Resources For Movie Folks

I've been organizing my media center recently with Plex (which is amazing) and had a pressing desire to sort out the rather large Asian movie collection I have. Turns out late 70's Kung Fu movies are almost always misnamed, and Korean movies have a habit of completely changing their English release name about a year after release. So I really needed some good resources to find the original local name (imdb only provides the English name and a transliteration, but not the original characters), the release year and the proper English name. Along the way I pulled these useful resources together:

Hong Kong Movie Database
This resource had almost every Chinese movie I threw at it. At times all I had to go on were the Romanized names of a few of the key actors and a year and I was able to sort it out.

HanCinema
The primary resource I used. It had easily 90% of the Korean Movies I needed to work with, autocomplete, aliases, release years, posters everything.

Korean Movie Database
Another good resource, but a little clunkier than HanCinema. Some of the movies that weren't in HanCinema were here.

Daum 영화
The Korean Language movie database. It's all in Korean so it's a bit tougher to use than the other two above, but can be a good last place to try.

Virtual Korean Keyboard
Sometimes, you really need to search for movie in it's native language. This is a great way to get the Korean titles written somewhere so you can copy-paste them out.

Wikipedia
A surprisingly good resource for Japanese Movies and Anime. I was almost always able to find the name of the movie in the original Japanese.

Hope these help.

Okay here's what I want (smartphones, tablets etc.)

There's lots of speculation in the phone and tablet market for what users want. Here's what I want in a smartphone, I would buy this tomorrow at the right price (none of this is crazy tech all of this exists):

• 300+dpi 1080p+ 4.x-low 5.x inch screen
• 32GB-128GB memory (honestly the memory used in smart phones is so cheap, 32GB should be the budget phone size)
• microSDXC card slot 
• quad-core ARM-ish 1.6+Ghz processor whatever
• 6,000 to 8,000 mAh battery (twice is thick on super thin phones means nothing if my battery lasts all week)
• under 6oz
• 4GB RAM
• 10+MB backside camera, 2+MP front facing
• Decent GPU
• On contract <$350

Honestly, this is mostly about the battery-life. Make the freaking phone twice as thick and stuff 2x the battery in 'em and I'll still buy it.

I

DON'T

CARE 

ABOUT

THICKNESS

As a matter of fact my favorite phone was an old analog cell phone I had around 1996,1997. It was a full inch thick and I loved every second I held it. It felt substantial and gave me incredible battery life. Call quality was awesome even on old analogue cell systems. Why smartphone makers don't think there's a market for phones at least a half-inch thick is beyond my possible comprehension. Every modern smartphone I've ever purchased I bought an extended-life battery and a new back cover to deal with the extra thickness. And still I'm in sub-4000mAh territory. I don't want to think about charging my phone under heavy use for at least a few days.

It honestly doesn't matter if a phone is .5" or .12", at some point it becomes irrelevant. So long as it isn't 2-3" thick it honestly won't affect any majority of use cases.

And why the heck is smartphone storage so small? I don't get the Nexus 4 -- at all. 16GB as the maximum for a flagship phone with no SD slots is insane. It doesn't really increase the BoM all that greatly to include an SD card slot, and honestly, 16 more GB of storage shouldn't jack the BoM all that much. For goodness sakes, a class-10 64gb SD card runs <$60. Just bury that baby under the battery housing for all I care. 16GB is an embarrassment. 32GB should be absolute bottom basement and 16GB should be for the free crap phone they include when you buy a disposable burner phone at 7-11.

It's stupid, it's like phone manufacturers don't think you have access to the internet. I would buy this phone tomorrow if it existed. Yet garbage like this is the "flagship" phone from Google.

Common! Don't just try and meet and slightly exceed "industry defining" iPhone specs. Rip 'em to pieces. 

And for heck sake, sell a bluetooth enabled physical game controller attachment with a d-pad, two analogue sticks, 4 shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons, start and select + home and whatever for <$40. It's stupid that these things cost so much and are so crappy. Why is "generic bluetooth controller" with half the specs I want $90? 

And don't get me started on tablets.

Wellspring - Mree and the Gift of Explosive Talent

Every so often talent flares into the universe with such intensity you almost have to turn away. I've been following Mree (Marie Hsiao) for a few years now. I don't remember exactly when I first came across her, but I originally remember her as one of a crop of talented YouTube cover artists, armed with a guitar and great singing voices, who burst onto the scene and have since moved onto bigger things: David Choi, Kina Grannis, Clara Chung and Mree.

I came across most of the singers independently looking for good covers of popular songs and these singers easily floated to the top of the heap. Clara Chung's cover of Coldplay's Yellow and David Choi's cover of Owl City's Fireflies are among my favorite videos on the site. I didn't notice till later that all of the singers I was encountering were young and Asian-American. There's been a few articles written about this phenomenon, but it's an outgrowth of the difficulties that talented Asian-Americans have getting recognition and making it in the mainstream music business. There's talent here, real talent, and as these artists have shown over the last few years, they aren't afraid of the hard, knuckle grinding, work it takes to try and make it.

Among this group, one of the artists I came across was Mree. Her first videos are of her, still in high school, sitting in front of a piano or behind a guitar in a stairwell, singing her heart out to some of her favorite tunes. These were great covers by a talented high schooler with a great a voice and lots of promise. I mentally filed away her stage name and checked in on her channel every once in a while. Then one day she posted this cover

Within the first 10 seconds I was awestruck. 34 seconds in she started to sing and I had to sit down. *instant frisson* By the end of her second phrase I had become a fan for life.

At 1:36 I realized that this wasn't just another video of a girl sitting in a stairwell, singing a song she happened to like, this was something of an entirely different sort. Layer upon layer, she built this song into a magnificent edifice, filling the space of the audio stage with drama and a sudden intensity and then at the moment of rapture pulling the phrasing back perfectly. And all this appeared to come off as effortlessly for her as breathing.

Barely able to contain myself, I listened to this song over and over again for hours.

Excited, I dove in. I found out that she had done all the filming, recording, audio and video editing, arranging and of course the performance herself. Having messed around a bit with just the audio mixing bits myself, I was stunned. Still a teenager, she was producing world class music videos from her bedroom.

A day later it dawned on me that I wasn't even familiar with the original song. It turns out to be a good song, a perfectly fine sort of catchy post-rock indie folk tune I might have found myself humming in an idle moment. But Mree's cover was stupendous. She had taken the original material and transformed it into

something otherworldly. The delta between the original and her version was a gulf as musically wide as the Grand Canyon.

I dug around a bit more and found out she wanted to do more than just sing in a stairwell, she had real ambition and conspired to be an honest to goodness recording artist. "Grow" her debut album of original songs was released in 2011 and charted well (as did some of her singles) -- for a self published entirely independent girl still in high school. To promote herself, she set up and went on a mini tour to people's houses (mostly local, she was still in school!). Recording industry be damned, she was going to muscle her way to success. If more people possessed this kind of indomitable moxy, the world would be a better place.

Without pretension she kept working, self-producing more videos, doing more covers and working out the tough bits of a solo artist with a deeply textured and rapidly maturing multi-layered sound in a live performance. Each new release was better than the last. From stairwell singer to mature recording artist with MTV ready music videos - it's simply super human. It's unpossible.

Then she hit back to back to back to back with four incredibly crafted songs/videos:

With her last two videos she once again introduced me to new artists whom she has long surpassed with not so much covers but complete recraftings of the originals. Her cover of Empire of the Sun's "Walking on a Dream" is not so much a fan tribute as a rocket ship, launched off the original into the tranquil depths of space. It was simply awesome and it blew my socks off.

I followed Mree on Facebook and saw her starting to get attention -- playing local venues, getting a reviews. She'd already accomplished more before graduating high school than most artists do in a career. Was it too much? Can somebody sing, play, write, film, edit, mix, storyboard and produce this much musical magic just by themselves without burning out? Could this wellspring of talent go on?

Then slowly little trickles started coming in -- a new project, a new album "Winterwell", I was as excited as a 12 year old on Christmas day opening a pile of toys. Little snippets on vine teased as an avalanche of delicious musical layers built a musical space that I wanted to be in.

The title song, "Into the Well" is a masterpiece. It hits with layers of acoustic guitars and builds into a rich fantasy. A complex but subtle polyrythm drives it along. The video Mree produced (shot by fan and photographer Joey Cardella) is no less astonishing for something shot partially in a neighbor's pool and using string and colored paint as a special effect. This is music making, no that's not the right word, this is art making at its absolutely best. Limitations and resources be damned, this will exist.

She's followed up with more shows, a band, guest editor spots and even a tune making it onto a popular TV show. What next? I can only imagine, but she's only got to keep working, keep maturing, keep advancing her art and it'll spread itself out to the right people. She'll be on Conan before you know it and a household name before she's 25. It's been such fun watching the girl in the stairwell grow (just like her first album's namesake) as an artist, I can't wait to see what's next...and then what's next after that.

Go buy her stuff, buy both albums, buy them on iTunes and get the physical disks too, seriously, they're that good, and in the interest of advancing the human species by supporting the best of the arts and the best of the artists, it's just the right thing to do. We're only going to continue to see amazing stuff out of this young artist and it makes me wonderfully glad to be around to see it happen.

A Man of Steel meta-review/review

I'm frustrated. Frustrated at movie reviews written by reviewers who either hate action movies, or didn't even bother to watch Man of Steel. Frustrated at reviews that have barely mentioned actual problems with the film (opting to point out perceived issues available to anybody who's seen the trailer), and ignoring some of the magnificence of this film.

Superman, as a character, is both delightfully complex and wonderfully simple. He's an amalgam of the original Siegal and Shuster car lifting creation, expanded through the cold war as an unstoppable living symbol of benevolent omipotent American nuclear power, diminished and capped in the late '80s, revisited as a modern Greco-Roman god in Ross and Waid's beautiful Kingdom Come, been the subject of both a romantic drama and a romantic teen drama. The Superman we come to in Man of Steel must be viewed through this lens.

The Goyer, Snyder, Nolan Superman is a good-hearted Kansas boy with a complex and difficult childhood, struggling to understand his differences and his growing powers, given strength and focus by adopted parents trying their best to keep their son safe, show him right from wrong, but give him the agency of choice. He's a young man struggling with identity, hidden and overt, and with the gift and burden of the choice the Kents endowed him with. He's a complex hero, drawn towards good, but frustrated with his hidden identity and the shackles it puts on him to stop wrong in the world. He's Hercules struggling through god-sized labors.

This character is beautifully revealed through a series of easy-to-follow flashbacks and connections to the Clark of the present, bedded on one of the best scores I've heard in a generation. It's a natural evolution of Zimmer's Inception musical language, given subtlety through constant plays on a few lietmotifs, the theme of right and the theme of wrong -- so well structured that the same motif is used in a quiet inspiring single-note piano theme hinting at the coming of power, then seamlessly expanded into triumphant horn blasts, electric guitars and intense percussion to shake the firmament. The expanded soundtrack also includes a stunningly beautiful half-hour sketch that shows some different directions the score could have taken. I have a feeling that this is a soundtrack that will reward repeated listens over the next few months.

Like music, the film is structured to start slow, visiting Krypton and giving motivation for the antagonists. Then visiting with the different Kal-Els as he comes to terms with the different stages of his life -- the one we know will result in the hero Superman, but beautifully told. How young Clark, in the end, couldn't choose but had to follow the path of good. This is all revealed in a series of non-linear pieces from different time periods of Clark's life, slowly opening like petals, each offering a piece of the whole. From there it crescendos into the kind of epic battle of the gods that Superman deserves to have put down on film. A man that can throw a train without breaking a sweat has the power to destroy a city block, an enemy space ship, a bank vault and more. We see the what super powered beings of this nature could really do if let loose in the middle of a populated city.

The action is fast, and huge, but unlike recent Michael Bay movies, is coherent and easy to follow. Super-powered mega punches are followed with Newtonian ballistic trajectories, military equipment moves in a way that makes sense, and when it doesn't make sense it still makes sense.

The bad guys, bred and trained warrior Kryptonians, Zod (Michael Shannon) and Faora-Ul (Antje Traue) and some cronies are magnificently played. Traue in particular exudes a kind of exotic icy cold ruthlessness that's damn near terrifying next to Shannon's more expected rage filled heat. Faora-Ul is the cold winter that freezes you to death while Zod is the hot fire that will burn you alive. Major supporting cast are credible, decent, warm people. Costner's earnest Kent was easily the actor's best performance in years, and beautifully played. Adams' charming Lane is the reporter you want to know better. Diane Lane plays a doting mother, Russell Crowe a powerful and conscientious Jor-El figure, Harry Lennix a very serious General Swanwick, Christopher Meloni's honorable Colonel Hardy and on and on. Great performances from even minor characters.

And then Cavill performs what will be the new template for the character. He derives and owns the part, finally breaking it away from the Reeves portrayal. He's a dash of the Kingdom Come Superman, but freed of the late 80's power caps. He struggles with his labors, but doesn't know his limits. There's no tossing of islands full of Kryptonite into space. We're literally finding out what Superman can do as he does. His Clark is relatable, with a light humor, a trustworthy guy you want to know, but with hidden struggles.

And then it's over, and the film decrescendos, strings are tied off, sequels are set up and we end introduced to Clark Kent post crucible. His identity struggles sorted out as he's decided to embrace both Clark and Kal-El, but as two sides to one man, pulling in the same direction instead of in conflict.

It's not perfect, there are issues, minor quibbles really: the macguffin that drives Zod and his cronies to Earth is almost as dumb as midichlorians (even if it does give Zod a raison d'être), the fall of the Kryptonian civilization after the destruction doesn't make any kind of sense upon close inspection, the Kryptonian's new weakness (gone is Kryptonite as a plot device) is weak, Jor-El as a mainframe virus is inconsistent, Zod's pirate TV station broadcast is mostly unnecessary, some of the plot is told through ham fisted dialog, Jor-El is a surprisingly kick-ass scientist, there's some significant rewriting of Superman canon...aaaand....that's about it.

So why am I frustrated? Let's try an experiment:

1. Watch all of the Man of Steel trailers
2. Go to Rotten Tomatoes and click a random review
3. Read the review, is there anything reviewed that doesn't come from the trailers?

If so does it follow on the following complaints?:

• There's too much action...in an action film.
• There's not enough Romance between Clark and Lane.
• The story uses flashbacks and apparently reviewers are confused about this technique having never seen it in a story ever in their lives.
• Superman wasn't funny. Seriously.
• Clark Kent wasn't a bumbling fool, a characterization which only exists in the 80's movies.
• Clark isn't a complex character.
• Endless whining about it being too long.

Some of the reviews are factually incorrect: I've seen reviews that mix up Jor-El and Kal-El, claim the Clarks come from Texas, that Zod destroyed Krypton and on and on.

At this point I'm pretty sure that almost none of the reviewers have actually watched the film. The days of well written, well considered reviews a la Ebert really are gone.

Some examples:

• Here's a review by the Atlantic's Christopher Orr that literally doesn't make any sense. For reference here's his gushing review of Superman Returns. I mean really, which is the better movie? Orr vs. Orr comes down firmly on the 2006 movie's side, which as any person who actually likes movies would find abhorrent.
• How about Newsday's Rafer Guzman? "...this reboot skimps on fun and romance..." and "Krypton is needlessly refashioned into Middle Earth, with dragons and wizards" I don't think I need to say anything else. Guzman really just wanted to see a 90 minute Lois & Clark movie.
• Kaplan vs. Kaplan: A review written by people who really honestly just hate seeing action on screen and pine for longer romance and family relationship scenes (which decidedly don't involve Superman doing super things) and can't sit still for an entire 2 and a half hour movie and can't get over why there's no Lex Luthor in this movie.

Disgraceful

For reference: Rotten Tomatoes viewer rating is over 80% and IMDB viewer rating is at over 8 out of 10.

Here's a discussion I think is well considered, reasonable panel review, with dissenting opinions I can even understand and get behind.

I can't wait for the sequel.

I've just seen the future of computing

This is the closest thing I've yet seen of a clear vision for the future of computing. A single computing device, always with you, with all your stuff, that you can expand and grow to suit different use-cases and needs. The number of times I wish I could switch seamlessly between my phone and computer - to "session shift" some activity I was working on between the different formats, is perhaps 3 or 4 times daily. Session shifting has become even more of a problem for me as I end up dealing with half a dozen computing devices in a day (desktop, netbook, laptop, phone, work laptop, work software testing laptop, etc.)

One thing I have to also admit to liking about it is the surprising unslickness of the whole presentation.

It's perfectly mundane looking. Like it's something that everybody just uses as a matter of course. The computing devices just blend into the background, there's no spotlight or fancy dog and pony show. It's just a stock monitor/keyboard/mouse and a more or less humdrum looking laptop style device. It's commodity stuff that'll find it's way into ubiquity.

In other words, it's not Apple and that's a good thing. Apple makes beautiful devices, but at the end of the day, they always fall short of that ever present need for our tools to simply blend into the background and do their thing quietly -- not showcase themselves. Apple doesn't understand the need for computers to simply be an appliance with pure utilitarian functionality.

Yes, Apple talks about computing as appliances all the time, but when was the last time you dropped half a month's salary on a toaster designed by the top industrial designers in the world pushed out by a multi-million dollar marketing campaign? Apple is a boutique pen maker in a world powered by disposable bics. There's always a market for the Montblanc, and there's nothing wrong with that. But a fine pen is a work of usable art. The $.12 disposable Bic powers the world. And while my overstretched analogy is getting a bit thin here, I'm not saying the whole setup looks cheap, but functional and utilitarian. It's not a Yugo, it's a Honda.

Hence my thinking about this. It's a good/decent looking device, crammed full of all kinds of goodness.That powers 95% of most people's computing needs. Speaking with a colleague over the last few months, he's gone through a tortured decision making process to find a lightweight portable computing device to take on vacations with him. He's found that when he brings his laptop with him, he almost never takes it out. And an iPad doesn't let him do the couple things he wants to make sure he's able to do on the go, the new MBA, while sexy, can't justify their price to him. This device would completely fill all of his needs. Couple that with the media center role (and the upcoming Netflix) this phone can assume, the kindle app and some games, and literally you can bring your world around with you in your pocket.

What I found also very interesting is the end-to-end thinking behind this. It's clearly targeted at corporate users, the portion of the demo regarding citrix and the use-case of the laptop dock on a train really drove that home. But it can clearly assume useful roles for most people.

Is it perfect? No...clearly not. It's stuffed full of all kinds of compromise, bridging the webtop and phone sides is going to be a challenge in some cases, but it's a bold first step in the right direction.

Tron : Legacy - Analyzed as a Religious Allegory

The technology, open source bits and corporate back-story is a red herring nobody seems to be able to see past. Watching it I couldn't help but notice it's chock full of religious commentary (mostly Christian but sprinkled with some Buddhist and miscellaneous other Eastern philosophies). I’m not religious by any stretch, but I found the movie deeply satisfying when viewed this way.

***Warning Spoilers***

This analysis is very preliminary, I’ve only seen the movie once, but I think it’s fairly sound.

• In the movie Kevin Flynn represents the Christian God the Father, the creator of all things, all powerful, all knowing (supposedly) etc. etc.
• Tron represents the Christian Holy Spirit, the kinetic 'action' arm of God (or perhaps more likely an Archangel like Michael or some synthesis).
• CLU then, I thought originally, represented Jesus, but may also represent the Christian God's other creation, Lucifer (or perhaps both simultaneously).
• (I'll get to Sam Flynn in a minute).

Where the story plays with the allegory (and quite cleverly I think) is in the twist it takes on the traditional Judeo-Christian story of God the father, omniscient and omnipotent. In the story Flynn sets out to create a new world with his holy trinity, and while he thinks he's creating something fantastic, all he ends up doing is creating conditions ripe for a new life-form that, emerge from the wilderness. This is commentary that perhaps mankind was not the direct creation of God, but an emergent behavior of a complex universe that God couldn't possibly understand.

From there, it uses this principle to define the rest of the story.

CLU, tasked with creating perfection turns against his master to eradicate this new life-form and leave Flynn a powerless and mere observer of the going ons in his creation. With the power of destruction and the ability to repurpose programs, CLU tries to build an army of true believers to take into the real world and conquer it. Considering the Christian Story of the apocalypse, the story is not about world domination in the 007 sense, it's about Satan's gathering of an army, turned by temptation and corruption (which has meaning in both the digital and religious worlds), into an assault on Heaven itself! Here Heaven is the real world (as represented by the portal high in the clouds). Except in Tron, Heaven is deeply flawed and not the world of perfection described in Christianity.

The allegory extends further if you consider the common concept in many Christian faiths that God must leave the world alone for mankind to exercise free-will. The story hints at this, that the programs have a kind of free-will, there are programs that resist CLU and ones that seek to serve him. Even the turned army is given an inspirational speech to keep them along CLUs path...implying that they need encouragement to stay on his side.

Where the commentary gets some spice is in the elements of Buddhism and Eastern philosophies that are brought in. Left as an observer, Flynn fights the compelling need to interfere in his world by seeking a Buddhist-type detachment. It finds him deep in meditation, a Guru to Quorra (who represents a particular naive and warlike humanity in the movie BTW)...on the edge of Enlightenment -- advising non-action. To further add to this, he's meditating high in a mountain, far from "civilization" in his quest for detached enlightenment, just as Buddhists today will head to the mountains to meditate and focus on their detachment. His house is a representation of the things he has not yet detached from...most things are pale imitations of things in the real world, the furniture is white and featureless, but implies a rich elegance (temptation towards attachment), but the furnishings are rather spartan in a way. Yet two notable things are virtually exact mimics of things that Flynn cannot yet give up (representing how far he has to go to yet achieve enlightenment), food (sustenance) and books (knowledge). These things are rendered in exacting detail, down to dusty book covers. And the books in particular standout as center pieces in his home. The sudden appearance of Sam convinces Flynn that enlightenment, detachment from the world and inaction, are not the right ways to go, and he resumes his place as God the Father to save his son from creation out of his control and under the influence of Lucifer/CLU (in notable opposition to the Christian tradition of God the Father sacrificing his son) and send him (and humanity as Quorra) back to heaven.

However, this changes back as Flynn finds further and further detachment from the world useful. In order, he abandons his house (and thus the last remnants of the real world, his books and food). Then he abandons the world and Sam in a final act where he faces and absorbs his last vestige of attachment, his ego/CLU and brings about not only the end of the world but also enlightenment.

Sam Flynn represents a kind of Jesus/Adam character in opposition to Flynn's false son Lucifer/Jesus/CLU. It's an interesting literary fracturing/blending/bending of Jesus/Lucifer/Adam as a character into two parts. CLU, who is to do Flynn/God's work on Earth/the Grid for him, just as Jesus was to perform God's work on Earth for God the Father. Sam represents simultaneously Flynn's true son, and the first man in the Grid (with Quorra the first woman). Another interesting twist on this concept is that the movie ends with Flynn sacrificing himself (as opposed to his son), by reintegrating with his false creation CLU with himself, thus bringing about the end-times and destroying the world/grid. This is of course a metaphor for both the Judeo-Christian story of Jesus's sacrifice (re-rendered as God the Father's sacrifice) and for the Apocalypse.

Quorra represents both humanity and Eve before temptation. As humanity she represents an uncontrollable free-will, and warfare. Notably, even though she appears a warrior in the movie, her skills never seem to quite match up with the tri-part God's abilities, thus ensuring her place in the hierarchy of the characters -- yet she's willing to sacrifice herself to/for her God. As a woman, she represents Eve, the first woman. And like in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it's never discussed or revealed where the rest of humanity comes from (others of her kind, the Isomorphs). As the bearer of children, women are also often symbols of humanity.

Other characters can be analyzed this way as well, Gem & Castor also represent humanity, but they represent temptation and false paths. Quorra, flawed as humans are, send's Sam to meet with Castor, obviously from younger years when she was tempted and entranced with this character. As a nightclub owner and sometimes revolutionary, he represents the temptation of cheap thrills and a wayward path that would ultimately lead to Sam's (and the real-world/heaven's) destruction. Only the appearance of God-the-Father/Flynn sets Sam and Quorra back on the straight and narrow (interestingly represented by the Solar Sailor, which rides a straight and narrow beam of pure light and in the interest of extending interesting dichotomies via twists in traditional Judeo-Christian stories is also the vehicle Satan/CLU is using to bring his armies to Earth/the flawed Heaven).

There are more analogies and symbols that bring it home, the Grid is obviously an extrusion of solid land in an ocean. The floating stones leading to heaven represent a kind of stairway or ladder to heaven. In an extension of more traditional symbolism, discs are the place of the soul, but are also a traditional symbol of heaven in the Chinese tradition. The grid evokes the idea of squares which is the traditional Chinese symbol for Earth. In the beginning of the movie, Sam is seen falling from on high both literally via a parachute, and figuratively as he descends from the opulent Encom tower down to street level, then his warehouse/house then to an obviously crappy part of town, then into the arcade where he descends even further down stairs and finally behind a closed door until he descends down into the Grid (where he descends further in the Armory). Only after he descends, literally into hell, does the story really begin. This evocative both of the Christian story of Jesus's descent into hell before his ascent into Heaven, but also of the notion, present in some traditions, that only through suffering can one ascend into heaven/enlightenment -- present in both some forms of the Judeo Christian tradition and several Eastern philosophies.

As commentary, it rejects the notion of an involved, omniscient, omnipotent God. Instead it makes the bold statement that God is aloof, uncaring and in the end only destructive of his creations -- Flynn's major contribution when he gets involved is to bring about the apocalypse in the grid. God/Flynn sits bewildered and amazed at emergent behaviors in a complex system, at the craftiness of his own creation (CLU's coup), Sam's presence in the Grid, Quorra's impulsive behavior, etc. He is powerless to effect change in a creation grown greater and stronger than he. His own creation, the Grid evokes the world and hell at once. While the real world/Heaven is represented as free from Satan/CLU's control. And perfect in its flaws, as opposed to a fake perfection. CLU as Lucifer also represents ego, and the presumption that ego brings about great suffering. Flynn seeks detachment as a way of throwing away ego, paying for his mistakes...the flaws of an ego filled, jealous God made manifest in his own creation. Curiously, by reintegrating with his ego/CLU, Flynn not only brings about armageddon, but it's represented by a blinding light that may also symbolize finally achieving enlightenment as Flynn rejects the real world. His soul/disk is left in Sam's possession at the end, supposedly as a prophet to bring this news out into the world forgetting that it brought about the end of the world.

I actually found the movie's symbolism and commentary very deep and I'm only touching the surface here. I'm sure on further viewings I'll find more. The plot as such is merely a scaffolding for this rather interesting blending of Judeo-Christian and Eastern philosophies. I think the only point I'm yet to resolve is the flip-flopping of Flynn from detachment to attachment back to detachment. Perhaps this is supposed to evoke Buddha's final walk on down the Middle Way?