Let's kick this entry off like it's Livejournal! (If you are here only for a review of FH911, and don't care for my ramblings, go down to the marked section)

Current Mood: Weirded OUT!
Current Music: Coheed & Cambria - "A House Atlantic"

So, today after an incredibly fun (read: boring) day at work, I went to see Farenheit 9/11 with a bunch of friends.

When I got to the theatre, I decided to empty my bladder, as for some reason I just hate leaving a movie to use the bathroom. I get in the bathroom, the urinals are taken, so I hop into a stall. Assuming you are all familiar of the process a male goes through at this point, I will save you the details. Anyway, I finish my business, and zip up. As I turn to leave the stall, I find myself looking right down at what seemed to be a 4 year old kid. He had apparently crawled under the stall door and was just laying on the floor smiling at me. So I did what any totally creeped out 20 year old would do: I said "whoa." As he crawled back out and ran out of the bathroom, I wondered what I should have done...Should I have kicked him? Though hilarious, it would probably been cruel I guess. Kids that age should be kept on a leash 24/7.

Anyway, I washed up and started towards the theatre, and after seeing copious amounts of high school memories (in the form of people I knew), I was ready to watch the movie.

Start here if you don't care about anything but the movie (jerk)

I wanted to see Farenheit 9/11. Not because I respect him, he doesn't really deserve it. But I do like hearing different perspectives.

I say that I don't respect him because I know he's a liar. He uses his "documentaries" to lie and mislead people to push his opinions. He uses editing and voiceover to make fiction seem like fact. Then he spouts crap about hating Bush because he hates fiction and Bush is a fictional President. And hating Bush because Bush mislead the American people. Moore is a HYPOCRITE.

So that is what I went in knowing about the filmaker, but I was still ready to listen to his side. But he really pushed it at the beginning of the movie when he decided to imply that Fox news had something to do with Bush winning Florida. They may have been the first to credit the win to Bush, but THE MEDIA DOES NOT AFFECT THE NUMBERS! They only interpret them. Everyone else just interpretted them wrong, and they apologized for that mistake...

Luckily, I didn't completely lose it there, and was able to watch the rest of the movie without being overly critical.

Moore did make some good conections and had some good points. The Bin Laden family should not have been sent out of the country 2 days after the tragedy. He also made some good points about the shabby treatment of Afghanistan in comparison to Iraq, the instilled fear in all Americans, and the lack of purpose in the Iraqi war. However...

Afghanistan was taken over and rebuilt much quicker than Iraq. They probably figured it would be that easy. Maybe they underestimated the amount of troops they'd need, just like they did in Iraq. But they succeeded anyway.

As far as Iraq having anything to do with Bin Laden, I never thought that. I was never led to beleive that the Iraq war had anything to do with the attack other than the fact that Iraq harbors terrorists.

I really cannot take this movie to be all fact, due to what I know and what I know about Moore. And if it is fact, I think it presents enough evidence for any other county in the world to have just as valid a reason to attack us as we did to attack Iraq. That's the feeling I got at the end, anyway. And that is why I think Micahel Moore hates America.

Anyway, disagreements aside, I thought it was a very well made film. I can understand it being nominated for awards (though I wouldn't call it the best movie of the year) but it was very good. And in some ways thought provoking. However, after anyone sees this movie, I'd recommend you then look into the facts behind what he discusses. There are quite afew anti-moore sites out there, but make sure you check their sources too. Biased reporting is quite often misleading. Anyway, I'll check out stuff tomorrow probably.

In other news, I have actually listened to the entire Coheed and Cambria album, "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3". I really liked it.

Bye bye, beautiful.

So, yesterday was quite the day for me finishing things. For example, I finished a design for the archives of this blog. But that is immaterial. I also finished something that amazes me. I finished a book.

Yep. Apparently I am not nearly as illiterate as I thought.

The Da Vinci Code is one of those puzzle/mystery/suspense novels that keeps you guessing. It starts with the murder of the curator of the Louvre, which launches a police investigation that involves Harvard-bred symbology professor Robert Langdon. And, as that last sentence implies, it is full of lectures on symbolism in art, but very interesting, sometimes funny lectures.

"Symbologists often remarked that France--a country renowned for machismo, womanizing, and diminutive insecure leaders like Napoleon and Pepin the Short--could not have chosen a more apt national emblem than a thousand-foot phallus."

But then the book turns into way more than a simple murder mystery. It is a treasure hunt. A treasure hunt for the greatest treasure ever hunted. It is more than a treasure hunt, it is a quest. The all time greatest quest of history, a quest for something so great that it has been sought by thousands of people, and visited by movies of Harrison Ford and Monty Python alike: The Quest for the Holy Grail.

However, this quest is a little different. It is not only a quest to find where the Holy Grail is, but what the Holy Grail is (for the reader anyway...the protaganist already knows what it is, but he keeps it a mystery for a while).

The puzzles add quite a bit of fun to the book, especially when you figure them out before the main characters (hehehe). I'm not saying I'm a symbolism genious, or that this book is ridiculous due to me knowing more than the characters that are experts. I'm saying that the author, Dan Brown, is GREAT at hiding clues to unlock the mysteries of future clues. All you need to solve many of the puzzles is a close reading of all that came before it and a little bit of basic knowlege. However, there are some puzzles that are meant to not be solved by the reader, as there are cases where it adds to the suspense if you don't know. But its lots of fun.

Anyway, that's about all I can say without giving anything away. Read the extended link for more thoughts, if you have read the book, don't plan on reading the book, or don't care if you know what the holy grail is before reading (i won't give away the ending or puzzles, just thoughts on what the book says the holy grail "is". I knew before reading the book, and I still liked it, but you might want to wait. Your choice.)

Oh, and if you are planing on reading it:

Christians: This book will attack the foundations of your religion.
Catholics: This book will attack the practices of your church. Also keep in mind that the Pope of this book is not the current Pope, but a fictitious Pope that took the position in the previous book, Angels and Demons.

However, in defense of Brown, he does show compassion towards Catholics, repeatedly bringing up the theme that a few bad ones do not speak for the whole organization. He also brings up a point that either theory is plausible, people just need to look at the evidence and determine which speaks to them.

And now, without further ado, click below to read some more thoughts on the book's theories.

If you are reading this and haven't read the book, here is the book's account of the real Holy Grail.

We have all heard the story of what the Holy Grail is, the chalice that held the blood of Christ. It is also known as the Sangreal, or San Greal, which is Holy Grail. However, this word can also be split to read Sang Real, or Royal Blood. Here comes the symbology: There is an ancient symbol called the chalice, basically a V, which represents the woman (shape of the womb). The theory is that the Holy Grail, the chalice that held the blood of Christ, is actually a woman that carried the bloodline of Christ, none other than Mary Magdalene, Jesus' wife. The Holy Grail that has been sought for ages is a record of Mary's life after Jesus, diaries and other relics to prove her status, and her family tree, which is beleived to be connected to the Merovingion dynasty of France.

Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute, that beleif came from a misreading of the numerous Mary's in the Bible. The Catholic Church rescinded this beleif in 1969, and since they were the ones to create that beleif (Orthodox Christians have never beleived it), there is absolutely no reason to beleive that today.

The evidence to support the theory that Mary is Jesus' wife is actually much greater than I knew when I first heard the theory. There is astounding evidence in the gnostic gospels, which are beleived to be some of the oldest gospels, and represent Jesus in a much more human, down to earth way. A philosopher.

Why is the Grail the one thing that has been sought after for so long? Why not his grave, his buriel shroud, the bowl of bread, the cross, the thorns, any other relic...Why is a simple cup worth so much? If Holy Grail really is a metaphor for the truth, it makes much more sense. People sought to either protect it or destroy it.

Also, who was the first person Jesus appeared to after he died? Mary Magdalene.

This would be a very large hit to the foundations of Christianity, because if Mary had children, and Christ was actually God, then we'd have numerous possible God people walking around.

Or maybe Jesus was no more God than anyone else...

I might be able to accept that. It doesn't cloud his message in any way. He was still a great man.

And most of the stuff in the book seems to check out. It makes sense. There is another book, Breaking the Da Vinci Code that supposedly exposes holes, but the reviews I read claim that it relies so heavily on faith that it can hardly be respected.

There is one hole in Code that I have looked into though. The Priory of Sion really does seem to be an elaborate hoax conjured by Pierre Plantard in the mid-20th century. But the book is still fiction, and since the Priory is technically a secret, the information that "proves" their beleifs comes from elsewhere. Their being real is not essential to the information in the book.

Well, I gotta eat. I'd like to discuss this on a more personal level sometime though...

Yesterday I watched a movie called "Shattered Glass". It's a movie about journalism. I don't wanna say too much, because I feel the movie was much better not knowing what it was about (yes, I was told, but I forgot, and I don't want to assume you all have the memory I have). I just checked imdb and watched the trailer, and realized the plot outline and trailer give the whole movie away. So avoid them. And don't search the Internet for Stephen Glass either, you'll probably find some Forbes articles that the movie is based on.

Anyway, it was about journalism. Then I remembered my parents were talking about William Randolf Hearst, since they had apprently seen his house. I remembered that I had learned about him somewhere, and wondered if he was the guy that started the Spanish-American war with journalism.

So I started looking into Hearst, and I discovered the secret to time travel. Just kidding, but your were probably wondering where I was going with the title of this entry weren't you? I'll get there.

Anyway, I was looking into Hearst, from what I found he didn't "start" the war, but he definately used his publication to stretch the truth and sway the public towards supporting the war in an isolationist time. "Yellow journalism". Some people beleive the reason for having fact checkers stems from this.

Anyway, somehow I ended up on the wikipedia entry for hoaxes. I started reading about some of them, and then on caught my eye. One that was listed as only a "possible" hoax was a pretty recent one, from the year 2000. It was about a man named John Titor, who posted on message boards and claimed to be from the year 2036. He spouted all kinds of science, even had pictures and diagrams of his time machine.

This man claims that 2005 will mark the beginning of a 10 year civil war in the United States. Tensions will grow around the 2004 elections and blossom into full scale war by next year. It will not be North vs. South, though. It will be Farms vs. Cities (a somewhat modern equivalent to the rural South vs the industrialized North in the original war). The war will be ended when Russia nukes all the major cities.

Now, ultimately he'll be proved wrong or right by next year. But I don't beleive him. Besides the ridiculousness of it, he did not predict 9/11. You'd think that would stand out. And it has changed a lot of things.

Before 9/11, we were a country with no major wars. We just had a huge military stationed on peacekeeping missions all around the world. And the US has a long history of rural vs urban relations, in government. I can see this building into a war, if we had nothing else to think about.

But now we do. The news is all about Iraq and Afghanistan. Foreign affairs is what we are divided on right now. No one cares about the farms and cities, we are looking at the rest of the world. That's where the splitting is.

But I guess time will tell with this guy.

Oh, by the way, a site that has his stuff archived is johntitor.com

See ya in the future.

Tonight I left home at about 8 PM, and 2 hours and $8 later I saw The Day After Tomorrow.

It was entertaining, but I won't give it much more than that. I think it was just another disaster movie, following in the footsteps of Deep Impact, Armaggeddon, The Core...you know the movies. There is some global catastrophe that is predicted by one middle-aged scientist who then tells the American government to do something about it. Intertwined is, of course, a love story, as needed, and a story about a kid who's dad was never there (not necessarily a disaster movie theme, but a Hollywood cliche nonetheless).

And like all disaster movies of the present day, there are many dazzling CGI scenes of stuff getting smashed and destroyed by the weather, many of which could be cutscenes from the next SimCity game. That makes it entertaining, of course, and is what I was expecting.

It was also completely unrealistic, I'm sure any movie geek that watches movies only to find the mistakes would find thousands. But that is also a part of being a disaster movie.

However, this movie also had a message. It was obviously an environmentalist movie, a criticism of how we treat the environment, and what will happen if we do nothing to stop global warming. It portrays the vice-president as an irrational man with no care for the environment when he had the economy to look after (Dick Cheney? C'mon, he even looked like him...) So it had that going for it, at least the movie had meaning.

The last disaster movie I saw was The Core, or "The worst movie ever". I had the unfortunate "priveledge" of seeing it twice. The first time I saw it I said it would have been better if my seat was moving like a ride. The second time was on a turbulent plane. It still sucked. I didn't care about the characters at all. They kept dying and I just didn't care. It had science, but it was presented terribly.

So I guess The Day After Tomorrow really wasn't all that bad in comparison. It had its good points. I did care about the characters. I did get excited, and my fists were clenched through the drama. It was also different in that crisis was not averted, people just need to live with it. I liked Deep Impact for that too (waaaay better than Armageddon...jeez, why the heck did Armageddon get so popular? Fricken movie...) So all in all, it was enjoyable. Just not a great movie.

And now it is the day after yesterday. Later.

Hey, I decided to write my own reveiw of Revolutions, now that I have had time to think about it some and steal other people's ideas. No, I did come up with a bunch of this on my own, but it does help to get pushes from people. It's like teamwork.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Lets start with the questions that the last movie left us with. How the heck did Smith get into Bane? What do you mean "there have been One's before you"? And how the heck did Neo stop that machine outside the matrix?

The fact that there have been multiple One's doesn't surprise me, int the first movie Morpheus pointed that out. He said there was one with great power that freed the first few Zionites, and promised he would return. Neo was that reincarnation.

The other two are a little more difficult questions, and are kinda explained in the movie, but barely.

At the beginning of Revolutions, we find Neo in a coma, and find out that he is in some linking zone, not really in the matrix, but not really in the real world. In Limbo (Mobil Ave.) How did he get there? Well, some part of him was lost in the source, according to the movie. But that doesnt do much to explain how his mind and that part of him were communicating.

If it weren't for the coma and the strange brain frequencies, I would pass it off as this: Neo's will was in the source, looking out for him. When it noticed a machine going after Neo (through the machine's eyes) of course it would do as Neo would do (being his will and all) and stop that machine. That cause a disturbance though, and it had to go hide, in the linking zone.

However, since Neo physically feels the sentinal, and his brain is active, it has to be telepathic communication. That bothers me a bit, I'd rather him be a real person. But whatever. The brother's W do what they want.

Moving on to the question about Bane, I think that question is easy to field, based completely on what was learned in the other movies. When you plug into the matrix, you become a computer program. Your brain waves are converted to 1's and 0's, and the computer reads them. Your thoughts become actions, and your surroundings affect your thoughts. Therefore it is safe to say that the computer can, in computer terms, both "read" and "write" to your brain. Since agents can take over other people's bodies and live, it is also safe to say that the programs are written to control even involuntary functions, such as breathing and heart beat. Therefore, when Smith copied himself into Bane, his brain program replaced Bane's brain program, and his brain digits were fed into Bane's actual brain. Nifty, huh?

Then there's a war, Trinity dies, Neo fights Smith, both are destroyed, and Neo ascends into the Deus Ex Machina.

Then we get to a conversation betweent he architect and the Oracle to tie up the series.

The Oracle wanted a better world and took a gamble. Every once and a while, someone comes along, destroys the old matrix and reloads it, and the cycle repeats. But the Oracle felt that choice was a very important thing. And choice was hardly possible with those pesky machines destoying Zion every few years. So she devised a plan for this one. Apparently a child of the 70's, the Oracle decided that love was the way to peace, and peace was the road to free will. So she devised a little plan. Give the One a choice. Wasn't it her that drove Trinity and Neo together in the first movie? Every thing she said brought them closer, and made Neo's decision harder. So when given the choice, he had to choose to save Trinity. The Matrix did not undergo its standard reload. Then Neo raged against the machine and then ended up making a compromise. He fought for the machine to create peace (Neo AntiVirus Software 6.0). Exactly as the Oracle had planned. It was a gamble, as she did not know Neo would succeed. But he did, and the Oracle got her way. A world as perfect as she wanted.

Anyway, I think people need to give more props to the Oracle, she seems a bit overlooked, even though everyone says she was the best actor with the best lines. Maybe ther's a reason y'all liked her so much...She drove the movie.

Anyway, that's all i gotta say for now, I can't say much more without really stealing ideas (these really are mostly mine, seriously).
Later.