American Splendor (2003) [3/5] »

I must have lived under a rock, because I didn't know anything about American Splendor. The movie shows us the life of Harvey Pekar, who wrote the American Splendor comic books. And it shows us the real Harvey Pekar, commenting on his life, the movie, etc.

But due to me not knowing anything about AS beforehand, it left just a small impression. I can see why some many liked the movie, but I really should have read the comics first.

3/5 points.

The Core (2003) [2/5] »

The Core is a bad rehash of Armageddon. Good production values makes the film
look good, but the story is just way too silly. The movie science is
several notches too unbelievable to work in this type of a film. And the drama
lost itself quickly. 2/5 points.

Big Fish (2003) [5/5] »

Big Fish is fabulous tale about a mans life - Ed Bloom (Albert Finney and Ewan McGregor) - and the stories he tells. Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) is the son who is getting tired of the stories he has heard so many times, not finding his real dad behind the stories. "All you tell is lies, dad. It was fun when I was 8."

The movie deals with storytelling on multiple levels and does it with ease, talent and heart. The story sets your mood quickly and embraces you until the end. It's an absolute marvel to experience. Magical.

Tim Burton gets to show his unique style and Albert Finney does his I'm-very-very-ill-and-I-have-to-be-in-bed thing :-)

I think I'll have to get the DVD.

5/5 points.

Quantum Physics »

I like this: A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics by James Higgo (1999). It's a bit dated, but gives a nice overview of different interpretations. Pick one:

• Your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles
• Particles move backwards as well as forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once
• The universe is splitting, every Planck-time (10 E-43 seconds) into billions of parallel universes
• The universe is interconnected with faster-than-light transfers of information

I liked the "Time Reversibility".

The Mind of the Fundamentalist »

While the actual subject of fundamentalists doesn't really intrest me, the related psychoanalysis was very interesting.

The Mind of the Fundamentalist
Presented by Rachael Kohn.

"You see, we believe (and we have evidence for this) that the mind feeds on, breathes, dwells upon and thrives on emotional truth. And conversely without emotional truth the mind suffocates, it withers and it dies. Now death of the mind, we in the business call madness. Now in spite of the centrality of emotional truth to the mind, emotional truth itself is very hard to define, and I can’t define it really, but I’d just like to say that it’s somewhere in the area of love, of understanding, of truth, and of coherence.
And when we experience these things we tend to feel at peace. And when we don’t, we feel agitated and we feel driven to do something about it. Though we might not be able to describe the emotional truth, what emotional truth is, we can experience it and we can express it in all kinds of ways. For instance we can express it religiously and we can express it artistically, and it’s those two areas that I’ll be concentrating on."
-- Shahid Najeeb, The Mind of the Fundamentalist radio discussion