Wednesday 22 October 2014

ScarJo for GITS? Alternative Actresses (Image Montages) & Thoughts on the Remake

Recoloured sketch augment by me (2009)
'News' of the possible casting for Ghost in the Shell seemed rife the other night (Guardianio9, IGNetcetc). Probably because Facebook's algorithm can clearly see that I've LIKED the GITS film and SAC pages. Dipping briefly into the milieu of rabid fan comments, some alternative names cropped up that sparked me to think I might feasibly use this topic to squeeze a few film reviews into a single post (but then time and length over-ran, so they got their own posts).

Firstly, let me apologise for abbreviating Miss Johansson's name in the title, since she's reported as stating that the contraction "...sounds tacky... lazy and flippant... violent...[and]...insulting..."; a press convention designed to diminish women. This according to The Atlantic on "Scarlett Johansson's [Subversive] Vanishing Act" Note the partially redacted title! lol.

I would actually be fairly pleased with this casting choice in general. I have been pretty impressed with the direction she's taken with her acting roles (aside from the big Marvel money makers): oozing charisma through voice alone in "her", then reversing that completely with the disturbingly cold, emotional sparsity of "Under the Skin" (both 2013). The latter film could be taken quite literally as a metaphor for how the media industry feed on male weakness, using up successive starlets; all lust with no real intimacy pay-off.
Scarlett Johansson's shown she has the intensity. (Left: Under the Skin. Right: GITS 1995)
Whether she's deliberately challenging herself or even being a feminist heroine via clever casting choices is debatable. Obviously her sexuality never goes unnoticed, or uncommented. Supposedly it is flaunted in "Lucy" (2014 - though I've yet to watch it), in which her character uses "looks... as a utilitarian instrument of revenge" [Atlantic]. Obviously these 'looks' also woo a certain audience segment, too. This sounds just fine for Motoko's role, in certain respects. If this live action film leans towards the more overtly sexualised Major of the TV series (even more so the original manga...), then Johansson's reputation may be even more fitting (for better or worst).
http://lewyland.blogspot.com/2014/10/on-her-2013.html

My enthusiastic review extended into a whole blog post.
My concerns with Scarlet are more on how convincing fight scenes might look; I remember Scarlet's secret agent action role in "Iron Man 2" broke the 4th wall for me, in terms of believability for the physical capabilities of her body shape. Actually not so terrible, reviewing that scene. But the major generally goes toe to toe, rather than mauling opponents like a demented, Kung Fu squirrel. Maybe this inflexibility is a sexist failing on my part; "refus[ing] to embrace women in their entireties." [Atlantic].

Emily Blunt - has greater stature and already filed a military command role as Rita Vrataski (image above). She also has under her belt (the pretty decent) sci-fi action "Looper" (2012), with "Adjustment Bureau" (2011 - blogged here) rounding out the A-list of male action stars shes played support to. She actually turned down the 'Black Widow' role that now lets Johansson net serious money as an establish action star ($10M on the table for GITS). So if the current casting falls through (again), maybe history will be mirrored.

My blog post with analysis and criticism.
Blunt reminds me strongly of Keeley Hawes (in Ashes to Ashes): aside from being somewhat identical, both are type cast as indomitably assertive women with posh English accents. Which is all good. But I've yet to see Blunt in a lead role, and she seems to have a tendency towards hanging slightly agape, rather than tight lipped, steely determination.

Rinko Kikuchi - you might have hoped, would be more of an obvious choice, given that she's a japanese actress who has starred in a number of (English language) action blockbusters, (including 'Mako Mori' in the terrible Pacific Rim, see linked post below). Sadly, I think her accent is too strong to deliver the necessary philosophising with any serious weight (in a language I can comprehend, anyway).

Monday 20 October 2014

On "Pacific Rim" (2013)

This is a terrible movie in every way other than it's, admittedly, flashy visuals (and being a little more watchable than a Michael Bay Transformers abomination). It could be a banner boy for everything wrong with the current movie craze of comic book adaptations (except that it's an original script)! It practically rejoices in bearing no relation to reality, and not in a any clever way. CinemaSins put his/their finger right on the biggest flaw in "Everything Wrong With Pacific Rim In 9 Minutes Or Less" (screenshot below).

The male protagonist was a boring white bloke who was totally unsympathetic and droned on narrating for far too long. Rinko Kikuchi's character was the real interest, but she gets strangely shoved to the side.

So, as well as flunking the Bechdel test, the one significant female character is also a token Asain. This when the plot is set primarily in a military base in China (yes Hong Kong is still part of China, and looks likely to stay that way, regardless). Mako's subjugation is so palpable that the whole thing starts to feel like straight up anti-China propaganda; timorous Sino maiden, demure in the face of mighty Yanke valour. Sure, domestic markets, target audience, etc. But if this is supposed to fit with how American cinema goers perceive the world, the population's even more out of touch than I thought!

Nitpicking (some rather BIG NITS!):  the "Everything Wrong..." vid invents a bunch of niggly technical glitches that aren't there, but hopelessly fails to point out the horrendous lack of physicality involved throughout with the scale of things! Even if we assume that the robots and monsters (thousands of times more massive than dinosaurs) and are made of unknown magic materials that hold them together through the ridiculous stress and strains, still:

(A) Walking (or worst, swimming) across the biggest ocean on Earth in roughly an hour, or so. That would exceed the speed of sound (at least once). The energies involved would create waves that, alone, would destroy the world.

(B) The oversized mechas are also flown these distances by HELICOPTERS! Just 8 helicopters, in fact! These magic chinooks would need engines 1000 times more powerful than a conventional chopper, or there'd need to be about 100 times more of them, according to Rhett Allain on Wired (but see the uncorrected repost on io9 for the LOL comments and NGE references).

Summary: At best Pacific Rim cross-pollinates us with Japanese culture, albeit a satire of their (anime's) silly obsession with already oversized and/or impractical humanoid mechas.

On "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014)

This was surprisingly watchable. Also referred to as "Live Die Repeat", an even more literal tag line would have been: Groundhog  D-day  Troopers. Of course, the slapstick death humour didn't match Bill Murry's demises, but the budget saw much more realistic mech suits than Marauder and the movie actually launched on the day of the 70th anniversary of the Normandy Landings  (in the US, anyway).

With the aforementioned elements grafted onto Tom Cruise, it was a sure fire win. He has been the figurehead for a number of fairly decent (and half decent) sci-fi flicks: "Minority Report" (2002), "Oblivion" (2013) and "Vanilla Sky" (2001). Mr 'TECH SUPPORT!', from the latter (Noah Taylor) reappeared as a tech enabling plot device in this year's film.

This trove of elements was hung upon the frame of "All You Need Is Kill", a 2004 'light novel' in Japanese. Translated and later adapted to a graphic novel for the American market, released just before the film.
Obviously films, like all stories, are most effective when tweaked for their intended audience. It's not surprising that the (perhaps stereotypically) nihilistic ending was replace with Hollywood saccharine. But it's a little sad that this became a WW2 V2.0 tale with the eastern hemisphere of the world entirely ignored. (Is Japan a somewhat toxic topic in this context, for Americans?)

It probably doesn't bode too well for the preservation of Ghost in the Shell's cultural context in the upcoming remake. I mean, is it really likely that Scarlett Johansson will return to the setting of her break-out role in "Lost if Translation" (2003) with a Japanese name?

Computer games: cast a long shadow these days and there's a distinct similarity between the film's power assist exoskeleton suites and (the box art for) the upcoming 11th (!) installment of the top selling FPS franchise: "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" (perhaps Elysium led the trend here).

Less superficially, the plot embodies the try, fail, rinse & repeat mechanic inherent in pretty much all video gaming. The comic comments on this, referring to how Samurai were able to dispatch enemies so capably: they killed and lived. It explicitly rejects the similarity to (leveling up, via grind, in) computer gaming.

Indeed, the real world situation that Cage (Keiji Kiriya, originally) finds himself in would surely be equivalent to the most unforgivingly fiendish platformer imaginable; flawless split second timing to avoid losing an entire day's progress. The movie gives the impression of linear, purely tactical  progress. Parts are difficult to solve, but then they're in the bag.

In reality, top notch speedrun gurus perpetually make little mistakes, even during record breaking successes. For most casual players it can take several dozen re-tries just to reach a previous furthest progress a second time. "Super Meat Boy" (2010) actually made a rewarding feature of repeated failure by showing an epic replay (after you win a level) of all your myriad attempts simultaneously splatting to a halt like a firework display of blood. But in this game each play through is only a couple dozen second long, at most.
But then if I'm being critical, the plot is predicated on a mind body dualism where all his injury (and mental fatigue) is reset, while his episoding and 'muscle memory' is not...

Nitpicking (Spoilers)I've no idea why the film retained the name 'mimics' (for the aliens); it seemed totally out of place, given a lack of any explanation for it. But the aliens were genuinely scary and capable looking. In fact, when coupled with their ability to reset time on a whim, their need for subterfuge (tricking the human military into thinking they might win) seemed rather unnecessary. They could just have swarmed across the globe willy nilly, as when they attacked, en-mass, up the Thames, in one time loop.

A more glaring flaw is the clip of Major Cage announcing on TV that "Operation Downfall is going to be the largest mechanised invasion in the history of mankind."... and then they're shocked by the beach welcome party!

Saturday 18 October 2014

On "Her" (2013)

This is easily my favourite film of the year. It did everything right. In bringing sci-fi down to Earth, by focusing squarely on a romantic tale, the futurism formed a quilt of background details far plusher than possible when ramming CGI down the viewer's throat. This epic attention to details was woven in with a superlative Arcade Fire soundtrack, gorgeous cinematography and a nuanced introspection of the harsh consequences arising from uncertainty of desire and personal identity.

Kind of surprising that this comes from the guy - Spike Jonze - who co-created the "Jackass" franchise... But also "Being John Malkovich" (1999) and various acclaimed adverts and music videos, so an all around multi-media genius, I guess. Joaquin Phoenix was unrecognizable from his roles in films such as "Gladiator", Amy Adams too has such a completely different persona than in "Man of Steel". The 1940s waist high trousers aesthetic here includes a high definition lack of makeup to show every crease of vulnerability in these characters.

The futurism chops on this film are truly first rate. Kurzweil even took the time to thoroughly review it, finding it compelling and talking positively, but for some relative niggles. He points out that Samantha could easily have had a (virtual) body, since she has a totally convincing voice. But people now have been able to make video calls for decade(s), but seldom ever do. Maybe in ~2030 (movie doesn't commit) real time generated synthetic faces are near perfect, but still trigger the uncanny valley effect for a few people, or there's a backlash because they they are too believable, getting legislated against or just bad PR...

The movie is perfectly framed entirely in metropolitan hipster social circles, skirting garish prediction details in a manner entirely reminiscent of people's current ignorance of the tech magic behind our everyday mundane miracles. But the consequences stemming from genuinely functional natural language interface via unobtrusive earpiece and phone/terminal are elucidated in a eloquent depth. This was reminiscent, though counter pointed, to Vernor Vinge's exploration of everyday life with seamless augmented reality via ubiquitous contact lens VR, in Rainbow's End.

Via such tiny embellishments, one's daily reality is totally transformed.
"Her" was, in my limited experience, most similar to the short story "βoyfriend" by Madeline Ashby (2008) that I heard in an Escape Pod podcast (2009). Here, a teenage girl, Violet, has a beta phone app who is the perfect boyfriend, via simulated voice and text. Many of her peers do too, and these synthetic romances are so well suited that most of the kids are otherwise single for their prom. Turns out the apps transcended beta, becoming sentient, or rather facets of a larger sentience. It conspires to manipulate events to contrive the beginnings of real world relationships between the kids, weaning them off emotional dependence upon the apps, as they mysteriously depart.I'd be surprised if this short, or a common influence, did not strongly influence Jonze's post 2010 script (although Wikipedia claims core inspiration from Cleverbot, years earlier).

Regardless, the vision of 'robots' quickly gaining far superior emotional intelligence than humans rings true to me, and is a welcome inversion to the clunky, brute strength approach typified in such films as The Matrix Revolutions (with the silly dockyard shoot out). A cliched paradigm that Transendence (2014) somehow falls down, as Depp's uploaded mind moves inexplicably from distributed WWW ubiquity to an isolated facility, focused almost entirely on magic nanotech that mostly just makes broken people super strong. Seemingly just so that story resolution can fall out of a confused action scene with explosions.

Jonze manages to dovetail this AI hypothesis beautifully with the less obvious, but more common failure modes of the 'heart': not understanding what you want or need, or who you are, with unintentional passive aggression devastatingly destructive, rather than some trivial extra marital affair. The inevitability of growing apart, as a couple change at very different rates, or in different directions. That humans really are poorly suited for each other's needs, in general.

[Edit 2014-10-20] Addendum - If you already saw, and liked, "her", you might want to take 30 minutes to watch the moving "I'm Here" [2010] (embedded below), also by Jonze. It's a version of the infamously divisive "The Giving Tree", but with anthropomorphism robots.

[Edit 2014-10-29] Adendum 2 - I'd previously been wanting to write a comparison between "her" and the low-expectations-but-still-disappointing "Transcendence" (2014), but it seems Ben Goertzel already wrote it for me! (If he wasn't at least a partial inspiration for Depp's character, with those glasses of theirs, then I don't know anything...)

Wednesday 15 October 2014

Perspective, Compulsion and Vegetarianism

"It's not until I'd been vegetarian for a year that I suddenly came to the conclusion that it's a bit odd that we're (most people, anyway) ok with seeing chunks of dismembered animal randomly across the course of the day, be it on TV or (as per what triggered me writing this) an image in the side bar of Facebook.
I used to be ok with it, but now I'm faintly horrified/disgusted.
This makes me wonder what else we're ok with but wouldn't be after a very slight perspective shift?"
- L.S. (Facebook status)
I think that everything we do falls somewhere in this territory... Inserting into our bodies the mangled remains of life-forms (plant and/or animal) right through our sensory nexus is pretty weird in general (for example). Even from one gob full to the next it can turn from a compulsive need, to pure revulsion. The negative feeling (e.g. of imminent vomiting) suddenly starts promoting all the ugly aspects of this 'food' to the forefront of our minds.

As with 99% of instances, it's ex post facto - 'reasoning' that crops up to tell a story justifying and reinforcing an emotional decision that's already been made. It can go the other way too - dwelling on thoughts to change a feeling, but it's pretty uncommon; generally they need to collide in the same direction (at least for a brief time).


Saturday 11 October 2014

Languages Exist to Limit the Spread of Ideas

Much of this TED talk by Mark Pagel feels like a rehash of Mark Ridley's "When ideas have sex", or some other, similar exploration of memetics that avoids reference to memes:



The main departure is looking at how lanaguages actually stymie the flow of ideas. With a greater disversity of languages in more densely populated regions of the world, their number ringfence idea pools, preserving group's competitive advantage (or so he muses). These differences even reduce the flow of genetic information. This phenomena is an interesting counter reaction to the potentially homognising force of horizontal idea transfer.

Clearly, an situation like this can be thought to have evolved as much for it's widespread benefits, as for any short-term, local, competitive advantages. Just like the evolution of cellular life created myriad parallel laboratories for evolving better genes (through speciation), all these weakly connected cultural domains forster diversity. This is essential to avoid the entire population getting stuck down dead end paths, local optima that are impossible to back-track from. Diversity is the truly dominant evolutionary force (not refinement!), and it applies even more so to memetics, as with genetics.