X-Message-Number: 18201
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 19:13:50 -0500
From: david pizer <>
Subject: Pizer replies to Platt's movie criticism

Pizer on Platt's comments of Vanilla Sky.

Charles, I liked the movie.  I plan to see it again so I can begin to
understand it.  

>5. Is the resemblance of the red-haired female cryonicist in the New York
>headquarters to Linda Chamberlain purely coincidental?

Both my wife and I also thought this person looked a lot like Linda and had
Linda's spunk and enthusiasm of earlier and better times.  (We all hope she
gets better, soon).

snip

>1. Many people will believe that a dog really has been frozen and revived.
>This will significantly devalue the news value in the future when a mammal
>really is resuscitated.

There seemed to be references to real people in the movie.  When we saw the
movie, my wife thought the guy on tv with the frozen dog might be a
reference to me. Like that character, I have a dog that I used to go on tv
with in Arizona. And, I have several dogs that are frozen.  The guy on tv
with the frozen dog was said "to own half of Arizona."  I own several
pieces of property in Arizona.  I told my wife that is was a just a fluke.
Almost any long time cryonicist can find some references to cryonicists
they know in this movie.

snip

>I was pleased to see the "look and feel" of cryonics presented in the
>movie, in the brief clips of a wrapped body being lowered into a steaming
>box. Of course clips of this type have already appeared in TV
>documentaries.

I was pleased to see this, also.  They did some homework, because they got
a few things very right.  The cryonics scenes reminded me of Alcor.  The
things they got very wrong, they must have known were wrong, but did not care.

Most of you probably know that Tom Cruise belongs to the Scientologists.
That is the religion that Keith Henson locked horns with recently and
caused them a lot of grief.  I wondered if trying to make cryonics look so
bad was done on purpose, as a way of trying to get even - a cryoncists
tries to make their philosophy look silly, so they try to make cryonics
look evil of scary to those who do not understand cryonics fully.

But not scary to us.  It would not bother many of us on this forum to have
to endure a 150 year nightmare if at the end you woke up and cryonics
worked and you came back, perhaps, to immortality.  But to the
non-cryonicst it is just a way of showing how to have a bad trip on the way
to what they think is a bad destination - biological immortality.

snip

David Pizer

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