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Bird Box

#1
Syne Offline

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/o2AsIXSh2xo

Many reviews compare this to a mix of The Happening and The Quite Place, and both are well-deserved. And I agree that this is better than the former and not as good as the latter. Definitely worth watching, even if only for the development of Bullock's character. I'd hazard to say that it wouldn't have worked near as well with a lesser actress.
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#2
Secular Sanity Offline
Yeah, she was great. The only other actress that could have pulled it off is Natalie Portman. The ending was different in the book, though. The sanctuary wasn’t a school for the blind. They did it to themselves.

Maybe the only way you can remain optimistic is to be blind to the truth.  Wink

"Life Itself" was pretty good but it would have been better without the spoon fed explanations.


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/b5kwtJkUdpA
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#3
Syne Offline
The book ending would have sucked. But I also thought that the ending was perhaps too much like...
...what she told the kids Tom saw at the top of the tree, and perhaps that hinted at it being a delusion.

Is Life Itself another study in coming to terms with reluctant mother/fatherhood? Is it relevant to Bird Box at all? If not, you might start a new thread.
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#4
Secular Sanity Offline
What he saw?  I thought that she was just doing what he had asked, providing them with hope. 

The author said that he always loved medusa. That’s what I was thinking of when I watched it but as Medusa representing nihilism.

Medusa has sometimes appeared as representing notions of scientific determinism and nihilism, especially in contrast with romantic idealism.

It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, and Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie.
— Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore

In "Life Itself," Abby comes up with an idea for her thesis paper—an unreliable narrator. She says that the only reliable narrator is life itself but life itself is also a completely unreliable narrator because it’s misdirecting and always misleading us. It’s impossible to predict where it’s going to go next. Her thesis is LIFE as the ultimate unreliable narrator.

She dies but Will can’t accept the truth. He constructs a story believing that she just left him and he’s trying to figure out why. He questions the accuracy of his memory. Was it biased? Was she really unhappy? Was he smothering her? Did he push her into marriage and into having a baby that she wasn’t ready for?

His therapist asked him to tell her about that day—the day that she left. He realizes then that she died when she was hit by a bus but the baby lived. His therapist tells him what happened.  He says, "Okay," but then says, "No, he doesn't like that story. He doesn't want to be here anymore." Right there in front of his therapist, he takes his own life.

I don’t know which direction the author of Bird Box will take in the future, but if it was me, I’d go with the nihilism.
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#5
Syne Offline
She was just providing hope...
...but what they found was pretty much exactly what she described (birds of every color and lots of kids to play with)...so it seemed maybe a bit too convenient. Didn't help that it never explained how a school for the blind had plenty of food for all those people.

If it were an analogy for nihilism, it wasn't a good one. Nihilism doesn't tend to infect happy, well-adjusted people, as they have little reason to doubt the meaning of life. And it doesn't spare the insane, who would be most apt to have suffered a trauma that would make them question life's meaning. Now you could say that nihilists wouldn't believe in the significance of the "visions", but I doubt you're trying to equate nihilism with insanity...although both seem to involve a break with reality (or the internal model thereof, i.e. expectations).


Thanks for saving me the trouble of watching Life Itself.
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#6
Secular Sanity Offline
Original thoughts? Do they even exist anymore? Surely I’m not the only one who thought of it.  And whad'ya know! Dani Di Placido and I think alike.

"In that case, what do the mysterious monsters represent? Well, that one is definitely open for debate. I think the creatures are deliberately ambiguous, but my personal interpretation is that they represent the danger of nihilism."
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#7
C C Offline
Apparently a birdbrains sequel to "Bird Box" is already making the rounds.

'Bird Box' challenge: Netflix urges people to stop due to safety concerns: "Perhaps unsurprisingly in today's media-obsessed world, people have been uploading and sharing videos of themselves, wandering around blindfolded, doing the #BirdboxChallenge, which is inspired by scenes depicted in the movie. [...] In hopes of going viral, people have attempted to emulate the movie by wearing blindfolds, staggering through their homes and fumbling around outdoors which, in some cases, has led to painful results."

~
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