kirevmaco

I thought Spirited Away (made in 2001) was awful, so much so that I didn't watch anything Miyazaki made after that for years.

I tried The Wind Rises (made in 2013), also found it terrible.

However, before those two films, I had seen several Studio Ghibli's earlier movies and found them pretty good. I thought Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (pre-Ghibli but the same group of people, with director Miyazaki) was absolutely amazing. So my impression is that their earlier films are much better than their newer works.

I'm convinced that a large part of this kind of thing is related to personality.

People's ability to get "in the zone" depends on if the level of presentation fits them. I remember in AP Chemistry, some kids just thrived on the rote memorization nature of the whole course. They did great. Some of us found it nonsensical that we had to memorize so much without explanation but we still managed to push through and get good grades. The people who did better weren't "smarter," they just never cared to ask any bigger questions about the material. I'm sure that lack of curiosity helped them to succeed in standard careers.

A person who was "smart enough" to do cutting edge theoretical research might get lucky and have a personality that fits with having a more standard life. Someone who isn't "smart enough" might be very interested in certain problems and push through to finding the answers. Someone who is "smart enough" to do that and doesn't like bureaucracy might drop out of grad school, or even undergrad.

My point was that if you aren't willing to memorize stuff before you understand it, you often do worse in school.

It's just testing and rewarding people who studied for the stupid test, that's all. It also rewards conformist personalities.

It reminds me of undergrad calculus, where you had to memorize how to do dozens of types of integrals. You're not supposed to ask "what does dx mean?" Asking those types of questions will give you a worse grade.

I remember back when I was supposed to "study" for this thing. I asked "if it's an aptitude test, how does it make sense to study for it?" No one could give me a good answer so I decided it was stupid and never studied for it. I thought it was disgusting that so many people were paying for services, books, etc. to specifically prepare for the test even though the whole pretense of the thing is that you're not supposed to be able to do that.

On the other hand, I loved a lot of the AP stuff (chemistry, physics, calculus) since you were rewarded based on understanding the actual content of a subject, a system that made sense. But it's a good thing I didn't think to ask what "dx" meant back then, otherwise I would have probably gotten a worse score.

Thanks for posting that, it was hilarious. I'll definitely re-watch the part where they're quoting him directly again when I need a good laugh.

I wouldn't say he misunderstood his creation, I would rather say that he didn't care about the source material and made something different, with themes that weren't really thought through too well. I agree that the sum of the visions amalgamated is better than the vision of the director in this case.

I agree with everything in your comment, including about AI. The last 30 minutes of that movie amazed me but I didn't like much of what came before that.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Probably you could tell from the tone of my comment, but I don't like the movie the way it is. I agree with you that the movie and the book work well together but I wish the movie worked as a standalone piece of art.

I think Kubrick and Clarke could have perhaps found a compromise. For example, I remember liking the ending part of the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" by Spielberg which had a similar situation to the last sequence in 2001. I don't recall if that movie had any explicit explanation of what the beings at the end were but it was pretty clear who they were and what they were doing from the way the movie handled things.