Alphaville

One of the best movies I've ever seen. I watched it on netflix instant last night. It's about a spy in the future out to kill a sentient computer that is controlling the minds of its public through the religion is has named capitalism. I also LOVE noir and this is particularly amazing to watch. I will be finding what it was filmed with and how because I MUST learn how to do this. This movie def shows me where movies like The Matrix comes from and even James Bond.

I even find it so poingient that the main character walks around with his instamatic camera taking photos of stuff journalists wouldn't find interesting. Quite like hipsters and instagram, and watching people in this movie watch live executions isn't that far off from watching the stripper on Real Housewives of Atlants suck his own junk. In the movie is says Americans are particularly susceptable to this kind of mindlessness. They are controlled by giving them a "bible" which is a live updated dictionary of words they can use. Words get deleted all the time, and people are subject to the laws of logic.

This movie gave me chills. It's amazing, watch it tonight.


Plot from Wiki
Lemmy Caution is a secret agent with the code number of 003 from "the Outlands". Entering Alphaville in his Ford Mustang,[3] he poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson, and claims to work for the Figaro-Pravda. He wears a tan overcoat that stores various items such as a M1911A1 Colt Commander automatic pistol. He carries the then new cheap Instamatic camera with him and photographs everything he sees, particularly the things that would ordinarily be unimportant to a journalist. Despite the futuristic setting, references made in the film still set the action in the twentieth century.

Caution is, in fact, on a series of missions. First, he must search for missing agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff); second, he must capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon); lastly, he must destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by von Braun which is in complete control of all of Alphaville.

Alpha 60 outlaws free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60's dictates is that "people should not ask 'why', but only say 'because'." People who show signs of emotion (weeping at the death of a wife, or a smile on the face) are presumed to be acting illogically, and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed. In an image reminiscent of George Orwell's concept of Newspeak, there is a "Bible" in each room: actually a dictionary that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned. As a result, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society of mindless drones.

Alpha 60's dictates have had some surprising results. Caution is told that men are killed at a ratio of fifty to every one woman executed. He also learns that Swedes, Germans and Americans assimilate well. Images of the E = mc² and E = hf equations are displayed several times throughout the film as a symbol of the regime of logical science that rules Alphaville. At one point, Caution passes through a place called the Grand Omega Minus, whence brainwashed people are sent out to the other "galaxies" to start strikes, revolutions, family rows and student revolts.

**there's more but I don't want to ruin it for you