What is the last movie you saw? and rate it.

[YesNo]

The Salesman sounds interesting. I should show up somewhere.

I just finished watching "The Great Gilly Hopkins": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the..._hopkins_2016/ A twelve year teenager who was abandoned cracks after harming others. To make a long story short, she grows a heart.

Score: 10/10

I also saw "Masterminds": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/masterminds_2016

This is supposedly based on a true story. To please a girl he likes an employee of a armored car company steals 17 million dollars and hides out in Mexico. His supposed girl friend starts feeling sorry for him and warns him that the mastermind who got most of the money and planned the robbery is enjoying himself and has sent someone out to kill him. Score: 10/10

[Leopard]

Mulholland Drive, widely regarded as David Lynch's magnum opus. It was great, though I still prefer Blue Velvet.

[Danik 2016]

The Salesman sounds interesting. I should show up somewhere.

I just finished watching "The Great Gilly Hopkins": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the..._hopkins_2016/ A twelve year teenager who was abandoned cracks after harming others. To make a long story short, she grows a heart.

Score: 10/10

I also saw "Masterminds": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/masterminds_2016

This is supposedly based on a true story. To please a girl he likes an employee of a armored car company steals 17 million dollars and hides out in Mexico. His supposed girl friend starts feeling sorry for him and warns him that the mastermind who got most of the money and planned the robbery is enjoying himself and has sent someone out to kill him. Score: 10/10

The Salesman should not be difficult to find as it is an Oscar nominee. But it isn´t a comedy. It is very human though but one leaves the cinema with a heavy heart.

[YesNo]

I should be able to find The Salesman. The people in the trailer didn't look very happy. I should probably select more dramas. One genre I avoid is horror movies.

I picked up an old Oscar movie to watch tonight "How Green Was My Valley": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Gr..._Valley_(film) I saw another film directed by John Ford about a year ago called "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", however, I thought Dorothy Johnson's short story was better.

[Danik 2016]

It´s not an actual horror movie. It might be a film about the horror of urban unprotectness in our times of social negative feeling.
It relates to at least two American art works:
The Dead of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
Psycho, by Alfred Hitchcock

[YesNo]

I'll give it a try. I thought it was more of a drama than a horror movie anyway. The horror movies that bother me have monsters popping up when I least want to see them. Of course, the music cues that they are coming and I can partially cover my eyes.

[Danik 2016]

No certainly not the ugly plastic monsters you mean.
It is a real situation. The Iranian films I have watched so far use to be very realistic.
And I think you are joking:I can´t imagine you covering your eyes because of some plastic monsters, even if some studios deserve the Oscar if there is an ugliness contest!
I think you will like it!

[YesNo]

I couldn't find "The Salesman" in the library but perhaps it is too early for it to be out in disk format. I'll keep it on my to-watch list. It does look interesting.

Rather than "How Green Was My Valley", I watched a science fiction movie "Morgan": https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/morgan_2016/

It looks like Rotten Tomatoes and I were in agreement. My score was 3/10. Their scores weren't much better.

The story did not convince me that people would act the way they did in this movie. I could not imagine an egotistical shrink insisting he be unprotected when interviewing Morgan after her wounding someone. The robot sent out to terminate Morgan did not convince me that she was not a robot from the beginning. The people who lost their weapons before they fired a shot at Morgan also seemed unrealistic.

So, forget about the movie, but just look at the concept of a genetically engineered human with superpowers and emotions. The emotions are no problem. This is a human being and conscious as such. The superpowers coming from modifying DNA or something mysterious in the human is what requires questioning whether that is realistic enough to fantasize about in science fiction. Its possibility rests on a belief that our humanity can be reduced to genes which we can manipulate. Is that realistic? The first proof that such a thing is possible would be to find a cure for cancer based on genetic modification. Until we have that, these stories are fairy tales.

One good thing about Morgan is that she is not an AI robot. She has a heart and so consciousness is not an issue. No one in their right mind wants a silicon AI robot to be conscious. We want to send such machines to explore places humans should not go like Mars or other bodies in the solar system. Or we want them to drive us around in cars. We don't want them to make choices on their own. We want them to follow their programming rationally.

[Danik 2016]

Maybe The Salesman will be available in disc after the Oscar ceremony. It must be in some cinemas from US but I have no idea how this distribution is done. Iranian movies are sometimes made with very modest budgets and this probably affects their distribuition.
I am not that keen on robot films, maybe because they are becoming more and more sophisticated.
But in older films like Bicentennial Man I often have the impression that the robots are a methaphor of dehumanized humans that long for their lost humanity.

[YesNo]

Robots may be a metaphor for dehumanized humans. That seems to be how I looked at them in the past when I was not thinking about artificial intelligence.

There is also an artificial intelligence perspective claiming that human consciousness can be generated by running a program in a robot. That cultural idea would be a way to dehumanize a human being, basically reduce the human being's consciousness to what the robot can simulate.

I don't know how the distribution is done for those films, but now that it is in my mind, when I see it, I'll check it out. Have you seen any others that you would rate as highly as you did The Salesman?

[Danik 2016]

I am very much afraid of this AI perspective. I don´t think that human inteligence will desapear as long as there are humans, but there are also groups that want to dominate other people and they might use AI or genetic means that aren´t known yet, like in Brave New World, where they have four or five genetic classes of people.

I don´t go as often to the cinema as I used to. But I noticed that one can find a lot of good films in the net. For example "Dreams" and "Dodeskaden" by Kurosawa are among my favorites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toZhE2nfMLk

I found "Dreams", but they have taken a lot of the films out. Well, who doesn´t want to watch good films for free?

[YesNo]

I found Dreams. I liked that bright umbrella in the rainy darkness at the beginning of the movie.

One could physically dominate others using AI. That still assumes the others are human beings. A subtle form of dominance would be to get human beings to think that that they are mechanistic machines that some future science will be able to manipulate. Since we don't know what science could be capable of in the future we assume anything might happen. That is a kind of cultural dominance. What makes it not dominance is that even the people doing this dominating are under the same hypnotic spell. Culturally today it is easier to believe science can do anything than it is to think gods, muses or magicians have similar unlimited potential.

[Danik 2016]

But human science has its limits too. One notices that when science manages to find the cure for an illness others appear.

[Danik 2016]

The unknown girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caKLk-LizyI

Dedicated doctor seeks to find out what happened to a girl that was found dead, shortly after she refused to admit her to the clinic because it was closed.
Score:8,0

[YesNo]

I can see how the doctor would be motivated to find out more about the unknown girl. I'll see if I can find it.

We watched an old movie written by Sidney Sheldon in the late 1940's: The bachelor and the bobby-soxer https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the...e_bobby_soxer/

I was amazed at how funny this was and how it kept our interest all the way through. Score: 8/10