Tuesday, November 22, 2016

MOVIE REVIEW: ARRIVAL (2016)

Arrival
Based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang

Starring
Amy Adams
Jeremy Renner
Forest Whitaker
Michael Stuhlbarg
Tzi Ma
Mark O’Brien

Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Screenplay by Eric Heisserer
Music by Johan Johannsson
Cinematography by Bradford Young
Edited by Joe Walker


“Don’t let it end this way…”
-Klingon Chancellor Gorkon’s (David Warner) dying words in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

“Holy fuck . . .”
-Ian (Jeremy Renner) in the film Arrival (2016)

A woman, a new mother (Amy Adams) speaks to us in poetry about time, and loss, and mortality. We see a life in fast forward-birth to death-a young daughter’s life cut short, in fact, leaving a divorced, bereaved mother to pick up the pieces and soldier forward with her life as a college professor. She is absorbed into her daily routine, as she walks through a university common area where students and staff cluster around a giant flatscreen. When she gets into the lecture hall, most of her students are absent, and those that are present are glued to their screens. She asks what’s up. A student answers by requesting the professor to tune the flatscreen to a news channel …

Strange objects-designated ‘shells’ by the US government-manifest in the skies over twelve human nations all across the Earth. They have no visible means of propulsion, and emit no waste products measurable by Earthling science. The shells look like slices off some titanic, impossibly hard alien fruit, or maybe the shavings off some monstrous carving. They just hang in the sky, defying all our physics, no doubt provoking hack cable news pundits to make references to H.G. Wells,  the Sword of Damocles, maybe out-of-context (mis)quotations from the Bible, especially the Book of Revelations.

One of the twelve shells has touched down in Montana. The US Army mobilizes to throw up a security/quarantine perimeter around the alien object. A secret effort is made to attempt to communicate with whatever intelligence lies within the shell ...

Soon enough, the woman from the cryptic opening is further delineated within her professional context: Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) of the US Army gets in touch with linguist and college professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), whose mastery of human languages in both theory and practice makes her a vital asset to the US’s Forever Wars on Terror. Colonel Weber, abruptly visiting her office in civvies with an armed escort, makes a terse, complimentary reference to their previous collaboration involving translations from Farsi: “You made short work of those insurgent videos.” Dr. Banks says, “You made short work of those insurgents.” Her solemn tone evokes a sense of betrayal-she didn’t sign on to be a cog in a killing machine. But when Colonel Weber offers her a chance to work on translating what may be an extraterrestrial language-the faltering initial gambit of First Contact between humanity and an intelligent alien species-she jumps at the chance.

Dr. Banks is, after some runaround by the government, inducted into a secret operation to communicate with the alien beings inside the shells. Banks is paired with Ian (Jeremy Renner) an astrophysicist. They are overseen by Weber and the deeply suspicious, but intellectual, CIA agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg). Dr. Banks and Ian are paired up to work on the problem of communication with extraterrestrials from the differing perspectives of language and mathematics. After some initial discussion of the differences between the soft science of linguistics and the hard science of numbers, Dr. Banks and Ian, consummate professionals who respect each other, get to work on the essential question to be posed to the aliens: “What are you doing on Earth?”

Meanwhile, human societies lose their shit. What’s left of it. Especially here in the USofA: food riots; mass suicides by a religious cult; the National Guard is deployed to maintain order through force; conspiracy mongering by online socially mediated echo chambers stokes fear and distrust of science; talking heads of corporatist Neoliberal media outlets churning out sensationalist pseudo-scientific talking head chatter dilute the information ecology; and, through it all, the very worst human instincts are aided and abetted by online right-wing, Neo-Fascist, and white supremacist disinformation ops. Ignorance, fear, anti-intellectualism, nationalism, racism, and late stage capitalist distortion of reality for infotainment, profit, and fuel purposes derange the human species’ collective capacity for communication and collaboration. Suspicion is also generated by the secretive efforts by national governments to keep their efforts to communicate with the shells under wraps.

Dr. Banks and Ian feel the pressure from Weber and Halpern to force results by cutting corners on scientific rigor within the security culture bubble thrown up to maintain US supremacy, even as other nations compete to be the first to crack the alien riddle. China, led by the hawkish General Shang (Tzi Ma), is the primary rival to the US. Nuclear armed, paranoid nation states all in thrall to doctrines of national supremacy, all trying to be first to decide whether to slaughter the aliens or forge a way to the negotiation table. It’ll all work out in the end-won’t it?

Director Villeneuve crafts a sci-fi film as visually and sonically rigorous and mysterious as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while weaving  in human emotions of loss, longing, wonder, despair, paranoia, anger, hatred,  and desperation. This is science fiction which is grounded in the central performance of Amy Adams, with the special effects as a support, contra Kubrick’s masterwork which casts human beings as specks within the cosmos. Humanity, however imperfect, has to reckon with its own agency as citizens of the cosmos in Arrival, whereas in 2001 humanity is at the whims of vast, alien powers manipulating our evolutionary history for unknowable purposes.

A major theme is the peril of communication between past and future both within ourselves as individual sentient beings with complex memories, and on the level of a human planetary society making a faltering first attempt at hailing an utterly alien intelligence and the redefinition of human identity that entails. Another theme is disorientation: the movie begins with a montaged depiction of Dr. Banks’s daughter’s birth-life-death which gives no hint of the first contact saga to come. But the grief and loss within Dr. Banks partially drives her mission to communicate with the aliens. When the human communications team first enters the central chamber of an alien shell, they are subject to weird gravity effects, and a key shot is framed upside down hammering home the idea of losing all human moorings when coming into the presence of the truly alien.



It would be criminal for me to spoil this movie any further. Part of Arrival’s power comes from the process of discovery. This is one of those movies you’re just going to have to see for yourself, Dear Reader. It’s a smart film about ideas, emotions, and high stakes conflicts. It is the rare science fiction film that functions at the same level of sophistication as science fiction literature. Think 2001, Gattaca, Solaris, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. Arrival will pop up on lists of the greatest sci-fi movies in years to come. Try to see it on the biggest, brightest screen possible, with the sound cranked to the max.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Every Day Is Halloween 3: living skeleton actor fuck

role puts flesh, blood, guts on this frame
not to mention tumors,  scars, bad thoughts, eureka insights,
mercy, sadism, self-sacrifice, greed, ambition, romance;

build each persona up from micro-replicators
into complex thoughts, interlocking processes of pattern recognition,
various esoteric mental exercises culled from misreadings of Stanislavski and Grotowski,
irrational desires, fears, obsessions, joys;

book the gig
fill me up
live in the moment
'til it got heavy
with burdens of reputation
now he's just repeating the same old shtick
fuzzy stretch where I didn't shoot after 4:30pm for about five years
'cause I was stinking shitfaced
but it made me more of a cult fave in the years to come
I'm slurring lines on camera,
always seated, slightly listing to one side,
visible use of body double when standing and shot from behind
obvious ADR by anonymous voice over artist
since lips and tongue were only capable of blotto-talk
the voice is one thing and then another
sad at the time
YouTube clipjob comedy gold in this New Era.

online parodies resurrected me
for stunt casting, for the new wave of self-aware exploitation flicks.
a lot of work,
a lot of love from all over the world
festival and con bookings
I go even if it's on my dime
depends on the size of the marketing budget
but I'll go just for the feeling
nothing like this was ever supposed to be in my future
what a racket,  you know?

my latest job
is a dipshit detective
gets his head cut off by a psycho lumberjack
they didn't even do a proper cast of my head
the wig
from behind
kinda looks like my hair
but they do it old school when they put my head through a hole in the set floor
and have me silently work my mouth like a freshly decapitated fish head,
it's actually an homage to a previous death scene I played
in the 1980s
one of the Italian Mad Max knockoffs
I did three or four of those back in the day
current crop of directors go crazy cramming in callbacks,
scenes from the past,
b-movies constitute their own reality, history, liturgy

I have this weird dream:
I strip it all down to the bone.
not even rehearsal clothes, like in my repertory theatre days,
not even the bare skin, like in my experimental protest theatre period.
no skin, blood, guts, eyes, brains, lips, tongue,
just the skeleton
all pinned and jointed together,
suspended from an ornate carved rack,
polished and lacquered to a piercing sheen.
you crank up the air conditioning,
put the script in front of the vent,
words lift off the page,
whisper'n'rage through my ribcage.

Something that stripped down-well, they could slather on some CG if that's too pure of a hit.
Make me into a transforming talking car or some shit.
-July 2015-October 2016
Copyright 2016 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

Friday, October 21, 2016

34 Hour Tetris Escape Plan

Within the 34th consecutive hour of a Tetris session lies the bardo gate.
Death,
Transcendence of earthly illusions,
And Rebirth lies across the border.
Death and Rebirth,
But not total forgetfulness.
You will carry with you knowledge of Reconfiguration,
Transformation,
Mutation,
Iteration in the Moment.
Cross the threshold, the real work begins.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

SKULL HOPPER

SKULL HOPPER
by
William D. Tucker

1.
White light against a plaster wall
Looking with my back turned.
Window is the vacancy of intersection.
A perspective on one aspect of the jagged upper texture
There is pointing and then there are jabs from the buildings.
You sit there, white light on your back.
The room is so suffused with cold, clear light.
Nothing is hidden yet nothing is revealed in the cold, clear light.
We speak of matters with a speech that the Observer does not render exactly
In the rendering, we become a pantomime.
Nowhere above and beyond this room,
So filled with light,
Can we ever speak truly of the vacant point of intersection.
Who has ever spoken before the cold, clear light suffused this room,
How was it even possible?
It isn't blinding,  it isn't sudden,  in fact it lacks all flourish or sensationalism.
The cold, clear light simply is,  and it is in a most unavoidable way.
Nothing hidden, nothing revealed.
Looking with my back turned.

2.
Drink. Purchase. Sitting.  Another drink/purchase.
Routine of the room of the cold, clear light.
Papers. Organize. Read. Papers. Sort. Prioritize.
This is the work of the room of the cold, clear light.
Pillows. Laughing. Porch. Train car. Outdoors. Indoors.
This is the room of the cold, clear light.
Green, beige, red, blue, yellow,  purple:
These stand out in strange new ways beneath the cold, clear light.

3.
He wished to communicate sunlight on the side of a building.
Many received his communication.
Others received many other things besides.
Drink. Routine. Cold. Clear. Light.
"More real than real" as one person put it.
Critical response: good, suffused with the cold, clear light.
He did not try to explain,  except for elaborate designs and plans,
Which were not accepted as any sort of explanation.
Many view. Experience an array of emotions.
There is a look of awareness at the science and rigor of construction.
Science/rigor/effort is reduced to "emotional response. "
Cold, clear light becomes invisible.
"I get a sense of loneliness, " one person says.
"This makes me feel the way I felt in college,  at 4:25am at a Waffle House after a night of drinking," says another.
Rigor, effort,  construction, science subsumed by "emotion."
Opinion. Subjective. I like. I think.  I feel.
Drink. Routine. Cold. Clear. Light.
Looking with my back turned,
I fall back into myself,
"I wished to communicate ..."
Taking over from "He wished to communicate ..."
I see them turning away having observed, felt, thought,  and processed very briefly the offering before them.

4.
Plans. Construction. Intersecting lines of purpose.
The science and the rigor necessary to achieve that specific, sleepless effect.
"I want to communicate sunlight on the side of a building."
Result: opinions.
I think. I feel. Maybe.Kinda.Wouldn't it be funny if.  I like. I did not like.
I am approached for moments, perhaps,  having extensively researched, practiced, and calculated myself.
Moments.
The rigor disappears. Lines of intersecting purpose are softly,  gently smudged into pleasant, distinct blurs of opinion.
Invisible. Cold. Clear. Light.

5.
Opinion passed.
Return of routine.
Beyond initial foray into understanding.
Drink. Office.  Papers.  Organize. Dance. Sunbathe.
Conceive ideal spectator,
Cloned from my own mind,
Hand them operations manual,
Put them through course of certification,
Indoctrination,
Overseer behind their eyes,
Now let them work:
Analysis:
Cold, clear light becomes visible, perceptible
Intersecting lines of purpose rise to the surface.
"I can see the wires. "
Repetition of analysis as per doctrine.
Rigor and science unearthed
Notebooks are thumbed through
Paradigm shift on schedule, as per doctrine:
Cold, clear light hides nothing, reveals nothing.
Analysis,  as per doctrine:
"In this place,  there are fewer, wealthier people.No one has any memory of the past, nor any need for such memories.Everyone is prosperous, satisfied,  happy, and no one quite wants to remember how it got that way."
Paradigm shift on schedule, as per doctrine:
"He is expressing a deeply ambivalent attitude towards his subject matter. The elements of the voyeuristic collide with an overwhelming sense of the privacy of each person's universe. Ultimately,  the voyeuristic wins out, because,  alas, the end result is the work itself.  He could not resist looking into the realms of privacy and then share what he saw with others."
Paradigm shift on schedule, as per doctrine:
"It is the portrayal of man's environment as supremely indifferent that wins out over everything else. His settings are neither threatening nor comforting, destructive nor supportive, good nor evil. His humans, likewise,  have learned to dwell in this environment with all harmony by becoming creatures of supreme indifference themselves. "
Analysis.  Paradigm shift on schedule as per doctrine.  Many cycles.
Results ad infinitum.
Return of opinion.
Opinion refined,
Elaborated as per doctrine on schedule.
Still opinion.
Overseer disengaged, cloned brain discarded.
Cold, clear light hides nothing and reveals nothing.
-April 2003-May 2016

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Hustleforms

Don Quixote becomes the book
Hamlet the stage
Captain Ahab the harpoon
Bruce Wayne the cape and cowl ersatz bat
Travis Bickle the gun
The Thing from Another World every-goddamn-one.
You can't be happy with who you are
If you wish to become a legend
Good, evil, categorically transcendent
In your time
Or the time beyond.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Back when I had friends

We would get together to play Wild Bunch,
And always fight over who gets to be Ernest Borgnine.
I usually ended up being Warren Oates.
I had the wardrobe for it.
And the teeth.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Wait Comix

Excellent comix
only functional wait mechanic
to bust you out of the eternal, punitive present.