notcoru

[notcoru]

Minecraft Movie Happened

I saw the Minecraft Movie.

Very evocative of the Mario movie in that it's so lazy in every aspect, to the point of having the shortest runtime possible for a feature film, that you're left wondering if you really saw a movie at all, or merely a movie-equivalent: an assemblage of features one might expect to see in a movie, but with no unifying creative vision to make sense of it. There was the scene where the kids argue, and where the arrogant guy learns to work together with the others, and the scene where the bad guy says don't be creative and focus on making money but then the kids defeat them. Scenes you'd expect to see in a movie, but there's no connecting tissue or emotional weight. The suggestion of character arcs or themes is only made out of obligation, and often with an ironic tone. This ambivalence toward the idea of telling a story makes the experience of watching the film rather dreamlike.

The Minecraft movie is a movie in the sense that trailers 1, 2 and 3 were a TV show. Actually, much of the movie was directed like a trailer for itself. Some parts are trailers for hypothetical other Minecraft movies that would have been better than the one they actually made (such as the hypothetical isekai where Jack Black wakes up in Minecraft and fucks around with his pet dog, or the hypothetical rom-com between an ordinary woman and a Minecraft villager).

When I went to the cinema, there were two separate families on opposite ends of the room, each individually consisting of only adults, save for one baby each. These babies were rather distressed by the noise, and early on I thought their crying might be diagetic. Did they come because they thought the baby would like it, or because they wanted to see it themselves and they didn't feel the need to get a sitter?

I saw the movie with my sister. I think she wanted to see it because of the memes. She saw them, repeated them out loud, and then said the movie was good afterward. With kids it's hard to tell if they have low standards or if they just don't know what enjoying a movie feels like so they say any movie they didn't hate was good.

When Steve said the Chicken Jockey line, several audience members began applauding. That's a joke, but it also really happened.

7/10 script could have used a second draft.

[notcoru]

The Remains of the Day

I read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and it was good!

I bought this book because it said it was written by someone who won a Nobel Prize and I thought it would be funny if I finished it and called it mid. Unfortunately, I must report that Ishiguro knows how to write.

The Remains of the Day fulfils what might be called the fundamental function of literature, being empathy. It's very tightly focused on its main character's perspective, a Butler living through the collapse of aristocratic power in the UK in favour of modern capitalistic democracy, who clings to the old ways so strongly that he feels he should never, ever break character. The portrait of Stevens is convincing enough that I can actually care about his long-winded rants on the ongoing debate about how to properly polish silverware, and Ishiguro uses that classic trick of initially playing his neuroses for comedy to smuggle in some hard-hitting scenes later once his flaws are taken more seriously.

Like anyone else, Stevens convinces himself that the things he occupies his life with are important and serve to give him some greater purpose. In the first half I became a little concerned, because while I appreciated the way the author could get you swept up in his perspective to the point where you see his alien values as just another way humans can find meaning in life, there is an undeniable rot in a worldview that is fundamentally centred on it being normal, even desirable, for a handful of old money idlers to completely control global politics through the power of tea parties.

I needn't have worried: Stevens' world is carefully constructed just to be torn down in the later stretches of the book. Although, "torn down" seems like an overly violent way of describing a story so prone to understatement. It's more like a Looney Tunes gag, where an immaculately chiseled sculpture is reduced to rubble by a single, elegant tap. You have to appreciate the story being structured in a way that metatextually reflects the perspective of its own protagonist. Stevens says that he feels British countrysides are the most beautiful in the world because while they are not the most impressive superficially, they are quintessentially English in the sense that they have this effacive character and don't feel the need to show off. Sums up pretty much the whole book's approach. Quietly devastating in how understated it's own emotional beats are. We don't find out that Stevens is crying over his Dad's death until another character in the scene points it out to him.

I enjoyed the comedy of manners going on between Stevens and Kenton. Every scene with those two starring in the world's most roundabout and unfailingly polite rom-com is a blast until it becomes tragic. Do I need to actually read Jane Austen or something? I also should get around to watching the movie of this at some point...

Anyway, good book. 4/5 if you like completely meaningless numbers.

[notcoru]

I read "A Short Stay In Hell" by Steven L. Peck and unfortunately I didn't really enjoy it.

The book's first scene is a fairly by-the-numbers parody of Pascal's Wager: what if the One True Religion was one of the smaller ones and everyone else is just condemned to Hell no matter what? Peck decides to communicate this by having a heavy-handed christian stereotype have a breakdown about how he's supposed to be saved, to which the demon giving him his sentence responds with an /r/atheist style monologue about how he never had a problem with condemning billions from non-christian cultures to eternal torment.

This will come to be representative of a lot of the story. The characters are laid out in only the broad strokes, making them difficult to really care about (the protagonist drops the line "I remember my own father, a real man of the house, someone who knew what it was to be a man," which is just a real gem), and Peck has this unfortunate habit of having a character stand around and lecture you about the themes, often times right after a scene that already demonstrated the idea perfectly well. I get that characters will talk about the situation they're in, but I have to roll my eyes when I see characters show up just to explain basic maths to me.

The protagonist's Hell, shared by many others like him, is the Library of Babel. The demons actually state outright that they got the idea from that story. It's an unimaginably large library with a repetitive structure, which contains every possible 410-page book. Naturally, most of them are random nonsense, with maybe one or two understandable words sometimes appearing. They're stuck in this place until they find the one book that contains the true story of their life.

One of the stronger themes the book has going for it is absurdism. What makes the Library such agony is the way it completely strips existence of any meaning. Everywhere is the same, all the people are pretty much the same (we're told that everyone the protagonist can find is a White American who speaks English and lived in a similiar time period) no-one can ever die and nothing can get damaged since everything resets every night. The protagonist points out that the task doesn't even make sense: the Library will inevitably contain a lot of true stories about their lives, written from every possible perspective, and there is no reasonable way to call one of them the one true book. For a book that's trying to be almost anti-human, that feeling of being at the mercy of a system that inflicts cruelty on you for no reason by some cosmic joke, and having to just muscle through because reality is unbending, is easy to understand and the most human moments of the book are the best ones.

I think the best scene in the entire story is the one where, during an interminable fall to the Library's first floor, having to kill himself by slamming into one of the balconies periodically to avoid the agony of constant dehydration, the protagonist finds a woman who is making the same trip down as him, and after months of constantly falling as other people grow sparser and sparser further down, they end up forming a connection solely out of mutual desperation. They form a whole plan for how to land on a balcony without separating by too great a distance, and promise to wait for the other to climb to whichever floor they end up on. Then it just doesn't work, and they never see each other again. That whole build up of hope just goes nowhere and it's exactly what the rest of the story was missing: making me care about this connection before crushing it into irrelevance with the sheer surreal scale of the Library.

Of course, Peck is sure to mention them having sex twice in midair before separating because this is a story where women only matter to the plot insofar as the protagonist desires them. I'm understand that this character trait exists to contrast with him being established as extremely faithful to his wife at the start of the story, showing how life in the Library renders all human values pointless, but then it seems like the idea of the protagonist sexually experimenting with another man at any point in his trillions of years of existence didn't even occur to him, so I'm left wondering if this approach to women is a blindspot of the character or of the author. It makes the protagonist seem oddly one-note for a being who has existed far longer than our universe by the end of the story.

That leads me into what some might call a nitpick: the characters don't seem very creative. The original Library of Babel was more a thought experiment than a story. There was an undertone of horror to the description of its strange and artificial universe, and the people inside it who know nothing else, and the story used its brief word count to speculate on what thoughts they might have on the nature of their reality. This is a setup that lends itself to experimentation.

If the bookshelves all reset at a certain point each night, what happens if you pull all of the books off of a shelf and then fall asleep on that shelf? What if you just break the shelf completely? They said anything a person is touching doesn't get reset, so if you rip off a shelf and hold onto it, where do the books go? If the food dispensers can make literally anything edible to the point of being able to perfectly replicate a meal that you had at a specific point in your life what happens if you specify something like "give me alphabet soup with the letters arranged into instructions for how to get the book that lets me out of Hell"? At one point, the protagonist talks about how any form of nonhuman life in the Library would be a prized treasure, but eating live food is not entirely unheard of. Will the food dispensers refuse that order? These specific questions don't need to have answers, but it feels like they don't bother to try much of anything outside of carving knives from animal bones. I think showing the different tribes throughout the Library coming up with their own customs and clever tricks for navigating the Library's weird rules would have helped navigate what is currently a rather severe jump in tone from the more comedic opening of the story to the sober psychological horror, as well as hitting that whole "crushing irrelevance" beat that I talked about with the fall, once those cultures inevitably fade away, since people just can't stand eachother's presence for that long, eventually choosing solitude.

There's a pretty ridiculous scene in the story in which the protagonist happens upon a group in mourning and discovers that it's because their leader has finished calculating how many books are in the Library. I call this scene ridiculous firstly because of the laughable idea that it took literal centuries to figure out how to do the easiest combinatorics problem imaginable. The protagonist justifies not already knowing the answer to this question with the amazing quote, "our university, despite some people trained in calculus, had no one versed in probability theory." The other problem is probably the fundamental one I have with the story: it just isn't scary.

I think that there's a very natural connection between mathematics and cosmic horror. Even playing around with pre-school level maths, one quickly stumbles into the unimaginably large and incomprehensible in structure. "Infinity plus one." The simple fact that our number system guarantees that there will always be a larger number, and yet even a number that dwarfs any frame of reference in reality is still essentially nothing to infinity, is surprisingly interesting to contemplate.

That being said, quoting literal scientific notation at me represents a complete failure to communicate the horror of the scenario effectively. You can't just drop "AND THEN 10^153 YEARS PASSED" on me and expect me to do all the work for you. A human consciousness that has persisted that long without reaching any kind of steady state is unimaginable, and yet it feels as though the narrator is basically just the same guy he was at the start but maybe sadder. The question of what a person would become after so long is one that would probably have been better off left as a quietly unsettling hypothetical. There just isn't a way to do it justice.

After reading the book, I felt I would have gotten about as much out of just reading a plot summary. It feels like Borges said more in 7 pages than Peck managed in 100. Interesting concept, but only occasionally managing to execute on it in an interesting way, and the plot often can't hit the emotional beats it's supposed to as a result. I'd give it a 2/5 if you care about that sort of thing. It's a solid enough way to pass a bit of time if you're really interested in the premise, but given that we don't have all of eternity to sort through every book ever written, I think you could stand to spend your time with a better story.