chesleya

[chesleya]

2017 Books, Movies, TV, Games

Books

I don’t read many books. By a rough count, I read 12 this year. Here are two novels I liked:

Phillip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip - Dick’s Ubik is one of my favorite books. I decided to read Time-Slip because I have heard that it is a close second to Ubik among his books in instilling existential dread in the reader. I think that is accurate. Ubik is the better book but Time-Slip has more interesting things to say about the real world. 

John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies - I’ve always loved le Carré’s Smiley books. It’s a fun read. Some low-level troubling sexism that comes from an author who has never really known how to write women. The “message,” such as it is, is a little too obvious. I prefer Cumberbatch’s film Peter Guillam to le Carré’s own.  

I also liked the two Twin Peaks books by Mark Frost, but I would only recommend them to die-hard Twin Peaks fans (more on this below). If you want to read a book about English usage and grammar, I recommend Bryan Garner’s The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation. It has a bad name; the book is more readable than it appears from the cover. 

A 2018 resolution is to read more novels. 

Movies

I watched a lot of movies in 2017, including rewatching every single James Bond film for purposes of a ranking exercise that wound up being less interesting when I was done. 

I’m writing this before seeing a bunch of Oscar contenders because none of those came out in Oklahoma before I left for vacation in mid-December. I’m picking two 2017 movies to share my meaningless favorite 2017 movie award because they’re so different: Wind River and Lady Bird. Maybe I’ll write something about Wind River later. I don’t have much to say about Lady Bird. Other contenders for this distinguished honor: mother!, The LEGO Batman Movie, and Columbus. 

My favorite blockbuster/action-y movie of the year was Blade Runner 2049, which I put above stiff competition from War for the Planet of the Apes and The Last Jedi. 2049 is sure to be the 2017 movie I rewatch the most frequently. 

The best non-2017 movies I watched for the first time in 2017 are Birdman and Moonlight. The best actually old movie I watched for the first time in 2017 is Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. 

The non-2017 movie I rewatched in 2017 to the greatest re-appreciation is Mulholland Drive. Or maybe it was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. That movie rules. 

Movies I saw, liked, and forgot until looking at a list of movies that came out in 2017: Split, Get Out, Logan, Personal Shopper, Alien: Covenant, The Beguiled, Logan Lucky, Wormwood (on Netflix as a six-part TV show for reasons unknown, but definitely a four-hour movie). 

Movies that would probably be on this list if I’d seen them yet: Dunkirk, Coco, The Florida Project, The Shape of Water, Phantom Thread, Call Me By Your Name, Thor: Ragnarok. 

Television

The only “prestige TV” I liked this year was Twin Peaks: The Return. I didn’t just like it. I loved it to the point that it made me go back and retroactively dislike almost all television I’ve ever watched before. Nothing looks good in comparison to Twin Peaks. 

This was the year I finally watched Rick & Morty. It is great, if you can get over the fact that it has the world’s worst fans.

Video Games

2017 was a historically great year for video games. My favorite game in my favorite franchise (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) came out this year and it isn’t my favorite game of the year. That would be PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Other contenders: Super Mario Odyssey, Prey, West of Loathing, Tacoma, Destiny 2. 

[chesleya]

An album of shots of Alec Guinness in the BBC’s 1979 miniseries adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. 

[chesleya]

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

I decided to watch this in anticipation of Darkest Hour, which sounds like a not-very-good movie that Gary Oldman is spectacular in. Darkest Hour is not the first movie that can be described that way. (Also I meant to see Tinker Tailor again before going to see The Snowman, but I have skipped that for hopefully obvious reasons.) 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a great movie and Gary Oldman is great in it. It may be my favorite spy movie of all time; I’ll need to think more about that. (Post-script: Lives of Others is better than this movie.)

There are no bad performances in this movie. On this viewing (I think my fourth), the ones that struck me the most were Kathy Burke as dismissed Circus employee Connie Sachs and Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy in what I still think are their best roles. (Locke is the most impressive acting Hardy has ever done, but that movie is not as enjoyable to watch as Hardy’s scenes here). 

And of course, Oldman. Playing Smiley was probably his greatest performance. In an era of ubiquitous sequels, is it too much to ask for this same cast to do The Honorable Schoolboy, the sequel to the book? 

The Karla scene is as ambitious as it is perfectly executed by Oldman, Hoyte van Hoytema (this was the first time I noticed he was DP), and Tomas Alfredson. Worth watching this behind-the-scenes look at that scene. Screenwriter Peter Straughan (co-writer and Straughan’s wife Bridget O’Connor died of cancer during production) says that the consensus was the scene would have to be delivered as a flashback, but Alfredson had enough confidence in Oldman to basically let him pull off a short one-man show on screen for an audience of one - Cumberbatch’s Peter Guillam. It’s extraordinary. 

A lot of this movie’s early scenes are liminal - they show the before or after of important moments but don’t show the important moments themselves. Better left unsaid or unshown. That changes later on. 

Alfredson has some Wes Anderson-esque shot construction. I thought of this in the first shot of the scene depicting the torture of Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong). The shot is of a tape player over a background of bright pink and blue patterned wallpaper. It is striking. And even more so when the scene ends with a character’s brains being suddenly splattered on that wallpaper. It’s brutal, shocking, and haunting. Even on a fourth viewing. 

The routine flashbacks to the Christmas party scene drive the plot forward in ways few flashbacks do. But on this viewing I noticed something I hadn’t before. The sound occlusion in those scenes is incredible. It is very cool when the Christmas music (or the Soviet anthem) becomes muffled when the character whose point-of-view we are following passes behind a glass wall. It’s great attention to detail and it pays off in the finale, when the entire scene is drowned out by Julio Iglesias’s live rendition of “La Mer.” What a great ending. 

[chesleya]

Blade Runner 2049

2049 is not called “Blade Runner 2″ for a reason. It is set in the same world as Blade Runner, somehow little changed in 30 years, but feels very different. I note here three ways it differs:

Plotting: Deckard is given a simple task in Blade Runner. K is given a simple task in 2049. But the way these tasks unfold is very different between the two movies. Blade Runner does not telegraph what Deckard’s next move is in any way. 2049 plainly lays out what K is going to do in order before he does it. Then he does the things he says he is going to do. Blade Runner obscured (to the viewer, but not to Deckard) what in video game parlance would be called the “critical path.” 2049 might as well give the viewer a quest screen with all the steps marked with checkboxes. 

Parable: I had originally called this “narrative style,” but that seems too close to “plotting.” Does Blade Runner directly ask any questions? If you showed the movie to an extremely literal person, they might ask some factual questions about the plot. The questions the movie causes viewers to ask (like “is Deckard a replicant” and what does that mean for our own humanity) are not discussed in the movie itself. 2049 takes on all of its questions head on, driven mostly by Leto’s character Wallace, who fancies himself a god. Tyrell was a man who built robots. Wallace is a lunatic. Blade Runner indicted all of mankind for its maltreatment of replicants. By having (George) Wallace preaching about the need to build great human achievements on the backs of slaves, 2049 takes some of the load off other characters and maybe the audience. 

Visual Style: Blade Runner was a dirty movie. It is a product of the 1980s. 2049 is either a product of no time (which is often how contemporary media feels), or a product of the mid-2010s expensive blockbuster era. All gorgeous cinematography unsullied by such imperfections as film grain, unbalanced color, and strange concessions to the challenges of shooting in the dark. When K is walking through the orange haze of a post-nuclear fallout Las Vegas and the camera hovers behind him about 20 feet off the ground, it feels like you’re floating behind him. Blade Runner never feels like that. 

(A film grain aside. I miss film grain! There’s a flashback towards the end of the movie where Deckard remembers seeing Rachael for the first time, walking towards him in the Tyrell office. It’s gorgeous through the grain, which picks up strange flecks from the super bright sun through the window. When the CGI’d Sean Young appears in the flesh to tempt Deckard into helping Wallace (more Leah in Rogue One than Tarkin in Rogue One), her very being appears slightly fuzzy, no doubt because they could not totally eliminate noise in the underlying footage that formed the basis for the CGI model they superimposed on someone wearing a green suit. I thought it worked, strangely.) 

Dialogue is also easier to follow in 2049 than in Blade Runner. Lots of scenes of two characters standing indoors talking to each other, with nothing obstructing the audience’s full view of each character’s face. Maybe I’m misremembering Blade Runner, but this feels like a difference. One example, Edward James Olmos now talks like Adama instead of like his character from Blade Runner. I didn’t get that. 

2049 is “Her” if instead of being an original screenplay, it was adapted from a Franz Kafka novel. The ending of Her is optimistic. This version of Her is deeply pessimistic. I like this one more. (The Kafka comparisons are laid out and analyzed by Walter Chaw, surprise surprise. I’m not smart enough to add anything to that). 

Chaw also says that the use of the themes of Her is less fresh in 2049 than in Her. But I think this movie takes the cake for the most disturbing scene depicting a romantic relationship with an AI. That would be K’s sex scene with the replicant pretending to be his holographic whatever-you-want-to-see-and-hear girlfriend. I enjoyed the times Wallace-employee Love refers to K as both a Wallace product and a Wallace customer. Love says to K “I see you’re a customer as well.” (Does she mean Love is herself also a customer, or is she saying “as well as a product”?) When Love kills K’s holographic girlfriend, she says “I do hope you were satisfied with our product,” while looking at the hologram, not K. What does it mean for a constructed man to be in love with a constructed computer program? What does it mean for the computer program? K’s relationship with the hologram is disgusting from beat one, when he comes home to her cooking him a holographic Americana dinner while wearing a classic 1950s housewife outfit. K’s relationship with the hologram stands directly opposite Deckard’s relationship with Rachael. We know what K, Rachael, and the hologram are all manufactured people. Deckard remains ambiguous. But who can love whom? Why is it so obvious to the viewers (and, eventually, to K) that the hologram’s love for him is gross, fake, and forced? But when K tells Deckard that Tyrell set up his meeting Rachael in that moment, so that he would fall for her, and that they could have a child together, why do we reject that hypothesis, or at least set it in the back of our minds and think only of the “real” love between Deckard and Rachael? Does it even matter if Deckard is a human or a replicant? What matters, I think, is Rachael’s interiority. Was she like K’s hologram, “programmed” to tell Deckard everything he wants to hear so that Deckard would eventually impregnate her? 

If it’s not obvious, I think that love is the most interesting theme of 2049. Humanity was the most interesting theme of Blade Runner. There’s another difference. 

(Another side note: that horrifying sex scene is a great example of the kind of storytelling that modern special effects make possible. That scene couldn’t have been done to look convincing anything more than 3 years ago. That the hologram is always very slightly see through is a cool effect too. The sex scene is very Lynch. One person becoming another, two people being the same person. Hmm.)

Miscellany

I liked Leto. Here’s something that Katharine Trendacosta wrote in her great review for io9 about Leto:

Leto’s Niander Wallace isn’t, thankfully, in this movie much. First of all, an unintended consequence of his “method” is that it’s now impossible to see him in a film and not think of him as Jared Leto. He doesn’t disappear into roles anymore. If you told me that in the future, Leto becomes a blind tech billionaire who speaks in circular riddles, I’d believe you. It’s just him now. Second, he’s also so over the top that, in a movie where everyone else is giving much lower-key performances, he’s impossible to take seriously.

I agree that all you can see in the role in Leto, but I don’t mind this. I had no trouble taking him seriously, which I chalk up entirely to the production design of the places where he speaks and of the props that he uses. All of the Wallace interiors are incredible, as are these floating robots that help him see. Wallace’s weird windowless floating office is such a great contrast to Tyrell’s insanely bright dining room/office in Blade Runner. Deckard first meets Rachael in both of these rooms. But the second one is a poor copy of the first. Something something commentary about sequels? 

Gosling is great. Ford is better in this than he was in Force Awakens, giving me some confidence about the new Indiana Jones. Deckard is a different person 30 years later. Han Solo was still Han Solo, even though both he and Deckard lost children. Robin Wright and Dave Bautista are also great. Sylvia Hoeks is better than either of them (but Bautista would have been better in a larger role). Ana de Armas was good in her creepy, creepy role. 

Why does K only experience anti-replicant discrimination in one scene and never again?

The baseline tests that K undergoes are instant classic sci-fi scenes. They are shot perfectly, cutting back-and-forth between K and the camera. They are offputting for reasons that are hard to identify. As this movie's version of the Voight-Kampff tests from Blade Runner, they succeed.

I didn’t think the movie was over-long, but I do think there’s a very interesting sub-2h cut of this movie to be made. What would this movie be like without any of the scenes of K thinking he is the child? I also think it would be better without the couple of times there are flashbacks to help the audience make connections. I didn’t need to see K remembering Bautista’s character saying that it is good to die honorably before K dies, honorably. 

[chesleya]

To digress for just 30 seconds, today’s bench notes remind me that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to register my thoroughly anecdotal, unscientific observation that note-passing among the justices seems to be a fading art. This is based chiefly on the collection of bench memos kept by the late Justice Harry Blackmun, which suggest that in Blackmun’s early years in the 1970s, the justices were passing notes as often as a class of fifth-graders. The most famous of those, of course, was highlighted by Linda Greenhouse in her book “Becoming Justice Blackmun.” It was a note passed to Justice Potter Stewart by one of his law clerks (but kept by Blackmun and added to his collection). It came on an early October day in 1973 that was particularly momentous for U.S. politics and the Major League Baseball playoffs. The note read: V.P. Agnew Just Resigned!! Mets 2 Reds 0 Stewart was a fan of the Reds, who would lose that National League Championship Series to the Mets. And wouldn’t it be nice to have playoff baseball going on when the justices are on the bench?

http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/10/view-courtroom-big-windup-partisan-gerrymandering/

[chesleya]

Organized Thoughts about Apes 3

Unlike my earlier post about Spider-Man/Baby Driver, I have a more coherent organization for my thoughts about Matt Reeves’s excellent War for the Planet of the Apes. I want to explain why it’s not as good a movie as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes but is nearly as good. There are spoilers galore here, but I don’t think it’s possible to spoil the emotional power of this movie and the plot itself is simple and predictable. 

There’s nothing per se wrong with obvious parable, when it’s done well. Walter Chaw, I think, has overthought this movie somewhat when he bemoans the confusion of its metaphor: 

Too, it confuses the characters of its parables in such a way as to suggest, uncomfortably, a connection between Jews and their persecutors, and a concentration camp/Egyptian slave narrative involving the persecution of apes for cheap labour only adds to the confusion.

Caesar has long been the apes’ Moses, starting way back at the searing “NO” scene at the first climax of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. (Aside: does Caesar speaking more diminish the power of his dialog? Inclined to say it’s irrelevant because his lines are so good.) Here, the Moses story is more obvious, even if it is told in a different order. Caesar plans to send his people through a desert to find a promised land. That trip is interrupted by a mad man who enslaves Caesar’s people and puts them to work on an egomaniacal construction project until Caesar frees his people and, in the process, drowns the captors under precipitation via act of God. 

Woven into this story is an extended Apocalypse Now bit. AO Scott wrote that Woody Harrelson’s character went “full Heart of Darkness, staging a one-man remake of ‘Apocalypse Now.’” The second part is right; the first is not. I don’t think this movie has anything to do with Conrad’s story. What Harrelson does is deliberately evoke the visual signifiers of Apocalypse Now without any of the actual meaning underneath. The movie underlies this with obvious jokes of its own (”Ape-Ocalypse Now” written in an evacuation tunnel under Harrelson’s base by some escaping human--perhaps herself a film lover who saw through Harrelson’s self-aggrandizing adoption of Brando.) This is Apocalypse Now as meme. 

Harrelson’s actual motivation is not the same as Kurtz in Heart of Darkness or Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Those men are colonizers driven mad by the allure of being the all-powerful white god to non-whites. Harrelson’s unnamed Colonel (though his jacket says McCullough, he is credited only as “The Colonel”--apparently too much to ask for the jacket to just say Kurtz) is not trying to colonize anything. He’s trying to “purify.” His only motivation is killing. I choose to read the movie’s connections to Apocalypse Now as The Colonel’s choice and his choice alone. He cloaks himself in the symbology of a colonizer to justify killing. 

This reading, I think, clears up some of the confusion Chaw has about the parables here. Caesar becomes not just Moses, but Christ, to the apes. And why should he not be? He is the bringer of salvation to the apes, dating back to Rise. He has brought them out of captivity not once, but twice. And (unsurprising spoiler) he dies so that they may grow on without him. 

This is a simple movie that holds so much meaning. Some of it is obvious on the surface (see this tweet). Some of it is not. That some of it is “too ‘on-the-nose’” as Chaw wrote does not mean that as a whole the movie is. There’s still so much to unpack. A great feature of this movie is that it is so political on its surface but that there is even more meaning below that. 

Some other random thoughts: I basically never want serious blockbusters to have funny moments because they, for whatever reason, gives theater audiences the gall to start talking. When serious stuff is happening, the theater is quiet. When something funny happens, the laughing turns to chatter. I have no idea why this is. 

The score was underwhelming. Andy Sirkis is amazing. Watching some clips of Rise it’s remarkable how much the mo-cap technology has improved in just the last 6 years. 

[chesleya]

Assorted Thoughts on Baby Driver

I saw this movie last week, one day after seeing Spider-Man: Homecoming. I liked Spider-Man; it would’ve been a great movie if not for the frustrating MCU-ness of it. Saved from being bad by Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Zendaya (she was amazing in a limited role), and, most of all, Jacob Batalon playing Peter’s friend Ned. Batalon, Holland, Zendaya, and the other high schoolers were having so much fun that it was hard not to have fun yourself.

I can’t say the same for Baby Driver. I had high hopes. Hot Fuzz is sublime. Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim are solid fun movies. This isn’t really a review so much as it is a collection of assorted thoughts. For more coherent thoughts, I would recommend Walter Chaw’s review, as he is the best movie critic working today. 

I thought the last good big studio live-action comedy was Grand Budapest Hotel. Will reminded me of The Nice Guys, which is correct. There seems to be roughly one good big studio live-action comedy a year. Still waiting on this year’s. (Logan Lucky? Can’t stop watching the trailer.)

Lot of people seemed to think the movie was good and let down by a bad final act. I didn’t get this until a couple days later, when it hit me that one character’s motivation at the end made no sense and was unexplained. This doesn’t bother me that much. I thought the ending was better than the middle, which dragged. Movie should’ve been 20 minutes shorter. 

Edgar Wright’s amazing percussive gunfire (using guns as diagetic percussion set to the awesome soundtrack) ruled. 

Baby’s relationship with his foster father was the highlight of the movie. I think the movie might have been stronger if it had been written around that and left Lily James on the cutting room floor, even though I found her delightful. 

I liked the black-and-white shots. Nobody else seemed to.

The “Jamie Foxx guesses Jon Hamm’s background” scene was terrible.

The driving scenes were underwhelming. That seemed to be the main thing the movie would have going for it. So I guess the movie is underwhelming. There’s the “review.” 

How many recent movies fit this description: “Kevin Spacey plays a character named “Kevin Spacey” who goes by a pseudonym for some reason”?

Here’s a few: Baby Driver, Margin Call, The Men Who Stare at Goats, 21, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Not a movie, but you get the point. 

Spacey was scarier when he was younger. He’s obviously a great actor, but the parts that are written for him now are too transparently written for Kevin Spacey. Not his fault. (Reminds me of the joke about Dan Brown books: “Robert Langdon, a Tom Hanks-esque man....”). 

[chesleya]

Video of spire at One World Trade. Way cool.

[chesleya]

Totally awesome panel at NYU Law on concussion litigation in the NFL.

[chesleya]

Richard Costolo, Twitter CEO, delivers the commencement address of the year.

[chesleya]

"This idea of merging a chip and a shell together--it sounds simple, but it's very hard to make a reality," Gomez says. "To tackle this huge challenge, for months we shared know-how between the technical teams at Frito-Lay and Taco Bell."

Fast Company article on the development of the "DLT"

[chesleya]

Fighting GIFs - backgrounds of famous fighting games turned into GIFs

[chesleya]

It was left to Justice Antonin Scalia to provide a quip that might have provided some clarity: what was going on, he said, was a kind of government stick-up, “Your raisins, or your money.” Justice Elena Kagan almost topped that, by suggesting that maybe the Court should let the Ninth Circuit Court figure out whether the government’s raisin-regulation program amounted to an unconstitutional ”taking” of private property, or “was the world’s most out-dated law.”

Important Supreme Court case about raisins!

[chesleya]

Words fail in describing this piece.

[chesleya]

OK, so then, after more thinking and doing some research on extension cords, you think it would be feasible to use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors. You look in the literature, and it turns out that nobody's ever thought of doing that! You proudly tell this idea to your advisor, but they do some back of the envelope calculations that you don't really understand and tell you that vacuuming the outdoors is unlikely to be very useful. Something about how a vacuum cleaner is too small to handle the outdoors and that we already know about other tools that are much better equipped for cleaning streets and such.

What do math grad students do all day - Quora

[chesleya]

"I'm honored to be here tonight, and to have this opportunity to represent my people. ... [M]y people are one of our nation's most accomplished minority groups: doctors - lawyers -- business owners. ... [O]f course, I'm referring to the Republican Party. They say this is a place where you can come and tell jokes about the president, poke fun at yourself, set political ambition aside and just generally say anything you want. Kind of like the Romney campaign.

Gov. Bobby Jindal at the Gridiron Dinner.