placed on the cowboys. But he got beat just the same, because Little Bill was more interested in sending a message to others than in ascertaining the facts.
And while he turned out to be right about William Munny, that was mostly by accident. At the time, he had no real knowledge that Munny was anything other than a guy looking for a drink in a rainstorm.
He believed his own bullshit. English Bob knew he was bullshitting. Even William Munny reckoned he’d done wrong. I haven’t thought this through, but it seems that Little Bill is the only one who kept on enjoying his evil self, clear through to the end.
Re-reading, we also need to point out that, had Little Bill actually done his job of protecting the town, in particular against the guys who cut up the woman in question, the assassins would never had been a factor to begin with. The entire plot relies on Little Bill not doing his job until his job involved kicking the shit out of people.
Killing Ned Logan and standing his body up outside the bar is pretty big violence in my book . . . even if he’s suspected of being a hired gunman.
One thing that always bugged me about Unforgiven is that the woman, Delilah, was cut up for the faux pax of laughing at the guy’s weiner. One of the other women is explaining “she didn’t know better”. Except the actress was born in 1953, making her in her late '30s. Disrupts my ability to accept she’s that inexperienced if she’s been a prostitute for any length of time.