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The only important, inspiring math movie.


Why this film's full title "Antonia's Line" is abbreviated to "Antonia" could do with some explaining.

Preview of upcoming review:

Antonia’s Line…..(the only important, inspiring math-movie)

Here is a stark contrast in movies about the subject and culture theory of mathematics in a modern biographical/educational setting. It’s a foreign film, Dutch, and it provides a contemporary alternate point of reference for the many examples of mathematics involved cinema in American film. And what it tells Americans about their society, it’s institutions of film and government, how they are seasoned with psychological, anti-intellectual propaganda is fascinating. Those conditions have their pronounced features for different historical reasons, geography, culture drift and the unique roll of the U.S. since WWII and of course the synergy between mathematics, war technology and the evolution of the Cold War to permanent information war. Part of that war you see has opened up a front specifically treating mathematics whereas it had long since considered the public and public education critical targets for softening and fluorochemical bombardment directly linked to today’s epidemic mental retardation anomaly--The war not only against information, but the war against mind; and the staple brand manufacturing of the U.S. public educator as motion picture laughing stock in a devil may care, entertainment commercialized riot zone on what the electorate is supposed to keep throwing away its taxes and the students their disposable income, trend adoption, affected attitude, style, mannerisms and other grievously wasteful contaminations.

The movie sets its own pace, follows the development of a little girl and her close-knit communal ties. Indeed it would appear that in the structuring of the mathematician here it does ‘take a village’. And she turns out to become a remarkably gifted algebrist/group theorist of some kind. We could parallel this film through a procedure often employed in mathematics, what’s called an [Extension] to another European movie “Mindwalk”, where we could imagine catching up to her after her career had gone through a government military closure working on SDI in physics. This is the woman the politician’s friend takes him to see on Mt. San Michelle; and by this procedure of comparing biographical cinema in the sciences better appreciate its span and gender specification through the traditional underdog in the stereotypically male dominated arenas of math and science.

For one thing, the main character isn’t portrayed as crazy or mentally ill; if that’s important in establishing the sharp contrast repetitively marring American genre in this same category. So the film is a great relief from the mental cruelty heaped on intellectual aspirations in a perennially bullied and sinking American educational decline, promoted through the mass industry of Hollywood film propagandas marketed as so called ‘entertainment’. ‘Buyer beware.’ Not to bother comparing it with the far inferior movie ‘Proof’, even in the biographical abundance that would have been available to structure a film about John Nash, “A Beautiful Mind”, a wide ranging set of life experiences also caught up in Europe for an extended time, instead a hack biographer is selected to play up the crazy smear in order a distortion in film can be manufactured from that template. Chalkboard scenes are important litmus for calibrating the realism or contrivance, in Antonia’s Line you have a far more natural setting, in the Nash film something completely different, i.e. yet another instance of ‘throwing away the textbook’, similar to the classroom setting in ‘Dead Poets Society’, and a storming of the lecture by an overzealous psychiatrist’s Gestapo when Nash lectures on The Riemann Hypothesis. Induce, then blame the victim—the usual knuckle-dragging monkeyshine’s half-truths and characteristically feckless White lies. The American audience is dismissed as childish enough to have those sorts of overt propaganda coercions foisted on them without comment or feedback, what are really unqualified abuses of portrayal, demeaning to education and educators and really amount to nothing more than the usual crass bullying of another intellectual that has come to supplant better film and literature development in this country domineered instead by ‘Animal House’ and high school movies trying to reduce our establishment to zoos and mockeries in terms of international standards. Through this filter of film culture-study a picture of the Cold War victor begins to take on a caste of imbedded contradictions…not so much the friendly film skies and greatest country in history…as it is in fact a continuation of the social war of the 1960s, a jingoistic sniping at the public from hidden bunkers and assassin boy scout camps of no account, now more contained in how the news media selectively manages the gathering dirty secrets as they pile up, cumulate in unexplained pandemic disease prevalence or just happen to come crashing down in tons of steel and debris for no official, discernable reason. If, upon weighing the available fare, interpreting and selecting from the alternatives this review stimulates a greater interest to seek out foreign film equivalents rather than continue to be bludgeoned by the bad parent of Hollywood imitations, hopefully the better informed consumer choice will result in a healthier film-going experience avoiding such obstacles to unhindered aspirations.

...state of the art video graphics....

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I would like to know just what drugs you are on, how long you have been on them and where can I get some?

There can be no true beauty without decay.

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You wrote: "It’s a foreign film".

No, it's not.

Michel Couzijn
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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You succinctly point out a kind of attitude that rather annoys me, that is seeing all the world that isn't where one lives as "foreign," or all (usually) non-USA-made movies as "foreign." It's like when folks talk about "ethnic food," as if most food came from people or cultures with no ethnicity, unlike that 'exotic,' "ethnic" food. Oy.

I also love ANTONIA'S LINE. With this, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, DOLORES CLAIBORNE, TO DIE FOR, LONE STAR, WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, FARGO, BEFORE SUNRISE, STEALING BEAUTY, BOUND, CLUELESS, COURAGE UNDER FIRE, Lelouch's LES MISERABLES, and lots of others, the mid-nineties were blessed with some really good movies.

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I'm so excited that this is being shown on TV in the United States. I saw it many years ago and it had a strong impact on me. I can't wait to see it again.

I dreamt an animated musical last night. Is that normal?

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