Category: Archive

Anatomy of a Fall (2023): How Far Can We Know?

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“With no witnesses or confessions, one must interpret”, towards the final third portion of the film, one returns to the courtroom and gets reminded that one has been speculating, hypothesising and interpreting an immensely private matter. Anatomy of a Fall (now seems more like Anatomy of a Marriage) juxtaposes the private and the public, the personal and the institutional, the moral and the legal. What matters is no longer who killed Samuel, but how a state apparatus violently disseminates an imperfect private union, and how one’s personal poignancy gets publicised and exploited.

Eternals (2021): What Went Wrong

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Eternals is a paradox, perhaps from the very beginning. For Marvel, it is meant to be a reset, or a glorious beginning, after the Avengers trilogy. Chloé Zhao was recruited to direct the film shortly after her Oscar win for Nomadland. Eternals also unmistakably features an ensemble cast more diverse, more cosmopolitan than any other Marvel production. It is an ambitious, soul-searching production about the fate of humanity, free will and femininity. Its scope covers major events in human history while making scattered references to other Marvel films (. In short, Eternals feels like a mission impossible.

Dark (2017-19): God is Time?

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The intricate yet meticulously plotted story spans over two centuries, four generations, three family names (about twenty major characters) and three parallel worlds - all cramped into twenty-five hours. I had to constantly look for the complete family tree online when it became impossible to recollect character relationships. Rooted in modern German thoughts, the philosophical drama quotes, sometimes excessively, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein and Martin Heidegger, the Germans who have shaped the modern understanding of reality, that reality is not necessarily deterministic, and how human will constitutes the phenomenal world apart from the inscrutable nominal reality.

《生活在树上》：高考满分作文到底写了些什么

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最近一篇浙江高考满分作文引发了网友的讨论，在一篇题目为《生活在树上》的作文里，考生在短短几百字内引用了数位欧洲近代哲学大家，还用到了不少生涩的词汇。读第一遍的时候我对自己语文水平自惭形秽，感觉初中毕业就出国留学的我中文水平可能已经退化，最乐观的说法也是止步不前。我基本上每隔一句话就有一两个词需要查字典，有些表达和隐喻我也不能第一时间理解，也正是因为这个过程，我渐渐对这篇作文有了兴趣，这是一篇我写不出的文章，有它了不起的地方，也引起很多争议。

Miss Americana and Her Folklore

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Throughout Folklore, once again, Swift showcases her metaphors, insecurity in love and acute self-consciousness. However, instead of putting herself at the central stage of the album, Swift learns to dissolve her personality, her selfhood into a broad range of fictional characters, married or divorced, teenage or middle-aged, men or women. The newest persona of Swift is no persona. Instead of focusing what she has been going through, whether she breaks up again, Swift wants her audiences to contemplate with her phrasing and hum along her soft breath. It is about shutting down the noise, the distractions and the planned agenda of life so that one can take things slow and appreciate what’s important.

Life-Sized Mikey Mouse, Sigmund Freud and Quantum Physics: How Reality May Not Be Reality

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Recently, I have been quite addicted to Emily Levine, the American philosopher-comedian, or comedian-philosopher, whatever. Emily passed away in February 2019 due to stage-IV lung cancer, but she most likely prefers to say that she has gone back to Emily’s universe. In her last appearance as a speaker on TED, she talks about death, American politics, quantum physics and nasty feminist jokes. She does not ask for pity but shares her experience of making peace with reality.

Phantom Thread (2018): Love is Toxic, Literally

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We all need some magic mushrooms sometimes. I do not mean the ones you can buy on the streets of Amsterdam. I mean the ones that effectively poison our husbands/wives (but don't kill them) so that they become sick, vulnerable and needy. The extent of neediness is essential. And hallucinations about dead parents are a bonus. These magic mushrooms remind our loved ones of the importance of our companionship and the limit of their outsized ego. They play a key role in a lasting, healthy, self-correcting relationship. After all, love is toxic, literally.

The Anxiety of Nature and The Difficulty of Grace

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"A man's heart has heard two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You'll have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. It likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, and love is smiling through all things. " - The Tree of Life (2011)

The Mathematics and Phenomenology of Infinity

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Perhaps surprising to many, infinity comes with different sizes. While mathematicians can establish this generic result, they cannot always calculate or pinpoint different sizes of infinity. Such incapability demonstrates that mathematics is still an incomplete logical system. To me, the incompleteness of mathematics has an existential overtone echoing the finitude of human existence in contrast to people’s pursuit of eternity, meaning and purpose for their lives. That contrast, or paradox of life, reveals the pain of finite human existence, which I understood more in a creative writing workshop organised by USP. In this post, I explore how the desire to reach the infinite and the pain of finite existence inspire mathematicians and artists in their pursuits of truth and beauty.

Reason and Wounded Women

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Cogito, ergo sum. René Descartes famously claims after meditating on the certainty of human knowledge. Upholding the rational, thinking self, Descartes pioneers modern rationalist philosophy which believes that reason is the most effective, if not the only method of acquiring knowledge. I confess that reason, with its promise of universality and objectivity, enticed me into studying philosophy in university. But as I encounter more complex situations in life, I increasingly find reason incapable of representing reality and guiding my moral decisions. Reason seems to detach me from everyday life and trivialise ambivalent moral situations that do not immediately make logical sense. I have been internally conflicted regarding rationalist philosophy and the superiority of reason in everyday life...