Star Trek: Into Darkness

I've never found the Star Trek universe very compelling.  Good looking people who like themselves and each other overcoming fanciful oppositions doesn't really get at the tensions of our technological age.  I prefer Primer, or Moon because they ask about technology, power and human instrumentality directly.  So, given that I thought it was about less pressing problems than our present problems, what did I like?

I liked the intro, which sold the Federation as something like the Culture, and set up the problem of obedience and individual commitments.  I liked Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, John Cho and Zachary Quinto.  The plot was faintly ludicrous, but only faintly, and the premise was fairly good.

Bad was recycling Khan into something so different.  A good character slightly spoiled for me by the associations he was supposed to be inheriting. Also bad, the callback of Nimoy and the Alice Eve underwear scene.

Casting Novels

Casting is a complicated business. Because of the extent to which audiences follow movie stars as indicators of film quality and sensibility, the money (following the audience) wants to know that a script has the right stars signed on. Conversely the wrong star can put money off.

This is especially complex for novels and other fiction, where there is no set appearance. Audiences will have extremely specific requirements in the appearance, but they may be mutually exclusive. Personally I understood Frodo for the first time in Elijah Wood's portrayal of him, but I though Jennifer Ehle was not as lean and long-limbed as Jane Austen had made her Elizabeth. Harison Ford is not fat enough to be Colonel Graff, but I can go with it.

I have a couple of firm casting opinions for films I wish were coming:

No1. Ricky Gervais for Chiark-Gevantsah Jurneau Morat Gurgeh from Iain M Banks' "The Player of Games". Gurgeh goes the gamut from lightweight Culture personality yearning for more risk, to Azad-addicted power pervert, back to Culture person and instrument of world-collapse for the Empire of Azad. He's got the beard, the sneer and the pathos to be Gurgeh. The other characters are mostly aliens and machines, but Lal Yay is a type* and Shohobohaum Za could be a Ryan Gosling smooth operator, or Idris Elba with a big Afro and some speed.

No2. Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from Modern Family) to be Dr Talos from 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe. Dr Talos is a homonculus - Severian thinks of his ur-self as a stuffed and mounted fox. It's mostly the red hair and beard, but Dr Talos' menace, vaudevillean streak, cruelty and yet his almost feminine care for the giant Baldanders seem like they would be within his range if he could play it a little less snarky.

No3. Who to be Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'? Someone massive, big and tall, with a barely restrained violence. He should be fat at the beginning and lean down and muscle up as he quests for more life. The cupboard of my awareness of actors is pretty bare.

* I'm unable to think of a young blond actress - is that weird? Britt Marling seems too smart, insufficiently frolic. But she might work out. Lal is a game player Gurgeh has some time for.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Stars My Destination

Lorenzo DiBonaventura (producer - Transformers, other things), Raymond Wagner (producer, super-old) and Neal Adams (odd* conceptual designer) are listed on IMDB as developing 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester, for the screen, since 2007, scheduled to be released 2012.  Nothing seems to be happening on this film.  (Warner bros have some work under way for 'Cristo' or as I think of it:  Space Count of Monte Cristo. A shallow reader might think it similar to TSMD.  It is relatively lame (see below).  Still a great story and should be an awesome film though.)

The Stars My Destination should be made as a film.

  This is a hot, fast-moving book that I think should be an easy adapt, except for the complicated backgrounds that might need exposition.  The novel teeters on the brink of chaos, but somehow he wrestles the whole into shape with structures within structures, interlocking shapes of story that you can only read and marvel at.  I would write it for free if it helped it get made (though I can't imagine anything less likely to succeed than approaching a giant star and director and production company with - "here's the screenplay - it's by another hopeful dickhead you never heard of. You didn't read about it in the trades because it was free - it's literally worthless.").

Themes - why this is an important story for today:
1. Intellectual Property ascendant.  The background is a world of very high technology and a very stratified society, where an aristocracy of intellectual property holders dominates the globalized society.  If you think about how copyright is steadily being extended and patent law is more and more the ground on which inter-corporation wars are fought, this seems to be exactly somewhere we could get to.
2. Inequality. Everyone except the very rich is vulnerable to poverty, violence and crime.
3. Terrorism. The solar system is at war, but it's a fundamentally unequal war in which the tactics are terrifying, asymmetric - attacks on populations, exploitation and internment of refugees.
4.  Globalization. The power of Earth national governments to regulate issues of citizenship is limited, because transport (jaunting - pretty much 'disapparating' from Harry Potter) is very cheap and very fast. The boundaries that now define 'nationalities' are found at spaceports and similar, and Earth has a government and secret police and military.
5.  The body. Surgical intervention to augment and alter the body is available, but most heavily used by criminals, the military and social climbers.
6.  Life. The foregoing sets up a lot of very recognizable vulnerability (and corresponding, prized invulnerability). The story mythos is how to live under this vulnerability.

Synopsis (spoilers - but the book is from the fifties, so for goodness sake):
Gully Foyle is an emotionally shut-down ambitionless lump of a spaceman.  His ship is captured by Outer Satellites privateers, and he ends up in a small airtight locker on a ship drifting aimless out past the asteroid belt.  He lasts about half a year by scavenging air and food and water in desperate adventures in a leaky space suit.  When a ship appears, he thinks he will be rescued, but on seeing it is only him, SS Vorga doesn't stop.  This awakens Gully emotionally and when he tries, he finds he can repair his ship and get the main engine started, although navigation is not possible.  (There are a number of statistically very unlikely conjunctions in space in this story, but we'll just have to deal with it.)

     Gully reaches Earth where he is rehabilitated and learns to jaunt and begins to be a criminal, plotting against the Vorga and sexually assaulting his jaunte instructor Robin to ensure her silence. Then he makes a stupid attempt at revenge which sees him locked up.  At the same time, his story comes to the notice of Presteign of Presteign, a front rank aristocrat with basic patents on a lot of spacefaring.  Gully is imprisoned in the Gouffre Martel, a perfectly dark underground prison, from which jaunting is impossible. There he meets Jizzbella McQueen, a beautiful and brilliant professional criminal. They become dependent on each other - he for her intelligence (and he learns to prize intelligence) and she for his absolutely implacable courage/rage. When Presteign attempts to interrogate him in prison, he escapes with Jizzbella.  During his escape he sees the Burning Man, a grim apparition of a man on fire, for the first time.

    Gully and Jizzbella work out that there was treasure on his ship, steal a sporty spaceship and try to salvage it.  But Presteign turns up and Gully just barely escapes, by abandoning Jizzbella.

   On Earth, he is soon fabulously rich and takes an identity as Geoffrey Fourmyle, a ludicrous spendthrift clown-entrepreneur.  He travels with his Fourmyle circus, a sort of giant Carnivale / Burning Man Festival / royal court in which there are concealed a few terribly serious scientific investigations into the mysterious substance that came with the treasure.  But he is really beginning in earnest his quest to find the captain and crew of the SS Vorga, and he recruits Robin to coach him in civilization.  At the same time, Presteign wants to draw Fourmyle in, at first because of his wealth, and to keep his enemies close.  And Gully falls in love (violently, as he does everything at this stage of moral development) with Olivia Presteign, Presteign's albino daughter, with eyes that see Infra Red.

   Having identifed three former crewmen, Gully sets up an opportunity to interrogate them during a progressive New Years' Ball, in which he takes as an escort the partial telepath, Robin, who taught him to Jaunte. Each of the crewmen dies on trying to say the name of the director of the mission, but Gully gets a new facts: the name of crewman now working as a slave on the Moon's algae farms. The Burning Man appears at each killing, and the Burning Man is recognizable as Gully. He kidnaps him and hooks him up to life support before interrogating him.  Even though the hypnotic kill switch activates and his heart stops, he stays alive long enough to reveal that Lindsey Joyce is in the Skoptsy colony on Mars, having renounced life.

   Gully feels beaten.  Skoptsies are religious who give themselves to total sensory deprivation.  There seems no way to punish Joyce.  But Gully is implacable - he steals a telepath and uses him to intrude on Lindsey Joyce.  He terrifies the young telepath so much that everyone, including Joyce, is affected. Gully is absolutely disgusted by Joyce.  Her detachment is absolute evil in his moral scheme.
  Then Gully finds out the last name.  The director of the voyage, who refused to pick him up was Olivia Presteign. And all the silence was because she was scuttling refugees - taking their money and belongings, then dumping them to die in space.  Gully has the insight of a tragic hero - everything he's done to remake himself for revenge had made him too great to take revenge on her.  He gets captured by Presteign.

   Presteign explains that among the treasure was PyRE - a substance that is the primordial stuff that detonated in the big bang; and PyRE can be detonated any time, by Will and Idea.  Robin is there, and her idea of detonation radiates out - Foyle's lab in the Fourmyle circus had a smudge of Pyre left behind and it explodes.  Fortunately the main mass of PyRE is deeply secured below the lab, and cannot detonate.  Gully negotiates with Presteign for Olivia; he expresses his outrage at the power of PyRE being under the control of just a few people - having mastered all his smallness while remaining himself, he is enraged by the narrow, dirty cheating of the wealthy and powerful. Although drugged, he escapes to Earth, and from there he heads to his laboratory to do something about PyRE.

  His lab is on fire.  His great strength and augmented reflexes and courage lead him to try to go to the PyRE, but he gets stuck in a burning loom of wire, tangled and flailing.  He tries to jaunte, but being drugged is making it difficult to resolve a destination, and then he starts flashing to significant places - the air-tight locker, the cell, the scenes of the deaths of the spacemen, the present, and then the future.  In that future, Robin tells him how to get free.  In doing so he discovers the secret to space-jaunting - thinking through time - he space-jauntes to Arcturus' blue fire, to his old coffin and back to earth.  Presteign helps him.  The fire is coming under control, and Gully recovers and sits up.  He lectures Presteign on living, then distributes PyRE across the world and directs everyone to start living, right now.

Story Structure(s) - why this is a (very) filmable story

Neal Gaiman wrote an introduction to the story that highlighted the sequence of wombs, out of each of which, Gully is reborn more powerful: the air-tight locker; the Gouffre Martel cell and several others, culminating in the burning wire cage.  Each of these forms a sequence with goals, stakes, urgency of their own.  The sequences are basically the seven and a half paragraphs in the synopsis. A lot of detail has been lost to synopsising, but in every sequences, Gully grows and becomes more powerful, and more morally conscious, although he remains cruel and remorseless, beginning with neglect of even himself, through a blunt and aimless cruelty, to a razor-edge relentless predator ranging the solar system.  But you can't grow so much as a person without starting to have your shit together morally speaking.  Gully is genuinely sorry for raping Robin by the middle of the film, and does her only good once he recruits her.  By the conclusion of the film, Gully has transcended everything that made him, as has Robin.

Second, the morality.  There are two layers of morality operating in the story.  The more familiar is the conventional morality in which its wrong to hurt the weak, to be unfair.  The less familiar is straightforwardly Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality, in which letting other people make you is a regrettable weakness, but evil is refusing life - refusing to make big choices and take big chances. Lindsey Joyce and all the other crew of the Vorga allowed Olivia Presteign to make them, and crushed by guilt, gave up on life.  This is their evil, the evil of weakness dwelling in and clinging to its weakness.  Its what Gully overcame when Vorga abandoned him.


Third, the characters all partake of both moralities, but strongly represent one or the other.  Presteign represents Nietzschean power, but in the end Gully judges him to have taken too much on himself, which is wrong even as a Nietzschean because it preserves his power that should exist by contending, not by secrecy and declining to compete.  Dagenham, Jizzbella and other minor characters operate on skill power - Presteign, though, is most skilled at holding on to his inherited power.  Robin operates entirely without Nietzschean power, and yet by the mid point Gully is begging for her help, and by the end depends on her to save his life.  He is moved into conventional morality by this.  Robin has lived to overcome his assault, to become too great to hold it against him.  Olivia is a pure Nietzschean, willing to do anything to sate her Presteign passions for blood and money - yet she expresses a desire to be overcome to Gully.  Gully was shut down to life until he nearly lost it - perhaps he was trapped in conventional morality, just going along, conforming, until the people really living life showed how little that meant to them.

Everyone has a story - indeed its bewildering how much story is in this short book.

Challenges

• Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality freaks people out ('Yes Man' notwithstanding):  
• The protagonist is extraordinarily imperious, relentless and cruel - and those are the qualities his character develops.  
• The protagonist rapes a lovely woman who helps him, and then gets her to help him achieve his dreams.  I can't imagine that going over well with women and people who care about them - I would expect protests from feminists.  (I would argue that this is treated as seriously as anything in the story, but I doubt any writer could make it serious enough.)
• Olivia Presteign is the worst mass murderer I can think of in fiction - defrauding and killing the most vulnerable people she can, including Robin's family.  And her punishment is that Gully marries her.  It has a certain logic, but its to see audiences feeling satisfied.
• The protagonist may not be very sympathetic in the opening of the film.  Just getting pushed around and being unwilling to push back is not universally sympathetic.
• The amount that would need to be explained is large.  Jaunting, PyRE, the solar system's warring sides, the existence of telepathy, Gully's progressive identity shifts (Geoffrey Fourmyle, souped up Commando), and the complex webs of relationships, inferences, games and tricks that motivate all the participants.

Come on, guys!  Make this film!


* Neal Adams thinks that all seismic and geological evidence is best explained by his idea that Earth (and other planets) is steadily growing in size.  ?        ???              ?????

The Film Sense

There's an ad for a show at the moment in which the final few lines are young man protesting:
'I won't go back inside, I won't go back inside.'
Then the voice-over guy says 'and a shocking conclusion...'
Then a woman says 'I'm pregnant.'

Join the dots on why that conclusion is shocking...

This is an example of Eisenstein's theory of montage.  The oft-cited experiment is of a great actor of the day who was shown intercut with a meal, or a gun, or something else, and ask people to rate the mans expression.  When the intercut was food, he looked hungry.  When it was a weapon, he looked threatening.  People also mentioned that he was the greatest actor they'd ever seen, even though it was the same footage of his face in every case.  The goal of montage-school film-making is to manufacture the passage of images in a way that the mind of the watcher puts a story on them.

Here's the book.  I got it from an op-shop, pretty much by accident.

Here's a good essay/post in case you want to actually learn something, rather than my half-remembered thoughts.

Inglorious Basterds

I finally caught up with Inglourious Basterds.  Heidegger's justly famous essay on the origin of the work of art talks about a hermenutic circle (or spiral) about trying to differentiate the whole of the work from what the parts are.  It's hard to know how to break in.  Inglorious Basterds is a grindhouse revenge-fantasy on the second world war.  It's about the viciousness of the Nazis, and a vicious retribution that should make you sorry for them.  I think the way I'm going to break in is in terms of Genre.

Grindhouse, for my money, is cinema for the weak, or rather, for those who are afraid of, and need to cover up their weaknesses with a prurient fondling of shock at sex and violence. That's a hoity-toity definition for a pretty common answer to a widespread hunger, the male equivalent of mills&boon and soap tv.

Can you use Grindhouse to talk about the holocaust?  Yes, you can do anything if you like.  Tarantino has done it; and of course its auteur grind-house, very cinematic and engaging, and with the dialogue and drama deftly constructed.  The end result is an enjoyable film, a memorable film, and a film with a moral - but the three are loosely tied together. What is memorable and enjoyable is not moral. It impresses you with a point, but it makes you a worse person.

I'm now very curious about 'Django Unchained', Tarantino's next film.  It seems likely to be a counter-part of Inglourious Basterds, unsubtly ramming home the point that Slavery in the South of the USA was an engine of violence and injustice that made with South liable for unlimited violence toward justice.  When Andrew Sullivan was objecting to a lack of anti-genocide protections for social classes, I thought he was right, but that the protections should not be universal, because there have been classes for whom it might be justice - for slave traders or slave owners to go into a Gulag for life would not have been unjust. Though it might have been counter-productive.

Source Code

I finally watched Source Code, with Jake Gylenhall. He came over with some beers and a copy, and I was all like 'I've got new Dr Who, if you prefer', but he was really keen I see it. But seriously...

He is a good actor,and good looking to beat the band. And this was a tight film - well plotted and written very elegantly with emotional punch at the right times. I've been trying to work out why it felt slight. I think it was because there were no subplots. It just lacked a small thematic restatement in a minor key - someone who died but couldn't come back or someone hungry for another day, just a little more consciousness. JG's character Colter was too simply a good guy in a tough situation...

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Love and Anxiety

The Dish has picked up a couple of blogs analysing a certain scene in Terence Malick's Tree of Life.

Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other.Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then?
Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

Here is Terence Malick, one-time Heidegger scholar, putting his finger on the special sauce of consciousness and calling it love.  I had the same intuition weakly in my thinking on my screenplay, but I have found it is already well expressed in Hegel, though it is hidden in dense 'reasoning'.  Hegel's 'self' is engaged in a restless, endless, relentless attempt to re-unite with the Other which is its essence.  This division is in consciousness at every level, but the uniting across the divide is the special sauce. 


Last night we read Luke 6:

²⁷ “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹ If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. ³⁰ Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. ³¹ Do to others as you would have them do to you.   ³² “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. ³³ And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. ³⁴And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. ³⁵ But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. ³⁶ Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

This is anxious stuff to try to live, but it is also what Hegel prescribes for the self's self-relation. Stoicism (accepting experience overruling what rationality might expect) and Scepticism (doubting experiences except rational understandability) are simply modes of anxiety covering the self's difficulty with itself.  Heidegger's commentary on Hegel renames 'Absolute Knowledge' as 'Absolving Knowledge.' These verses are about that absolving, about living in Love.  If someone's ideas compel you to go one mile, you can go another with them. If something slaps you across the face and makes your eyes water, you go back for the rest.

Movie Review: Drive

Ryan Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn got a lot of attention for Drive, the story of a young man with a gift for driving who does some stunt driving, some racing and some getaway work. He has no name, and is known in secondary sources as Driver.  Seeing his pretty neighbour (Carey Mulligan) needing help, he befriends her. A week later, her husband is released from jail and moves back in. They're not a perfect match, but he's a pretty good guy wanting to go straight.  The trouble is, he's got old debts that need repaying. So he takes on one last job because Driver offers to help him.  Things go horribly wrong, leaving Driver with a lot of money, and trouble with two crime syndicates that lay claim to it. Can he get square? Will cool nerves and discipline and timing be enough?

This is an interesting film to watch after hearing it built up.  Coming in cold, I would have regarded it pretty highly, because the story is always surprising you and the emotional story is simple and well told. There are no wasted words, no wasted scenes, no gore spared.  It sits somewhere close to a western, and the violence was extreme.  The structure and story resolution are not upbeat, but satisfying.

Some things that didn't totally satisfy - the score is largely techno, and it works well for the half of the story that happens in the dark, but in some of the rundown motels and diners it just seemed a little thin and clean - also, there's nothing of the calibre of Oxygene.  There's an air of unreality about some of the car sequences: reverse doesn't go that fast; and cars that slam their foes in the side don't retain working headlights.

The character of Driver is very close to my vision for Langley, a character in the screenplays I've been working on.  A man of great ability, curiously blank, hard to read yet straightforward, emotionally vulnerable and tightly wound but holding it together coldly, and struggling with old men and economics to carve out some secure space, to get a place in the world.  I wonder if this is a new type we will see more of.  It's not exactly coming of age, because he's come of age and is an omni-competent adult. But after you come of age, life is still a struggle, and if you fight well and are lucky, you might come out even.

How annoying is James Cameron?

Oh, I just produce the most successful big budget sci-fi films as a day job to help fund my real passion - the deep ocean.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Cell

I picked up 'the Cell' from our Opp shop for $3. It is sf (machine-aided psychological interventions through lucid co-dreaming) with a nasty serial killer. The visual compositions are magic, appropriate to vivid, lucid dreaming. Apart from a weak performance from Vince Vaughan (Dodgeball is the only movie he has benefitted), and a slightly too-linear plot, and a resolution that lacked irony/symbolic setup, I really like it. Most of the thinking apparently went into arresting imagery, but they were playing to their strengths and the result is rich.

For me this earns its R rating, so if you usually avoid R, I don't recommend this film. It has a voyeurism that relishes what it claims to revile, like Law&Order SVU and similar - killing women for money, as one of Pilar's guests described it in an On-the-Page podcast.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Total Recall

I had forgotten how good Total Recall (more Paul Verhoeven) is, or perhaps I had not been alert to its double structure on past viewings. For the case that it was all a sophisticated self-covering memory in which something went wrong, there is some troubling evidence - how would they make money if there was supposed to be a full refund? For the case that it is all real, the intervention at the beginning and at the midpoint in which 'Recall' staffmembers give plot summaries that anticipate events uncannily. This amplifies the tension because instead of coherent mutually exclusive accounts, each is slightly incoherent at points where the other story would make it very plausible. I'm not sure, but it seems very like Philip K Dick. A blurb on neuromancer praises William Gibson's Dickian vertigo, but really, no one can do it like Dick.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Future Movies

This weekend has been an SF film extravaganza (by my standards) in the Fool household.

We re-watched Moon - an impeccable contained thriller that makes explicit the hidden agenda that motivates cloning - to have a person be equipment.  Brilliant film from front to back - don't miss it.

We watched 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' - probably the best Planet of the Apes, a rich homage to the others, but a strong film in its own right.  In a world where you can hardly get a film made with a black male lead, the screenwriters sold a concept where the central character is a CGI chimpanzee.

Finally, District 9. Somehow, like Moon, it just flows so effortlessly that it is a first rate film, full of surprises.

When will we see an SF best picture Oscar, I wonder, instead of nostalgic pap?

Conjunction

Slate (slate.com) has two headlines side by side that make a good pair:
Michael Bay to Continue Assaulting Your Senses with Another Transformers Film.
Germans select 'Shitstorm' as Anglicism of the year.

I guess the Germans will be ready.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Finding an audience for my film

As assiduous readers may recall, I am supposed to be partly a screenwriter.

One of the tests of a pitch is 'who is the audience for this movie?' - is it a kids movie, a married with children movie, a frustrated husband outlet piece or what...  You want to narrow in on a big chunk of audience and pander to them as hard as you can.

I picked up a thin book by Raymond Plant on Hegel (part of a series called 'The Great Philosophers'), and after finding this quote, I think I have further narrowed my audience, from astute sf readers with an appreciation of symbolism, to astute sf readers with an appreciation of symbolism and an intimate knowledge of Hegel. I am not sure who that would be, but as the entire audience for a film that probably would cost $10s-100s million, I need to warn them the ticket price may be a little higher than they are used to, unless they are willing to see it millions of times. The quote:

Singularity, as return into self, is certainly spirit, but as otherness to the exclusion of everything else, it is finite or human spirit[.] 

Exactly what that means, I am not sure yet.  But it certainly sounds on the money.

Do you have a Gold 2000 Honda Civic?

I listen to Pilar Alessandra's 'On the page' podcast, and enjoy it immensely.

She has been podcasting conversations every couple of months with the producers of 'Desperate Acts of Magic'.  The most recent podcast included the following story.

They have shot one or two days per month, on average, for a little over twelve months, aiming toward a total of 18-20 days.  They were using the car of one of the producers, but with a day of car located shots still lacking, it was wrecked in an accident.  So they needed a 2000 Honda Civic in Titanium Gold, with exactly the right trim, and they don't have enough money to buy another one from used car lots, or get one of the specialty car procurers that apparently operate in Hollywood to find it, and they are not available any more from car rental places.

Finally, they solved their problem by putting out a casting call notice for an actor or actress with almost any qualities or experience, who owned that exact car.  They got a lot of responses.  Actors would respond to an ad for their car, in exchange for a line of dialogue. Lots of actors with totally the wrong car  got in touch.

I wonder if the acting industry is a model for the singularity economy. Far too few people can do all the work needed, and everyone else is cutting each others throats for scraps.  I hope we can all be as good natured as the film making community seems to be.  I don't know where their living comes from, but somehow people are still cheerfully showing up.

Above and Below

'The Tree of Life', directed by Terence Malick (a former Heidegger scholar apparently) apparently tries to commmunicate an understanding of the human condition as participation in two worlds according to the law of each. The law of Nature, which is of scarcity, conflict, predation and death; and the law of Grace, of unlooked for forgiveness, riches, gifts and love.*

The contrast seems to map onto matter and mind, that physical things are scarce, vulnerable to destruction, while ideas and intentions are free, durable, and infinitely shareable (possibly with the exception of things like 'The Secret', which include in their content the fact that they are not widely known - past a certain point of sharedness, there is no longer a secret and the advantageousness might arguably be lost). On the basis of these properties of information, Richard Stallman (GNU) has been prophesying a Hegelian synthesis of communism and libertarianism through open source software. For him, the future could be mythtv for everything - labour freely and cheerfully given in the exercise of a skill, use shared across a global community, functions available to all.

What I find interesting is the way the world below seems to naturally meet the world above, and the way the law of grace bears much fruit in the world of nature. The law of nature relentlessly drives species and group level altruism, and the transcendence of instinct in strategy. The law of grace teaches the groups to go beyond altruism and make the Other the center, and community is made of strangers, and the USA becomes a superpower.

* I haven't seen it.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

True Grit

Last night we watched the Coen Brothers' True Grit. It was something like True Romance, and something like a Miyazaki film. Like True Romance in that it seemed quite self-consciously to be revelling in the milieu, creating characters that verged on cariacature, somewhat self-aware and vulnerable, but even more aware of each other's comical image-making. Like a Miyazaki film in that the girl at the heart of it is brave and shrewd, but also protected by many characters, even some of the wicked.

Very enjoyable, if not as profound as some of their work.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7