Tag Archives: film

THEY LIVE!

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“I have come here to chew bubble gum and to kick ass.  And, I’m all out of bubble gum!” — from the John Carpenter film, ‘THEY LIVE”

“THEY LIVE” —  PLOT SUMMARY:

“An unemployed drifter named John Nada (Roddy Piper) finds construction work in Los Angeles, and befriends fellow construction worker Frank Armitage (Keith David), who leads him to a local shantytown soup kitchen. There, Nada notices strange activity around the church; a blind preacher (Raymond St. Jacques) loudly chastising others to wake up, a police helicopter scouts them overhead, and a drifter (George Buck Flower) complains that his TV signal is continually interrupted by a man warning everyone about those in power. Nada discovers the nearby church is a front: the choir is actually an audio recording and the building is filled with scientific equipment and cardboard boxes. Nada finds a box hidden in the wall, but escapes when the preacher catches him. At night, the police bulldoze the shantytown. Nada returns in the morning to find the church empty, but with the hidden box still there. In an alley, he opens the box and finds dozens of sunglasses. Taking one, he hides the box of remaining sunglasses in a garbage can.

1988They_Live_poster300Nada discovers the sunglasses are special. After putting on a pair, he sees the world in black and white and discovers it is not what it seems. Media and advertising hide constant subliminal totalitarian commands to obey and conform. Many in authority and wealthy are actually humanoid aliens with skull-like faces. In a grocery store, Nada confronts an alien woman, who then speaks into her wristwatch notifying others about him. Two alien police officers try to apprehend Nada but he kills them, taking their guns. He goes on a shooting spree, killing several aliens that he encounters in a nearby bank. He sees one vanish using its wristwatch. Nada escapes, destroying an alien flying camera and taking a Cable 54 assistant director Holly Thompson (Meg Foster), hostage. At her hill-top home, Nada tries to convince her of the truth. He also begins suffering migraine headaches from using the glasses. Holly does not believe him. Catching him unaware, Holly knocks him through a window and calls the police. Nada tumbles down a steep hillside and escapes, leaving his belongings behind.

Nada returns to the alley, where he finds the garbage can that he hid the other glasses empty. He sees and enters a nearby garbage truck, where he discovers and saves the box. Frank meets him to give him his paycheck and tells Nada (now considered a wanted man) to stay away. Nada fights with Frank in a long battle, trying to force him to put on a pair of sunglasses. Finally, Nada holds Frank down and puts them on him and he sees the truth. The two rent a hotel room to discuss their predicament. Gilbert (Peter Jason), a member of the shantytown, discovers them and notifies them about a secret meeting with other activists.

There, Nada and Frank are given special contact lenses to replace their sunglasses. They learn from the bearded man’s broadcast that the aliens control Earth as their third world, depleting its resources and causing global warming before moving on to other planets. The aliens use a subliminal signal broadcast into people’s brains to camouflage themselves. Destroying its source will allow everyone on Earth to see their true form. Frank is given an alien wristwatch, a complex radio and teleportation device. Holly appears, apparently joining the cause before apologizing to Nada. However, the police suddenly attack the meeting, killing anyone in sight while Nada and Frank are cornered fighting their way out. Frank accidentally opens a temporary portal by throwing the watch, through which the two jump into a network of underground passages.

The two find the aliens in a grand hall celebrating with their elite human collaborators. The homeless drifter from earlier, now a well-dressed collaborator, believes the two to be collaborators as well. He takes them on a tour of the passages, revealed to link the alien society, including a space travel port. A further passage leads to the basement of Cable 54 station, the source of the aliens’ signal. The two then launch an attack through the building to find the broadcaster on the roof, before meeting Holly and taking her along. As Nada climbs to the signal broadcaster disguised as a satellite dish, Holly kills Frank. Revealed to be a collaborator, she takes aim at Nada and persuades him to stop as an alien police helicopter hovers overhead. Nada complies by dropping his weapon, but then retrieves a hidden pistol from his sleeve and kills her. He then shoots and destroys the broadcaster before being killed by the aliens in their helicopter. Before he dies, Nada gives them the finger as his last gesture now that he scored the final victory over the aliens. With the signal destroyed, humans discover the aliens in their midst on TV, in the bar, and even some humans mating with them.” — Wikipedia.org

NEW ORDER ORDER ‘MERICA — WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

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The “immigrants” who sought freedom and opportunity in North America were our forefathers and fore-mothers (mostly Europeans) mixed with a relatively small number of slaves and slave labor from Africa and Asia. “Americans” inherited the legacy of their hard work, greed, murderous conquest of the indigenous natives, and desire to survive by overcoming all physical and financial obstacles.
Ideologically, “freedom” and “democracy” sounds reasonable. Historically, neither have ever lasted more than a few hundred years in any nation on Earth.
The Karma of our ancestors, and OUR actions in the present, seem to be moving our “civilization” toward the control of the Caucasian “elite” — a economic class, self-appointed as the “New World Order”. This tiny minority are international bankers, secret societies of criminals, perverts, pedophiles and global corporations who control mass-media, the US military and other hidden forces.
Socialism (just like in Russia and China) is coming to the US, enabled by money manufactured by Rothschild banks, made legal by a corrupt criminal class (Congress), propagandized by Hollywood, “the media”, enforced by the military / police and maintained by the “security state” (NSA, DARPA, CIA, HLS, et. al.) and global electronic surveillance apparatus of satellites, social media apps and drones.
Obviously, our “democratic elections” are a fraud and have no influence over who controls our government, economics or “freedom”.
I don’t know if “Americans” can change the “collective Karma” of accumulated atrocities our citizens have committed against the 100 million Indigenous people who were slaughtered between 1492 and 1910. Or, the millions of people US soldiers have killed in endless invasions of foreign nations around the world since 1776. The dead are dead. RIP.
However, we can still change ourselves as individual spiritual beings. We change our minds. We can change ourselves. We must continue to live into the future of Planet Earth. It could be a paradise, but it’s looking a lot more like Hell every day, unless stop agreeing with our past.

THEY LIVE

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OBEYThey Live is a 1988 American science fiction-horror film directed by John Carpenter.  The film follows a nameless drifter referred to as “Nada”, who discovers the ruling class within the moneyed elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of a signal on top of the TV broadcast, concealing their appearance and subliminal messages in mass media.   This is a clip from the famous “sunglasses” scene: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass.  And, I’m all out of bubble bum….”

The idea for They Live came from two sources: a short story called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1960s, involving an alien invasion in the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and a story called “Nada” from the Alien Encounters comic book.  John Carpenter describes Nelson’s story as “…a D.O.A. type of story, in which a man is put in a trance by a stage hypnotist. When he awakens, he realizes that the entire human race has been hypnotized, and that alien creatures are controlling humanity. He has only until eight o’clock in the morning to solve the problem.

The more political elements of the film are derived from Carpenter’s growing distaste with the ever-increasing commercialization of 1980s popular culture and politics. He remarked, “I began watching TV again. I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something… It’s all about wanting us to buy something. The only thing they want to do is take our money.” To this end, Carpenter thought of sunglasses as being the tool to seeing the truth, which “is seen in black and white. It’s as if the aliens have colorized us. That means, of course, that Ted Turner is really a monster from outer space.” (Turner had received some bad press in the 1980s for colorizing classic black-and-white movies.) The director commented on the alien threat in an interview, “They want to own all our businesses. A Universal executive asked me, ‘Where’s the threat in that? We all sell out every day.’ I ended up using that line in the film.” The aliens were deliberately made to look like ghouls according to Carpenter, who said: “The creatures are corrupting us, so they, themselves, are corruptions of human beings.”

Because the screenplay was the product of so many sources: a short story, a comic book, and input from cast and crew, Carpenter decided to use the pseudonym “Frank Armitage,” an allusion to one of the filmmaker’s favorite writers, H. P. Lovecraft (Frank Armitage is a character in Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror). Carpenter has always felt a close kinship with Lovecraft’s worldview and according to the director, “Lovecraft wrote about the hidden world, the “world underneath.” His stories were about gods who are repressed, who were once on Earth and are now coming back. The world underneath has a great deal to do with They Live.” — (Wikipedia.org)

BREATHLESS IN 524 FRAMES PER SECOND

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“Experimental film maker Gerard Courant has taken Jean-Luc Godard’s classic  French film from 1960 Breathless, and sped up it (or compressed it as he prefers to call it) into a four minute movie.

The French title of Godard’s debut film is À bout de souffle which translates to English as “out of breath.” Courant’s compression is most likely a play on the title.

What I find interesting about the compression is the way it brings Godard’s style and the American noir films he was inspired by to the foreground. The nervous energy of the film, the pans and tracking shots, cigarettes smoked, automobiles in motion, zooms, jump-cuts, and close-ups, all create an angular yet fluid motion that seems driven by forces of destiny – the movie is tumbling into a dark void of betrayal and its opposite – yin and yanging to the beat beat beat of a heart in the throes of atrial tachycardia. No time to catch your breath – you’re breathless.

Fucking with Godard’s masterpiece is very Godardian.  If, as Godard claims, “cinema is truth at 24 frames per second” what is cinema at 524 frames per second”

— va Dangerous Minds