Human Movie

Legal movie download sites seem very difficult if not impossible to find online, and I am not surprised that illegal downloads run at about 4 – 5 times the rate of legal downloads. Part of the reason for this is geographic limitation, whereby movie companies allow online sites to sell legal movies only to specific geographic areas, such as Movielink that is not available outside the USA. You can’t even join their affiliate program unless you live in the USA.

Vongo are the same, so why are they so surprised that the rest of the world purchase lifetime memberships to file sharing software services? The chances of being prosecuted are less than those of winning the USA and European lotteries both in the same year. Even if you do purchase legally the prices are way over the top, almost inviting people to break the law.

They are complaining at losing so much money that the actors are in penury, working for practically nothing. I think the millions they are given for just making the movie should be enough for one human being, without continuing to fleece us on royalties from sales of the videos. Why do videos cost so much when they cost only pennies to make?

However, let’s have a closer look at the morality of illegally downloading copyrighted movies. On the face of it, it is an offence to do so, and we all realize that. So what are the alternatives is we want a movie to play on our PSP or iPod? Where do we get them?

I have checked out Google and every site offering iPod movies is a file sharing P2P network site. It is legal as claimed, but only if used to download amateur movies rather than those that most people want to buy. Every single one, even those attached to article directory files from writers claiming to offer totally legal iPod movie downloads, were P2P sites.

So if we can’t get what we want legally, what do we do? Remember the Prohibition? We obviously get what we want illegally. Don’t get me wrong: file sharing is not illegal and it is not illegal to promote file sharing websites, but it is illegal to use them to download copyright protected movie files. However, as I said, your chances of being caught are almost zilch, and if the big movie companies can’t move into the 21st century, then they deserve to lose out. It might not be morally right, but they should provide the alternative rather than complaining.

Even legal PSP movie downloads seem impossible to get, even if you are willing to pay for them. Every site I found on page 1 of Google was a P2P site. If there are any real legal sites out there that are run by the movie companies, or by Sony, then they should be at #1 on Google for the most obvious keywords. They have the dough to pay for even the highest priced Adword keywords and to employ the SEO experts to get them to #1 for every keyword.

Nope. I have come to the conclusion that the movie companies spend more time complaining than trying to do something about it. At least you can purchase legal music downloads pretty easily these days, but movies? No chance! Stop complaining and acting like the little kids you prosecute. You are supposed to be the Big Boys of the movie world, yet you cry your eyes out about little high school kids beating you senseless with technology, when you can’t even make regular movie downloads available for we who are willing to pay for them.

Until that time, I will continue to offer peer-to-peer file sharing software to those that want to use it, and if they use it for illegal purposes that is their choice. I should warn them not to and do, but I certainly can’t blame them.

Until movie companies get off their big fat butts and get into this century I will provide people with the means to legally share movie files – nod, nod, wink, wink! My software isn’t illegal and it is free. Why should I give up my business of providing a means to legally download movies and music made by people that want to share it freely just because large corporations can’t get of their big fat asses and provide the public with what they want?

As soon as any legal download facilities become available than I will offer it, as I do the sites that allow you to legally download copyrighted music, such as the new Napster and other similar music sites. The problem is that there are few similar movie sites.

I am completely honest about the legality of downloads from P2P sites, and to extend that honesty, most of the p2p software on sale for a lifetime payment is free open source software that anybody can get completely free without paying anything. If you go for that, however, you don’t get the supercharged software that speeds up the downloads to a tolerable speed, you don’t get the support and you don’t get the extra software offered.

You make your own mind with open source software whether to use it as it is or to go for a better presentation, support and download speed. I made my mind up and know what I prefer, but then I download legal movies.

If ever God descended on earth to talk to human beings, surely he will speak like Plato. No other language will suit Him so well, in order to touch the mind, heart and soul of human beings. By reading his celestial dialogues, one rather feels that God incarnated as Plato, in order to distribute knowledge, wisdom and love to humanity. His thoughts are so profound and perfectly chiselled, that no one as yet, managed to add even one iota onto his celestial writings.

Hoping not to exaggerate, I want to voice, like the fanatical Islamite Omar for his Koran, “Burn the voluminous libraries, they are unnecessary, since their true values are all in Plato’s writings”. Whatever one wants to know, he will find it always in his books. Philosophy, physics, metaphysics, immortality, sociology, cosmogony, language, politics, mathematics, justice, pedagogy, literature, astronomy, rhetoric, civil constitution, hygiene, athletics, pure love and whatever else.

Plato’s book “The Republic” will suffice to educate the world”, said Emerson, no other schooling is necessary.

Without Plato’s thoughts, we would surely all look like the young infants, who scream and kick their little legs, until they learn to speak the mother’s tongue, and say what they want in order to calm themselves.

Plato means philosophy and philosophy means Plato. He is the father and teacher of man’s reason, and without him, societies of today would not be far better than the lower animal kingdom. He established the first organised school on earth, and until today, 25 centuries later, schoolbells ring in every city and village around the globe.

He consumed, like a silkworm, the undefined and unripe thoughts of ancient Greece, Egypt, Babylonia and Asia, in order to synthesise and deliver them in a more defined and perfect way to Hellenes, and other European nations. Barbarians and savages of the world became calmer psychosomatically by suckling Plato’s mental ambrosia for 2500 years. Philosophers, mystics, poets, prose writers, language teachers, rhetoric’s, astronomers, cosmogonist, pedagogues and dogmatic worshipers, all ran and will still run forever into the mystery, that is named Plato.

Many borrowed his intellectual ladder to climb a little higher, in order to gaze at their soul’s loftiest wonder.

Christians have Platonise in their creed; Hebrews have crypto-imitate him, and Muslims copied Plato’s morals, almost identically in their little book on ethics “Ahlak-y-jalaly”

Poets and profound sheers like: Amonios, Plotinus, Plutarch, Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, Thomas Taylor, Voltaire, Hugo, Bacon, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, Carlyle, Emerson, and a thousand others, where all Platonic offspring.

Although Aristotle tried to oppose Plato’s thoughts for a while initially, he failed to do so. He too, Platonise in every feather -writing word until the last day of his life.

It is impossible for one to think any further without Plato’s help. He is like a large hairy-handed father, who holds his child tenderly by his hairless hand, to lead him to his first day of primary school.

He was born around 427 B.C, near Pericles, where one of the worlds most known ancient political leaders died. He lived in the glory days of tragedian play-writers – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and witnessed the catastrophic side effects of the Peloponnesian war. In spite of his rich and aristocratic upbringing, he refused to follow a materialistic road of plenty and egocentric vanity. He chose instead, the path of temperance and moderate poverty, in order to harvest later, his brilliant intellectual and spiritual glory.

At the tender age of 20, he met the mighty Socrates whom he followed until his death. After the inhuman execution of his beloved teacher, he devoted the rest of his life to talk only about him.

He travelled extensively to the “magna Grecia” of Sicily and visited Egypt and Babylonia, they say that he went even further. Returning to Athens, he opened the first university in the world in 368 B.C, which he named “Academia” after the well know Greek athlete Academos. It was an open aired school among pine trees and olive groves where Aristotle’s would imitate him later with his Lyceum school on the banks of the Illissos River.

Students from all over the world would arrive thirsty to study at Plato’s Philosophical school, but only those who were initiated into his Platonic’s ideas were allowed to enter. On the front of his school gate, you could read from a distance the large inscriptive banner in Pendelic marble.

“No entrance to none initiated” He always lectured verbally by conversing with his students like a gentle loving father. Although he never believed in written teaching method, he wrote many books to pass his time.. He called his dialectic writings “pagali paidia”, which means, pleasant game or noble amusement. He believed like the mathematician Pythagoras, that the true intellectual system of the universe is mathematically rapt and a difficult one to understand well, without some basic knowledge of geometry. For this reason a second sign-board at his School was written: “Ignorant in geometry should not enter here”.

He absorbed the Hellenic forerunning thinkers like, Homer, Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Philolaos, Parmenides, Empedocles and Xenophanes, in his mental mill. He re-synthesized them all and reproduced them tastier and more digestible for the Hellenes and the rest of the worlds understanding. Unfortunately they did not have the convenience in those days, like today, of recording lectures for storage, but his feather pen written dialogues, are good enough to make our souls dance like hedgehogs when we read them.

When I read his book “Last days of Socrates” at the tender age of 25 , not only could I not sleep that night, but I also wept like a child and felt very pleased at my new discovery. A spiritual awakening had taken place inside me, like a “purgatory” (cleansing fire) that cleansed my soul like the wheat kernels from other harmful weeds. I did not know to whom I must be grateful first, Plato’s wonderful brain or to Socrates’ mighty wisdom. They were both so God like, that I could not distinguish where the one ended and the other one began. It is impossible for one to remain the same after reading Plato’s thoughts. They are like rare remedies that harness our five senses to obey human reason.

Plato awakens in us the love of learning and our endless spiritual enfoldment. A new and common world opens for all who have been touched by Plato’s magnanimity, leaving behind all ignorance and darkness that made us walk blindly like the sleepwalkers in the midnight hours.

He united the European brotherhood intellectually and inspired the rest of the world to follow him. He made all of them feel that he was their compatriot. The English said with admiring voices: ‘A! How English are these Platonic writings! The Normans, Teutonic’s, Slavs, Scandinavians, Latinos, Asians, Africans and all the rest of our global dwellers to own him as well.

All great souls who are surpassing their national borders, become citizen of the universe or cosmos, and called ‘cosmocrats’, which means, citizens of the universal beauty. Souls as Plato’s are cognate with the bright sun that is welcomed immensely and loved wherever its warm shining rays touch. We are all grateful to the mighty Zeus, who descended to earth in the form of Plato, to ignite brilliantly the journey of our souls, to higher planes. Scholars from all over the world translated and will keep on translating Plato’s writings, like the Lord’s Prayer. They wish to learn Plato’s original spoken language, to feel a little closer to his celestial thinking genius.

Plato’s wisdom is the only one in the universe that lifts higher the human intellect, to be free, and spiritually upright.

His creator wasn’t a watchful sky-dweller, but earthly collaborator with heart and intellect. God’s height for him was never surpassed the peaks of mount Olympus.

Freedom of the Soul, (salvation) was exclusively an intellectual issue, and never one of a faith, prayer and confession. “Man is the measure of everything” used to voice-out the sophist Protagoras.

He asserted like Socrates, that he knew nothing personally, and that he was learning by conversing with others. The real knowledge, he said, does not derive from to much schooling, but can only be discovered within ourselves through mutual conversation. Wisdom is all in the soul, he said, and can be resurfaced by remembering. What is the first step then in discovering this knowledgeable journey?

The mind should control and direct the wild passions and sentiments first, like the charioteer does with his horses by controlling them through discipline, to arrive safely and on time at his destination.

I have searched for more information about Plato’s life, but unfortunately, I did not find much. It seems that great men have an unusually short biography. No one entered his house, to tell us more about his private life. If he had a wife, friends, girlfriends, weaknesses or other personal peculiarities, we know nothing of it.

All of his private time was converted to contemplation, wisdom and spirituality, like the well-built chimney where the fire burns well and smokeless, to avoid polluting the earthly atmosphere.

They say that he did not smile easily, or hardly ever. He was not far wrong I think, since uncontrolled laughter sometimes can be a sign of a psychosomatic disease and mental anomaly. Schizophrenic or mentally effected people, usually roar with laughter without any reason what so ever.

All anecdotes, said Aristotle, are half finished truths without danger, if they end in danger they become tragedies. Plato never loved superfluity and unfinished truths, they did not produce him laughter, but rather sorrow for its plight.

How did Plato’s intellectual flame remains non-extinguishable for so many centuries, in spite of being fiercely persecuted frequently from the religious fundamentalist?

They say, that never has never been more than a hand full of people in every country, who read and understand Plato’s writings well; Certainly not enough reading -force to support a new edition to be published regularly. Despite this, Plato’s books have been republished almost yearly around the globe. Here we see clearly, that some higher cosmic power takes care and regulates Plato’s spirit to flow uninterrupted on this planet. Like the oxygen in our atmosphere that must be constantly regenerated to support life on this globe; so too with Plato’s voice, will his work be republished inexhaustibly, as necessary spiritual food for mankind.

Whatever advances or changes our future brings, even if the earthly axis changes its place or the sky cracks in the middle, Plato will never vanish from our planet.

He will remain like an irreplaceable torch, throughout the ages, to light the mental and spiritual journey of humanity. His books will survive like heavenly heritage, revealing to each of us, how high we can reach, if we choose, and follow the right path in our own life’s journey.

Dimitri Karalis

Johannesburg

Society has always held a curiosity for the non-conformal body, the deviant, the abomination, and the monster. From Beowulf’s Grendel, the Victorian sideshow freak and Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory creation, and through to the modern cinematic creations such as Giger’s Alien, the posthuman has both fascinated and appalled. In some cases, such as with Mary Shelley’s unfortunate beast, the monster has garnered pity; a misunderstood misfit that is sympathised more than it is feared. The posthuman “Other” is always identifiable, if not always associable.

Posthumanism is a critical theory that realises mankind’s fallibility, vulnerability, and inconsequence within the universe. For the last century science fiction, through literature and cinema, has analysed the human, and exactly what defines the human, physically and psychologically, perhaps further than any other popular media. And the alien, more specifically the extra-terrestrial, presents us with a being that often rivals humanity in terms of intelligence and wisdom, and at other times cruelty and ignorance, but importantly, is always differs from us in appearance.

The extra terrestrial creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing reminds us of our inferiority; genetically it is the superior life form. The Thing is an unusual creation, in that it is immediately identifiable, as is any effective cinematic creature design, despite having no secure form or consistent features. Instead, the sexless, faceless alien mimics its victims, which it must first consume, often merging several of these assimilated forms into grotesque, ever shifting amalgams that are only in part identifiable as human, a common trait of the postmodern subject. There is never genuine explanation as to why the creature must consume that which it mimics, though this could be considered essential to the plot; the Thing kills not because it is evil, but purely for self preservation, an important factor that separates the creature from our sentient values; Carpenter never reveals the Thing’s motives, or exactly how intelligent it is.

In Carpenter’s movie, the human body, mind and body, is viewed as little more than disposable flesh; though the alien mimics the form of those it has assimilated, its victims are inconsequential once gone. The mutation of the character’s identities produces images hideous and shocking, but never less than magnificent; despite its alien design, the Thing demands a certain level of respect. It is the efficient hunter, one step above man on the evolutional ladder, never conforming to one analytical or interpretational state, a unified mind even in coexistent bodies. The non-identifiable Thing, far removed from the more traditional, sympathetic monster such as Dracula or Frankenstein’s creation, is terrifying because it is simply the better beast, and not unlike the virus it is a form without our limitations that will continue to adapt and consume until it is the planet’s dominant organism. To the Thing we are the threat, we are the alien. The film’s downbeat ending, with MacReady and Childs unsure whether the creature has been destroyed or is in fact one of them, suggests that man has met his match.

The Enlightenment subject suggests that reason and rationality form the basis of human progress, that the human race, our actions dictated by reason, has its limits. Man is a self-governing body, unified and complete. The alien body, conversely, is inhuman, liminal and incomplete, often limitless, a randomised facsimile of our own form, that compels us to anxiously consider our own image. The way in which the Thing absorbs it victims could be seen as something similar, a violation of the human form, its complexity and uniqueness. The alien genetically rapes that which it assimilates; that it is able to mimic the scientist’s actions and mannerisms suggests that it also absorbs the scientist’s personalities to some degree, stealing intellect and memory as well as genetic makeup. This violation of the human form in which nothing is sacrilege, a simplification the flesh of the body into a leaking, simplified substance, opposes the essentialist basis of inherent identity; here, identity is something to be taken.

It s interesting to compare Carpenter’s remake to the 1951 original, The Thing from Another World, an allegorical portrayal of the McCarthy era, and the American fear of communist intrusion. This political theme, of constant threat to an American identity ever susceptible to violation from foreign bodies, is near neglected in Carpenter’s1982 remake, released only two weeks after the more optimistic E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Though this version retains the themes of paranoia and confused identity, Carpenter’s movie plays on a far more relevant fear; that of contagion. The inability to detect the Thing by sight alone, and the scientist’s reliance on blood tests, reflects the world-wide hysteria around the AIDS virus that had emerged just a few years earlier. The Thing is not a physical creature as such, but a contamination, an infiltration of the system, detectable through examination of bodily fluids. Whereas The Thing from Another World’s characters are united by their paranoia, MacReady and company are isolated and distanced in The Thing, despite the film’s smaller scale. When MacReady kills one of his comrades, we realise that the scientists may be as much at risk from each other’s suspicions as they are from the alien. The notion of the sociological subject, of identity formed by significant others, is perverted by the presence of the posthuman Other; identity is now unclear, unreliable and dangerous. Though it is tempting to see the Hollywood monster as pure spectacle, it is not the monster that we consider when witnessing the amorphous, leaking forms of the Thing, but ourselves.

Though it bears little resemblance to the alien from Philip Kaufman’s original The Thing from Another Planet, Carpenter’s creation is not unique, owing more than a little to the impostors from either version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But whereas the body snatcher could love, feel and hate (or at the very least express impressions of such human emotions) the Thing displays no desires other than consumption and self preservation. In Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of the most effective scenes involves our protagonist Bennell, played by Donald Sutherland, facing the cloned shell of his now deceased girlfriend Elizabeth, as she gains consciousness and stands naked before him. This moment of temptation, as Bennell is overwhelmed by panic and enchantment combined, is broken only when Elizabeth releases a piercing, inhuman scream, revealing that she will never be capable of replacing the dead partner. This scene possesses a certain level of identity anxiety that The Thing lacks, and asks a question that is at the centre of Tarkovsky’s Solaris; could one come to accept that which is human only in appearance as a replacement for a deceased loved one?

Whereas Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays with themes of wide spread violation, an extra terrestrial insurrection which only Leonard Nimoy’s peculiar psychiatrist eventually embraces, the protagonist in Solaris, confronted by a perfect replica of his dead wife, struggles to reject the warmth of illusion. This cold sexuality displayed by the replicas in Solaris and Body Snatchers, is an artificial empathy, almost android, with little understanding or appreciation of the human, takes the fear of violation in the opposite direction of The Thing’s hunter/prey themes: man is replace by an equally civilised being, perhaps more so, which adapts naturally to man’s normative identity. The body snatcher does not disrupt society but replace it with a new order, an order not suited toward man.

The ‘uncanny valley’, a hypothesis that suggests that the more human in appearance a robot may be, the more repulsive it will be received by a genuine human. Also applicable to dolls and computer generated characters, the uncanny valley suggests that we hold the body sacred, and become disturbed when something appears almost human… but not quite.

This is a far more complex identity anxiety to appreciate, in terms of visual or physical imagery, than the ‘Other body’ of the Thing. Giger’s Xenomorph design, from Ridley Scott’s Alien, is a humanoid, relatable evolution of the shark; engineered and phallic in design, externally based on both human genitalia and machine parts. The Xenomorph is ritually parasitic and sexless, both savage and motherly, vile and alluring. Strangely, the Thing lacks this fetishist attractiveness; when it does take on human parts, they are either a perfect mimic, or stretched and disfigured beyond association. But it does fascinate, if only through indifference, and for the film’s stunning use of animatronic technology, itself a mechanical imitation of natural life. Though it is sexless (or at the very least, its gender is unidentifiable) the creature shares two common elements with man, a drive to consume and a desire to keep warm.

The case studies we have looked at, such as The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, are not set in futuristic dystopias or idealistic utopias, but grounded in our own present. The ‘it could happen to you’ impact of these films should not be overlooked. The Thing is a hideous half-resemblance of man, an amorphous, monstrous fake that not unlike the infection that it metaphorically represents, wants nothing more than to survive; to find food and shelter. In this respect, we are not so different. Science fiction has represented the posthuman in as many ways as it has the human, emphasizing that:

The Thing preys not only on the fear of contagion, but on the loss of individuality. Of all of the recent science fiction ‘horrors’ it reveals the human condition as much as it tells a good monster story. The films human characters are almost indistinguishable from one another. Cold and impersonal, they are a study of the human race as a whole than any one specimen. The protagonist MacReady’s identity is defined not by similarity to his fellow men, but from his differences to the alien. In Carpenter’s movie, the posthuman Other and the human form are indeterminable, and identity is indefinite.