Fracture Film Quotes

But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

Kon’s films present a fractured, multifaceted world in which everyone has their own different reality.

They learned about purity before they learned about sex, and they have a silver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion of the Christ, Soul Surfer, or the latest Kirk Cameron film with their youth group. They attended Promise Keepers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in small groups. They’ve learned more from Pat Robertson, John Piper, Joyce Meyer, and The Gospel Coalition than they have from their pastor’s Sunday sermons. The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches. Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into mainline Christianity,

There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he'd seen since this all started? He'd been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries. That was old. Every television station had those shots. He'd been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man's civilized veneer was when set against nature's uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted - a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse. ("Into The Water")

He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about. Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive. There were simply not enough people to monitor all the cameras. Every shop had one, every bus and train and theatre and public convenience, every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To private security firms all trying to undercut each other. The big stores had their own security men, but they were only interested in people going in and out of the store, not someone just passing by. So instead of a single all-seeing eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.

A few years ago, Kobe [Bryant, duh] fractured the fourth metacarpal bone in his right hand. He missed the first fifteen games of the season; he used the opportunity to learn to shoot jump shots with his left, which he has been known to do in games. While it was healing, the ring finger, the one adjacent to the break, spend a lot of time taped to his pinkie. In the end, Kobe discovered, his four fingers were no longer evenly spaced; now they were separated, two and two. As a result, his touch on the ball was different, his shooting percentage went down. Studying the film he noticed that his shots were rotating slightly to the right. To correct the flaw, Kobe went to the gym over the summer and made one hundred thousand shots. that's one hundred thousand made, not taken. He doesn't practice taking shots, he explains. He practices making them. If you're clear on the difference between the two ideas, you can start drawing a bead on Kobe Bryant who may well be one of the most misunderstood figures in sports today. Scito Hoc Super Omnia by Mike Sager for Esquire Magazine Nov 2007

In his book about boys, Dobson found occasion to denounce Hillary Clinton, “bra burners,” political correctness, and the “small but noisy band of feminists” who attacked “the very essence of masculinity.” He praised Phyllis Schlafly and recommended homeschooling as “a means of coping with a hostile culture.” He advised girls not to call boys on the telephone (to do so would usurp the role of initiator) and encouraged fathers to engage in rough-and-tumble games with their sons. He lamented that films presenting moral strength and heroism had given way to “man-hating diatribes” like Thelma & Louise and 9 to 5, and that “lovely, feminine ladies” on the small screen had been replaced by “aggressive and masculine women” like those in Charlie’s Angels. Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, a tale in which Gibson starred as a Revolutionary militia leader who ruthlessly avenged his son’s death, proved the exception to the rule. 10

Great stacks of film-star biographies, most of dispiriting thickness.