Consider Hamlet . I'm sure you remember Hamlet. Gloomy guy. Wears black a lot. Talks to himself. Likes to hang out in cemeteries. Now, imagine for a moment that you are Hamlet. You are the Prince of Denmark (congratulations!) and heir to the throne. While you're off at University doing the "student" thing, you receive word that your beloved father (the King) is dead; murdered, it turns out, by your horrible Uncle, who then promptly marries your mother (eww) and usurps the throne, snatching it away from you before you even have a chance to catch the next train home. Your father's ghost (who is, you learn, burning endlessly in some harrowing Purgatory, suffering torments beyond imagining) confirms all this, and urges you to take revenge on his behalf. You're not really the right guy for this sort of thing; you're more the academic type. Revenge isn't your natural style; your first instinct would probably be to write an essay at them or something... bu...
"I tried to write poetry in College. You know what it got me? Night after night, sitting in front of that little portable typewriter, staring at the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Just staring, hours at a time. And I told myself, if I only knew the order; the right pecking order in which to hit those twenty-six keys, I could write the poem that could shame Shakespeare. But I could never quantify that ridiculous, simple, twenty-six-digit code." Kurt Vonnegut's Epicac , adapted for television by Liam O'Brien Every single idea ever expressed in English (some assembly required) "Artificial Intelligence" might not be the most frightening topic in the news these days (it's up against some pretty stiff competition after all) but it is a topic that seems to be prompting an awful lot of existential questions about the human condition at the moment. Nestled amongst all the apocalyptic stories about mass murder, human rights abuses, political violence, enviro...
If you immerse yourself even casually in the world of A.I. pop culture, you are going to encounter a lot of Apocalypses. (Apocalypsi? Apocalypsae? Did we ever decide whether "Apocalypse" has an official plural? Let's never find out...) Whether it's the Terminator, HAL, Colossus or Talky Tina, robots, ChatBots and supercomputers always seem to be running amok, taking over the world or trying to killing everybody (occasionally in that order). Can you blame people for getting nervous now that A.I. ChatBots are actually starting to enter our lives for real? We have decades of reference literature to justify those fears, and the ChatBots do seem to be spreading awfully fast, even if all they are doing at the moment is talking to us. But that's how it starts, right? A harmless chat here, a bit of cybersex there, and then boom! MurderBots on every street corner. We've all seen those movies. And guess what? The DeathBots really have arrived, but not quite the way you ...
Okay, folks, this one is just plain bonkers. We've had a month or so of fairly heavy films that tackle some difficult topics (Evolution; Witch-burning; Segregation; Rape.. nice, uncontentious subjects) so it's about time we pause for some refreshment. The rest of March is going to be fun, fun, fun. Say hello to Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was born in Russia to a well-educated, upper-middle class Jewish family. The October Revolution of 1917 brought her comfortable childhood to a very sudden and violent end (she was twelve at the time) and her family lost absolutely everything. By the time she was able to travel to the United States in 1926, she had cultivated what was to become a life-long visceral hatred for Communism, or indeed for any remotely collectivist philosophy. She wasn't merely opposed to the Soviet Union (which you can sort of understand, given what happened to her family); she was violently opposed to any obligations that might be imposed upon the individual for the b...
It may have quite understandably escaped your notice (what with all the mishigas going on around us) but 2025 marked the tenth anniversary of these film nights at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. In truth, there have been a few interruptions here and there. We took a brief hiatus for the occasional global pandemic, and then there was the time when the Church roof collapsed... ...but even allowing for all that, we've covered a lot of territory since 2015. Now, as we prepare to enter our second decade, I hope you will indulge me if I permit myself a moment of quiet reflection. What I earnestly hope is obvious by now is that these film nights are not primarily about the films. Yes, I screen movies (and I fully intend to screen many more) and I hope everyone enjoys the titles I select. Even the bad films can be important for anthropological reasons... But this isn't just a film club , and my purpose here is not merely to stick a film in the slot, press "play" and sit do...
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