Over Fragmenten.blog

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Welkom op Fragmenten uit het Schemerland, mijn persoonlijke website en content-verzameling. Je vindt hier veel artikelen over films en series in de FilmDungeon. Ook vind je op deze site mijn achtergrondverhaal, een selectie van mijn professionele werk, en een groeiende collectie blogs – fragmenten genaamd – over uiteenlopende onderwerpen. Veel leesplezier en bedankt voor het bezoeken van mijn blog!

— Jeppe Kleijngeld

PS: Bezoek ook eens mijn andere website over bewustzijn en mijn visie op de ware aard van het universum:

Dungeon Classics #42: Sexy Beast

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

FilmDungeon’s Chief Editor JK sorts through the Dungeon’s DVD-collection to look for old cult favorites….

Sexy Beast (2000, UK, Spain, USA)

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane
Running Time: 89 mins.

Retired British safecracker Gal (Ray Winstone) enjoys a tranquil life in Spain with his girlfriend, basking in the sun, lounging by his pool, and sharing dinners with a nearby British couple. His idyllic routine is shattered – first symbolically by a boulder crashing into his pool, then literally by the arrival of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), an obnoxious gangster from London. Logan’s mission: to drag Gal into a heist masterminded by the eccentric Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). Like the boulder, Logan is an unstoppable force, disrupting Gal’s peace with relentless aggression. The film is best remembered for Kingsley’s unhinged performance – a whirlwind of rage, bluster, and toxic masculinity. His character’s relentless pressure on Gal creates an atmosphere of suffocating tension, embodied by the film’s tagline: Yes or yes? There’s no escaping Logan’s demands, and the audience is drawn into Gal’s impossible dilemma. The dialogue crackles with sharp, Cockney-flavored wit, delivering lines like: “Shut up, cunt-louse. Look at your fucking sun tan. You’re like fucking leather man, your skin. You can make a fucking suitcase out of you.” You get the picture. Glazer and his team subvert expectations with the film’s climax, offering a fresh twist on the British gangster genre. Sexy Beast is a stylish, unsettling ride – equal parts sun-soaked and sinister.

Dungeon Classics #41: L.A. Confidential

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

FilmDungeon’s Chief Editor JK sorts through the Dungeon’s DVD-collection to look for old cult favorites….

L.A. Confidential (1997, USA)

Director: Curtis Hanson
Cast: Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger
Running Time: 138 mins.

Three L.A. cops in the 1950s – three different personalities – each dealing with corruption in their own way. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a celebrity cop, something like the influencer of his day, working closely with tabloid journalist Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) and frequently appearing on the TV cop show Badge of Honor. Bud White (Russell Crowe) is an explosive sledgehammer with a particular hatred for abusive men. He’s not afraid to bend the rules to punish the guilty. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is the son of a legendary cop who wants to advance his career strictly by the book, which is hard to do in a city with a massively corrupt police force. When organized crime boss Mickey Cohen goes to prison, he leaves a wide gap for new players to move in, and the three leads soon find themselves in the middle of the heat. L.A. Confidential is a true masterpiece: a fantastic recreation of 1950s Los Angeles and an exceptional character study. The three leads, young and fairly unknown at the time, are truly stellar in their roles. There’s also an excellent supporting cast, with Kim Basinger especially stealing the spotlight as high-class prostitute Lynn Bracken. A great movie from start to finish – on the QT and very hush-hush.

Double Bill #17: Kill Bill Vol. 1 & Kill Bill Vol. 2

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

After Jackie Brown, Tarantino took a long break (six years), but when he returned, he did so with a vengeance. If you’re going to compare a Tarantino movie, you compare it to every other movie ever made that wasn’t made by Quintin Tarantino. By that standard, the two-part Kill Bill saga stands among the finest pieces of cinematic art of the century so far. Here, Tarantino does what he does best – lifting fragments from forgotten genre and exploitation cinema and fusing them into something wholly original – better than ever before. It’s a double-edged sword in many ways: a bold blend of Eastern and Western influences, effortlessly shifting between comic-book ultraviolence and moments of genuine emotional weight. This tonal balance works largely thanks to Uma Thurman’s superb central performance as The Bride, which anchors the madness with real feeling. The story itself is simple, yet utterly captivating. The characters are fascinating and endlessly quotable. The style is unmistakable and unmatched. Volume 1 plays like the ultimate samurai/yakuza/action movie of your childhood – the one you could watch endlessly – only somehow even better. Volume 2, by contrast, leans into the rhythms of a spaghetti western, offering more of Tarantino’s signature dialogue and a terrific performance by David Carradine, who reimagines his Kung Fu character Kwai Chang Caine as a pop culture loving and psychopathic mentor. Structured in ten chapters and told out of chronological order, Kill Bill unfolds as a true epic, packed with all of Tarantino’s hallmarks: razor-sharp humor, wax-museum characters, stylized violence, brilliant music choices, and a Pussy Wagon–load of pop culture references. The only Double Bill I actually experienced in theaters – back when Volume 2 was released in 2004 – and one I’ll never forget. Whenever The Whole Bloody Affair finally arrives in European theaters, I will be there for sure.

Dan Brown’s ‘The Secret of Secrets’ Explores a Radical New Paradigm of Consciousness

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Is the world headed to a new scientific mindset? I think this might be happening, even though with the current political hellscape in the USA, the Ukraine war still raging, the genocide in Gaza, and countless other atrocities unfolding across the globe, it can feel as if human evolution is running backwards.

Yet online – in discussion forums, academic debates, and emerging intellectual communities – there are signs that the long-standing dominance of materialism may be beginning to fade.

Changing the collective ‘mega-mind’ of the public is no small feat; such shifts often take generations. Quantum mechanics brought the mind into the realm of physics as early as the twentieth century, and yet public understanding of consciousness has remained largely unchanged.

What is a huge contributor to a new mindset is popular culture. New ways of thinking can spread virus-like, thanks to books, movies, television series, social media, and now also A.I. The material mindset – that sees the universe as unintelligent, and life and consciousness as having no relation to the physical world – has been largely resistant to change.

For that to change, the biocentric ideas researched on my website Free-Consciousness.com have to reach a contagion level, so that they can replicate like a virus. It cannot be predicted when this will happen, but products of popular culture can help to speed up the transition. The latest of such products is a brand new novel by best selling author Dan Brown (‘The Da Vinci Code’). It is called ‘The Secret of Secrets’ and it’s the sixth novel in the Robert Langdon series.

The book opens with the near-death experience of a neuroscientist. She explains to herself in clear terms that what she is experiencing – floating above the city of Prague, massless, and formless – cannot be happening. In the materialist perspective, death is the end and all experience, which is created by chemical compounds held in suspension by electrical charges in our brains, dissolve into nothing. The afterlife is a shared illusion… created to make our actual lives more bearable.

This is the typical materialist mindset. Brown immediately invites the reader to question that assumption…

Read the Entire Essay on Free-Consciousness (Free-Access)