Author: faith

Zero Days

In case you did not know, everything you have stored digitally is public.  While this has probably been true for at least a decade, it is an ironclad fact today.  Zero Days is an excellent documentary examining one of the most sophisticated cyberattacks ever launched as far as the public knows. It also features a nice gentleman from Cyber Command, NSA’s offensive upstairs neighbor, stating that even Cyber Command realizes that its data is not safe.

I would like to believe that, since we are all living in the same glass house, we will learn to stop throwing rocks and feel a little less ashamed or frustrated about things that truly do not matter.  I want to believe in us, the way Rocky believed he could single-handedly end the cold war (and did!), but optimism feels misplaced when the United States, Russia, and China are busy amassing small nuclear arms.  I am sure they are safe.  Not like those clunky cold war nukes that only the United States has used.

In the ever crystallizing glass house, I think it is much more likely we will live to see a president’s genitals than any kind of cease fire.  While much of this documentary has been reported in the past, like the massive s.f. cyber attack the United States had in place and may have turned on had negotiations with Iran failed, the documentary is thorough, well paced, and brings together a lot of information with an elegance rarely seen in fiction let alone non-fiction.

The film starts with a detailed look at the discovery and dissection of what us civilians called stuxnet and NSA types who built the bugger referred to as Olympic Games.  Despite being an OG, the subtle attack on Iran’s centrifuges was only a tiny piece of a much larger, terrifying whole.  The s.f. cyberware of the future is here, and it is just a matter of time before a major attack has devastating consequences for countless civilians.  Of course, we are all complicit.  What floor do you live on?  Those elevators probably will not work if you upset the wrong people.  At this point, it is probably out of your hands.  You might be delightful, but wars have casualties.  Cost of doing business.

We insist that you watch this movie for your own good.  If you stubbornly refuse, at least buy a motorcycle and have an exit strategy.  I will be waiting for you in north-central Florida.  You will know when to meet me.

Fandango

Watching a herd of people on my roof watch fireworks through their cell phones immediately reminded me of this scene in Fandango.  Though not technically dystopian, we might do well to remember that some of our parents may not enjoy a celebration involving loud, colorful explosions.  This film follows a group of kids taking a road trip across the country before shipping off to Vietnam. (NOTE:  A recent viewing of this film reminded us that it has some deeply problematic scenes.)

I would have been drafted had I been born on the same day but the year of my father’s birth.  He watched the draft with several neighborhood kids huddled around a boxy television.  During my lifetime, I have only seen groups of draft-age children stare at a television with that intensity when sports and binge drinking were involved.

The next time you are tempted to yell at a distant athlete through a one-way flatscreen, pretend your friend’s life is in the balance.  Then remember how lucky we are that we can pretend.  Also, maybe call your parents if you can and tell them that you love them.

Curious what your draft number would have been?

Ghost in the Shell

With the upcoming live action Ghost in the Shell three dimensional experience approaching, it feels like a good time to revisit the ghost hacked garbage truck driver who asked “[w]hat does a virtual experience mean then?”  Probably not a three dimensional movie, but those kids at Dreamworks and all the punks who have the skills but moved to New York to cut their teeth on freelance benders are making it pretty damn difficult to tell if the pixels I see on the way to work are forming Time Square in my reality or yours.

“I am a life-form that was born in a sea of information.”

Speaking of Times Square, school is out, and teenagers instinctively know that Times Square is their territory.  I am more afraid of a group of teenage boys than anything else I encounter on a regular basis.  When they suss out that deep dark insecurity you didn’t know still lingered, they let their insults fly casually so you know how easy it is for them to hurt you.

These kids.  They were born in a sea of information.  They don’t, as far as I can tell, have George Church’s sili brains, but they do carry a rough draft around with them like the rest of us.  Will they give us a choice when they merge?

Released at the end of 1995, which began with the opening statements of the OJ Simpson trial, Ghost in the Shell was both ahead of its time and right at home in the same year that witnessed the Oklahoma City bombing and the Unabomber when some of us were naive enough to believe that tragedies on US soil were by definition outliers.

The film did not depend on special effects or violence to the same extent The Matrix franchise would a few years later, instead, it asked a serious question about the future of humankind.  These Times Square kids might be surprised at how much dialogue is in this film.  It is thoughtfully constructed, and its spirit is more in line with Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker than most stories involving cyborg assassins with ghost cloaks.

Ghost in the Shell was visually inspired by Blade Runner, and that is beautifully evident in the final scene, which takes place in a large room with a domed ceiling that intentionally or not looks like a sly nod to the impossibly fresh view of LA’s iconic Bradbury Building seen in Ridley Scott’s masterful adaptation of PKD.

If you’re feeling broken, take an evening to re-watch this classic before the marketing blitz for the live action remake assaults you.  Watch the subtitled version and, if you can, try to get a teenager into it.

Sunspring

Although the short film Sunspring is more s.f. than dystopian, it belongs here because of its author, Benjamin.  I suspect that the last thing a truly terrifying artificial intelligence would do is let us know that it exists.  It would probably spend more time learning to hack our brains to distort reality.  The two humans who created Benjamin, which named itself and ensured a victory at the annual film festival Sci-Fi London by voting for itself 36,000 times per hour, fed Benjamin a list of scripts from a variety of s.f. films and television shows.  The resulting short film and what it teaches us about the scènes à faire for the genre should not be ignored.

Watch the full short film here.

Sunspring

The Maze Runner

You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?  Months after watching The Maze Runner, I feel a lot like the main character.  I can’t remember much.

The film jettisons narrative in favor of a loosely stitched collection of heavy handed simulacra reminding viewers that they are watching a dystopian film.  In that sense, a symptomatic reading of The Maze Runner could give it value as a harbinger of our own unfolding apocalypse.  That said, I think I might have mindlessly enjoyed portions of the movie.  I have no idea what it is like to be a parent, but I do not think this film is suitable for children who might mistake it for something other than a commodity.

Hardware

For reasons discussed in more detail below, this is one of the most disturbing films I have seen in a long time.  It affected me viscerally for several days.  If that fact piques your interest, I highly recommend watching this disruptive art project masquerading as a film.

If you have never intentionally put yourself into a dissociative state, you might be bothered by Hardware’s hot mess of a plot.  But if you’re no stranger to time loops, and the horrible feeling of being doomed to repeat the same mistakes ad nauseam, you might feel right at home inside this film, which is one of the bleakest and most graphic portrayals of the end of humanity I have found.  While not entirely accurate, I heard myself describe the film in a post-viewing discussion as “We die watching ourselves die.”

It isn’t the complete lack of hope or even the hard-to-watch almost pornographic deconstructions of human flesh that profoundly disturbed me.  It was the slow realization that I had tried to watch Hardware at least a half dozen times without making it more than 15 minutes into the film.  In that way, Hardware had already infected me and illustrated how insidious passive consumption of media can be.  If I were a character in the film, I wouldn’t stand a chance.  By the time I could exhale, I felt like the song birds my childhood friend from Africa taught me how to shoot and splay on his kitchen counter in preparation for the grill.  I spent the rest of the day examining my media consumption habits.

On paper (and in streaming media provider algorithms), Hardware looks like it was made for me.  Lemmy and Iggy Pop both make appearances.  Stanley shot the film on a relatively meager budget in 8 weeks.  The opening long shot shows a barren wasteland, and the ensuing plot is as trippy as it is dystopian.  For these and other reasons I am not privy to, Hardware consistently appears in the top of my search results when I am looking for a movie.  Finishing this film was a reminder that I am not immune to advertising, and the marketing people I spend my professional life saying “no” to have my number.

To Stanley’s credit, he warns viewers that they’re in for a fucked up ride in an opening shot focused on Chapter 13 Verse 20 from the book of Mark.  In the King James version, the verse refers to intense persecution by the Romans and reads “[a]nd except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved: but for the elect’s sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days.”  Stanley wisely shortened the verse to “[n]o flesh shall be spared.”  Mark 13:20 is a clever and immediate reference to the fate of the characters in Hardware.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of or seen this film, remember Liza Minnelli’s admonition that “money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around.”  Your answer starts with the CIA arming people in Afghanistan to fight the Russians.  South African born director Richard Stanley was traveling with and documenting a band of guerillas fighting Russian troops in Afghanistan when he found out someone was willing to fund Hardware.

Paul Trijbits and JoAnne Sellar, two independent London cinema owners new to film production, convinced Stanley to come to England where he realized he had to submit a real budget for the film.  Faced with a more realistic and therefore a much larger budget, Trijbits and Sellar did not give up.  Instead, they contacted a fledgling Miramax and convinced the Weinstein brothers to invest in the film.

The film barely avoided an X rating and opened to unexpected success in the United States.  Its instant profitability kept it out of general circulation for several years.  Not only were the investors arguing over the profits, the publishers of the comic Shok!, which appeared in 2000 AD (linked below), brought a successful copyright lawsuit alleging that the film copied directly from the comic.  If you’re interested in the copyright aspects of this film, the entire comic in question is linked below the trailer for the film.

http://www.britishhorrorfilms.co.uk/shok1.shtml

The Running Man

When I saw this movie as a child, I thought it was an excellent critique of mass media.  Having just watched it, I think it’s only value may be that it got kids like me thinking critically about media.  It is so blunt that the only things I enjoyed yesterday were Arnold’s one-liners and Jesse Ventura’s bravado.  If you want to watch Arnold before he became a governor, I suggest his trip to Rio:

V for Vendetta

The first issues of the comic, V for Vendetta, penned by Alan Moore were published the same year I was born.  Years later, the collected edition was my first meaningful foray into comic books when my 19th century British literature professor inexplicably put it on his reading list.  I don’t think he got tenure.  He did, however, recommend picking up Watchmen.  Solid advice from anyone.

The film, while entertaining, sanitized one of the main characters, V, and Moore saw another of his anarchic screeds turned into a family-friendly product.  One glaring omission in the film is the absence of V’s laboratory where he makes “hallucinogenics as cheaply as water.”  In Moore’s book, LSD is almost a character in a pivotal scene.  Of course, the film gave Moore an opportunity to engage in what seems like his favorite pass-time:  misanthropic grumbling.  Overall, the movie is a fun adaptation, but this time I find myself agreeing with most of Moore’s complaints.