by sauce » Mon Jan 13, 2014 3:14 pm
saw her and 12 years a slave recently. her was astonishingly beautiful, definitely my favorite movie this year. and 12 years was super powerful but I feel like I couldn't really connect to it because it happened so long ago.
I was thinking earlier about how 12 years is a really important movie since it does a fantastic job reminding us of how far we've come (in terms of human rights) in the past few centuries, but didn't really beckon any questions I don't know the answer to. I guess it teaches that we shouldn't forget that every human life holds the same incredible amount of worth, but I've already discovered that so I feel like it didn't really empower me to discover anything new. her, on the other hand, beckoned really unique and novel questions, for example 'what constitutes love' and 'can programs have emotions' and then similarly 'what makes us human'? and there's also the question of the film's prediction for the future- with all this improving technology, would human contact continue to diminish, will humans begin to communicate more often with AI than with each other? and also the possible metaphor of human's love for the technology, relating the main character's love with the OS to my love for communities on the internet, which forces me to explore whether that love is even a healthy obsession (this metaphor was noted by another user first too I think). so then relating the two movies makes me think, what's more important? exploring novel questions that we don't really have the answer for, or exploring the mistakes we made in the past and the questions we've answered in reflection?