Films you've seen recently and would unreservedly recommend:

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
suspended said:
As other people have pointed out, the physical environment almost seems responsive to his thoughts and paranoia. What he thinks materializes.
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Always the way - not to quite the same extent - in noir detective type things, one clue always magically pops up the second another one reaches a dead end. Here it's that but life too.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Egyptians were buried with possessions and familiars weren't they? Well the pharaohs I mean, not all of them. Or is that so obvious it didn't need saying?
 
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suspended said:
As other people have pointed out, the physical environment almost seems responsive to his thoughts and paranoia. What he thinks materializes.
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"I was probably about 18 or 19 when I read Ulysses and that taught me how to write. As Leopold Bloom wanders around town, you get his complete thought processes, but it’s threaded through the whole city. What Joyce is doing is creating electricity. He’s wiring a whole territory – both the book and the city – with these connections and nodes and transfers and switches. Everything becomes this huge network in which any division between outer space and inner space collapses. There’s a total consistency and continuity. And I love that – it’s what life is actually like. It’s what literature should try and somehow produce."
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Sowden House I love (as you know) - more Aztec than Egypt but I reckon the link is a race of god-kings who were happy to sacrifice their subjects for their longevity and ascendance (at least in the popular view).

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This is the big book you see him reading in the film,
The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers—how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage—updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.

Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains the integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.
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www.goodreads.com

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret C…

The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers…
www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
 
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The Copiale cipher is an encrypted manuscript consisting of 75,000 handwritten characters filling 105 pages in a bound volume.[1] Undeciphered for more than 260 years, the document was cracked in 2011 with the help of modern computer techniques. An international team consisting of Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and USC Viterbi School of Engineering, along with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, found the cipher to be an encrypted German text. The manuscript is a homophonic cipher that uses a complex substitution code, including symbols and letters, for its text and spaces.[2]

Previously examined by scientists at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in the 1970s, the cipher was thought to date from between 1760 and 1780.[3] Decipherment revealed that the document had been created in the 1730s by a secret society[1][2][4] called the "high enlightened (Hocherleuchtete) oculist order"[5] of Wolfenbüttel,[6] or Oculists.[5][7][8] The Oculists used sight as a metaphor for knowledge.[9]
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en.wikipedia.org

Copiale cipher - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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suspended said:
And this to me is the big switch in the film: he starts out in the beginning peering out towards the world. He has plenty of problems at home—dysfunctional family relationships, missing rent, unemployment—but he seems more interested in finding something Out There that catches his interest. His own personal dramas are too boring to even be perceived as dramas.
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"The earlier era of paranoia in this country was based largely on violent events arid on the suspicions that spread concerning the true nature of the particular event, from Dallas to Memphis to Vietnam. Who was behind it, what led to it, what will flow from it? How many shots, how many gunmen, how many wounds on the President’s body? People believed, sometimes justifiably, that they were being lied to by the government or elements within the government. Today, it seems, the virus is self-generated. Distrust and disbelief are centered in a deep need to raise individual discontent to an art form, often with no basis in fact. In many cases, people choose to believe a clear falsehood, about President Obama, for instance, or September 11, or immigrants, or Muslims. These are often symbolic beliefs, usable kinds of fiction, a means of protest rising from political, economic, religious, or racial complaints, or just a lousy life in a dying suburb."
 
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Nah. We've talked about Stephenson on here before. I said I got the impression he'd be like a shit Pynchon, plus he looks like a white supremacist.
 
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