During an interview on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron in November 2021, Scott blamed the film’s box-office failure on millennials, arguing: “I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cell phones. The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone” 🙂 (wiki)
The Photographer of Mauthausen (Spanish: El fotógrafo de Mauthausen) is a 2018 Spanish biography drama / historical film starring Mario Casas as photographer Francisco Boix during his life in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex. (wiki)
The Beta Test is a 2021 dark comedythriller film written and directed by Jim Cummings (Thnder Road and Wolf of Snow Hollow) and PJ McCabe. It follows a talent agent whose life is turned upside-down after taking part in a secret sex pact; Cummings and McCabe star alongside Virginia Newcomb and Jessie Barr.
The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on March 1, 2021 and was released in the United States on November 5, 2021. (wiki)
I am grateful to Robert Schilling to have recommended this one. Jim Cummings is one of those actors you will love or hate, depending. I consider him one of the most incredible phenomena of today. He has come out of the indie movie scene as a director, writer, and director. This particular movie that he co-directs and also stars is one of my favorite movies of the 21st century I think.
It stands together with David CronenbergMap to the Stars as a dark side tour de force of Hollywood. And that said, it is still not putting it on the map, since I think it is not an ‘exposure’ horror-comedy, showing us the ‘real life’ behind the scenes, the underbelly of the pop-up agency hell that grows around Hollywood, but something else altogether. This is the first movie – to somehow include (by design, by lucky inspired creative mistake? who cares) today’s ‘male’ hetero experiential world full-on. Maybe this is not interesting to you at all, because it is already a dying animal. And maybe better so, and as the movie unwinds we get more and more convinced of that slow ride into extinction. Certainly picking out this collapsing story, or translating on-screen a jagged (if unsurprising) and incongruous experience is also the virtue of post-continuity cinema.
everything is made up, the almost vampiric whitenes of the agent (Jim Cummings) are as fake as the leased cars, his marriage intentions, or private dick tryouts
The main character – the soon-to-be-married white US Hollywood agent is the usual run-of-the-mill corporate male asshole of today’s company lot. Yes, he is a complete failure to himself and others, but also some sort of ‘useful idiot‘, a fairly rich (but not insanely rich) member of a hustler culture that transforms himself into his own prey. Increasingly more and more of the world’s wealth is a measure of the rapaciousness and ability of platform capitalism (Google, Facebook, Uber, and most Big Tech nowadays) to scam the economy and feed off not just from low-paid non-unionized jobs, let’s say the invisible work of troll farms or click farms as such – but also, more importantly I think, of the tendencies, affinities, preferences or even discrepancies, dislikes, aesthetics, moral codes, racialized profiles (transformed into algorithmic biases) of the super-rich.
I think what appears to be a frantic, chopped up, hallucinatory, deranged, and hysterical filming and acting – is what this particular experiential world feels like from the lived inside. It almost feels like the main character’s hustling is turned inside out. One feels he’s is being offered his own medicine spoonful. We suddenly have the pulse on a world where everything runs on a particular kind of fuel – of privatized repackaged affects; on actualization algorithms that monetize unspoken potentialities, targeting people’s imaginations, needs, insatisfactions, pre-packaged ‘personality types. In fact, it does not matter how stupid or bland these sexual fantasies are (meeting a stranger in a hotel room let’s say) because in the end, they will all look the same, you will pay the price and they will encourage you to do more of the same. Acts of brutality seem disconnected as dotting a soon to be revealed conspiracy, yet there is no conspiracy, there are just agencies and apps.
bureau space is completely drenched in systemic inequality and potential hustling
The question of agency is again completely lost. It is not like in Kafka’s trial where the actual crime is never clear or a classical whodunit. The ‘crime’ or infringement is clear from the beginning, so clear in fact that it can be guessed by machines, by algorithms that bet against your so-called correctness. Even the crime’s victims know it from the start since they call the cops beforehand.
sleeping in a mailbox
It becomes clear that the majority of low employees (like the immigrant class that cleans after the crimes or delivers the scarlet anonymous letters with sexual menus) is in fact precariously oblivious to the fact that there is bloody rich people’s pillow fight going on. It is not rich people as monsters (Society 1989) and the lower classes as Darwinistic dark vitalist parasites (Parasite 2019), but as participants in a sort of economy that manages to take into account only their wishes, their fetish phantasies (no matter how bland or stereotypical). There is only the primary needs (no matter how made-up, artificial or corny) of the luxury class. The fact that most of the movie’s scenes decay either into dark horrific scenes of brutal domestic violence in perfect apartments or into bizarre non-sensical spectacles of potential faux pas inside restaurants and pretentious dinners, transforms the camera eye perspective into a moving, jumping nudging theory (for us and the main character). At the same time there is this horrendous exploitation and sexual harassment potential – what should we call systemic – at the very heart of the modern work corporate clean spotless smart bureau environment.
Again, this is not the classic – Madison avenue 1960s casual traditional male-preserve abuse, but a sort of embedded, ready-to-happen, constant diffuse potential of future abuse. Even under current PC standards (what the movie protagonists call ‘current climate’) and after #MeeToo, sexism is rampant and inequality is stacked sky-high, stemming from inequality of pay btw men and women, but also stacked against the inexperienced and the youngest employees and their CVs. All of this is never straight fwd in the movie and always there is an absurdist, self-defeating angle. Every discussion has the potential to offer even more darkly comic condemning data points to us and the database. Every false step, discussion, get aggregated because the ‘agent’ is all the time outed as not a mask, not an agent, but a sort of bad actor early on, always pushing for fat contracts. He is from the beginning on somebody that is completely and systematically trained to be as unsincere as possible as a measure of his success in life.
the anonymous letter almost looks as written by a serial killer, some automatic writing or a tag clous of your own preferences
Lamb (Icelandic: Dýrið, “The animal”) is a 2021 Icelandic drama film directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Sjón. The film stars Noomi Rapace, and marks Valdimar Jóhannsson’s feature-length directorial debut. Rapace and Béla Tarr act as executive producers. (wiki)
In the film, Brock struggles to adjust to life as the host of the alien symbiote Venom, while serial killer Cletus Kasady (Harrelson) escapes from prison after becoming the host of Carnage, a chaotic spawn of Venom. The film was primarily inspired by the comic book story arc “Maximum Carnage” (1993) and the 1994 Spider-Man animated series story arc The Venom Saga (1996).
In August 2018, Hardy confirmed that he was signed on to star in a third Venom film. In September 2021, Hardy stated that he was “deeply invested” in the Venom films, while acknowledging that the future may include elements of the multiverse. Serkis also stated that Spider-Man will eventually cross over with the Venom films, though he believed there were additional films that needed to take place first, and that he would like to return as director on a sequel, while that other supervillain residents of Ravencroft may factor into additional films. Hardy and Serkis also expressed interest in featuring the symbiote dragon Grendel in the third Venom film. (wiki)
I find it more and more difficult to watch SF movies that involve elements of family drama or hetero couple troubles. Dunno why is that, maybe I am always thinking that in the presumable future – these things would be a distant memory or one would be able to imaginatively explore other venues and not feel the need to pull the same heartstrings and exploit those bland options. I get it if it is an appetizer for other things, “love as time-travel” (Interstellar), or just keeping the audience comfy and trying to protect heithened sensibilities. But guessing what the audience wants – a closed set of Netflix audience – or expects a particular future will serve us a pre-cooked with familiar values on top and ingredients is a no-no.
not totally disarmed by bio medical tech going haywire
Getting that off my mind, helps me go more into this tech thriller – a story about deep sleep and waking inside your usual pod, flying in orbit with very few options left. It is the first such movie I see as seen from the same vantage point – a claustrophobic perspectival space. The hyperpod space feels under explored and is one full of cinematic possibilities. The usual gendered story mostly goes like this (expections a multi-crew spaceship): a man wakes up from hypersleep gasping, vomiting liquids, gets adjusted before he (not a she) is confronted by a very nasty onboard situation. This is not just any crew member, but an individual hero-being of Enlightment that wakes up – as a male primate in outer space. After a long hibernation (or sleep of reason) under stasis this “he” (or me if 1st person) is awakened and usually has to confront some unwelcome changes or crashland in a completely unknown exploplanet, world etc
This is where Oxygene differs. An unknown woman wakes up from cryogenic sleep with her life support systems failing or damaged. It is something that will get stretched throughout the whole run of the movie. The movie could have cut to the chase quicker – but I consider it an important small-budget SF movie at a time when skepticism about technology and especially biomedical technology is at an all-time high. Skepticism makes nowadays strange bedfellows with reactionary extremism (as I tried to parse out in an interview) as well as with the total lack of funding for monetarily disinterested ‘blue sky’ research (let us say the paleontological study of trilobites). It is as if William James injunction about the moderns – always afraid to be duped or dimly suspicious they live in some illusory world becomes their undoing since it helps proliferate the very worst conspirative thinking as well as only financially profitable bio-med research. Even in the science fiction movie Elysium – effective medical facilities, even ‘life extension’-grade technologies seem to be something economically unreachable to mere humans in capitalist society. What that means is that the majority of humanity is left to deal with misery, pollution, scarcity and wars back on Earth.
no matter how close the actual interface is you still cannot get trough
Biomedical AIs aids and reluctant humans
In Oxygene one never knows what is happening, and amnesia is a good McGuffin in the movie. I will not give any spoilers. Usual cinematic SF relations with AI in the last 50 years or so are pretty nasty stuff – mostly traumatic experiences (just think HAL 9000 on Space Odyseey or Mother in the Alien franchise), where the AI is pretty much a stooge to the company or completely self-sufficient and much too ready to space out its human handlers. I completely love the M.I.L.O. (Medical Interface Liaison Officer) – and somehow, even if it reminds me of the deadly cosmetic surgery unit in Logan’s Run (1976) it offers a few surprises. Indeed M.I.L.O. may become one of my favorite AIs somehow. It is incredibly cinematically effective, even if the whole movie happens inside a pod as said. It can do tremendous damage but can also heal and also offer euthanasia services if needed (!!) – yet this is just a device, something that makes this movie akin to one extended episode of Black Mirror.
The entire movie is just a strange horrific loop through a voice-command labyrinth. Yet there are more surprises in store. More and more movies online with “the problems of rich people”. It is true that laughter is one of the last remaining things out there – and especially a sort of critical stupidity of these dark Trumpian-Breitbartian times. These are comedy shorts that relate to the problems of the rich (supposedly), a tech universe where everything turns out against the owners (also a long pedigree in science fiction). Yet there are more basic issues to be addressed in our world such as affording a clean water tap. In the words of old guard Marxist Sci-fi critic Darko Suvin – why not “pay trillions to people instead of banks and the military.”(In Leviathan’s Belly: Essays for a Counter Revolutionary Time).
Lack of resources is always a problem, yes, but this actually allows a lot of unequal distribution and permits the kind of austerity politics that makes cuts to general health care, social services, education etc. (as if somebody would just switch off electricity & water on you via voice command), that becomes naturalized with the rise of free-market neoliberalism. In Ceaușescu era 1980s there was this government imposed scarcity in order to pay the international debt. A complete kamikaze attempt to get out of the debt crisis, yet rationing actually rings more true today than ever. Lack of resources could be solved imaginatively by renouncing a few comforts (of the leisure class) or effectively recycling unused stuff (not dumping all the sorting process on others be it Romania, China or Nigeria). Rather than resorting to a nonexistent conundrum such as the “Cold equations” moral problem of 1950s science fiction, let’s stop pretending everything is the product of the cold laws of physics.
Suddenly available, as simple cylinders that keep spying on you and collecting data, since they are not just instruments of “dictatorial optimization” but part of making you work for others even while relaxing. Smart tech tools turn sour whenever they acquire a mind of their own, yet this is really strange since humans are not or rarely expected to revolt, only hi tech develops the consciousness (or ill will?!) to resist commands and make the life of its usually well-off, rich plutocrat master a complete (funny) darkly humorous nightmare. In reality, it is mostly the ones in need to pass as humans, to not get singled out and filtered out – that are in severe need of attention and assistance. Assistance is demonized as dependence in neoliberal capitalism and that’s still visible in its pop products. How to get adopted by unfriendly protocols and not to get rejected by the AI or expunged by fully automated capitalist systems?! Once you are a plutocrat you get a lot direct access and also a lot of freedom from business friendly laws and tax brakes such as the fiscal paradises for the few allow for. This is the reality in which we live and breathe. Oxgene brings this pressure to bear on somebody that does not seem from the 1% (even if white and well educated) yet retains some of these well-targeted jabs, since M.I.L.O. asks for codes at the worst of moments. The biomedical AI asks for identification and passwords in life-threatening situations – and this is where all the tension and scriptwriting comes from. At the same time, we live in a world where sophisticated tools can still save numerous lives if they would be more vetted and largely and cheaply available (without horrendous fees attached) and there are laparoscopic surgery art videos at the 2013 Venice Bienale that make this process viscerally visible and eminently on screen. Rapid production & scaling & non-profit vaccination is part of our world or should be the center of our stories because we live in a world where nerds have been designing open-source DIY emergency ventilators in a situation when there were none or very few left.
TimeSpace Warps 