There's no way to oversell how spectacular and incredible seeing a total eclipse is. A lot of people think they've seen an eclipse. They think they've seen a partial solar eclipse - even if they've seen a 99 percent partial, it pales in comparison to seeing a complete, 100 percent total eclipse of the sun.
You can't blame movies for embracing spectacle; filmmakers since D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille have loved spectacle, and spectacle is something that movies convey like no other medium, especially in a digital age.
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
I love movies with spectacle but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn't have to be a creature.
Modern capitalism, organising the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, cannot offer any spectacle other than that of our own alienation.
I don't think people come to television for spectacle. And I don't really have a lot of fun writing spectacle for television, I'll do that in features.
The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.
The first total eclipse that I witnessed was in 1970. I was an amateur astronomer. But after I saw the total eclipse, it couldn't be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because it was too spectacular. I needed another eclipse fix, because I got hooked on the shadow.
A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.
Cinema through spectacle, through the entertainment of spectacle, tells the story of many actual problems in life. Because who ever doesn't want to read between the lines can just enjoy the entertainment and the show and can go home happy.
Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.
If you're outside the path of totality eclipse, if there's any way you can get into the path of totality for the eclipse, do it. Take the day off. Take the kids out of school. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most people to see a total eclipse, and it is one of the grandest sights in all of nature. It's something you'll always remember, and you'll pass stories of it onto your grandchildren.
One of the big things right now is the DJ is a spectacle, isn't it? You have the enormous light show, smoke, explosions, and fire. There's a dude with a USB stick playing somewhere in there, but the spectacle is created out of lights and lasers and whatever. The original idea of DJing - being a shadowy figure in the corner while people were having a party - is not the one that makes money and is massively popular internationally.
Trump appears to some as too simulated, too much a spectacle. But all authorized politics is spectacle. He just does it in a different style. It's not conservative, its post-liberal. Rather than make hypocritical gestures towards the just, the good and the true, it's about making hyperbolic gestures about their absence.
The appeal of the Riverside 500 was based on that overall spectacle of witnessing a mob of brightly colored, bellowing automobiles gamboling over the countryside like a herd of runaway steers. Stock car roadracing is in fact like a mechanical stampede, and we personally think it's maybe the neatest form of motor racing known to man. It's definitely the greatest spectacle in roadracing.
All tyrannies are virtuoso displays, over many years, of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship, and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control.