Cow - a movie

E

edwest4

ACCESS: Top Secret
Joined
8 November 2007
Messages
4,749
Reaction score
3,827
Description:

An intimate portrait of one dairy cow’s life. The film highlights the beauty and challenges cows face, and the…​


No link. I hope for obvious reasons.
 
I wonder whether the challenges cows face in this oeuvre include the abattoir.
 
"She ages like a fine bovine." - Ruminant Weekly *****

Seriously, I might watch this. Requires a certain mental state though, as alluded above.
 
From the BBC News:

"No relation to such recent films as Dog, with Channing Tatum, or Pig, with Nicolas Cage, Cow is a revelatory documentary directed by Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Fish Tank). Its subject is Luma, a Holstein Friesian cow who lives on an English dairy farm. But unlike most agricultural documentaries, this one has no voiceover, and the farm workers and vets are barely glimpsed. Instead, Arnold shows life from Luma's perspective. Her evident distress as she is shunted from field to lorry to milking parlour for years will make every viewer consider switching to oat milk. "Cow is tender, respectful, and incredibly visceral," says Rachael Sampson at Film Inquiry. "It has heart, soul and oozes empathy. On a personal note, I have not cried like that in a long time."'

Uh... I see. Revelatory... Well, yes, if you say so... but I'm a bit skeptical about that.
 
edwest2 said:
From the BBC News: ...
Click to expand...

GUNDA - the movie

Pigs, cows and chickens. Intimate portraits of living beings who wind up dead on a plate every day. Director Victor Kossakovsky restores dignity to Gunda and company. A meditative intervention. A silent outcry that nonetheless celebrates life.
www.gunda.movie www.gunda.movie

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afZ6n7lwx48


A movie perhaps somewhat in the vein of "Gunda", then. If so, it's becoming something of a genre. Not bad, in fact, something of an antidote to the false immediacy of much of modern media. One needs space and time for contemplation and self-reflection.

Where his prior film, the acclaimed epic AQUARELA, was a reminder of the fragility of human tenure on earth, in GUNDA, master filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky reminds us that we share our planet with billions of other animals. Through encounters with a mother sow (the eponymous Gunda), two ingenious cows, and a scene-stealing, one-legged chicken, Kossakovsky movingly recalibrates our moral universe, reminding us of the inherent value of life and the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.
Click to expand...

On a somewhat inappropriate note:

"'Cow' has the moooves" - Playbull *****
 
With all the tenuously-relevant threads that got nuked by the mods, how is it that one about a movie that purports to show that cows are anything but ambulatory meat is surviving?

ab67616d0000b273f51ee338accf4dbdad61b576
 
Orionblamblam said:
With all the tenuously-relevant threads that got nuked by the mods, how is it that one about a movie that purports to show that cows are anything but ambulatory meat is surviving?
Click to expand...
Well it *was* a nice, mildly amusing, uncontroversial topic about some presumably whimsical animal-themed movie...

I suppose now that you've decided to take issue with it it will be elevated to some pseudopolitical forum-policy "debate" and eventually suffer the same fate.

This is why we can't have nice things.
 
hagaricus said:
Orionblamblam said:
With all the tenuously-relevant threads that got nuked by the mods, how is it that one about a movie that purports to show that cows are anything but ambulatory meat is surviving?
Click to expand...
Well it *was* a nice, mildly amusing, uncontroversial topic ...
Click to expand...
Ahem: "Her evident distress as she is shunted from field to lorry to milking parlour for years will make every viewer consider switching to oat milk."
 
Orionblamblam said:
With all the tenuously-relevant threads that got nuked by the mods, how is it that one about a movie that purports to show that cows are anything but ambulatory meat is surviving?
Click to expand...

That's a bit of a tortured logic and a whole lotta projection. These movies are without narration (discounting the very evident intent and intelligence of their subjects) - basically, they just represent livestock (domesticated animal, what you will) life as it happens. Or slow food, even. I don't see an ounce of controversy in noting that they exist and how they exist. The cinematographers, whatever their personal convictions might be, trust their subjects to carry the story. While they're not purporting to be exhaustive documentaries or values-agnostic, nothing truly extraordinary happens in them. Apart from said life.

What anyone gets from the experience is highly personal, each to their own. For the record, albeit I haven't eaten beef in a long while as a matter of personal choice (this has little to do with the cow-ness of things though), otherwise I'm an omnivore. Don't expect mere viewing experiences to be some sort of watershed events. Presently considering a membership in a hunting association, in fact. So, in a very human fashion, not on a strong moral or highly intellectual footing on this. Just willing to see points of view and ponder degrees of understanding and projection, enjoy perspectives and be challenged. Equally very interested in plant-based proteins, but find "lab grown meat" somewhat off-putting ATM.

It's a very hard world to be entirely self-consistent in. I don't see why "ambulatory meat", a valid description as it might be, should necessary be the dominant facet of understanding the subject, much less why this - in "The Bar" - should imply tenuous relevance or some comparative "nuke-ability" of the discussion? In my book, it's somewhat emblematic of the randomness in this section.
 
UpForce said:
It's a very hard world to be entirely self-consistent in. I don't see why "ambulatory meat", a valid description as it might be, should necessary be the dominant facet of understanding the subject, much less why this - in "The Bar" - should imply tenuous relevance or some comparative "nuke-ability" of the discussion? In my book, it's somewhat emblematic of the randomness in this section.
Click to expand...

My whole point was that an entirely cromulent thread about the AN 225 - you know, an airplane - got nuked for vague and ill defined reasons, while a *cow* gets a thread. I have no problem with a cow getting a thread; I had no problem with there being a general purpose humor thread... which got nuked. The rules seem vague and capricious.
 
Orionblamblam said:
With all the tenuously-relevant threads that got nuked by the mods, how is it that one about a movie that purports to show that cows are anything but ambulatory meat is surviving?

ab67616d0000b273f51ee338accf4dbdad61b576
Click to expand...

An excellent observation. And a mystery. Perhaps we need to get in touch with our inner cow... Count me out.
 
Orionblamblam said:
UpForce said:
It's a very hard world to be entirely self-consistent in. I don't see why "ambulatory meat", a valid description as it might be, should necessary be the dominant facet of understanding the subject, much less why this - in "The Bar" - should imply tenuous relevance or some comparative "nuke-ability" of the discussion? In my book, it's somewhat emblematic of the randomness in this section.
Click to expand...

My whole point was that an entirely cromulent thread about the AN 225 - you know, an airplane - got nuked for vague and ill defined reasons, while a *cow* gets a thread. I have no problem with a cow getting a thread; I had no problem with there being a general purpose humor thread... which got nuked. The rules seem vague and capricious.
Click to expand...

There you go, using words I have to look up to find out what they mean. I mean I've seen cromulent before but I'm expecting worse..

:)
:)
 
And how come this thread is getting more views than the one about Japanese robots? Robots are way cooler than cows...
 
@Orionblamblam :

Probably for this(?!):

American Secret Cow Project 1945-1956 (×_×)

Cover illustration (to be refined) :
funny-flying-cow-plane-travel-sky-buzzing-jet-airplane-farm-animal-having-fun-106061246.jpg
 
Last edited:
If you're going to do a cover like that, at least put air to air missiles on the cow. At least...
 
Orionblamblam said:
My whole point was that an entirely cromulent thread about the AN 225 - you know, an airplane - got nuked for vague and ill defined reasons, while a *cow* gets a thread. I have no problem with a cow getting a thread; I had no problem with there being a general purpose humor thread... which got nuked. The rules seem vague and capricious.
Click to expand...

Well, we all have our experiences here and our frames of reference - even within the site - vary. I never, ever intentionally opened the "humor" discussion, surmising I didn't want my cognitive bandwidth littered with unintentional baggage. Just a simple cost/benefit call based on life experience "at large".

As to discussing Mriya, it's (to continue with animal analogies) emblematic of the elephant in the room, so much so that it was transformed into a whole woolly mammoth in the hangar, both figuratively and in real terms (banal though that focus is, considering the wider framework). It's an ongoing matter as to what ramifications this current enforced amnesia and obliviousness will have locally (pick your Hannah Arendt quote here, basically all the famous ones apply). Coincidentally a certain by-their-very-real-world-actions conspicuous contingent seems quite muted here these days despite growing notably more visible and raucous, even, shortly before precipitating the latest inflection point. The paradox of perceiving a victim to be indefensible making an attacker's actions so.

This particular tuft of grass will yet come up several times to be chewed on and there are plenty more on the steppe whence it came from. A cow would think nothing of it (something to appreciate, perhaps), the rest of us might want to take into account our own physiology in comparison and consider the co-dependencies between the active externalized cooking/fermentation processes and the sustenance of our cognitive capacity to employ them together in the first place.

edwest2 said:
And how come this thread is getting more views than the one about Japanese robots? Robots are way cooler than cows...
Click to expand...

We smelt it so we dealt it, I guess. As to the robots, many of them seemed contrived. Luckily there was at least one agricultural bot there, those have huge potential.

TomcatViP said:
American Secret Cow Project 1945 1956 by Tony Butter & Alan greenies
Click to expand...

"Udder wingsanity." - Barnstormers' Biplanely *****
 
Last edited:
"co-dependencies"? What? Have I wandered into the Psychology Today forum?
 
Next: The Barn Swallow

"Enthralling." - some guy

"Insightful." - some other guy

"Tender, respectful, incredibly pointless." - the guy at the local pub

"Hey. Cows are cheaper than people." - unidentified Hollywood Producer
 
edwest2 said:
"co-dependencies"? What? Have I wandered into the Psychology Today forum?
Click to expand...

I don't think I've ever been, so cannot tell. In any case, just a reference to the mismatch between the energy demands of our (supposedly) big brains and our relatively puny (in comparison) digestive system. Though the latter has an incredible amount of neurons as well, not to mention the vagus nerve connection itself.
 
So I'm actually in the Comparative Psychology forum... or Comparative Physiology forum... or both...
 
The Bar is where members may post anything offtopic but likely to be of interest - a place to chill out. That last bit appears to mean different things to different people here.
 

Similar threads

Please donate to support the forum.

Back
Top Bottom