tagged w/ metaphors
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" MONSTROUS OBSESSION " ;
SMU dean shares meaning of GODZILLA with giant beasts biggest fans
The amphibian beast hails from the East, big and green and mostly mean. King of the Monsters, they call him - which is to say that Godzilla is the Elvis of monsters, a hunka-hunka-burnin'-breath who has left countless cities and towns all shook up in his cinematic wake.
Revered and feared, defender and destroyer, he's just a big lug who is misunderstood. For 56 years, this icon of pop culture and Japanese film has conquered imaginations and similarly costumed foes, creating perhaps the world's most prolific movie franchise.
Along his torn-up trail, the menacing brute also has created some major Godzilla geeks. One of them is William Tsutsui, the recently appointed dean of SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, whose obsession with Godzilla goes beyond campy special effects.
As he was growing up, his childhood fascination gave way to scholarly interpretation - and Tsutsui came to see the globally recognized monster as cultural ambassador, the therapeutic creation of a postwar Japan.
"I realized there was something more there than just a guy in a rubber suit," said Tsutsui, 47.
Wait - here he comes again, bursting through hillsides, shattering bridges and tearing through power lines, and now hundreds of villagers are fleeing in terror ...
Elvis has crushed the building.
Earlier this month, Tsutsui addressed Godzilla's place in Japanese culture for about 130 people at SMU's Dallas Hall, where his passion and admiration for the big fella was evident in his lecture, sponsored by the Japan-America Society of Dallas/Fort Worth.
"It's really cool," said Lauren Sethney, the group's program director. "He's a top-notch academic, and he's really into Godzilla."
. . . .continued, at
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http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20101024-SMU-dean-shares-monstrous-obsession-with-7286.ece" MONSTROUS OBSESSION " ;
SMU dean shares meaning of GODZILLA with giant... more
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French advertising companies are often criticised for using sexual images to sell everything from designer spectacles to sweetcorn. Now, for the first time, a controversy has erupted in France over the use of sexually suggestive posters as a deterrent.
A campaign to discourage young people from smoking shows male and female teenagers kneeling in front of a man, as if being forced to have oral sex. A cigarette takes the place of the man's sexual organ. The caption reads: "Smoking is to be a slave to tobacco."
The campaign, which was devised for a pressure group supporting the rights of non-smokers, has been attacked as "scandalous" and "potentially counter-productive" by feminist and pro-family campaigners.French advertising companies are often criticised for using sexual images to sell... more
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Yeti89
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added this
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1 year ago
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A "HULK-SMASH" ! of a blog
All things HULK. .....and be sure to check out this guys art collection. Recommended for all gammafans.
http://hulkcollection.wordpress.com/A "HULK-SMASH" ! of a blog
All things HULK. .....and be sure to check... more
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"Could vampires , like the filthy rich, parasitic. aristocratic be representatives of the capitalist class? And zombies...stand for labor and the proletariat? ...these movies would embody the audience's anger and fascination with the money men responsible for the recent economic collapse..."
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/movies/102380-voodoo-economics/"Could vampires , like the filthy rich, parasitic. aristocratic be... more
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Though many say ninja monk flick Book of Eli is about Christianity, it's actually about rebooting the old church for a new world. Like many SF stories about the emergence of a new faith, Eli questions religion while defending it.
In the pantheon of science fiction tales, Book of Eli is just one of many that imagines future, mutated versions of contemporary religion. Like Margaret Atwood's recent novel The Year of the Flood or the classic Dune, Book of Eli makes just a few telling tweaks in familiar forms of faith. These stories suggest something that many would consider blasphemous: Religion is a product of history, and it changes with the times.
The Democracy Of Heaven
Book of Eli is, as its title suggests, a movie that tells the story of a new chapter in the Christian Bible. But it's also a reboot of the New Testament, retelling the origin story of Christianity. Our knife-wielding badass Eli, who risks everything to walk across the country and deliver his Bible to the only printing press in all the land, could be viewed as a Christ figure of the future. He spreads the word of old-school Christianity, but he's remaking the religion as he goes, incorporating printing presses, Johnny Cash, and ninja skills into traditional lore.
But the tweak here goes beyond suggesting that Johnny Cash could become part of tomorrow's hymnals. Book of Eli transforms the origin story of European and American Christianity, converting the chalk-white faces of Jesus and his apostles into the battle-scarred face of a powerful black man. The figure of Eli is a far cry from the classic imagery of the manger that many Americans grew up with. And in the end, Eli leaves behind a powerful female apostle to spread his word. With those changes - a holy book now starring a black man, who chooses a white woman as his apprentice - contemporary Christianity gets a makeover.
More at the link . . .
http://io9.com/5451262/why-does-science-fiction-invent-new-religionsThough many say ninja monk flick Book of Eli is about Christianity, it's actually... more
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A university lecturer in philosophy suggests that Gotham's hero and its worst villain share an unwilling awareness of society's fragility — and a profound isolation from others as a result. We're pretty sure we knew this, but validation is nice.
Ron Novy, a lecturer at the University of Central Arkansas, argues that what Batman and the Joker have in common are formative traumas that highlight how easily order can slip away. Bruce Wayne, of course, saw his parents killed in front of him as a child, thus learning an unwelcome lesson about how peace can be upturned and the law can fail.
Novy draws on Alan Moore's semi-canonical Batman: The Killing Joke to explain how the Joker's experience mirrors Batman's own. In Killing Joke, the man who'll become the Joker is a struggling stand-up comic forced to turn to crime. His pregnant wife dies just before a botched break-in at a chemical plant, where the comedian falls into a vat of chemicals that turn him into a chalk-faced, green-haired ghoul. Seeing his reflection, his mind finally breaks, and a villain is born.
Throughout Killing Joke, the Joker keeps returning to his theory that "one bad day" is all it takes for a morally upright person to access their depraved side. If anyone can sympathize, Novy points out (as have others), it's the prematurely orphaned Bruce Wayne.
By Novy's lights, Batman and the Joker have each "glimpsed behind the curtain of appearances," learning all too well how artificial, and easily broken, are the rules and codes that keep the world running smoothly. The difference lies in how they use their insights. One fights to preserve the system; the other takes a jackhammer to it.
Novy doesn't mention The Dark Knight, possibly because that movie makes too much of the hero-villain kinship to support his conclusions. Even so, his essay and Heath Ledger's anarchic portrayal of the Joker — by turns acerbic, childlike, barbarous, and oddly feminine, as if he were bored even with the unwritten rules about how a man should walk or talk — seem to be in a kind of accidental dialogue.
At one point, Ledger's Joker is called crazy, and he flatly refutes it: "I'm not. No, I'm not." It's the most serious we'll see him in the whole movie. If anything, Ledger's Joker believes he's the sanest guy around. He understands things on a level that almost no one else does — the only other person operating without illusions is Batman himself.
It's that shared alienation, Novy suggests, that makes Batman and the Joker such perfectly matched foes. Though it's a bone-deep character trait that they only have in common with each other, it's also what drives their struggle — what Novy calls "a relationship without which each one would cease to be who he now is." Or as the Joker puts it in The Dark Night, "I think you and I are destined to do this forever."
http://io9.com/5418487/the-existential-loneliness-that-unites-batman-and-the-jokerA university lecturer in philosophy suggests that Gotham's hero and its worst... more
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Hungry for Vampires
EW talks to the best-selling authors behind the current vamp vogue including Stephanie Meyer, Melissa de la Cruz, and Anne RiceHungry for Vampires
EW talks to the best-selling authors behind the current vamp... more
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Who knew that the creators of Twilight, True Blood, and Buffy the Vampire slayer were covert leaders in the sustainability movement?Who knew that the creators of Twilight, True Blood, and Buffy the Vampire slayer were... more
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leahl
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added this
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2 years ago
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Global Poverty can be thought of as a vast desert of despair and hopelessness. That said, foreign aid programs deliver hope and possibility. The Borgen Project lobbies politicians on behalf of the worlds poor so that foreign aid programs have more than enough liquidity to get the task done.
http://borgenproject.org/Global Poverty can be thought of as a vast desert of despair and hopelessness. That... more
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Global Poverty can be thought of as a vast desert of despair and hopelessness. That said, foreign aid programs deliver hope and possibility. The Borgen Project lobbies politicians on behalf of the worlds poor so that foreign aid programs have more than enough liquidity to get the task done.
http://borgenproject.org/Global Poverty can be thought of as a vast desert of despair and hopelessness. That... more
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