The Portal à la The 10th Kingdom

The plot line isn't novel at all, but I don't seem to stop delighting in films that pop aliens into the big city and engage them in tête-à-tête with jaded humans, amid the rubble of alleyways and greetings of middle fingers.

Couple:  Discover the magic.  I can't wait.
Kim:  There is no magic.
Couple:  What?  What?
Kim:  What?
Tracy:  [simply a look: what the hell?]
Kim:  There is no magic.  There's loneliness and food poisoning.

When we hear this well-acted funny exchange, we know the handsome, wacky outfitted alien and the pretty, bored to tears agent are on a collision course of romance and comedy.  The Portal follows in the footsteps of the lengthy miniseries The 10th Kingdom, and accordingly producer Laura Perlmutter notes that there are plans to turn this short film into a web series.  Tahmoh Penikett as Alar and Erin Karpluk as Kim make for an odd but fated couple.  Penelope Corrin as Tracy cinches comic acting rather well with her facial gestures and brief lines:  So lunch was good?  I love it, so I cannot wait for the web series.

Yeah Rite à la The Exorcist

I just love the takeoff on the classic horror The Exorcist (1973) and recently The Rite (2011).  By and large such films don't frighten me, because I can immerse myself in their suspense and mystery, while drawing a line on their implausibility in the back of my mind.  Moreover, I remember seeing The Exorcist with my younger brother, when we were teens, and finding myself chuckle at a few of its scenes. 

So Yeah Rite is not only a clever pun on the sarcastic American expression of disbelief yeah right, but it is also a comic turn for an otherwise frightful flick.  When the mother sighs Thanks God you're here, I hear my Arab and Indian friends in Dubai say the same thing, which sounds funny to an American ear that is used to hearing thank God, instead.  The faux black eyes, on both the girl and mother, signal from the start that we're in for an amusement ride. 

The Proposal à la Mr. & Mrs. Smith

I love this short film.  The audio job is a bit lacking.  Either that, or we needed Missy Peregrym to articulate her lines better.  But otherwise she and Peter Mooney do a fine job of enacting a clever script and brisk stunts:

She: What about the bedroom?
He: That shouldn't be an issue.
She: That's what every guy says. It always is [an issue].
He: Well, unlike most guys, I actually listen.

Of course, this short film takes after the delightful Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), which elevates the customary repartee between lovers to deft aggression and comic relief.  Any conflictual couple, who can step back now and then and laugh things off, can delight in all of it.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (3)

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Let’s now reflect on what in particular I find so compelling about Transcendence.  It asks three existential questions, and offers stunning answers vis-a-vis the work of Michio Kaku.

What is the essence of who we are? 

Consciousness and intelligence, maybe soul and personality. Of course the whole of who we are makes us who we are. But when we talk about essence, we get positively elemental in our focus, attention and ideas. So while the body may be the most evidential aspect of who we are, by itself it simply doesn’t define who are. Clearly for Evelyn Caster, the essence of her dying beloved husband is his consciousness.

What if we were to displace that essence from one medium (body) to another medium (machine)?

Not just any machine, of course, but rather a quantum computer. Presumably this computer has enough intelligence and infrastructure to accommodate our essence. But the film suggests that it is Will Caster’s mind that makes that computer super-intelligent and super-capable. In other words, the machine in and of itself is merely a platform or a framework. Scientists and technologists have labored for decades to create artificial intelligence; Transcendence suggests that it is inevitably human intelligence that makes machines intelligent. 

Once displaced what is the nature of our new being? 

Kaku envisions us becoming virtually boundless. We can actually ride a beam of light, just as Einstein imagined in his thought experiments, because we aren’t constrained by the physical limits of our body. We can actually explore the ends of the universe, far far more capably and efficiently than any means at our disposal. In Transcendence, it is as if a hologram of the erstwhile scientist were uploaded onto that quantum computer. But it is a hologram with wide-ranging awareness, knowledge and abilities. 

Bree | The biggest threat humanity has ever faced is one of your own making, self-aware technology. Computers control our banks, our airports, our national security, our lives. Once they are able to think for themselves, they'll use this power to destroy us, unless we fight back. We can unplug from the network. We can stop the scientists who invent these machines. We can lead the revolution that will save our species. We are RIFT [Revolutionary Independence from Technology] This is just the beginning.

Reference: Transcendence Movie Quotes.

But as with many science fiction film, all of the above inviolably takes place in a human context. There will always be people, it seems, who fear technology advancement and who fashion resistance à la the revolutionaries in history. But if we were to take a film like Transcendence as a kind of self-contained debate, nay, fight, on such matters, then we give ourselves an opportunity to work through all sorts of dilemma that science fact Kaku (rf. Dreaming in Code: Michio Kaku's Future of the Mind) and the science fiction Casters (rf. 'Transcendence': Johnny Deep in a bold, beautiful flight of futuristic speculation) seem to dismiss.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (2)

Transcript | Isaac Asimov was my favorite science fiction writer and his favorite science fiction story talked about an era far in the future, when our bodies would be in pods and we would mentally control beings, beings of pure energy that would go flying around the universe. And, of course, it was science fiction but here's the idea: mind without body. Pure consciousness roaming across the universe faster than any rocket ship. It turns out that that's actually a physical possibility.  First of all the Obama administration and the European Union are pushing the Brain Project to delineate all the pathways of the human brain. This means that one day we might have a CD ROM called Brain 2.0. That is every single neuron encoded on a memory disc, your personality, your memories, who you are, the essence of your soul would be incorporated in this disc as pure information. Even if you die your consciousness, in some sense, may live on.

Now you as an organic being will have died. That means that your [body] will turn to dust. But the configuration of neurons that made your thinking process possible can be put on a disc in which case, in some sense you become immortal. Not only immortal but this could be the most efficient way to explore the galaxy just like Isaac Asimov predicted in his short story. Let's say I take not your genome but your connectome, put it on a laser beam - in fact in the book I actually calculate how big a laser beam will be required to put your consciousness as pure photons - shine it into the heavens. You're now shooting consciousness into outer space at the speed of light. Forget booster rockets. Forget asteroid collisions. Forget radiation dangers and weightlessness and lack of oxygen. Forget all that. You are riding on a laser beam at the speed of light and then at the end there's a relay station.

A relay station which takes the laser beam and then puts into a surrogate. That is all the neural networks encoded into laser beam can be manifested as a robot on the other side of the galaxy. So in other words, it's like staying at a hotel. If you're a businessman you go from hotel to hotel and relax. The same way you'd be on a laser beam going from relay station to relay station and when you go to the relay station you take the robot body of a super human. You become superman on the other end of the rainbow. So is this a physical possibility? Yes. When might we have it? Well let's be honest. It would take perhaps a hundred years or so before we have a complete understanding of the connectome that is all the neuropathways of the brain. Perhaps another century beyond that before we have relay stations on which we could then shoot our consciousness into outer space. Is it mathematically and physically possible and the answer is yes.

Physicist Michio Kaku offers very compelling context to the 2014 film Transcendence.  The tale that Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall tell, as scientists Will and Evelyn Caster, is truly an emerging science fact, though currently science fiction.  It is quite possible to upload our consciousness onto a supercomputer, and from there connect to the World Wide Web (aka the Internet).  In the far far future, that consciousness may be downloaded onto a flash drive (or memory stick), and shot into the heavens to co-mingle, I imagine, with the greater cosmos.  I'm sure writer Jack Paglen and director Wally Pfister very much drew on Kaku's work.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (1)

Will | For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and... hackers... in this auditorium pales in comparison to the most basic AI. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as "the Singularity." I call it "Transcendence." 

I find this 2014 film, starring Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall as the erstwhile scientist couple Will and Evelyn Caster, simply enthralling.  To be sure, there is quite a bit that's uncertain and frightening about what they do, but the notion of uploading our consciousness onto a super computer; shedding what a poet called a dying animal (Sailing to Byzantium, Poem by William Butler Yeats); and reconstituting our being in a vastly expansive universe is, quite frankly, stunning.  

Max | This thing [i.e. uploaded Will] is like any intelligence. It needs to grow, to advance. Right now it's settling somewhere it thinks it's safe from outside threats. Somewhere its massive appetite for power can be met. But it will want more than that. After a while survival won't be enough. It will expand, evolve, influence - perhaps the entire world.

That new being isn't just exponentially intelligent, but also godly capable.  Because the transcendent Will can manipulate nanoparticles, he can quickly heal wounded colleagues, even resurrect them from the dead, and endow them with superhuman strength.  Will can create material, build apparatus, and fabricate the high technology platform he needs to survive forever, all seemingly out of thin air.

Audience | So you want to create a god? Your own god?

Will | That's a very good question. Isn't that what man has always done?

Reference: Transcendence Quotes.

Right.

Meryl Streep Calls Out Pretentious People

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I absolutely love this. Meryl Streep is the grand dame of acting on film, stage and TV, and is so accomplished that fellow actors can only crack jokes at how regularly her performance is nominated for an Oscar (18) and frequently won an Oscar (3).  That's just the Academy Awards.  She has had so many that Wikipedia has to installed a separate page for List of awards and nominations received by Meryl Streep. 

I can relate to what she says:  I have an old friend who seeks out my counsel, and has engaged me in numerous projects, but repeatedly fails to follow up and follow through.  He is a sweet guy, and he talks a good talk.  He has embarrassed me with my own colleagues, as recently as six months ago.  So when he tried to reach me in recent weeks, I just ignored him:  I kept telling myself There simply is no need to talk to this guy, no need. 

Hooray for Meryl Streep!

Cold is Inevitably Heartwarming

OH GOD HOW DID I END UP IN THE REALLY DEEP SHORT FILM SIDE OF YOUTUBE I SHOULD REALLY GO BACK TO CAT VIDEOS I AM DROWNING IN MY OWN TEARS, but honestly this was was so fucking deep and they managed to make a 25 minute movie better than 90 percent of 2 hour Hollywood movies good job short film people

agreed..this is so deep..bring tears to me too..and yes for only 25 minutes this short way better than some movies..

These are two YouTubers commenting pointedly how good Cold is and how it drew them in.  It was written and directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Wassim Shaikh, and rather deftly runs a thread through the lives of several people to show how cold their city is.  And we're not talking about the weather.  That deft threading reminds me of Crash (2004) which nabbed the Oscar for Best Picture at the 78th Academy Awards and also of the less known but just as superb 13 Conversations About One Thing (2001).  But Shaikh manages to weave a completely moving story in just 25 minutes. 

There is a quote that crops up now and then on social media, and it says something to the effect of:  Don't judge or criticize people, because you don't know what suffering they've endured.  That's mighty apropos for this short film.  But in the end a simple smile, delivered by a despondent radio DJ to a despondent middle aged transvestite, in a hot dog line at night, no less, unravels that thread in a heartwarming, profound way. 

I looked for more information on this Award-Winning Short Film, and I didn't find much.  Apparently it didn't win an Oscar, but I found this:

Towleroad reports, “Toronto-based filmmaker Waseem Shaikh has released his latest work, the award-winning short film Cold, online for free. The film “is about one night in Toronto where several lives intersect—each of them oblivious to the loneliness that connects them all,” said Shaikh. He also said the film speaks to “the feeling of isolation one often deals with in gay circles.” ”

– NOMINATED for 5 TARA Awards.
– WINNER of Ryerson University’s 2013 President’s Award of Excellence.

Reference:  Short Film: “Cold” A Bitter-Sweet Ode to Toronto of Intersecting Lives of Cold to Strangers. 

Maybe it just wasn't marketed as well as it could've been, as it certainly deserved a wider range of recognition.

Romance, Suspense and Comedy in The Crush

The Crush is sweetly romantic and wickedly suspenseful, all in one 15-minute film, written and directed by Michael Creagh.  It is the age-old schoolboy (Ardal, played by Creagh's son) crush on his pretty teacher (named Ms. Purdy, interestingly).  The inevitable heartbreak comes when Ardal runs into his teacher, her fiance Pierce, and her brand new engagement ring.  From crush to crushed, however, the young lover must've sensed that the fiance isn't quite up to snuff for what Ms. Purdy deserves.  So he openly confronts the dickhead (Ardal's term) to a deadly duel, guns de rigueur.  Creagh could've easily turned this short film into a tragedy, and while expected and usual, it still would've garnered accolades, I think.

Picture this, instead: Ardal pulls out a gun his father had hid in the closet, while Pierce has no weapon whatsoever, because it's all a silly, youthful crackpot of a matter to him.  Under threat of death, however, Pierce confesses the unsavory truth about his sentiments for Ms. Purdy and in so doing proves how much of a dickhead he truly is.  A shot thunders in the gray afternoon, and the errant fiance falls to the ground.  The ending is deliciously hilarious and, did I mention it, sweetly romantic.

By the way, The Crush was a nominee at the 83rd Academy Awards (2011) for Best Live Action Short Film, but lost the Oscar to God of Love.  Still, this film is very well done.

At Issue with Open Water

This film is written and directed by Chris Kentis and co-produced by his wife Laura Lau.  For for a positively meager $130,000 budget, it has a running tally of nearly 55,000,000 at the box office.  Not bad, at all.  It is based on the unsolved mystery of what happened to a diver couple:

It's a diver's worst nightmare: Miles from shore, you surface to find your charter boat nowhere in sight. You call for help, but there's no response. There are no outcroppings to hold on to. You hope that someone realizes their mistake before it's too late.

This is what presumably happened to Eileen and Tom Lonergan on January 25, 1998, at St. Crispin's Reef, a popular dive site on the Great Barrier Reef, 25 miles off the coast of Queensland, Australia. The Lonergans, diving veterans from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had gone out with the Port Douglas, Queensland-based scuba boat Outer Edge. Stories vary, but at the end of the day, the crew did a head count and came up with only 24 of their 26 clients. Someone pointed out two young divers who had jumped in to swim off the bow, and the crew, assuming that they had missed them, adjusted the count to 26. With the swimmers on board, the Outer Edge headed back to port.

Two days later, Geoffrey Nairn, the boat's skipper, discovered Eileen and Tom's personal belongings in the Outer Edge's lost-property bin, including Tom's wallet, glasses, and clothes. Concerned, he called the owner of the Gone Walkabout Hostel, in Cairns, where the couple had been staying, to see if they had returned. They had not. A five-day search began, which turned up no trace of Eileen or Tom. After more than 48 hours in the ocean, the couple may have drowned, or been eaten by sharks. But as the chilling story broke, other theories emerged. One is that they committed suicide, or a murder-suicide took place. Journals in their hotel room hinted at personal troubles, but the couple were devout Catholics with good prospects.

Reference: A Watery Grave.  Also, check The Cruel Sea.

Employing his artistic license, Kentis fashions a gruesome end to the couple - Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel Kintner (Daniel Travis) - who are inadvertently abandoned in shark-infested waters.  But critic Roger Ebert speaks to the apparent popularity of Open Water:

Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. "Open Water" had that effect on me.

That's not to say "Open Water" is a thriller that churned my emotions. It's a quiet film, really, in which less and less happens as a large implacable reality begins to form. The ending is so low-key, we almost miss it. It tells the story of a couple who go scuba diving and surface to discover that a curious thing has happened: The boat has left without them. The horizon is empty in all directions. They feel very alone.

I'm not afraid of water and don't spend much time thinking about sharks, but the prospect of being lost, of being forgotten about, awakens emotions from deep in childhood. To be left behind stirs such anger and hopelessness.

When night follows day, when thirst becomes unbearable, when jellyfish sting, when sharks make themselves known, when the boat still does not come back for them, their situation becomes a vast dark cosmic joke.

I don't always agree with Ebert, of course, but there is lyrical resonance in how he describes the effect this film had on him.  It's one thing to weigh fact vs fiction as a case for intellect, and it's quite another to experience it as a matter for gut and soul.  We may never know what happened to the Lonergan couple, but even the thought of being stranded in endless miles of ocean is, in and of itself, frightening.  This simply-shot film succeeds in this fashion.

At Issue with Amityville Horror

It's been 35 years since I watched this film (1979), and about as long since I read the Jay Anson novel (1977), on which the film was based.  But the issue is fact vs fiction, so consider this documentary on the sleepy town and the grisly murders that Anson drew on:

The Amityville Horror. You've heard of it as a movie or maybe a true story. You might even have heard it mentioned in an Eminem song. However you first heard about it, you heard the real truth. Amityville is a real town in New York, Suffolk County to be precise. The town was settled back in the 1600's, but it wouldn't be until the 1970's that it'd rise to national prominence due to a tragic real crime committed at the famous address 112 Ocean Avenue.

On the night in November [13th] of 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr killed 6 of his own family members in what would come to be known as the Amityville murders. That's the true Amityville horror, but the story continues after that. George Lutz and his wife (along with their three children) moved into that house on Ocean Ave the following December [19th 1975]. Kathy Lutz found the place creepy right away and 28 days later [January 16th 1976] (interesting?) the family moved from that residence claiming they'd experienced traumatic paranormal events.

Now, enter the author Jay Anson. He wrote not only the book 666, but also the novel titled 'The Amityville Horror' based on the events that the Lutz family went through, though it is up for debate how close he stuck to the original real story. That book (published in 1977), in turn, became used to base a movie that would bear its same title in 1979. The movie terrified audiences worldwide with James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger all giving creepy performances that only added to the already scary story of the Amityville horror house.

Does the Amityville house exist today in real life? It certainly does, though it's been renovated these days and the address has been changed. Many people came to see the site of the DeFeo murders and the place where demon possession was supposed to have taken place. Obviously, the home owners needed their privacy so they took steps to get that back.

I hope I've helped clear up any misunderstandings about the awful events surrounding the Amityville house. While the movies are terrific (a new version was made in 2005), the real stories are nothing to smile about.

Reference: Top Documentary Films: The Real Amityville Horror Story.  (Note: The foregoing write up was in the description box of this documentary.  But since I watched it, YouTube terminated the account.  In any event, I found the above version, instead.) 

The fact vs fiction matter of this film is more complicated than that of Captain Phillips, which I wrote about in the preceding article.  Besides the novelist himself, the Lutzes and William Weber, the attorney for Ronald DeFeo, Jr., among a range of parties involved, seem to have obscured the lines between fact and fiction.

In September 1979, Judge [Jack B] Weinstein dismissed the Lutzes' claims and observed in his ruling: "Based on what I have heard, it appears to me that to a large extent the book is a work of fiction, relying in a large part upon the suggestions of Mr. Weber." In the September 17, 1979 issue of People magazine, William Weber wrote: "I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine." This refers to a meeting that Weber is said to have had with George and Kathy Lutz, during which they discussed what would later become the outline of Anson's book. Judge Weinstein also expressed concern about the conduct of William Weber and Bernard Burton relating to the affair, stating: "There is a very serious ethical question when lawyers become literary agents."

George Lutz maintained that events in the book were "mostly true" and denied any suggestion of dishonesty on his part. In June 1979, George and Kathy Lutz took a polygraph test relating to their experiences at the house, which they both passed.  In October 2000, The History Channel broadcast Amityville: The Haunting and Amityville: Horror or Hoax?, a two-part documentary made by horror screenwriter/producer Daniel Farrands to mark the 25th anniversary of the case. George Lutz commented in an interview for the program: "I believe this has stayed alive for 25 years because it's a true story. It doesn't mean that everything that has ever been said about it is true. It's certainly not a hoax. It's real easy to call something a hoax. I wish it was. It's not."

Reference: The Amityville Horror.

There is a lot to sort out, but it is clear that art does not exist in a vacuum, and there is probably no such thing as pure, unadulterated art.  Inevitably its context is human one, and thus subject to the best and the worst of people involved.  The original story spawned several films over nearly 40 years, so if money was at all a motivation for any of these people, there must've been plenty to grab.

Finally, we mustn't forget the matter of paranormal activity.  Doesn't it really happen?  Is it reasonable for me to say I believe it can, yet also say I am skeptical?  I am mindful enough of the many things we as humankind simply don't know, so weird stuff like a haunting is a possibility that we cannot categorically dismiss.  However, I am skeptical at the same time about what people may say, given whatever motives they harbor within themselves. 

They say, Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.  Ain't that the truth.