Film Commentary: Logan and Bladerunner -- Bleak vs Bleak

 OK, we all know that the future is loaded with tons and tons of dark, somber grays and blacks and midnight blues with smoke and fog and haze wafting through, to cover the sheer devastation of a shiny future turned dystopic because, well, it’s inevitable, right? Right – so let us entertain you! 

Two films exemplify dissimilar shades of that bleak spectrum: “Logan” and “Blade Runner". United in their agreement on the coming Bleakness, they diverge immediately in execution. But first, their similarities. 

Both films present beat-down protagonists, exhausted from their physical and mental battles, questioning their worth, their effectiveness and the meaning of their pathetic lives. Logan, the exhausted X-Man, must summon the strength to triumph over a seemingly endless variety of bad-to-the-bone dudes. And Bladerunner’s “K” must risk the enmity of his superiors in wrestling his conscience into doing what’s right, outside of party lines. 

 Both men find themselves in thoroughly unpleasant surroundings. The Blade Runner earthscape is particularly onerous, given to its barrenness in the face of a complete sociological collapse, with the seemingly same hapless city-droids from the original feature lurching past those urban noodle parlors, 35 years later.  And Logan’s world staggers from stinking desert hideaways to murderous highway stretches filled with soulless mercenaries and endless carnage. 

The glue that holds both stories together? Kids. Innocent children, lord love ‘em. Without them, live is a meaningless miasma of murder and mayhem. Save the children by all that’s holy! 

The difference, however, is stark. One film is just plain violent and the other is artistically, exquisitely cold. Director Denis Villeneuve and DP Richard Deakins present a stunning depiction of a serenely coiffed Bladescape that beckons via a series of details and shadows that are museum quality photos of the pride and privilege of a near future ruling class. Cold, cunning, exasperating, beautiful. Each setup is an airbrushed magazine ad for a $500 perfume. Logan’s setting is low-budget Mad Max. Sputtering killers, heads rolling in the sand, road kill. While somehow, Bladerunner couples its murderous violence with design and lighting brilliance. 

The result is a paradox of pleasure derived from the pain of a depicted world, delicious in its arched grind towards conflict and hopeful resolution. And if this is my choice to make, I’ll take the grace of a skyway filled with screaming air cars banking in formation along ruby skies, kissing the sunset with madly disruptive serenity. If the future is gonna be horrifying, let’s do it in style.

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Another Kind of Immortality

There's ample evidence and research indicating that it's just a matter of time before virtual entertainment becomes virtual living. How far out are we from being able to step into a world that is so perfectly generated, it becomes real to us and as it does, more and more compelling?

We're already bored with the early mind-blowing attempts that brought this unfolding tech to the forefront. Occulus Rift seems a lightyear ago, with Augmented Reality such a compelling second step. But the case for Fully Virtual is incredibly alluring.

To be able to step into a world designed for your personal use, edification, advancement and pleasure isn't just attractive, it's being madly developed in tech centers from San Francisco to Tel Aviv. And as it moves towards a functional reality, another parallel track will follow. Perhaps sometime later, but with utter certainty. Virtual Life. And with it, virtual immortality.

In Richard Morgan's barn-storming scifi detective novel "Altered Carbon" a central conceit features the ability of its characters -- living somewhere around 500 years in the future -- to store their living brain functions in a tiny implantable capsule that can preserve the essence of someone too sick to live or who has actually died.

Think about it: the sum total of your life experience in a tiny chip that is stored in a super facility, then implanted into another body for you to then be revived and alived all over again. Morgan refers to this process as slipping in to a new sleeve. And if you're determined and wealthy enough, you can pick and choose the kind of body you want -- including changing sex -- and do it repeatedly, netting you lifetimes of hundreds of years, as you wake up inside another casing and figure out what you look like and how it feels to be someone entirely new.

Nuts? Nu-uh. It's logical, possible, predictable and simply a matter of time. Gives the term "be seein' ya" a whole new connotation, eh?

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On Auto

So I'm cruising along at 350, enjoying some big puffy cumulous formations and breathing some sweet pistachio synth air, when Boom, the dash starts flashing bright enough to wake you out of a chem dream, the car screams to a mid-air halt and a blue'n'white floats over with a sour-faced cop in the window.

 "Sir, may I see your bios and lightband?"

"Uh, sure, officer, what seems to be the trouble?"

"Sir, were you aware that you were altering your cloud course through that last bank?"

"Alter... Officer, I was just admiring the view when..."

"We have a heat impression of both your hands ON the steering stick."

"Well, I was just resting them for a moment, I mean, it's a beautiful day and..."

"Sir, when was the last time you texted during this flight?"

"Tex... I, I was just in touch with my friend about the party on Rexus9, and HE was saying..."

"Your transmit log indicates that conversation was over 5 minutes ago. Any sub-orbital texts you can produce in the ensuing time frame?"

"Well, I was about to send..."

"May I see your record of cute animal viewing for this period, please."

"Oh! I just finished that one with the kittens running across the meadow with the ducks!"

"Which played on your screen 26 hours ago?"

"Wait, I mean the puppies! The puppies rolling over each other and then falling out of the dresser drawer!"

"Earlier this morning."

"The... the parakeet -- with the Pitbull!"

"Sir, you haven't texted or participated in any form of social media for the past 34 minutes and appear to have been steering your vehicle in a random manner for the past twelve, prior to my pulling you over."

"But I... wait, look! I found these babies eating strained peaches. (laughing) Look at that, they're getting it all over their bibs and faces, isn't that a riot, don'tcha just love watching them carry on, OMG that's so..."

"Sir, please step out of the vehicle and place your hands behind your back."

"But they're... Wait: You want me to step OUT -- we're 150 feet up!"

"On to the jet-plat, sir, let's not make this any more difficult, OK?"

"Officer, I NEVER steer, I was just day-dreaming and, and staring..."

"At nothing. Step out of the vehicle please. Central, this is 34F6, requesting backup..."

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Wonder Woman and SciFi Mythology

Finally got around to seeing Wonder Woman, the movie. Well, actually, hung with Wonder Woman herself, as well, but read on. 

First, on the way back from a trip overseas, the film was available on demand to watch from my seat on the plane and I began it there, only to realize that for something this big and this good, dealing with a low res print on an 8” screen with the engine noise a constant component of the soundtrack wasn’t going to work, so I switched to a Bollywood musical instead (which was pretty cool!). 

Day after arriving home, we got an invitation to a press screening for awards consideration – nice timing, which featured a Q&A with the director and several members of the cast, including Gal Gadot – who could resist that? 

If you haven’t seen it, no spoilers, I promise. Instead, these thoughts about effect, focus and our current culture. 

First, it’s about as good as a superhero film gets. Which begs the question: why? And that’s where mythology comes in. My problem with most superhero films is the absurd leap of faith you have to take to accept some kind of agreement that invulnerability et al, is the given and impossibility is the norm. Which I find difficult to impossible to accept most of the time. From super-villains, bent on destroying the world with their atomic weapons to superheroes getting slammed through buildings and emerging unscratched, eh, how’d they do that? 

There’s an alternate supposition for WW. She comes from a mythical island fashioned by the gods and blessed with god-enhanced magic, which in the skilled hands of director Patty Jenkins, seems utterly plausible. 

And Diana isn’t neurotic or a misfit. She’s simply naive. Having lived on this island all her life, she’s been 100% sheltered from all things earthly, let alone an actual man. So what comes across is a hero focused on a single goal: setting things right – to the exclusion of anything else, gifted with powers that serve to intensify her resolve. 

That makes for an alt conceit that is uniquely entertaining in how forgiving and fresh her take on a situation plays out. Of course, there are all the usual bad guys and insane situations, but the cast is remarkable in its warmth and cohesiveness – kudos to Patty for that and the result is a picture that stands as one of the very best of its genre. Amazing! 

And afterwards, I managed to get into a great conversation with Gal, a gorgeous in-the-flesh Amazon herself and got away with a few dim-lit selfies I get to share. 

Look for Wonder Woman on upcoming best picture lists. It belongs on them.

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Wake me When We Get There

There was a fascinating article somewhere (that’s the problem these days –there’s so much info everywhere, it blurs together) about the realities of long-term space travel. Which means what?

Look, the thing is, for the foreseeable future, we’re going to get to places like Mars or Titan (Saturn’s most promising life-possibility moon) in the coming generation or two and by scifi standards, it’s gonna take forever-ish. Seven months each way to Mars, years and years to Titan. Wanna go? Think of what a hero you’d be on Earth. If you made it. Or didn’t. Or actually managed to get there and return in say, 40 years. Who knows, if you travelled fast enough, you might even come back younger! And wouldn’t that be a great thing to mull over with all that free time in space?

So to the practical. As of the latest science, you can’t simply seal yourself up in a pod and chemically induce some kind of suspended animation and wake up refreshed and ready to go 7 years later, as the ship’s AI calmly informs you we’re now in low orbit over our destination planet and how was your rest?

No. But not totally no. You CAN sleep big gulps of it off. You just have to be awakened every 3 weeks or so. Why? Body has to be reanimated, pumped with fresh good stuff, moved around, cleaned out – all the things we do on a daily basis, which, it appears to turn out, you cannot simply ignore for years of sleep at a time without dying. Might happen someday way in the future, but by then we’ll be folding time and travelling across galaxies just like Seth McFarlane does every Thursday now.

So sleep three weeks, wakie-wakie, eggs n bac-ie walk around, catch up on instagram, watch a movie, tighten a bolt on the holo-deck and then back to bed for another three weeks. Which means around ten cycles like that to get to Mars. Boring? How could that be boring!? Now, to Saturn and cycling oh, a hundred, 150 times, hmmmmm… Where’d we leave off on that Parcheesi game last time? And aren’t we intrepid…

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Where was the future in the year 1700?

From all the info I can gather, science fiction got its more or less official start in the early 1800’s with the appearance of one Dr. Frankenstein. Written by Mary Shelly in 1811, it basically crowned her the Mother of Science Fiction. Try smoking that one, guys…

But prior to that, we have a distinct lack of evidence of anything quite so fanciful and a big part of the reason is, in my mind at least, for lack of things electric. Oh, there were drawings from Galileo – fantastical ones – and a great TV series based on his life as well. But story telling? Not so much. You need to have some basic understanding of possibility in order to dream in scifi and without having any clear concept of propulsion, for instance, how are you gonna get there?

It looks like it may have taken the industrial revolution to get the wheels turning, from laying powerful railroad systems around the world, to great migrations into the cities, factories, efficiency, suffering and overcrowding – the kinds of concepts that might have been quite different in the 1700’s, when the world was still tilted towards agrarian. 

What did your average peasant think about space travel, robotics, reanimation and ray guns? I think religion must have had a huge impact on the way we ALL thought about things in the 1600’s. Religion was the answer for questions unanswered, the purview of the wisest and most powerful figures and a convenient way of explaining unexplainable phenomena.

And strict interpretation and god-fearing belief was undoubtedly the most acceptable, politically correct and life-affirming path to take. You want to take a stroll down that corridor to the suite of rooms we keep for trouble-makers downstairs, do ya? I didn’t think so. Any more questions, my son?

Given the baseline of info we own, it’s easy to teleport into the next galaxy for a 10-year old. Were kids thinking about star-hoping in the middle ages? I’d love to be able to ask ‘em.

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Shooting the Moon

Dateline 1871

There has been examination of the makeup and content of the moon that encircles the earth, with fanciful poetry and lore of the Man who lives there. Undoubtedly, his face is plainly visible at times, a sign from the heavens that he beckons us with open heart and good will.

Astronomers tell us the orb is outside the reach of Man, but the engineers at Winchester now believe it is indeed within the realms of possibility to construct an instrument with such length and power as to create a predictable trajectory that with recently devised chemical compounds affixed therein, power a massive projectile capable of striking its surface with some assurance of accuracy.

The bullet casing has been estimated at a circumference of 3 meters in width and 6 meters in length, sufficient for a coterie of scientific scholars to enter into a padded and succinctly prepared interior and travel the distance without physical harm.

It is of the political opinion that such a journey would do great justice to the country of origin from which the shot would take place and that a suitable location could be created in the Hoboken dockyards of New Jersey, suitably removed from denser, more populous areas, thus insulating them from the great boom of the cannon and creating a zone of serenity around its immediate functionality.  

Once lunar contact is suitably arranged, Earth would rapidly create an alliance between itself and the Moon populace, establishing trade and mineral rights, greatly benefitting the United States. Winchester, Inc. stands ready to cooperate with the government, as always, in arranging for a demonstration of its capabilities and to successfully launching a new phase of extra-heaven communication.

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The Future of the Future

How lame is our current culture going to look to someone exploring it a hundred years from now? You could start by considering life in 1917, as American was embroiled in World War 1. There’s a scary thought. Will someone be writing “You could start by considering life in 2017 as America was embroiled in WW3.” Yikes…

Let’s figure on that not being our history and how about another bite of that nice fresh-baked brownie you got at the dispensary?

OK: 1917. Candlestick phones, Model T’s, women’s suffrage, bowler hats and new-fangled typewriters. Quaint, but relatable. Which is to say in the hundred years between now and then, we progressed faster than a speeding freakin’ bullet, going from 17 mph to 17K mph and developing technology absolutely and unimaginably magical. How much of what we are today could a smart reader like yourself have figured on back then? Commuter jets? Gay marriage? Pop Tarts? VR? Chuckie Cheese? Rock ‘n’ Roll??

So the Q that keeps rattlin’ around in my head is if that much happened in the trailing 100, what can we expect in the Next? And let’s consider Moore’s law and apply it to the future of everything. Which is to say we’re evolving SO much faster than we ever have, the amount of general information in the world has gone from doubling every thousand years to every hundred, every 50, every ten, five and yes, one or two, now. Doubling.

And at that rate, we, each and every one of us, brainiacs all, are gonna be equally gob-smacked with what happens in the Next hundred, because we can only guess at where they’ll take us. Or our kids, at least. Who’ll likely live well into their hundreds and vaguely remember gramma n gramps giving ‘em bitcoin to go out and buy some toy levitation shoes.

Quaint.

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Caution: Only 87 Years to Go…

In 1999, whispers turned to talk, turned to shouts, turned to panic that at the stroke of midnight 2000, most every computer on Earth would reset itself to the year 1901 and turn of the lights of the First World.

The Millennium Bug was an unplanned disaster in the making, fueled by the temerity of early programmers foolishly building in 2-digit year designations next to the 2-digit month and date. Remember how it unfolded? First, a lot of tech companies made a lot of money by combing through mainframes and laptops and reprogramming them to recognize four-digit year numbers, instead. And then, at the stroke of midnight 2001, the trillion or so other processors, from car radios to toaster ovens, looked left, looked right, and then muttered a collective “whatever” and continued to burn the edges of that artisanal bread that was going stale on the kitchen counter.

Much ado, indeed. Fast forward to today, and we’re a society that now has an 8-digit date standard. Yay, us! Look at how forward-thinking we are. No one’s gonna catch us with pants around ankles on THAT one again. Last month, the fam left on vacation and stopped the paper for a week. The two-minute phone-automated vacation stop process went like this: “Please enter the month, day and 4-digit year you want your paper delivery suspended, then press #. Now enter the month, day and 4-digit year you want your paper to begin delivery again and press #.”

Wait, you want to know the 4-digit YEAR I want to take the vacation I’m calling you about stopping my paper for? And then the 4-digit YEAR I want it resumed? How about 1856 and 1922? How does that grab ya, grandma? What idiocy. But wait: We’re Protected! Against the Twenty-SECOND Millennial Bug coming in 87 years!  Yep, when 2101 rolls around, ain’t no notion of the wrong century gonna confuse THIS machine – It gonna KNOW.

You’re welcome, great, great grandson. Breathe easy.

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We’re All Voice-Over Stars

I’ve been involved in the VO world for decades and have watched it change dramatically, then become commercially disrupted and change again, then socially and change again.

In the entirely different world of the 1960’s and 70’s voice-over artists were a neat little boutique extension of the entertainment business, who worked mostly out of three cites: New York (by far the largest market), Chicago and LA. 

To be a VO talent was to be represented by a union talent agency and be a card-carrying SAG and AFTRA member. Your agent brought you into their offices several times per week to record demos of radio and TV commercial copy, then the tape operator edited several auditions together onto a reel-to-reel tape and messengered it over to the advertising agency for review and hopefully, a booking.

There were stars in the voice-over world, quite different from any other types. They were only known to the agencies and each other and enjoyed both the faceless anonymity of being regular people in the outside world, but also made gobs of money with ongoing campaigns that could pay residuals as high as a quarter million per year, per campaign. Which, if you were really hot, could be one of a dozen you’d nabbed and could go on for years. I recently met the woman who played Charley Tuna’s girlfriend for Starkist Tuna, back in the 70’s. That gig netted a house and a college education for her kids.

By the 1980’s, voice-over got a suddenly glitzier with the advent of major TV and screen stars landing million-dollar contracts to become the voice of big and luxury brands. It gave the brand a sheen to be associated with a premier voice and it gave the VO business a deep and fearful shudder to see a significant portion of its rank and file actors being shunted aside for in the name of glamor.

By 2000, digital recording made it possible to record from casually constructed home recording setups, then submit via the internet to your agency, which would assemble a digital link to send off to the client, now anywhere on earth.

And by 2010, entirely digital agencies had established such an internet stronghold, that many traditional agencies dried up, replaced by direct-to-client business models via digital handshake, repeated thousands of times per day.

Today, with something like 500 hours of video getting posted online per minute, voiceover is anyone making a smartphone video and talking over the picture. It’s turned the cultural tonality of voice recording into a much more casual overall style and created dozens of sub-genres, ubiquitous on a web that seems second only to the infinitely expanding universe out there in space.

Where outer-worlders are undoubtedly listening.

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