An excursion to the post office this morning
generated angry shouts and fingered gestures from the driver in back of me when
I failed to accelerate through a yellow light but instead stopped just as it
turned red. His car actually shook from his interior motions and pounding of
his dashboard. It certainly wasn’t my intent to enrage anyone. It was my intent
to avoid either an accident or a ticket. However, I must admit to a certain
degree of satisfaction that the other driver’s rage apparently was causing him
so much distress. Uncivil of me.
Scarcely a day goes by without an article on the
“incivility crisis” in America. They turn up both in left and right wing
publications though naturally each tends to list the misdeeds of the other ideological
group as examples. It goes far beyond politics though. According to a Weber
Shandwick poll, 65% of Americans think incivility is a “major problem” that has
worsened in the past decade, whether driving, shopping, working, or, of course,
posting online. That doesn’t prevent 59% from admitting in a KRC Research
survey to being uncivil themselves.
I’ve breathed the atmospheres of enough decades to
have some basis for comparison, and it is my general sense that there really
has been a trend toward more casual rudeness, but that the trend has been not
nearly so significant as the change in our experience of it, particularly
online. Without social media, we previously didn’t have the opportunity to
experience as much casual cruelty from so many different people in so short a
time. Often it is dressed up as candor. Tennessee Williams: “All cruel people
describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” For anyone in the public eye,
abuse arrives in a cascade. Sarah Jessica Parker recently said she does not
read anything posted online about her because of “random cruelty.” Let’s be
clear that rudeness is cruelty.
In the wild, aggression is necessary for survival.
We didn’t rid our instinct for it by moving from the wild to the suburbs. Aggression
directed outward easily crosses the line into sadism and directed inward crosses into masochism. According to Freud both arise out of the death instinct. Nietzsche
tied aggression to the Will to Power. Envy is particularly effective at bringing out the
worst in us. All social animals make social comparisons and jockey for relative
position; if we can’t raise ourselves up we are tempted to take others down. Researcher Hidehiko Takahashi found by means of fMRI scans that envy
activates the same portions of the anterior cortex that are triggered by
physical pain; conversely the pleasure centers light up when the envied folk
face trouble. We are prewired for schadenfreude. Gore Vidal: “It is not enough
to succeed. Others must fail.”
To say it is normal to have such feelings,
however, is not to say we need act in accordance with them. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud
argued that restraining our destructiveness was necessarily a cause of
individual unhappiness but was the price of civilization. We don’t have to look
far to see what happens when people fail to make that trade-off. Freud himself
wasn’t too confident about the long-term prospects: “The fateful question of
the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent the cultural
process developed in it will succeed in mastering the derangements of communal
life caused by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” He had
hopes for the more constructive set of instincts associated with Eros. They do
sound like more fun. To what extent common incivility and petty cruelty – as
opposed to outright criminality – thwarts them is open to debate, but they
probably don’t help.
I feel the temptation, though, to go for another
drive. This time I think I’ll stop for two red lights.
Placebo: Every You, Every Me opening track to Cruel Intentions (1999)
Memorial Day Weekend, the “unofficial
start of summer,” is here. It did not start out as an automobile sales
promotion. It began back in 1868 as Decoration Day. The decoration Congress had
in mind was flowers for the graves of Civil War dead. By convention, the decorations
expanded over the years to include the graves of casualties from later wars, the
graves of former service members who were not war casualties, and, eventually,
any and all civilian graves as well. Some of this still goes on, but not as
much as in the past. People used to visit and decorate cemeteries more often than
they commonly do today, not least because more of one’s family tended to be
there – and at younger ages. May 30 still was Decoration Day when I was a kid,
though the term “Memorial Day” was informally in use, too. Congress officially changed
the name to Memorial Day in 1967 and in 1971 specified it would fall on a
Monday. Auto sales aside, the primary focus continues to be on the deceased who
had served in the military, but others among the departed are not excluded.
I’ve never been big on visiting
cemeteries, even though I personally know an alarming number of the permanent
residents at the nearby one on Hilltop Road. My mom (d. 2001) always told me,
“Give your flowers to people while they’re alive. They don’t know it later.” It
always struck me as sound advice. However, if gravesite visits or decorations
make some of the living feel better, there surely is no harm in it for them.
On Memorial Days for the past
couple of decades there has been an especial emphasis on remembrances of the GI
Generation, alias Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” The GI Generation is
diminishing rapidly, constituting less than 1% of the current US population,
but they are the Boomers’ parents, and the Boomers still vie with Millennials
for being the largest generation in raw numbers; Millennials definitively will surpass
Boomers this year thanks to attrition among our aging ranks. So, while we don’t
wield as much clout as we did in the 1960s when Boomers were 40% (!) of the
population, we still wield a lot, and at present we are very nostalgic about
our parents and their contemporaries.
There is irony in this. In the 1960s
we were extraordinarily rude to our folks, prompting talk about an unbridgeable
“Generation Gap,” which sounds like a geological feature. True, a generation
gap exists in every era. In 1935 a 69-year-old HG Wells wrote, “Always, as long
as I can remember, there have been a dispute and invidious comparisons between
the old and the young.” Nonetheless, we widened it more than usual, blaming our
parents for all the faults in society as though they had invented racism,
militarism, sexism, and poverty. In fact they were responsible (with the help
of the Silent Generation, b. 1929-45) for rolling back all four far more than
we ever were able to do when we picked up the reins; if they didn’t go further,
it was because they started so much further back. Our attitudes flip-flopped in
the 1990s when we began to lose our parents in substantial numbers. Suddenly we
got all mushy and started calling them the “Greatest Generation” and all the rest
of it. We’ve been at it ever since. Perhaps we’re hoping the Millennials will do
the same for us in another decade or two. I wouldn’t count on it.
Also, once we surpassed the age
our parents were when we were at our rudest, it dawned on us that they had had
youths of which we knew little. We’d always thought of them as middle-aged or
older. They were young, of course, and they were pretty wild. The 1940s were a
far more revolutionary decade in cultural mores than the 1960s – a fact that
was obscured for us by the strange socially conservative reaction that took
hold in the 1950s. The teen pregnancy rate, for example, was higher in 1940 than
it is today, and the divorce rate of the 1940s wasn’t equaled again until 1973. Women poured into factories and the professions. The music was better. And, of course, there was the War – the one war in which
we’re sure we were on the right side. During the war the GI Generation turned
long-distance romance into an art form, sometimes literally in the form of
bomber nose art.
Following my mom’s dictum, I won’t
be putting any flowers over at Hilltop this weekend. Instead, I’ll post some
pics of my parents being young in the 1940s. It’s a part of their lives I never
knew, but their long distance romance turned out to be a fortuitous one for me.
All the photos are from 1945 when they were 19 and 17.
100 years isn’t so very long. Anyone past the age of 30 knows how
fast a decade goes past, and it’s only 10 of those. Yet it is long enough to
replace the entire population of Earth barring a few centenarians. The oldest
verified lifespan ever, Jeanne Calment (1875-1997), was 122, so let’s allow 130
years to eliminate every last straggler; claims for higher ages crop up, but so
far have been unconvincing. The cultural elite turns over much more frequently
than that – for most practical purposes 50 years since the early part of one’s
lifespan is consumed by education and the late segment by survival. True, there
are exceptional teen prodigies as well as nonagenarian overachievers (e.g.
Henry Kissinger), but there is a vanishingly small chance of the same person
being both.
The musings of previous elites are often a curious mix of the
still relevant and the obsolete. Those merely 100 years old (more or less) were
at a time when modern industrial economies were well-established as were the core
elements of modern life. Many of those musings – not by rabble-rousers but by
respected intellectuals – are unsettlingly honest. Examples are two books I
read earlier this week, both originally from 1928: The Open Conspiracy by HG Wells, and the Propaganda by Edward Bernays.
Starting with the title, it is hard to imagine a book better
designed to confirm the worst fears of conspiracy theorists than The Open Conspiracy. Yet, the book needs
to be seen in context. World War I had been such a colossal calamity that it
convinced many people including HG that the world could not go on as before
with its old national and religious rivalries. Without a “New World Order” the
ongoing advance in the science and technology of war threatened civilization
itself. All the while, that same science and tech held a potential for a new
egalitarian prosperity. HG saw a solution in the evolution of a broadly
socialist global governance. He rejected doctrinaire Marxism, which was so 19th century, “But as soon
as the Socialist or Communist can be got to realize that his repudiation of
private monopolization is not a complete programme but just a preliminary
principle, he is ripe for the ampler concepts of the modern outlook.” HG foresaw
governance and economic organization run on a “scientific basis” by enlightened
folk such as himself. “It [the Open Conspiracy] does not want to destroy
existing controls but either to supersede or amalgamate them into a common
world directorate.” The duties of these future social-scientist/directors will
include eugenics: “There is a clear hope that, later, directed breeding will
come within his scope.” The primary strategy of the Open Conspiracy is propaganda:
spread the mores and values consistent with this new society through education,
re-education, and persuasion. Change in the correct direction necessarily will
follow. Whether one finds HG’s Conspiracy appealing or appalling, it is at
least…well…Open. Except for eugenics, which is no longer fashionable (aloud anyway), these
views are far from absent among the current crop of Western intellectuals.
It is no surprise that Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew)
quotes HG Wells in his classic book Propaganda,
which describes the tools that every persuader and re-educator needs. Bernays
doesn’t use the term “propaganda” in a pejorative sense, but in its technical
neutral sense; the term is independent of whether the propagated information is
true, false, helpful, or harmful. He had plenty of first-hand experience with
propaganda in his work for governments and businesses, making especial use of
what we nowadays would call “cool by association.” On behalf of tobacco
companies he organized Torch of Liberty Brigade marches that helped popularize
cigarettes among women by associating them with suffragists. He pioneered the
modern PR news release that manipulates news media into treating advertising as
legitimate news. He saw the possibilities of new media and of inherent messages
in them: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of
propaganda in the world today.” He was well aware that truth wasn’t a central
tenet of the toolkit: “But even supposing a certain propaganda is untrue or
dishonest, we cannot on that account reject the methods of propaganda as such.”
Bernays had no qualms about any of it. On the contrary. He saw the work of the
few manipulating the many as essential and beneficial: “Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute
an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are
governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by
men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our
democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in
this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”
True
enough, trouble can arise where a free (or relatively free) press propagandizes
in opposing directions. This can disrupt that smoothly functioning society. He acknowledges
this but concludes nonetheless, “Intelligent men must realize that propaganda
is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help
bring order out of chaos.”
Surprisingly,
one issue Bernays does not address is the risk of propagandists being taken in
by their own propaganda, an all too common eventuality with dire consequences
in his own day and serious ones in our own. A nephew of Sig should have
recognized the danger. Perhaps he did, but for propagandistic reasons passed
over it.
Overall,
both books are stunningly candid. Whatever one thinks of their messages, that
was and is their value.
I’ve always liked
Katherine Heigl. Her TV roles have been hard to fault. While in the teen soap Roswell she was the favorite alien of every
straight teenage boy. Later, she had broad appeal as Dr. Izzie Stevens in Grey’s Anatomy. I wish I could say as
much for her movies. Oh, she was adorable way back in 1994 in My Father the Hero, but since then her
films have ranged from dreadful to “eh.” A few were commercially successful,
e.g. Knocked Up and The Ugly Truth, but, strangely, these
were among the most dreadful ones. The best of the bunch might have been Bride of Chucky, which pretty much says
it all. So, I suppose it is almost a compliment to say that Home Sweet Hell is nearer than most to
“eh.” “Almost” means it’s not.
In this self-styled
comedy Mona (Heigl) has goals – specific goals that she pastes in a scrapbook.
They all have to do with meeting or exceeding the standards of an affluent
suburban lifestyle. She and her hapless husband Don (Patrick Wilson) own a
furniture store; the capital for the business and for their kids’ private
school came from Mona’s well-to-do parents. Mona lets Don run the store. More
accurately she requires him to do so since she needs to focus on her goals; she
schedules everything in her life including (six times per year) sex with Don.
Don hires an attractive and spontaneous young salesperson named Dusty (Jordana
Brewster) who has no trouble seducing Don. She also has no trouble blackmailing
Don by claiming she is pregnant and threatening to tell Mona. Don decides the
least bad option is to come clean with Mona himself. Mona coolly decides they
should kill Dusty so they can stay on track toward their goals. Are you feeling
the humor yet? Me neither. Dusty has accomplices so other murders ensue.
I have no trouble
with dark humor. Two of my favorite authors are Robert Bloch (Psycho) and Jeff Lindsay (the Dexter novels). I like Arsenic and Old Lace, Heathers, Serial Mom, and To Die For.
I even like Psychos in Love in a
so-bad-it’s-good sort of way. This film, though, is neither sufficiently dark
nor sufficiently humorous. It is, at best, “eh.”
“Eh” doesn’t cut
it. Thumbs down.
Miss Meadows (2014)
Overly proper
female killers must be in vogue. We have another one in the substitute teacher
Miss Meadows (Katie Holmes). Due to a childhood trauma she has become a
vigilante. Imagine Death Wish if Paul
Kersey were Mary Poppins. No don’t. That makes this movie sound too good. There
is little suspense and (oddly) not enough action, even in the climactic scene.
The pacing is sluggish and the romance with the cop unconvincing.
Another “eh.”
Thumbs down.
The Babadook (2014)
Amelia is a
struggling single mother of Samuel, a boy who is by the kindest description
difficult. The last thing she needs is a scary entity messing with her head.
She gets one anyway.
Suspend disbelief
for a moment. What if there really were a type of existence on different
principles than the usual ones? What if some entity exists on another plane
that only partly intersects ours? Suppose a creature of this sort thereby has
limited (not zero, but limited) ability to interact with ordinary matter
directly, so it must get most of what it wants by influencing the behavior of
people, primarily by scaring them. Though this movie doesn’t try to explain
what the Babadook is, what I just described fits the bill. As you might
imagine, police and others don’t find Amelia credible when she tries to explain
her predicament, and it doesn’t help that her son’s behavioral problems seem to
provide a better explanation for any disruptions in her household. She can’t
even run away, not just for financial reasons but because the entity has
latched onto her personally, at one point manifesting itself while she is
driving, with unfortunate results.
This low-budget
Australian film is well-written, well-acted, and unconventional. If you like
your horror movies with copious blood and gore, this isn’t the right movie. If
you regard eeriness and suspense more highly, it is. Thumbs up.
Everly (2014)
Everly (Salma Hayek)
while wearing lingerie shoots and bashes bad guys in an apartment. That’s
pretty much the whole movie. There is the barest excuse for an explanation: she
is a prostitute who has ratted out her yakuza boss, so her boss wants her dead.
A parade of would-be killers try, but somehow Hayek proves to be an amazing
expert at any and all weaponry and at hand-to-hand combat, so the bodies pile
up. Unlike the similarly violent Kill
Bill!, which had character backstories that were intriguing even if silly,
this movie offers little else but the violence. It quickly grows numbingly
repetitive. Thumbs Down.
Laggies (2014)
Laggies is
aimed primarily at twentysomething Millennials disturbed by the all too rapid
approach of age 30. Millennials have a reputation for lagging behind previous
generations at adopting an adult lifestyle. Since neither Boomers nor Xers were
very quick off the mark, that is saying something. Generational generalizations
of this sort by their nature are unfair. All age-groups contain a mix of
early-achievers, late-bloomers, perennial Peter Pans, and the pre-maturely
middle-aged. Yet, the numbers do tell us something. The median age at which
Millennials get drivers licenses, finish college, get full-time jobs, get
married (if they ever do), and buy property really is higher, and no one is
more aware of it than Millennials themselves.
Megan (Keira
Knightley) is in her late 20s and has a degree as a therapist, but she works
for her father by holding a street sign. Her relationship to her parents is more
like that of a college freshman just back from the dorm than like anything more
adult. She lives noncommittally with her boyfriend Anthony whose maturity isn’t
noticeably higher than hers. She still hangs out with her old high school
friends. One is married and pregnant while another is soon to be married, yet
they aren’t exactly mature either; they are shallow and seem to regard marriage
the way they would dates to the prom. Then Anthony proposes to Megan. She
accepts but has major reservations. Her reservations are as much about the step
toward adulthood as about Anthony.
Megan encounters
some high school kids outside a liquor store. She finds she has more in common
with them than with her own circle of friends. Megan tells Anthony she will be
away at a career conference but instead stays with Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz),
one of the teens. Annika’s single dad is not happy to discover a grown woman
staying over with his teen daughter.
In a sense this is
a coming-of-age story, but it is Megan’s story, not Annika’s, and thus it comes
about a decade late by past reckonings. The ending is far far too facile, but
it doesn’t altogether ruin what went before, especially the interesting
friendship between Annika and Megan.
Lynn Shelton’s film
is flawed and, like the lead character, insufficiently ambitious. But it is
good enough for a Thumbs Up.
Not even a dedicated
roller derby fan can see EVERY home game. Well, I guess one could, but that
would be a little creepy. I prefer my creepiness to emerge independently from the
inside. Anyway, last Saturday was a double-header in Morristown. I wasn’t
there, but congrats to the Jersey Shore
Roller Girls for a win over the home Jerzey
Derby Brigade and to the home Corporal
Punishers for a win over the Central
Jersey Roller Vixens. I’ll be back at trackside another night.
My first awareness
of Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was in the summer of 1966. Though neither of my
parents attended college, my mom was an eclectic reader. Jumbled in no
discernible order on the bookshelves at home during my teen years was the
oddest variety of books including Sigmund Freud, Harold Robbins, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Jacqueline Susann, Jules Verne, and Gore Vidal. I don’t know why one day at age
13 I picked out of this hodgepodge Dark
Green Bright Red, one of Vidal’s youthful (1950) novels. Perhaps it was
just because, unlike most of his later works, the book is short. It is possible
I wanted to read something but didn’t want to get carried away with anything
requiring a real commitment – a disposition that has been common enough for me
in matters other than literature too. The novel about a Central American
revolution intrigued me at once.
Over the next few
years I sought out other novels by Vidal, all the while ignoring much of my
assigned reading in school. Julian, his
historical novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome, was the clincher. With Julian he became and has remained my
favorite 20th century author. Fortunately for me, he was a prolific
writer not only of novels but of short fiction, plays, reviews, commentary, screenplays,
and essays. I like them all. I would like them for the prose alone, but they
also are thoughtful and drily funny. With regard to his commentary, I often
found myself on the other side of the political fence (not on social issues),
but he invariably knew where the fence was, which is valuable in itself.
I don’t read many
biographies of writers. In my experience, very few good authors are remotely as
interesting as their books, even – perhaps especially – when they deliberately
make their lives theatrical, e.g. Hemingway and Mailer. Besides, Vidal wrote at
length about himself. Nonetheless, a couple of weeks ago on a whim I picked up Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of
Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw. Mewshaw is a novelist and
journalist two decades Vidal’s junior. He became friends with Gore and his
long-time companion Howard Austen in Rome during the 1970s, and remained
friends with them for the remainder of their lives. In Sympathy he tells us what that was like.
I rather wish I
hadn’t read it, because the depiction isn’t pretty. To be sure, the book has
plenty of anecdotes about Gore of the sort a book like this should have and it
is generally well written, but it chronicles a sad and not very graceful
decline from middle age to old age. The last three decades of the 20th
century were enormously productive for Gore. He churned out essays,
screenplays, and truly impressive novels (Burr,
Creation, Lincoln, Smithsonian Institution, et al.) with as much talent and
energy as ever while working the lecture and talk show circuit and taking the
time to run for US Senate. He hobnobbed with the elite, including Nancy Reagan
of all people, while preaching populism. Yet, depression, personal loss, and vast
quantities of alcohol exacted ever more severe tolls with the passing years. Mewshaw
quotes Gore as saying he preferred to “sink myself into whiskey where one’s
sense of time is so altered that one feels in the moment immortality – a long
luminous present which, not drinking, becomes a fast-moving express train
named…Nothing.” By the 21st century he frequently needed a
wheelchair. In his public appearances, his former witty humor gave way to cantankerous
scolding. He became deeply suspicious of people around him. But then, as he
liked to say, “Anyone who isn’t paranoid isn’t in full possession of the
facts.” Then he was gone.
After Mewshaw,
something more cheerful was in order. I recalled that there was one novel Gore
wrote during his peak years that I thus far had neglected to read, the
relatively obscure Two Sisters. As of
yesterday, the omission has been corrected. Written shortly before he met
Mewshaw, Two Sisters is an idiosyncratic
but marvelous book that gives us the full Vidal range in a compact package. It
is a screenplay inside a memoir inside a novel masquerading as a memoir. Gore,
appearing in the novel as himself, is asked by another author to read a memoir by a deceased mutual friend; the memoir includes a spec screenplay titled Two Sisters of Ephesus. The layered
structure of Two Sisters allows Gore
to digress into mordantly funny commentary on culture and movies while
remaining on plot.
Though Gore already
was a heavy drinker by 1970, the quantity and quality of his literary output appears
not to have suffered. At one point in Two
Sisters he says, “I have known or known about most of the American writers
of my time and I can think of only three who are not – or were not once –
alcoholics.” Hmmm, would my own fiction benefit were I to consume more whiskey?
Maybe. But I’m not sure it’s worth it.
Having returned to
my pattern of following one movie with an older one which the first brought to
mind, I’ve observed the following movies flicker on large and small screens in
the past month. Tangentially, I’m curious to see how the different business strategies
work out for the two movie theaters which, being the closest to my house, I
most commonly frequent, including for two of the films below. Bow Tie Cinema in
Succasunna offers low prices (by today’s standards) and standard seating, while
AMC in Morristown offers spacious leather recliner seats but higher prices. The
two theaters don’t always show the same films (only AMC offered Ex Machina), but when they do I personally
pick price over seats. Not everyone does the same though.
The Age of Adaline (2015)
Agelessness is a
fantasy as old as the first mirror. In this movie it is also a hook for hokey
romance and sentiment – yet Adaline gets
away with being hokey. I’ve mentioned before that modern cynicism doesn’t jibe
very well with romance in the movies. Nowadays we prefer to take romance out of
everyday life before we’re willing to credit it. Christopher Orr in an Atlantic article said much the same
thing: “The premises grow more and more esoteric: She’s a hooker. He’s a
stalker. She’s in a coma. He’s telepathic. She’s a mermaid. He’s a zombie.
She’s pregnant. He’s the president.” In the case of Silver Linings Playbook, they’re crazy; this allows us to say, “Ah,
that explains it.” Setting a movie far enough in the past works too, apparently
on the assumption that people looked at things differently then. Effectively
that is what The Age of Adaline does.
Adaline retains 1930s/40s sensibilities even though much of the film is set in
the present day.
Adaline has a freak
accident in 1937 at the age of 29. As time goes by she eventually realizes she
isn’t aging. Her permanent youth comes at a cost. Whenever her appearance
mismatches her official age too obviously, she has to change her ID and start
over, leaving friends and family behind. They, of course, age and die while she
doesn’t. There are good performances by Blake Lively and Harrison Ford. The
sentimentality works fairly well despite (or because of) the contrivance.
Thumbs Up.
The Picture
of Dorian Gray (1945)
There is no
shortage of films about extended youth: In
Time, Peter Pan, Tuck Everlasting, and for that matter almost every vampire
movie. I opted for the most obvious.
This stylish adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel contains enough of the author’s
verbiage and wit to be entertaining, and we get to see a young Angela Lansbury
as Sybil Vane. In late Victorian London, Dorian (Hurd Hatfield) is a handsome –
“pretty” might be a better word – young man who is corrupted by the clever immoralist
philosophy of Lord Henry. But whereas Lord Henry is an intellectual armchair
immoralist, Dorian chooses to act on his impulses. The wages of sin do not show
on Dorian’s own face, but on his portrait; the portrait ages while he does not.
Today, a similar film likely would display graphically the lead character’s
depraved acts. Here we merely get obscure hints as to the bulk of them, though
we do see mistreatment of Sybil and a murder. Although the 1945 critic for The New York Times chuckled at the “mawkish
pomposity of the film,” modern critics generally have been kinder. I rather
like it, though be aware that it paces more leisurely than most contemporary
flicks. Thumbs Up.
**** **** **** ****
Ex Machina
(2015)
Nathan, an
eccentric tech genius, invites Caleb, an employee, to visit him at his isolated
home/research facility. Caleb learns he is there to run a Turing test on an AI
robot named Ava. Nathan wants to know if Ava (Alicia Vikander) is conscious or if
she only simulates consciousness. We soon suspect Ava of running a test of her
own on Caleb. She wants out of the facility – not least because Nathan might
deactivate her – and Caleb might be open to manipulation.
Ex Machina
has a well written script that questions the nature of consciousness and
ethics. Is the fact that Ava is manipulating Caleb for her own ends proof of
consciousness? What are Nathan’s obligations to Ava, if any, if she is
conscious, and what are hers to him and to Caleb, if any? The performances are
good, with Oscar Isaac doing an exceptional job as Nathan. Anyone who ever has
met an eccentric genius will recognize Nathan. The fx are good without
overwhelming the script. Thumbs Up.
Bicentennial
Man (1999)
Based on the novel The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and
Robert Silverberg, Bicentennial Man
is another instance of swathing sentiment in the esoteric in order to make it
acceptable, this time in circuitry.
Andrew (Robin
Williams) is a household robot for the Martin family. Through some glitch, Andrew
shows evidence of conscious behavior. Before long his consciousness is
indisputable, and eventually he asks for his freedom. Over decades his
upgrades, many of them of his own design, bridge the gap between the biological
and mechanical – his artificial organs will work as replacement parts in humans,
which blurs the distinction between humans and robots. The generations of
Martins age and die, but Andrew loves and begins to romance one young Martin
woman. (Tangential note: Apparently in anticipation of such a real eventuality,
Calvin Klein has trademarked “Technosexual.”) Andrew’s final upgrade makes him
mortal, which doesn’t seem like a good bargain to me, but he is cool with it. The
film is family friendly with all the good and ill that entails. Thumbs Up, but
only slightly.
The isolated-teens-in-trouble
plot has a long pedigree. In this one, the water skiing vacation of teens Reg,
Julie, Skip, and Pam turns bad when they come ashore on an island where
diabolical scientist Dr. Myra (Katherine Victor) has a research facility. She
wants to be able to turn people into zombies because…well, it would just be
cool, that’s all. Especially if you’re power-mad. She captures the teens for
her experiments. Oh yes, she has a gorilla, and why wouldn’t she? The sheriff
is on the case of the missing kids but he is corrupt. This movie is so
incredibly awful that it is enormous fun for those of us with a taste for campy
bad movies. For the general viewing public though, I can’t in conscience give
it anything but a Thumbs Down.
**** **** **** ****
Into the
Woods (2014)
Into the Woods
intertwines the Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Jack and the Beanstalk
fairy tales into a musical with star performances by the likes of Meryl Streep
and Johnny Depp. Lapine's and Sondheim’s Into
the Woods was a long-running hit on Broadway. To my mind, musicals work
better on stage as live performances than on screen, and this one is no
exception. Nonetheless, the Disney production is about as good as one
reasonably might hope. The movie takes an odd turn in the third act that might
take viewers unfamiliar with the play by surprise. The characters have to face
loss, betrayal, second thoughts, and their own moral ambiguity. Jack, for
example, is not really such a hero; he is a thief who killed the husband of the
giantess who has come to earth seeking revenge. Be aware that this is a musical
with some dark elements, not primarily kids’ fare, but Thumbs Up.
The Glass
Slipper (1955)
This musical
adaptation of Cinderella is the best of the bunch to date in my book. Leslie Caron
gives an atypical but utterly appealing interpretation of the role. While her
stepmother and stepsisters are evil enough, Ella (taunted with the name Cinderella)
herself is a flawed character. She is feisty, suspicious, and hot-tempered. The
Prince disguises his identity on their first accidental meeting during which
she gets angry and pushes him into a pond. He later invites her to the Ball,
but Ella believes he is the son of the palace cook. Ella’s benefactor Mrs. Toquet
apparently does have unusual abilities, but she doesn’t display them openly.
The movie requires a little patience from the viewer during the extended
voice-over set-up at the beginning, but all-in-all it’s a charming film. Thumbs
Up.
**** **** **** ****
The Voices (2014)
Ryan Reynolds is
Jerry. Jerry by state-mandate must visit his psychiatrist weekly. She insists
that he stay on his meds, but he is much happier when he is off them. Without
them, the world is bright and colorful. When he is on them, depressive realism
sets in: he sees the world as it grimly is. Unsurprisingly, he throws away the
medications. Also, when he is med-free his animals talk to him; the cat urges
him to indulge his vices and the dog urges him to be good. Jerry’s life seems
OK, but then he accidentally kills his date. Fearing his mental status and
personal history will cause people to conclude the worst, he dismembers the
body in order to hide it, and he puts the head in the fridge. The head talks to
him too. The second killing is half-way accidental – she hits her head when she
falls during a struggle – but after that only the cat is on his side.
Kidnapping the psychiatrist doesn’t help. I enjoyed this dark comedy but a sizeable
proportion of viewers surely won’t. Thumbs slightly up.
Dementia 13 (1963)
Even in this very
early low-budget film, Francis Ford Coppola is in good directorial form. The Halorans
have money, secrets, an unexplained death, a contestable will, motives for
murder, and a killer with an axe. Finding/figuring out who did what to whom is
much of the fun in this twisted tale, so I’ll leave it at that. Thumbs Up.
Even on the small screen we prefer to delegate
romantic sentiments to otherworldly creatures. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Spike the vampire, spurned by his toothy
inamorata, discourses on love in a way uncommon in human characters during the last two decades.
