Absolute Power Movie Quotes

And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair.

SPIEGEL: You have a lot of respect for the Dalai Lama, you even rewrote some Buddhist writings for him. Are you a religious person? Cleese: I certainly don't think much of organized religion. I am not committed to anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think. I think you can reduce suffering a little bit, like the Buddhists say, that is one of the few things I take seriously. But the idea that you can run this planet in a rational and kind way -- I think it's not possible. There will always be these sociopaths at the top -- selfish people, power-seekers who want to spend their whole lives seeking it. Robin Skynner, the psychiatrist that I wrote two books with, said to me that you could begin to enjoy life when you realized how bad the planet is, how hopeless everything is. I reached that point these last two or three years when I saw that our existence here is absolutely hopeless. I see the rich people have got a stranglehold on us. If somebody had said that to me when I was 20, I would have regarded him as a left-wing loony. SPIEGEL: You may not have been a left-wing loony, but you were happy to attack and ridicule the church. The "Life of Brian," the story of a young man in Judea who isn't Jesus Christ, but is nevertheless followed like a savior and crucified afterwards, was regarded as blasphemy when it was released in 1979. Cleese: Well there was a small number of people in country towns, all very conservative, who got upset and said, "You can't show the film." So people hired a coach and drove 15 miles to the next town and went to see the film there. But a lot of Christians said, "We got it, we know that the joke is not about religion, but about the way people follow religion." If Jesus saw the Spanish Inquisition I think he would have said, "What are you doing there?" SPIEGEL: These days Muslims and Islam are risky subjects. Do you think they are good issues for satire? Cleese: For sure. In 1982, Graham Chapman and I wrote a number of scenes for "The Meaning of Life" movie which had an ayatollah in them. This ayatollah was raging against all the evil inventions of the West, you know, like toilet paper. These scenes were never included in the film, although I thought they were much better than many other scenes that were included. And that's why I didn't do any more Python films: I didn't want to be outvoted any longer. But I wouldn't have made fun of the prophet. SPIEGEL: Why not? Cleese: How could you? How could you make fun of Jesus or Saint Francis of Assisi? They were wonderful human beings. People are only funny when they behave inappropriately, when they've been taken over by some egotistical emotion which they can't control and they become less human. SPIEGEL: Is there a difference between making fun of our side, so to speak, the Western, Christian side, and Islam? Cleese: There shouldn't be a difference. [SPIEGEL Interview with John Cleese: 'Satire Makes People Think' - 2015]

People say movies are escapist, just entertainment, but I think that’s only an alibi, a way of hiding from ourselves just how effective what we do actually is. When something is in a movie, and especially when something is in a particularly successful film, its language, its grammar, is added into the grammar of possible reality. The banal fact that sharks are terrifying was cemented into our cultural imagination after Jaws. We have no idea how much power we have and absolutely no idea how to use it. It’s like we invent people’s dreams.

Try a little experiment. Sit on the couch and tell yourself you deserve to do absolutely nothing for ten minutes. Put your feet up and exhale. Then listen as your home bursts into life like an animated movie. You’ll begin to hear demands from different tasks around your home. The gutters say clean me. The dishes say wash me. The closet says, Marie Kondo me. This rising chorus becomes louder until it yanks you up two-fisted by your collar and you begin to do. And that’s just the voices of the inanimate objects! When flesh-and-blood humans join in the cacophony of requests, you’ll be running in six directions before you realize it. You don’t believe in the basic permission to stop. I wish I had the power to grant this permission to you. If there was an incantation or potion that I could bequeath to you, I’d crawl on my knees to get it. The best I can do is tell you, “I, Juliet Funt, imperfect mother and businesswoman, give you permission to stop.

There are two myths about Hollywood censorship, both the result of wishful thinking. The first is that the censors were predominantly concerned with the way things were expressed; therefore, all one had to do to circumvent censorship was to come up with subtle ways of saying the same things one might expressed overtly. Some have even suggested that censorship made filmmakers sharper. The second myth is that the censors were stupid, that their witlessness made it easy for shrewd filmmakers to slip things by them. Neither could be farther from the truth. Though the Production Code administrators brooked no lewdness or nudity, their main goal was to censor ideas. The censors were absolutely fixated on the messages movies transmitted.

The reason why we can’t see our eyes moving with our own eyes is because our brains edit out the bits between the saccades—a process called saccadic suppression. Without it, we’d look at an object and it would be a blurry mess. What we perceive as vision is the director’s cut of a film, with your brain as the director, seamlessly stitching together the raw footage to make a coherent reality. Perception is the brain’s best guess at what the world actually looks like. Immense though the computing power of that fleshy mass sitting in the darkness of our skulls is, if we were to take in all the information in front of our eyes, our brains would surely explode.** Instead, our eyes sample bits and pieces of the world, and we fill in the blanks in our heads. This fact is fundamental to the way that cinema works. A film is typically 24 static images run together every second, which our brain sees as continuous fluid movement—that’s why it’s called a movie. The illusion of movement actually happens at more like 16 frames per second. At that speed, a film projection is indistinguishable from the real world, at least to us. It was the introduction of sound that set the standard of 24 frames per second with The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first film to have synchronized dialogue. The company

As Powers shortly learned, one of Holden’s high-ranking friends was Malcolm MacDonald, the last British Governor of Kenya, which he helped to gain independence in 1963. Previously, MacDonald was the High Commissioner of India, and, prior to that, the Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia, where Holden spent much of his time. The likelihood that the movie star might have been a CIA informant was a distinct possibility – if not an absolute certainty. Whatever the answer, he never confided the truth to Powers.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

The corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres of the cortex, myelinates from 7 to 10 years of age. At age 10, a child’s thinking speeds up noticeably. Ask seven-year-olds a question and it will take a long time for them to respond. Sometimes you can almost see the question move up to the brain and the answer go slowly back down to the mouth. This really became clear to me at our dining table. Our family knows seven different graces to say before meals, and each of our three daughters wanted to choose grace. So we suggested that each daughter could choose grace before breakfast, before lunch, or before dinner. Our youngest daughter, then age six, chose grace before lunch. Lunch is the shortest meal time — we have to walk home, eat, clean up, and walk back to school. Every lunch when we asked her what grace we should say, she would be absolutely quiet for a very long time. She would look around the room, furl her brows, obviously thinking hard, and then announce which grace to say — and it was always the same one. I got a little angry. Was this a power trip? Was she trying to control us? After all, we couldn’t eat until she chose a grace. I finally realized that, because her corpus callosum connecting her left and the right hemispheres was not fully myelinated, the signal was going very slowly back and forth in considering which of the seven graces to say. She was thinking as fast as her brain would allow. The teenage brain The last connections to mature are those between the front and the back of the brain; these connections begin to myelinate at age 12 and continue through age 25. The back of the brain is the concrete present. Environmental stimuli from the senses activate the back of the brain, where a picture of the world is created, like a movie on a screen. This picture is then sent to the front of the brain, the executive centers — the “CEO” or boss of the brain. The frontal lobes place the concrete present — what is happening right now — in the larger context of past and future, plans, goals, and values. Even though teenagers may look like adults, their brains are still maturing. The teen’s brain, whose frontal connections are not fully myelinated, is like a company whose CEO is on vacation. Each department is moving full speed ahead without the benefit of knowing the big picture. Teens are very passionate; they are engulfed by their ideas. They can generate a plan that takes into account their immediate circumstances, but they don’t see the bigger picture.