How to do justice to the memory of one of America’s greatest politician is a question that Emilio Estevez must have asked himself countless times while planning his movie Bobby. Unfortunately, it appears that he didn’t find a satisfactory answer.

Bobby is built on an interesting, albeit increasingly overused, premise: to capture the last 24 hours of Robert F. Kennedy’s life through the eyes of several people who have only one thing in common: they will be present during Kennedy’s last speech in a Los Angeles hotel during that ill-fated night of June 6th, 1968. Estevez mixes their lives, stories and beliefs with real footage of Kennedy on the campaign trail, as he spreads his message of hope across America.

One of the early problems with the film is that this dozen or so of lead characters are all played by more or less well-known stars, and one can’t help but to start wondering who else is going to pop up next. The viewer becomes trapped in this overabundance of celebrities and begins to watch the stars themselves rather than the characters they portray. In addition, some of these familiar and pretty faces (my god, they were all so pretty in 1968!) happen to be very average actors and actresses, resulting in characters that are simply tedious to watch and enjoy, and in scenes that simply feel too much like they were built for a celebrity to fly in for the day and recite a few lines and express their liberal penchant by simply being there and by appearing in a film about Robert F. Kennedy. Using so many stars effectively is a difficult undertaking and intertwining their stories in a way that is compelling is even more complex. One can’t blame Estevez for trying to be Robert Altman (or to a lesser extent, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) but one can certainly fault him for failing and for only being able to come up with a result that is as mediocre as Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004).

But what comes out as the single biggest problem with Bobby is that it is an avalanche of cheap and democratic sentimentalism. Estevez tries so hard to capture the impact that Kennedy had on people in 1968 (which begs the question as to why Estevez decided to focus mainly on all these white pretty people, instead of attempting to show Kennedy’s impact on the poor and blacks – the couple of so-called Latinos and Blacks in the film do not feel believable at all. Their comportment and attitude feel to me much more late 20th century than late 1960s) that he can only use amateurish tricks such as showing us people who got into an argument reconciling to the words of Kennedy and to the required late 60’s soundtrack. Oh, you just had an affair? That’s ok, now that I hear Kennedy and how he will change America, I forgive you. Oh, you just got shot, you racist pig? Even though I fired you this morning for being a racist and even though I strongly dislike you, let me make sure that I am the first one in the room to help you as you lay on the floor. In summary, let us all suddenly become better people and embrace as we listen to the message of Robert F. Kennedy. Can someone please pass the soap?

The real footage of Kennedy is actually the most interesting and emotional part of the film. Kennedy was destined to be a greater man than he already was. His vision, his youth, his honesty, his idealism, all had the power to change America and to make a real transformation in issues such as civil rights and racism, the environment, and social justice. He truly believed in the possibility of a better world and seemed untouched by the usual constraints and pressures of the military and business establishments. How much he would have achieved is another question but there is little doubt that America would probably be a different place today had he not been assassinated and had he been elected, instead of Richard Nixon…

I recently asked a New Yorker if he had watched I am Legend (2007). His reply was that since 9/11, he has had no desire to watch any film that deals with the destruction of his city. While I am Legend didn’t draw obvious parallels to that fateful day seven years ago, it is however difficult to miss them in Cloverfield and to consequently not feel at times slightly uncomfortable at the sight of people dying and being trapped in situations in which they have absolutely no control over their fate.

Cloverfield is an old-fashioned 1950’s monster flick (see my post on sci-fi/horror and the city) that draws heavily on current filmmaking and social trends, especially in its depiction of a YouTube/Facebook need to document and share everything about one’s self, one’s experiences, even possibly about one’s death (everything leading up to death that is, which is clearly a lot more voyeuristic and contemporary than wanting to document what happens after death, which was the premise of the 80’s film Brainstorm (1983)). The Blair Witch Project (1999) had already caught on to these ‘self-documenting’ trends years ago, and as such, proved to be a groundbreaking film. Cloverfield, on the other hand, can only rehash what has been done before, and puts the documenting so much in the foreground that it often takes away from the believability of some of the scenes. It feels too much that the story is built around the idea of documenting whereas in The Blair Witch Project documenting was more seamlessly integrated into a solid narrative. In addition, the intensity and the wobbliness of the camera movements, while effective for the most part, can sometimes be confusing and even tiring.

Yet, Cloverfield also manages to keep us on the edge of our seat and to deliver an overall intense, and at times, frightening experience. The first half of the movie is the most effective since we are left guessing as to what exactly is terrorizing the city. One of the many things that Alien (1979) taught us (its impact on the horror/sci-fi genre has been inestimable) is that one can probably create more tension and suspense by showing less and by letting the potent powers of the imagination do the visualizing, which is most often based on one’s worst fears. Once we have become acquainted with the monster(s) of Cloverfied, the film starts to lose some of its pace and power, a fact reinforced by the increasing silliness of the protagonists’ decision-making. But a nice twist in the last ten minutes saves us from the unexpected dreadful and predictable ending.

In the end, running at a short 85 minutes, Cloverfield turns out to be a decently enjoyable viewing experience that is clearly in a higher league than recent monster films and remakes such as the dreadful Godzilla (1998).

As far as convincing kick-ass US presidents go, William Hurt has to rank towards the bottom of the list. I’ll chose Harrison Ford any day over Hurt whose physiognomy seems better suited to Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) type roles. Yet, Pete Travis, the director of the wasted effort Vantage Point, has no qualms about showing us Hurt, as the US president, getting into some kind of fistfight with the terrorists who kidnapped him.

Vantage Point starts intelligently enough, with the attempted assassination of the US president during a speech in Spain, being shown from different points of view. Every 10 minutes or so, we are offered a new perspective on the events, through the eyes of a new character. And each time, we seem to be getting closer to finding out what really happened. Except that after slowly raising the tension and having us fairly attentive, Travis decides, mysteriously and shamefully, to throw it all away and to turn his film into some kind of ridiculous over the top action flick. And to make things worse, Travis has the audacity to still pretend that it is intelligent by merging all the different stories into a silly denouement that reminded me of the terrible Crash (2004) in its mediocrity and pretentiousness. Rashomon (1950), this film isn’t.
Imagine a scene where for ten minutes we follow a little girl as she runs looking for her mother, and we can feel from the selection of shots and from the editing that the director is leading her towards a busy road with lots of incoming traffic. At that point, the only thought that logically must enter our mind is: no, the director cannot possibly be aiming for such a cliché scene. Something new and unexpected is going to happen, right? Well, no. Travis does indeed lead the little girl to a busy road in the middle of which she suddenly freezes and stays there screaming, waiting for a car to hit her. Didn’t Travis watch Austin Powers (1997)? Didn’t he get Mike Myers’s joke as Austin Power spends several minutes warning some guy that he is about to run him over with a bulldozer?

As I recently did with Jumper (2008), I will still manage to extract something interesting from this film. Aside for the MTV style shooting and editing, and terrorism aside, Vantage Point does capture a very relevant aspect of our lives. In the film, each character seems to be encountering a different reality, not only based on his or her direct sensory experience but also through their use of technology. Mobile phones and video cameras play an important role in the film as they help to assemble the various pieces of the puzzle. Yet, each version of the reality they convey is incomplete and misleading. Technology has the power to show us images that constitute only one type of reality. The question that is increasingly pertinent today is: what makes one’s reality any less significant than that of someone else? We live in a society where everyone now has the ability to be a witness and to create their own reality out of the different pieces they chose to select.

In addition, in Vantage Point, the mobile phone is used by both the terrorists to organize and implement their plan (a smartphone is used, among other things, to remotely control and trigger the riffle that is used against the president) and by the authorities to locate the terrorists and to avert their plot. This seemed particularly significant as several recent headlines have discussed terrorism and the use of mobile phones.
So, if anything else, Vantage Point does at least offer us a little something to think about in terms of how technology is affecting our lives.

André Bazin once stated that various aspects of the Western allowed it to identify with the essence of cinema. Writing in the 40s and 50s, Bazin saw in the classic Western films of that period a simplicity in morality and a reformist style that resulted in a genre that had no reason to excuse itself for its black and white, good and evil, and more or less accurate portrayal of an important period in American history. He also noticed a progression within the genre but his death in 1958 did not allow him to witness an even further evolution throughout the 60s and 70s. How interesting it would have been to know his assessment of what the Leones, Peckinpahs and Altmans did to the Western genre.

Personally, I believe they did it a lot of good and infused it with a much-needed dose of realism and freshness. I recently surprised a Cinephile friend of mine for stating that Red River (48) had left me unimpressed (as do most films with John Wayne). And as I explained in this post, most traditional Westerns, while stimulating our imagination with their exploration of a mystical historicity, have a tendency to nonetheless deal with aspects of human nature that probably shouldn’t be so unabashedly revered.

Enter The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a brilliant take on the Western genre by Andrew Dominik, who previously directed the very entertaining Chopper (2000). Bashed by many for being overly self-conscious, this film defies many of the criteria that Bazin identified 60 years ago regarding the Western. It contains little action, blurs the line between good and evil and asks us to connect for two and half hours to bandits with sometimes little to offer in terms of principles and decency. Like McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Assassination of Jesse James depicts a gray, cold and unforgiving West (or more accurately in this case, Mid-West) where life does not revolve mainly around patting the wife on the behind, eating beef stew with the mates around the campfire and shooting Indians in the back. Andrew Dominik’s film is a slow, atmospheric, beautifully shot, exploration of a death dance between two men. Jesse James, played remarkably well by Brad Pitt (who always seems to do much better when he can play unusual or slightly offbeat characters, as in 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, Kalifornia, Snatch….) is the very intelligent, crazy, menacing and tired killer hero who has fabricated an elaborate plan to ensure that his name will live on forever. Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck in a performance that earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, is the young neglected man who idealizes Jesse James and who wants to be one day as or more famous than his idol. The dissolution of the James gang serves as a background for a ballet between the two men’s fears, delusions and objectives. The Assassination of Jesse James is not an action film and probably not even a Western. It is a well acted and well scripted period drama wrapped in a heavy stylistic blanket that can either warm one’s sensibilities or that can turn one off in the same way that the films of Terrence Malick or Wong Kar Wai can exasperate some people. But if one were to insist on calling The Assassination of Jesse James a Western, then I would say that it is one of the best Westerns ever made.

From a futurist perspective, the possibility that everything in the universe is connected by a quantum vacuum (or Akashic field, or any other name that might help define what remains an elusive theory), from the smallest particles to the largest cosmic phenomenon, is a fascinating idea to contemplate.
Many transhumanists, such as Raymond Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, believe in the concept of a future global consciousness, enabled through the merging of the human brain with technology, particularly artificial intelligence. Already today, many are pointing at the rise of social applications, the increasing use of mobile technology and at the speed at which the Internet is evolving, to draw comparisons with various aspects of the human brain. Could the Internet become conscious? It is indeed a possibility that is not to be discounted.
Likewise, it is very likely that, sooner than most people realize, human beings, through mind upload and the development of AI, will be able to achieve a pooled consciousness, which one can only hope will lead to a betterment of many ills that plague our world today.
Yet, this connectivity exists already today, as it has for as long as the universe has existed. Moreover, if we believe the System Theorist and Integral Theorist Ervin Laszlo, our universe, having benefited from the infinite learning of this connectivity and coherence, is itself only an enhancement of previous universes, thereby explaining the ultimate perfection that enables every aspect of our cosmic life to come together and function.
Laszlo further speculates that every atom in our body is connected to every atom in the universe, including naturally to those of our fellow biological entities. To support these claims of connectivity between human beings and the cosmos, Laszlo provides a plethora of examples and scientific tests that have been performed over the past 100 years. Regrettably, the troubling and fascinating results from these tests have been mostly ignored by the scientific community (and by the medical community as well, as explained by, for example, Deepak Chopra in his books on Quantum Healing) and by the public as a whole, who prefers instead to discount them and to classify them as alternative and mystical belief.

This loss of ‘focus’ keeps us as a species from reaching towards global consciousness and higher states of being, a realm which is today the exclusivity of a very few, usually those practicing meditation or those gifted with certain abilities such as healing, clairvoyance or even deep compassion and empathy. While technology can be the promise for a better future, there is no need to wait for the Singularity and beyond for the merging of our minds with that of machines to reach global consciousness. We can renew a process that was lost a long time ago by reaching out to the cosmos and by embracing the possibilities of the quantum vacuum that exists all around us and within us. Because we are the cosmos.

‘I drink your milkshake…I drink it up!’
This innocuous line spoken towards the end of There Will be Blood by Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day Lewis, captures in the way it is delivered, the strange, powerful, sometimes magnificent but most often disturbing tone and atmosphere that permeates Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film.

An epic about oil, greed, good and evil, and, really, about nihilism, There Will be Blood is a troubling piece that resembles Requiem for A Dream (2000) in its desire, to quote more or less accurately something that Aronofsky once said about his film, ‘to throw you from a window and then once you are dying on the pavement, to throw a piano on top of you’.
The first 20 minutes of the film, which contain no dialogue, set the tone for what is a deeply unusual and remarkable film that makes a few statements with the power to draw contemporary comparisons, but that decides to keep them somewhat obscured in favour of an explosion of hatred, loneliness and ugliness. Surely, one can’t watch this film and be satisfied that it is simply about greed, capitalism and a loss of certain values that are pertinent to 21st century society (as they were already 100 years ago).

This lack of a clear message, as well as a haunting score and a very unlikeable protagonist (albeit so charismatic that we can’t take our eyes off him – enough has been said about Day-Lewis’s astonishing performance) who is the sole focus and the only fully developed character in the entire film, has disturbed many viewers and critics, depriving them of a traditional frame through which to appraise the film.

There is little doubt that There Will be Blood is not a standard film. Paul Thomas Anderson has delivered a work that is ambitious, different, and that pushes the envelop of traditional filmmaking. In the process, it asks the viewer to allow for a different type of experience to come through, one that is not always ‘pleasant’ but that certainly shows a high level of creativity and craftsmanship.

I love cinema because good movies take me to places in my self that I don’t always visit in real life. A good film for me is a film that knows how to tickle a part of my brain and arouse all sorts of emotions. These don’t have to be as simple as happiness or sadness or fright or laughter. It can be something else, something gray, something in between, something uncomfortable. In There Will be Blood, Anderson and Day-Lewis succeed magnificently in taking us to a place where cinema rarely goes, and they do so through a mastery of all the filmmaking ingredients, although in degrees and combinations that stand outside of usual conventions.

This channel 4 documentary, narrated by Christopher Sykes provides an overview of Aubrey de Grey’s efforts to defeat aging. An interesting look at the man who believes that we can perhaps abolish death within the next three decades and whose SENS research into aging is the source of much controversy, it nonetheless offers little new information for those of us who follow de Grey’s work on a regular basis.

I personally even found the selection of shots and angles to be at times purposely unflattering towards the various people that make up the anti-aging group by depicting them as a bit wacky and outside of the ‘norm’. In most cases, the pro-de Grey individuals are interviewed in their home or in a ‘non-institutionalized’ setting, which provides more opportunity for personal judgement and subjective conclusions, whereas the anti-longevity group is mainly seen in laboratories or expensive offices filled with books, as if to tell us that these people know what they are talking about and thus, that they should be trusted.

Does one need to be weird to want to live forever? That seems to be what this documentary would want you to believe. It also reinforces the cliché that if you are not within the norm (whatever this means) then you are strange and eccentric.
As I already explained when I reviewed Radical Evolution, it is interesting that the people who tend to be opposed to a drastically increased or to an unlimited lifespan tend to view those who seek to abolish death as mad geniuses who will do the world more harm than good. They also believe that today’s definition of normal is the one that must be upheld forever, the one that must endure. This obviously implies a complete disregard for what used to be considered normal (a very slippery concept when appraised in the context of history and within cultural considerations), and naturally, for what could become normal. It also implies, in my view, a total selfishness and narrow-minded belief that what we have today is as good as it is ever going to get and that our 20th and 21st century values (or rather, their values) are better and more appropriate than past or future values.

The ‘humanistic’ and preferred angle chosen by many who are opposed to eternal life is that death is what gives meaning to it all (see my review of The Fountain). Without death, one wouldn’t fully be alive. Quoting Freeman Dyson, ‘our humanity depends on the old ones getting out of the way’. Perhaps it is so; perhaps our definition of humanity today depends on newer generations replacing the old ones. But at the centre of these discussions is the word humanity. The anti-aging camp, and futurists in general, accept the idea that our humanity, which is what defines us in terms of values, belief systems, qualities and characteristics, can continue to evolve, even if it means abandoning today’s definition. The critics, on the other hand, seem incapable of accepting a future that will have redefined what it means to be human, especially not if we are the ones who have taken over the process of evolution.
Leave it to nature they say. Do not interfere with the natural order of things. But many of the humans race’s great accomplishments have occurred due to its interference with the natural order of things. If this were not the case, we would be living in a very different world today. I believe it is in the nature of Man to seek control over its own destiny. We live at a time when technology has given us the tools to do so with unparalleled assertion, confidence and power. We are now in control and to negate this potential would be foolish. Rather than negation, what we need is proper monitoring and ethical management of these issues and for the sceptics to apply their knowledge and concerns towards ensuring, not that this research does not happen since it will regardless, but rather, that it does happen in the safest and most beneficial way for all.

Documentaries can be very manipulative and can often play to the already established opinions and beliefs of its viewers. While watching ‘Do you want to live Forever?’, I couldn’t help using my own biases to filter the information I was absorbing. And in doing so, I found Sherwin Nuland and Preston Estep’s (despite Etep’s role in anti-aging research) opinions and arguments against de Grey to be filled with the exact same fear, envy and selfishness that they accuse him of. I tremble when I hear Nuland stating that the world could be destroyed by people such as de Grey and I fear that it is instead the Nulands of this world, the people who keep telling others what is best for them and who keep referring to the norm as the ideal mode of living, as if stuck in some 1950’s suburban ideology, whom we must fear the most.

De Grey is an enigmatic character who has made it his purpose to defeat aging. Whatever his reasons are (and this is another aspect of the documentary that I had problems with; this need to connect de Grey’s quest with a lack of love as a child or with some kind of egomaniac drive), his passion is undeniable and his approach, as unorthodox and threatening as it may be to some of the established scientific community, can only bring freshness, challenge, increased awareness and interest, and, let us hope, faster results.

Related websites:

www.Mprize.org
www.ImmInst.org
www.sens.org
www.longevitymeme.org
www.fightaging.org

An ode to the beauty of the natural world, with particular emphasis on the sumptuous North American West, a condemnation of a race driven by personal gratification and material satisfaction, an homage to the power of love and of human connections, a portrayal of a remarkable, idealistic, selfish and naïve young man in his quest for a simpler life away from civilisation, Into the Wild is a riveting film whose cinematography and message linger in the mind long after the initial viewing.

Sean Penn’s fourth picture clearly shows that he is an accomplished director with a strong understanding of human tragedy and, in the case of Into the Wild and of The Pledge (2001), for placing it in the midst of humbling and majestic landscapes.

Based on the book by Jon Krakauer (the journalist and mountaineer who also wrote the tragic and fascinating Into Thin Air (1997), about a 1996 ill-fated ascent of Mount Everest), Into the Wild tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a bright young man from an affluent family in Atlanta, Georgia, who after graduation decided to leave everything behind, including his family, for a bohemian and penniless lifestyle across the American West. A modern Jeremiah Johnson, McCandless’s spiritual quest led him, after almost 2 years of nomadic wandering, to Alaska where he attempted to live alone in the wild.

There seem to be different opinions about McCandless’s personality and relationship to the world and whether he deserves the positive depiction that he received in Krakauer’s book and now in Sean Penn’s film. But regardless of whether McCandless truly was such a likeable person, Into the Wild is a breathtaking film that should make anyone long for the serenity and splendour of a world that we are sadly in the process of destroying.

How many times have we seen this story brought to the screen before? Man comes across a deal gone wrong, takes the money and tries to get away with it. If it is true that all film scenarios pretty much revolve around 32 plots (which it probably isn’t), then only real talent can make such a cliché story interesting again.

Enter the Cohen Brothers, the entity that might be known one day as one of the best director in the history of cinema. Forget Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and forget The Ladykillers (2004), two mediocre films that do little to tarnish an otherwise spectacular filmography. The Cohen brothers are back on top and while it is difficult, and probably inappropriate, to compare such a hard and dark film with some of their previous work, this latest effort is nonetheless as good a film as they have ever made.
No Country for Old Men has an intensity and rhythm that reminded me of the recent Scorcese, The Departed (2006). No fluff, no silly and excessive music, no unnecessary dialog, no gratuitous scenes, no let down in the strength of the performances, only tight and solid directing, scripting, and acting (and beautiful cinematography as well).
Many have spoken about the performance of Josh Brolin as a career defining role (good enough apparently to convince Oliver Stone to want to cast him as George W. Bush in Stone’s next biopic), or about Tommy Lee Jones’ convincing turn as a laconic and delusioned Sheriff (one can’t help but to try to create a connection between this character and the one he played a couple of years ago in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)) but I personally would like to single out Javier Bardem in what i consider to be one of the best villain performance of all time. I can’t remember the last time the character of a madman was so brilliantly and realistically depicted on screen (perhaps Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, or Ralf Fiennes in Schindler’s List). I still get chills down my spine thinking about some of the killings in the film and about the character’s methods, which involve a mix of principles, sadism and intelligence.

Overall, an intense, dark and disturbing film that ranks as one of the best thrillers ever made.

I am grateful to Francis Lawrence, who previously directed the decent comic book adaptation Constantine (2005), for bringing seriousness, darkness and sobriety to the Hollywood Sci-Fi blockbuster. In a world where the Michael Bays are working hard to reduce the global IQ and EQ levels with mind numbing big budget action, it is refreshing to see a director trying to add cleverness to escapist entertainment.

I am Legend is based on the 1954 influential novel by Richard Matheson, and it is now the third time that this apocalyptic tale of the last man on earth, somehow immune to a virus that has either killed everyone else or turned them into vampire/zombie hybrids, has been made into a film. The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price, has become a cult classic and set the standard for all future zombie films (George A. Romero has often credited the novel as his inspiration for Night of the Living Dead (1968)) while The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, who brings to the film his Planet of the Apes (1968) / Soylent Green (1973) ’screw the world’ cynism, does the original novel less justice and suffers from several problems, least of which is the laughability of its creatures.

One of the most annoying trademarks of Hollywood blockbusters, at least to me, is the supposedly funny one-liners that the hero typically spurts out in the most improbable situations. Normally used to alleviate tension and to bring lightness where there should be none, the blockbuster funny one-liner dumbs down and cheapens the cinematic experience. I was able to count only one in I am Legend (‘I like Shrek’) which is a major improvement over the number that can be found, for example, in two of Will Smith’s previous Sci-Fi efforts, Independence Day (1996) and I, Robot (2004) or in Michael Bay’s most recent disaster, Transformers (2007).
One is also the figure I came up with for the number of really poorly scripted scenes (Bob Marley Sr.), which, again, is quite an achievement for a film this expensive and this heavily marketed.

That is not to say that I am Legend has no other flaws but, again, when measured within the greater considerations of the blockbuster, these seem fairly harmless and do not detract too much from the overall viewing experience. The sobriety is at times reminiscent of The Quiet Earth (1985) while a couple of chilling scenes will bring 28 Days Later (2002) to mind and even The Descent (2005) in one case.

In 2001, Judith Berman stated that Science Fiction literature was suffering from a failure of imagination and that the best most writers could offer us these days is Sci-Fi without the Future. This point was made again more recently by Alex Steffen in WorldChanging. After all, even Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk supremos William Gibson and Neil Stephenson have decided to take a break from the future in favour of the present or the past. In the words of Gibson himself, ‘the future is already here. I have become convinced that it is silly to try to imagine futures these days‘. Some writers now find it difficult, and perhaps also less fun and challenging, to write about a future, the near future at least, that has caught up with us. Cyberpunk’s not dead some might retort, but a strong case can be made that we are today experiencing the future more strongly than ever before.

One man for whom the very near future continues to be a source of inspiration is Vernor Vinge. Vinge, an ex-mathematician and computer science professor from San Diego State University, whose novels A Fire Upon the Deep (92) and A Deepness in the Sky (99) I can highly recommend, achieved notoriety in Futurist circles when he proposed his theory of The Singularity at a NASA conference in 1993. Vinge, along with many other fellow futurists such as Raymond Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, believes that we are fast approaching the point at which technological advancement will become so rapid that the possibilities will become endless.

In Rainbows End, which won the Hugo prize in 2007, he explores, by way of a cyber thriller, the impact of this exponential growth in technology on the merging of the real world with the 4 scenarios described in the 2007 report The Metaverse Roadmap issued by The Acceleration Studies Foundation: Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality and Lifelogging.

What makes this novel a convincing and compelling read is not necessarily its big ideas or even the underlying plot. Instead, it is the amount of details that Vinge uses to describe everyday life circa 2025. Almost any field of progress that is being discussed today is represented and elaborated on in Rainbows End, providing for an overall depiction of a richly constructed ‘reality’ that feels extremely believable. While great strides have been made in areas such as health, transportation, building and construction, and genetic engineering, it is around the 4 Metaverse scenarios mentioned earlier that Vinge builds its portrayal of a near-term society. As it is envisioned in The Metaverse Roadmap, reality in 2025 is a mishmash of the ‘real’, the virtual and the augmented, with the later two (both enhanced and complemented by lifelogging) increasingly replacing the first one as the preferred choice for socializing, learning, communicating, and for entertainment. Vinge uses an ‘old-fashioned’ character, Robert Gu, a man born in the 1960s and cured of Alzheimer in 2025, to not only advance the plot of the story, but also to contrast two worlds and sets of beliefs and to attempt to answer the question: what would life be like for a person with prejudices about the future and about technology if this person woke up in 2025? How would he or she deal with a society where most people below a certain age now wear special contact lenses connected to an astounding amount of computer power embedded in their clothing, thereby allowing them to access instantly information about anything they could possibly want to access, to communicate immediately with anyone on the planet, to create whatever virtual spaces they desire to enable this communication and to see in various layers of augmented reality the fruits of their creation or the results of their requests for information and interaction? In short, how would such a person feel if reality as they knew it had pretty much ceased to exist?

But Vinge doesn’t stop there. He also goes into a fair amount of details about the technology itself and about issues that are already important today with regards to the internet and the WWW and that will obviously become even more so in the future: open source vs proprietary, free vs fee-based, security, privacy, gender, identity, laws and regulations, universal currency, trust, reputation…

If this sounds like a lot to chew on, credit must go to Vinge for adroitly incorporating these discussions into the plot and into the daily life of the characters without the dialogue ever sounding preachy or pedagogic. It’s good entertainment all the way but skilfully mixed with all that you might need to know about the technological, social, economical and philosophical benefits and challenges facing humanity within the next 20 to 30 years.

Was Robert Redford ever a good director? That is the question i asked myself as i sat and watched, barely able to restrain myself from throwing a brick at my TV after only 25 minutes, his latest film about US foreign policy.

Yes, i remember fondly Ordinary People (80), The Milagro Beanfield War (88) and Quiz Show (94), but upon closer inspection, his directing career has been on the whole fairly average. I think Redford’s acting career in the 60s and 70s is what established him in my and in many others’ psyche as an institution, somewhat of a Hollywood legend who could do no wrong. But his directing efforts and choices of roles for the past 15 years, along with some interesting insights into his personality as revealed in Down and Dirty Pictures, insights which by the way make complete sense when compared to his consistently controlling and unemotional acting style, would indicate that, perhaps, Redford should be demoted to average status as both a director and as an actor.

Lions for Lambs profoundly lacks any subtlety and feels that it could have been written and directed by any C level film student. The film has some of the most tedious, arrogant, boring and embarassing scenes in recent memory, and 90% of them include Redford himself as some kind of Ueber-cool teacher trying to preach some mechanical, sanctimonious nonsense to an irritating student. I have no idea how Redford possibly saw any flow and sense of realism in these scenes. They are so badly written that i was gasping in exasperation. And there are the scenes between Cruise and Streep, which are barely more intelligent in terms of conveying a message. Cruise actually provides the only interesting performance in the entire film. Even Streep seems to be drowning, managing to come up for air only once or twice. Finally, a third story about 2 GIs in Afghanistan gives us the required dose of action, as if Redford was concerned that we would be bored by all the talking and that we would misinterpret his intentions and assume that he hates the US armed forces.

I won’t even go into the details of his liberal, anti-Bush message, as this film doesn’t deserve it. Which is a shame because i agree with what Redford has to say. It’s just too bad he doesn’t know how to say it.

We live in a world where the artificial and the real are merging at an increasing speed. Indeed, the word real started to lose its original meaning many years ago, particularly in the 80s, as exemplified by the works of people such as Beaudrillard and Fukuyama.  Simulation, simulacrum, hyperreal, virtual reality, augmented reality, alternate reality, all different ways to describe variations of what is slowly replacing the real as we used to know it. As i described in this post and in this essay, animation is an ideal tool to explore these alternate realities and to depict visions of the future. But there are different ways of using animation in film, and some are better than others, depending on the criteria that one uses to judge a film.

Robert Zemeckis, who in 1988 was already exploring the merging of real characters and animation with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, brings his Polar Express (04) performance capture technology to Beowulf, the classic 8th century English poem. Performance capture, another term for motion capture, means that ‘real’ actors, equiped with sensors, act out the scenes in front of a bluescreen, which are then rendered as digi-animations. In most cases, performance capture is used to capture movement. In the case of Beowulf, it is also used to capture visual appearance. And this is where Zemeckis lost of a lot of critics.

For these people, watching The Incredibles (04) or Ratatouille (07) is one thing. In these films, it is clear that the animated humans are not real, even if the story takes place in a copy of our world. Therefore, their acting is not judged on the same level as that of a human actor. However, in Beowulf, the digital characters look a bit like Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. Hence, a natural reaction for many is to expect more from these characters than they would from an animated one. Afterall, acting is an essential element of solid filmmaking. If this acting is not properly conveyed due to technological limitations, then the film naturally suffers. For this reason (and a couple of others connected to the script), films such as Beowulf can not be as effective and impactful on the collective psyche as animated features have become. But it’s probably only a matter of time and Zemeckis must be given credit for pushing the envelope and for playing with the medium.

But Beowulf is also very entertaining and if one can see beyond the limitations mentioned above, there is plenty of action and escapist fun to be had with this tale of warriors, demons and dragons.

I have never drunk a liter of corn syrup, but i can imagine that it must feel pretty similar to watching The Astronaut Farmer. After a very brief initial period of enjoyment, discomfort sets in, followed rapidly by nausea, resulting in the end in sickness.

This film, about a discharged NASA officer turned farmer who still harbors dreams of going into space and decides to build a rocket in his backyard, has enough cliches and cheap, preachy lines to make you want to forget that the Polish brothers once managed to make two decent films: Northfork (2003) and Twin Falls Idaho (1999) . But the Cohen brothers they are not.

It never ceases to amaze me how much bad acting and miscasting (only Virginia Madsen and Bruce Dern are properly cast and deliver interesting performances) and amateurish writing can still make it to the screen.

Some will be able to look beyond the film’s obvious flaws and will find this feel-good tale entertaining. But its cheap sentimentalism and messages of family, heroism, courage and of the importance of role-models will probably hold more appeal to the US market than to us European cynics.

As we approach the fourth and final season of the TV series Battlestar Galactica, based on the 1978 cult Sci-Fi series of the same name, and with the recent release of the excellent Razor, it is worth stating how surprisingly addictive this modern version is. I can’t remember ever following a TV series for three years in a row, but that is exactly what I have been doing with Galactica, even though I initially got into it somewhat reluctantly, assuming that modern television, which I have come to associate for the most part with trash TV, could not possibly deliver on the promise of the original series, and to a larger extent, could not, week after week, year after year, provide intelligent Sci-Fi.

But Galactica has done just that. There have been many moments when the different style and vision of a new director became too obvious and created a disjunction in the viewing experience and, in some cases, resulted in quite boring episodes, but overall, the series has been consistently solid, entertaining and clever.

Being the cynic that I am, I spent the first few episodes listing all the inconsistencies I could find (and there were many) and why certain things such as fashion, books, pens, products designs, allergies, cancer, city architecture, and much more, all looked and felt so terribly 20th century. A civilization that has mastered the ability to build ships that travel across space but that still writes with pens, uses notebooks and can’t find a cure for breast cancer…At that point, I felt that the problem with Galactica was that it failed where so many Sci-Fi films or series have failed before…it failed to effectively and convincingly create the world that it is supposed to create. Whether for budget reasons or for wanting to keep the viewers in an area of familiarity, or simply, for lack of trying, Galactica uses a large number of current human metaphors, traditions, and habits to portray a world that exists far into the future (or into the past)….but that world should in fact look nothing like today’s world. A civilisation that is capable of building faster-than-light ships, a civilisation that split a long time ago from the civilisation that lived on earth, so long ago in fact that new myths have had time to develop, would dress, eat, behave, live, and possibly even look very different from the way we do today.

But I suppose only Sci-Fi nerds like myself would let that bother them, and in all fairness, I fully realize that sustaining a TV series for 4 years without making these types of mistakes would require a higher budget and/or an increasing reliance on animation and, ultimately, the series would probably end up with a much smaller audience due to a lack of familiar, earth-like, frames of reference.

Despite these initial concerns, I found myself slowly captivated and sucked into this world that adroitly combines human and personal stories with larger issues that draw on current events (torture, war, terrorism, tolerance, politics, genetics….) that also seem fairly plausible as potential issues for the future; well, for the near future at least, since if one looks seriously deep into the future, one would expect some of these issues to be resolved, or at least, to have taken on a very different meaning.
Most of the characters are well developed and cast, and each episode (with the occasional exception) has at its core a strong storyline that offers its own rewards but rarely seems disjointed from the overall and consistent thread of the series.

In the end, it is refreshing and pleasing to see a Sci-Fi TV series being handled with such genuineness and earnest. Battlestar Galactica has definitively done its bit towards restoring credibility to televised Sci-Fi and to Sci-Fi in general.

What do Michael Clayton (07) and The Man from Earth, two very different films which I watched this week, have in common?
They are both respectable and honourable efforts with dreadful endings. They both deal with beautiful shades of grey that sadly bend and dissolve under the pressure of the all-too easy and ever so reassuring black and white. They speak of ambiguity, uncertainty and ambivalence, but can only snap back, or break, like a rubber band that has been stretched too far, to the comfort and familiarity of the expected.
The Man from Earth is one of those talking films that relies on one location only, in this case a living room, the type of film that seems to be taken straight out of the world of Theatre. Such films need to be adroitly directed and require a very tight script to keep an audience that’s been trained to expect something else from the film medium, from feeling boredom. I remember being bored to tears once watching the arrogant and tedious, one-room only, Friendship’s Death (87). But The Man from Earth, about a man explaining to his friends that he must move away and leave them because he is 14,000 years old and does not want to see them age (and does not want to attract unwelcome curiosity), is much closer to 12 Angry Men (57), or even the more recent Primer (04), and moves at a good enough pace to keep us interested in the possibilities that the discussion raises. Like the characters in the film, the friends who do not know if they should send this man they have known for 10 years to the asylum (perhaps to hang out with that guy from K-Pax) or if they should believe him, but who at the same time can’t stop themselves from asking him more questions, we find ourselves wanting to hear more of their questions and more of his answers. As mad and implausible as his revelations may sound, the screenplay, completed by Sci-Fi short story writer Jerome Bixby shortly before his death in 1998, is so smartly written and laced with so much sharp and plausible dialogue that one begins to think: why not?
Sadly, as mentioned earlier, this nicely challenging and entertaining low budget film falls apart at the end, closing with two scenes that are simply too sweet, convenient and that seem to exist for no other purpose than to raise the audience’s feel good factor…

Planet Terror has over-indulgent geekiness written all over it. B-movies have always been made with a specific crowd in mind, the type that can easily look beyond the obvious cinematic limitations of the movie and instead can find in it an interesting form of entertainment, and in some cases, the epitome of coolness, whatever that may mean. With the passing of time, these movies also have the potential to attract additional viewers through the ‘nostalgia effect’. When watching such films, one is taken back to the 50s, 60s, or, as it relates to Planet Terror, to the 70s when the Grindhouse double bill developed its legions of followers. Personally, and obviously one can deduce from this that I am not an admirer of these Grindhouse films, I believe that it is the knowledge of going back to a specific point in time, to experience a piece of ‘culture’ from a certain decade and country, that makes some of these films watcheable, and, at times, enjoyable. Most of them were bad films, but they were not always made with the knowledge that they were bad, or if they were, time has taught us to look back on them with anthropological compassion and with some kind of tolerant understanding.
However, when Tarantino and Rodriguez had the bright idea to come up with a deliberately bad double feature called Grindhouse (Planet Terror and Death Proof, marketed separately in Europe), to honor the past, and in Tarantino’s words, to offer viewers something ‘fresh and original’, they either must have assumed that the entire world lives on the same geeky film planet as they do and would rush to the cinemas to see their films, or, as is most likely the case, they just decided that they wanted to please themselves and do something to pay homage to a form of cinema they both love. I can just picture the both of them sitting in some room, writing the script, and telling each other: ‘a machine gun instead of a leg? Right on!’, ‘let’s make the reel look old. Now that’s fresh’, ‘and then the head explodes…how cool is that?’
The problem is that none of this is in fact that fresh or original (unlike both director’s early work). It’s old. And it only works as new for about 15 minutes and then wears off quickly, leaving behind a profusion of mindless and silly gore, and, regrettably, not one iota of scariness…even worse: the film is not funny. What kind of a Zombie film does not make you either laugh or scream?
I said to a friend ‘it’s a bad movie’. To which he responded: ‘That’s the point’. But, no, I believe his answer is the one missing the point. The real point is: it’s a bad movie. The fact that it is an intentional bad movie does not turn it into a good movie. And let us not be deceived by an artsy-fartsy, Rodriguez/Tarantino-can-do-no-wrong-because-they-are-so-cool, you-either-get-it-or-you-don’t temptation to see something that isn’t there. Remove the names of the directors, and the appeal of the film drastically goes down.

Of course, the debate between B-movies lovers and bashers has been raging for decades and it will not be solved today. If Rodriguez and Tarantino were hoping to please the lovers, they probably succeeded. If, on the other hand, they were attempting to attract some of the skeptics, I believe they failed.

One would be hard-pressed these days to not notice the ever-increasing role that China is playing in all affairs of the world. The hunger of this industrial juggernaut for more consumption and production seems to be constantly rising, swallowing in the process so much energy and raw materials that an increasing number of people around the world are now asking about the human and environmental cost of this manufacturing escalation. Naturally, the Chinese are responding that these people should also question the same cost produced by their own countries over the past 100 years, that China has a right to augment its productivity and the ‘well-being’ of its people and that the country is doing more than any others to combat the negative environmental effects of its alarmingly fast entry into the world of mass consumption and production.
Still, the statistics are alarming: 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China, coal production to double until 2020, 400 new cities planned over the next 20 years (including 233 Eco-cities, if the Dongtan model proves successful), around 14,000 people dying per year in industrial accidents (Corpwatch), about 60 percent (700 million people) of the population are poor peasants, the second largest producer of CO2 after the US, which it will overtake next year, the list goes on…
How can such an incredibly growth take place without triggering a chain reaction of negative consequences for many of the Chinese people, for the planet and thus, for all of us?

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So here I am, at this party in the Hollywood Hills, hanging out with my loser screenplay writer friend, when Michael Bay walks in with a girl around each arm. Out of all the parties in LA, Michael Bay has to walk into mine. Determined not to let it get to me, I undertake a precise and thorough strategy of avoidance, which works for most of the evening, until another loser friend of mine, this time a Foley operator, who mysteriously appears to know Bay, decides to introduce me to this evilest of all evil directors. Doing my best to hide my repulsion, I reluctantly shake the man’s hand and immediately start to feel nauseous all over, as if I had just put on the ring to rule them all, and had acquired the ability to see the darkness and shadows around me, or in this case, in front of me. And, clearly wanting my death, some guy who evidently exists on a different cinematic plane than I, barges in and exclaims some idiocy along the lines of ‘loved your Transformers Michael’, which naturally brings me closer to regurgitating my Shirataki noodles dinner. Not that I would mind plastering Michael Bay with some no-carb, no-fat vomit, but even Themis, the Greek Goddess of Justice, is not on my side this evening, and I must try to take consolation in the belief that, while slightly more successful than me, Michael Bay remains a cinematic barbarian with no appreciation of cinema as an art.

Documentaries have the capacity to expose their filmmaker’s partiality, willingly or unwillingly, in a much stronger fashion than feature films can, for the simple reason that documentaries claim to portrait reality and to expose the truth. But what is the truth? Is one person, in this case, a filmmaker, capable of exposing the entire truth of a topic? Or do they simply expose mainly one side of it, their preferred side, their own understanding of the truth, which is usually a counterpoint to a dominant view or ideology? How effectively do documentaries reach out to people who do not share the views of the filmmaker and to the people who truly need to be made aware of a different angle to a certain situation? Many decent documentaries such as Why We Fight and Iraq for Sale end up mostly preaching to the choir, which certainly makes the choir feel good about their already more-or-less established convictions, but it does not do enough to make the other side question their own beliefs.

Therefore, it could be argued that some of the best documentaries are the ones that try to not convince the viewer of any truth, either by equitably showing both sides of an argument without adding a biased conclusion, or by skillfully threading the middle line between both sides, never really taking sides. Brilliant examples of this are Errol Morris’ The Fog of War and Marcel Ophüls’ The Memory of Justice. I suppose one could argue that there is always a trace of bias in all films or documentaries. Godard’s typical Godardian statement that ‘a tracking shot is a moral issue’ demonstrate that all aspects of filmmaking, from the location and movement of the camera, to the order in which the scenes are scripted to the final editing decisions, are all part of a deliberate decision by the filmmaker to tell a story according to his or her own opinion.

Michael Moore chose early on in his career to dispense with any attempt to hide his bias. He has embraced the documentary style as a means to fully express his opinion and to punch the side that he is trying to expose. In a sense, he has appropriated the truth and made it his. He also seems to know a thing or two about marketing and film promotion, which has allowed him to take the documentary style into a new realm of profitability and mass viewing. Throughout this process, he has made a lot of enemies, from the people he attacks in his films to others who simply do not enjoy the manipulative style of his work.

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