Week+I

Code 46//, 2003 Michael Winterbottom: Tim Robbins & Samantha Morton** It is really hard to find a film that is not predictable. One of my favorite films is Femme Fatale but Code 46 is climbing up my charts because it puts everything to the table but makes me draw my own conclusions. I appreciated the movie a great deal and I think the actors were perfect for their role in portraying their characters. The first scene I noticed was when Tim Robbins’ character entered the city but right after crossing the inspection station they went into the tunnel and water sprayed the car like it was washing away germs of some sort. From that detail I knew that the outside world sought out to seem dirty but the city was a germ-free zone for the fortunate. I also enjoyed the futuristic English language with its splash of Spanish, French and Arabic all intertwined together. By the integration of different languages and races the world becomes one universal civilization. The cinematic views of capturing different scenes were great as well. The way the camera moved in so many directions was so refreshing. Everything was well thought out from visual identification all the way thru locations, technology, languages, aesthetic, music, mixed feeling/emotions and also the lack of understanding that made it even more intriguing. The film really wants the viewer to see that human behavior is always going to have laws and restrictions to control human nature. It takes place in another time but the world is the same, it shows everything that is happening now but it mainly focusing on how the future is going to be the genetics century and not the Freudian. I did not really see this movie as science fiction because everything looks and gives the impression like our present world but on the inside everything is so different. It seems weird that everything can be controlled with either the touch of a button, a finger print or with drugs. It makes me consider how the world is, in reality, going to be transformed over the year leading up to the future. Will everything be so technologically advanced? Will people be dominated by little pills that could change our inner feelings and mind-set? These are only a couple of questions that quickly came to my mind but my main issue is that will there be two different groups of people, One on the inside and another on the outside?
 * //Week 1//**
 * //Films:

The plotline is a bit confusing which appears not only to be one film but instead has many interlocking films. It seems to be jumping from one scene to the next scene in the matter of 2 minutes while constantly changing the focus from one character to the other. The viewer must really pay great attention to all the main characters and specific details about them because after a while they tend to look very similar and it might be hard to tell who's who. The whole point of this film is to inform the viewer what is going on in the world overseas. The international oil industry is being corrupted without anyone doing anything about it. The main character, George Clooney, plays a CIA agent who is digging throught the past in order to expose facts about the Middle East. Another main character, Matt Damon, is an oil broker from Switzerland who lost his by due to a swimming accident at the home of the Royal Family and is given a large sum of money for their grief. Continuing on with the rest of the characters there is a lawyer who uncovers the story of his life when he discovers corruption within the oil tycoons. Due to the movie's location in which taken place, and the actions that come across as being uncontrollable the Arab rulers, Arab reformers, and Arab terrorists are the major keys to this intriguing tale of complication. Thinking back to the first time I watched this movie more than a year I cab definitely remember the emotional scenes more in detail than the rest of the twists and turns the plot makes. For example, the part when Matt Damon’s little boy gets electrocuted in the pool was devastating and definitely strikes the viewer with a harsh and heartbreaking reality how someone’s world can be torn apart in a matter of seconds and never can be replaced not even with a large sum of money. I remember very lucidly in my mind how the boy loses his life playing a game, even though he is mortified, just in order to fit in and impress the other children as he jumps fearfully into the dark cold water. When there are children involved I feel like I am more compelled to the picture and feel a pain if something takes a toll down the wrong road. Another case in point is when the Arab rulers drive in the desert with their families in huge SUVs. Once the Ruler switches cars to be with his children the American officers blow up the jeep without even thinking about the consequence.
 * //Syriana//, 2005 Stephan Gaghan**

The first thing that caught my eye in this reading by Sanford Kwinter was how a San Bushman believed that animals had the ability to pass on their behavioral blueprint to men. The only way this could work would be through distance and time. It is quite interesting how the Bushman can to the realization on how these accusations came about be believed as “letters”. Rhythms always affect and involve one another. When you hear a first rhythm it certainly shapes the way you hear a second or third rhythm. It seems as thought Kwinter is correct in saying that it is hard for Easterners to understand Western music. Africans have many ways of looking into something. To some, the normal human being might be unaware of details or inner meanings of things but with the intention of really grasping a true understanding of anything object, music and even design, one must allow themselves to let lose and open their inner emotions. In doing so they would be freeing their central passion to feel what is truly there out in the open. Bringing nature into the design process as we all know can be difficult. The fact is that it is so complex that anyone trying to imitate nature never designed it accurately enough to be exactly acceptable as the real deal.
 * //Texts://**
 * Sanford** **Kwinter//, “African Genesis (A “Presentation)”// in Assemblage 36 (MIT, 1998)**

With the conclusions of the collapse of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989, Mark C. Taylor makes the interpretation that the shift progresses from an engineering social order to an informational civilization. Do walls bring about some sort of security? If so, does architecture play the part of the leading value of producing grids and networks? Three of the most influential architects in the history of time were all affected by the consequences of social and cultural currents. Taylor supports the idea that Mies van der Rochem Robert Venturi, and Frank Gehry design theories “shift from a world structured by grids to a world organized like networks”. Any type of machinery and software has architecture as complex as any building structures so each item relates to the other. There is definitely a complex relationship between grids and networks and in his book Taylor explains how the Cold War systems transform into a network culture. However, as times change so does the cold war systems. In the 1990’s globalization came about and took over the part of the cold war classifications. Now a day, instead of maintaining security of east/west, left/right, communism/capitalism, and etc. globalization makes it possible for a “new world order”. Everything Taylor says about walls and grids offering no protection from the distribution of more webs make sense to me as a reader with an outside perspective. I liked the part that he than says how the end product is likely to multiply and extend out only to make more webs grow. When those webs grow even more they tend to collapse which than contributes to matter of change.
 * Mark C. Taylor, //“From Grid to Network”// in the Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago 2001)**