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Holy Shit. I just watched 1984, and it blew me away.

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taxidriver Donating Member (663 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-20-04 11:55 PM
Original message
Holy Shit. I just watched 1984, and it blew me away.
every single thing winston's character said. every single thing, perpetual war, thought crimes, crushing your enemies...is reminiscent of the war on terra/gitmo/jose padilla type shit going on.

my goosebumps are starting to go away, i need something stiff before i go to sleep...
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Eric J in MN Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-20-04 11:58 PM
Response to Original message
1. Was it the version released in 1984?
this one?
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Directed by
Michael Radford

Writing credits
Jonathan Gems (story)
George Orwell (novel)
(more)

Add to MyMovies IMDbPro Professional Details
Genre: Drama / Sci-Fi (more)

Tagline: George Orwell's Terrifying Vision Comes To The Screen. (more)

Plot Outline: George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love. (more) (view trailer)

User Comments: Great adaptation of a classic satire (more)

User Rating: 6.8/10 (3,125 votes)

Cast overview, first billed only:
John Hurt .... Winston Smith
Richard Burton .... O'Brien
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Peak_Oil Donating Member (666 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:00 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. That's the one I saw a couple weeks ago. Visceral.
Excellent representation of the book for those who have read the book. I'm not sure how great it is for those who haven't studied his work in school.

They do still have this on the required reading list, don't they?

I'd be amazed if it was off the list. How obvious would that be?
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neverborn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 04:09 AM
Response to Reply #2
24. It's off the list.
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taxidriver Donating Member (663 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:06 AM
Response to Reply #1
6. it was the one with richard burton
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htuttle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:02 AM
Response to Original message
3. Was it the one with the Eurythmics soundtrack?
They re-released that version, the one with John Hurt and Richard Burton, but with the original music, and I like it better than the one with the Eurythmics on it.

It's a chilling movie treatment, however. The first time I saw it, I remember thinking that everything looked exactly as I'd imagined it while reading the book.

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2Design Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:05 AM
Response to Original message
4. there is a movie.....on vhs/dvd
I read the book way back when....before there were vhs....hmmmmmm I would like to see that......

can it be gotten at a regular video store...?????
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htuttle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:08 AM
Response to Reply #4
7. I rented it at a local video store
Not sure if it's 'regular' or not....it's independent -- and a little weird -- but the DVD should be all over in any case.
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Swamp Rat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:06 AM
Response to Original message
5. The book is very good too
I'll bet you can find a used paperback real cheap, depending on where you live.

"1984" was required reading when I was a kid. I wonder if it still is? I had a visceral reaction when I read it long ago, but it is ever more prescient today.
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taxidriver Donating Member (663 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:09 AM
Response to Reply #5
8. i read the book when i was 16. I didnt put it down from start to finish.
i've never since read a book as gripping as 1984
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Swamp Rat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:56 AM
Response to Reply #8
14. May I recommend the movie "Brazil"?
If you liked 1984, you will like "Brazil" as well.

Here's a good website for finding info on movies:

http://www.imdb.com/
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minkyboodle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 01:31 AM
Response to Reply #14
16. seconded
n/t
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Swamp Rat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 02:20 AM
Response to Reply #8
18. Oh and "THX1138"
This is George Lucas's first (and best in my opinion) movie. It stars Robert Duval and Donald Pleasence. You'll enjoy the car chase, perhaps.
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htuttle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 09:30 AM
Response to Reply #18
27. My favorite scene in that movie is the electronic Jesus booth
<BLLLLLEEEAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGHH!>

Jesus-o-matic: I'm sorry to hear that my son. Why do you think you feel that way?

<BLLLLLOOOORRRRRRG!>

Jesus-o-matic: Would you like to talk about what is upsetting you?

<RRRAAAAAAALLLLLLLPPPPPHHHHH!!!!>

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DEMVET-USMC Donating Member (789 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:11 AM
Response to Original message
9. The paralells are compelling.It gets more real every day. WE can and must
put an end to this unhappy trajectory we are on. WE CAN STOP IT AND WE MUST if life is to be worth bothering with. WE CAN STOP THIS MADDNESS. ...Oscar
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WillyT Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:13 AM
Response to Original message
10. Now... If Ya Wanna See 1984 On Acid, Check Out 'Brazil' !!!
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Sugarbleus Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:16 AM
Response to Original message
11. When we older types talked about BIG BROTHER...
That's what we meant... Pretty chilling stuff eh?
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rucky Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:40 AM
Response to Original message
12. Self-fulfilling prophecy
nothing to get freaked out about. not the first time facists & wackos have used cautionary tales as a business plan. see: Revelations
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ConsAreLiars Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 12:52 AM
Response to Original message
13. The book is online in several places
Here's one: http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/1984/1984_c1.htm

For anyone who hasn't read it,here are the first few paragraphs:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
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OneBlueSky Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 01:28 AM
Response to Original message
15. "i need something stiff before i go to sleep" . . .
well . . . might I suggest . . . :)

oh, never mind . . .



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Cronus Protagonist Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 02:12 AM
Response to Original message
17. Did you get your stiffie?
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Centre_Left Donating Member (129 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 02:41 AM
Response to Original message
19. Uh, if it was really reminiscent....
...then you would not be allowed to read 1984. Indeed, you would not be allowed to post on this message board without facing the risk of prosecution.

You may want to check out "Brave New World" as well; lots of frightening parallels to today's society. I think I'll go reach for my soma right now, in fact.
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alittlelark Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 02:46 AM
Response to Original message
20. I listened to the audio tape a year ago on my summer road trip
to NM....I had read it years earlier.

The audio taped (full version) experience was different. It was similar to listening to the RW talking heads in many instances.

It creeped the sh*t out of me.
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RBHam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 02:48 AM
Response to Original message
21. Emmanuel Goldstein = Osama bin Laden
Are YOU ready for the daily minute of hate on CNN?
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NewEmanuelGoldstein Donating Member (94 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 03:38 AM
Response to Reply #21
22. Please..
Stop the lies }(
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NewEmanuelGoldstein Donating Member (94 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 03:49 AM
Response to Original message
23. Almost forgot this
http://www.thecinematicverses.com/editorials/1984reloaded.html

A very good editorial comparing the world of '1984' to the US today/in the near future.
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RBHam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 04:15 AM
Response to Reply #23
25. That's a damn good essay...
Teaser...

1984 RELOADED
BY JAMIL MOLEDINA

excerpt:
In order to stomach their declining standard of living and the dulling of their spirit, the citizens of Oceania are obliged to invoke doublethink. As defined in the novel1984, doublethink is the state of “holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” When the telescreens tell you that the chocolate ration will not be reduced, while it actually goes from 30 grams to 20 grams, you must invoke doublethink to accept and believe the new information. In our world, the existence of so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was such a certainty to Rumsfeld and Powell, as well as the connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, are now denied by those same party officials. It never happened.

In 1984, an inner party leader extolls the false principles of INGSOC while an INGSOC banner flutters behind him

The Party that controls the government in Oceania uses giant banners to get their point across. For example, the principles of INGSOC “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength,” emblazon their political buildings. In our world, when the businesses deregulated and supported by the Republican Party such as WorldCom and Enron turn out to be defrauding and ripping off everyone, the Party head goes out in front of a banner saying “Corporate Responsibility” to condemn those same companies. Similarly, while the Party’s invasion of Iraq has actually magnified the terrorist activity in the region, the Party leader proclaimed victory on the deck of an aircraft carrier with the banner “Mission Accomplished” behind him.

Language and control of language is a key way in which Oceania maintains power. If you limit and redefine words, you can actually remove rebellious or dissenting tongues from the language. Newspeak, while not fully adopted in practice, is the official language. In our world, our language still permits dissent, although the government takes real words and ascribes political meaning to them to contravene the truth of the matter. Take the word “coalition.” The current administration uses it to describe its own army, nominally complemented by a handful of other nations’ troops. This was used in the invasion of Iraq, the same invasion that was flatly prohibited by the real coalition of virtually all countries, the United Nations. This use of the word “coalition” was picked up by nearly all U.S. media to describe our troops, which then carried to the American people the flavor of legitimacy that the administration wanted, but did not in reality have

http://www.thecinematicverses.com/editorials/1984reloaded.html
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anarchy1999 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-21-04 05:08 AM
Response to Reply #25
26. It is always such a treat to have you off the road and posting at DU!
Welcome home, RB!

"Something's happening here..."
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