Ziad Shihab

Hackers

by Ziad Shihab/ April 30th, 2024

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle, John and special guest Laura Hudson (formerly of Wired and The Verge) watched the 1995 cyber-thriller "Hackers," directed by Ian Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens and Lorraine Bracco, with supporting roles for Matthew Lillard, Penn Jillette, Wendell Pierce, Marc Anthony and Felicity Huffman."Hackers" centers on Dade Murphy, alias "Zero Cool," who made hacking history 7 years before the events of...

PITFALL - 1962

by Ziad Shihab/ April 27th, 2024

Otoshiana366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.DIRECTED BY: Hiroshi TeshigaharaFEATURING: Hisashi Igawa, Sumie Sasaki, Kunie TanakaPLOT:A miner in search for work is led to a ghost town where he’ll become embroiled in a plot involving manipulation, trade unions, and doppelgangers.COMMENTS: Pitfall was the first of a series of collaborations between Hiroshi Teshigahara (director), author Kobo Abe (screenwriter), and Toru Takemitsu (composer); the trio ...

Revenge Films - perspective from Denmark

by Ziad Shihab/ April 27th, 2024

From: 16-9.dk Apr 25, 2024 by Joachim Smed-Petersen, Josefine Bjerre Lyndgaard & Karen Marie The female avenger exists in countless forms, universes and genres and has been a rapidly developing character especially since the 1970s. We see her as the femme fatale in film noir, we get to know her through the rape revenge genre, and we fall in love with her when, in the 1990s and 2000s, she becomes a celebrated and more common female figure on film. But where is the female avenger today, and ho...

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George Orwell was weird

by Ziad Shihab/ April 26th, 2024

From The AtlanticThe Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to...

Election - film by Alexander Payne now Relevant as Ever

by Ziad Shihab/ April 26th, 2024

From Roger Ebert dot com:There’s an ongoing theme in Alexander Payne’s films -- the people we think are the antagonists aren’t actually bad people; we simply force ourselves into the corner of seeing them that way. From the simple-minded and unfortunately coiffed future in-laws in "About Schmidt" to the adulterous characters in "Sideways" and "The Descendants," to the animosity of the student-teacher relationship at the heart of "The Holdovers," these films all feature cases of the protagonis...

Starship Troopers - Heinlein and Realism

by Ziad Shihab/ April 26th, 2024

Robert Heinlein was one of the "big three" science fiction writers of his era.  Along with Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov, his prize-winning stories were hailed, and his critique of conventional norms, such as nonviolence and pacifism, captivated his audience.  In particular, the 1959 book Starship Troopers illustrated political and religious issues that continue to engage Christian Realists today.  The book takes brutal aim at pacifism, and thirty-eight years later it was made into the pop...

Kill Bill’s Enduring Impact — Two Decades of Echoing Retribution

by Ziad Shihab/ April 26th, 2024

In 2004, Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic masterpiece, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, captivated audiences with its profound exploration of morality, vengeance, and the intricate dance between love and violence. Now, two decades later, the film’s influence continues to reverberate, casting a shadow on contemporary narratives of revenge. As we delve into the timeless narrative of Kill Bill, its characters, dialogues, and moral complexities demand a closer examination. Quentin Tarantino’s magnum...

Alien World of Money and Beyond

by Ziad Shihab/ April 26th, 2024

Chapter 6 from the 1998 book Money and the Human Condition by Michael Neary and Graham Taylor.Authors:  Michael Neary and Graham TaylorApril 24, 2024          The Alien World of Money and Beyond . . . The magical qualities of money transfixed the philosophers of the ancient and medieval eras. The quest to turn base metals into gold eluded the greatest of ancient minds. It was the modern bourgeoisie which was to discover the secrets of the philosopher's stone. The class that laid naked the sup...

The Never End

by Ziad Shihab/ April 25th, 2024

The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm John ReedPalgrave Macmillan ($119.99) by Zoe Berkovitz "Orwell has come to an end," John Reed tells us. He’s earned a say in the matter: His newest book, The Never End, collects twenty years of essays, long form pieces, and interviews that parse the complicated history and l...

TO DIE FOR Review - This Film Kills

by Ziad Shihab/ April 24th, 2024

For most of its residents, the frigid burgh of Little Hope, New Hampshire can’t help but live up to its town’s moniker.  A perpetually blah place with an unromantic blue collar frozen-in-time and also freezing quality, its denizens have been long resigned not to ask too much of life. Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.But not for Suzanne Stone-Maretto.  For this young, recently wed career-minded woman, her frigidity comes from within.  Portrayed with an exacting edge by Nicol...

History of Ritual Practices and Folklore of Death in America

by Ziad Shihab/ April 24th, 2024

The wide range of ways in which Americans have experienced the presence of those who have departed.GhostsThe Haunting of a Heights HouseAlthough its owner died in 1865, many visitors to the Morris-Jumel Mansion still come just to see her.The supposedly haunted Morris-Jumel Mansion in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, 2012. / Seth Wenig/Associated PressSet on a green lawn at the edge of northern Manhattan, the Morris-Jumel mansion, white and stately, might seem charming enough on a ...

Translation analysis results explained

by Ziad Shihab/ April 24th, 2024

The article: Computational Perspective on the Millennium Trilogy "Larsson, Remade: A Computational Perspective on the Millennium Trilogy in English," was published online by Cambridge University Press on April 17, 2024. Authored by Karl Berglund and Sarah Allison, the essay explores the transformation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy in its English translation¹. The study employs computational methods to analyze the novels in both Swedish and English, identifying significant changes to p...

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Computational Perspective on the Millennium Trilogy

by Ziad Shihab/ April 23rd, 2024

23 April 2024: We are investigating problems with ecommerce on Cambridge Core. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to have full functionality restored shortly. Skip to main content Accessibility help We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. Home Cart ( 0 ) ...

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Glass Mountain - The - by Donald Barthelme

by Ziad Shihab/ April 15th, 2024

"Don't look down, don't look down..."It's a Donald Barthelme double feature this weekend! "The Glass Mountain" is unlike any short-story I have encountered before--the entire narrative structure consists of 100 individual bullet points! It's clever, hilarious and surprisingly poignant without ever feeling like a mere gimmick. Not many authors could pull off this narrative technique, let alone deconstruct the fairly-tale genre in the process. It's a masterful literary achievement that I can't ...

Dogville at 20 - On the Maddening Descent into Womanhood

by Ziad Shihab/ April 14th, 2024

Skip to the content Crooked Marquee Search for: Dogville at 20: On the Maddening Descent into Womanhood Anna McKibbin•Posted on03/25/2024•Happy Birthday, Looking Back There is nothing quite like Lars Von Trier’s Dogville. Formally, it is constructed like a low-budget theatre piece, rooms marked with white paint on a dark soundstage...

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With and Against

by Ziad Shihab/ April 12th, 2024

By James Rushing Daniel.   Dominique Routhier, With and Against: The Situationist International and the Age of Automation (Verso, 2023) In the contemporary art world dominated by glitzy international fairs and heavily licensed celebrity artists, it’s sometimes hard to fathom that art once held more serious political ambitions. Throughout the history of the avant-garde, from Dada to Fluxus, artists, in vastly different national contexts and through a variety of media, sought to cr...

Aftersun and the reflective property of memory

by Ziad Shihab/ April 10th, 2024

Chama Al Houari (f. 2002) is an aspiring filmmaker from Morocco. She is currently studying at NSKI in Oslo, and is passionate about film history and how movies reflects the world.*I walk into the theater not knowing what to expect, something about a father and a daughter. Something about a critically acclaimed directorial debut. Aftersun. The film starts, and I brace myself for another conventionally unconventional A24 flick. But before I know it, without warning, I’m looking at the broken pi...

Trains of Europe

by Ziad Shihab/ April 5th, 2024

Review By Eoghan Smith  John Holten, The Trains of Europe (Broken Dimanche Press, 2024)Since the Covid pandemic, there has been no shortage of fiction speculating on planetary catastrophes yet-to-come. As with typical iterations of this species of anxiety-driven literature, the cause of the apocalypse is never an abstract entity but a manifestation of an existing mega-threat already facing the world. Recent examples include the technocapitalist hellscape of Niall Bourke’s Line, the spectre of...

Somebody’s Always Listening

by Ziad Shihab/ April 5th, 2024

Paramount Pictures/Ringer illustration            As the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded, $100 million extravaganza ‘Megalopolis’ nears, it’s worth revisiting ‘The Conversation’ from 50 years ago as a reminder of what it looks (and sounds) like when a master is at work"At my age, I can afford for film to be a passion and not a business." That’s what Francis Ford Coppola told me 15 years ago during an interview about his 2009 film, Tetro, a glossy, quasi-autobiographical melodram...

Jonah and genre

by Ziad Shihab/ April 5th, 2024

Jonah and genre - OUPReading a piece of writing—from instruction manual, to sports page, to Op-Ed piece—according to its genre is something we do so naturally that it seems odd to even talk about it. Indeed, the very phrase "reading according to genre" sounds odd itself, entirely too formal, perhaps suitable for some English or Comparative Literature class, but hardly something that normal people do when reading normal things on an everyday basis. While that is true, to some degree at least, ...

Text of Light - Staying Vertical

by Ziad Shihab/ April 4th, 2024

Text of Light No. 3Staying Vertical by Jordan Cronk Last month I visited the Academy Museum’s exhibition "Shifting Perspectives: Celebrating Vertical Cinema," for which a trio of Southern Californian artists were commissioned to make short works to be projected onto a 20-foot-tall screen in the 9:16 aspect ratio—essentially a lengthwise inversion of the standard widescreen frame. Inspired by a concept by Sonic Acts, an interdisciplinary arts organization in Amsterdam that’s been presenting pr...

Teaching Media Archives

by Ziad Shihab/ April 2nd, 2024

We welcome submissions from all graduate students and faculty or independent scholars Apologies for cross-posting Synoptique is soliciting proposals for book reviews for our upcoming issue 11.1, which is a special issue with the topic "Teaching Media Archives." We invite reviewers to propose reviews for both the themed and general review sections. If you are interested in writing a review for this issue, please contact book.reviews@synoptique.ca with a short proposal (maximum 250 words) outl...

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Phoenix and Phoenices

by Ziad Shihab/ April 1st, 2024

Phoenix and Phoenices Copilot answers zas inquiry about "Phoenix" in mythology The oldest referent of the name "Phoenix" in mythology is associated with the ancient Egyptian Bennu bird. The name "Bennu" relates to the verb "weben," meaning "to rise brilliantly" or "to shine"⁴. This bird is often linked to the sun, creation, and rebirth. The Greek word "phoenix" could have been derived from the Mycenaean Greek "po-ni-ke," which may have meant "griffin" or "palm tree" and is believed to be a...

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Fear as Original Sin

by Ziad Shihab/ March 31st, 2024

Fear as Original Sin Certainly! The concept of "fear as the original sin" is an intriguing perspective that diverges from the more common understanding of the original sin based on the story in the book of Genesis. Let's explore this idea further. Original Sin: Traditional Interpretation The traditional view of original sin is rooted in the biblical account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. According to this interpretation:The Fall: Adam and Eve, the first human beings, were placed in ...

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