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film club XXX: ghost in the shell
Note: the seventh image in this post is Not Safe For Work. Scroll at your peril. So. As the first of two (delayed) Sans Soleil follow-ups, Film Club opted to watch Mamoru Oshii's 1996 anime Ghost in the Shell (based on a 1989 manga by Masamune Shirow). Marker's interested in the ways that technology and media manifest in the Japanese cityscape, although he's interested in it from an outsider's perspective: we thought it might be appropriate to see how those topics are tackled by folks who are actually from Japan. Turns out it's not actually that different. There are no shortage of shots in this film that one can comfortably imagine being slotted somewhere into Sans Soleil: Both films are pretty deeply interested in the boundary line between the contemporary present and science-fictional future. Oshii's film, of course, actually is science fiction, so it gets the opportunity to allow the visualization of speculation in a way that wouldn't quite be admissable in Marker's film. It reserves its most inventive speculation for the futuristic body: It's hard to imagine that Marker wouldn't be intrigued or even delighted by the sublime forms that Shirow and Oshii have concocted for us, even when they surge into extremity: As for what, exactly, he might think that they indicate about the present, I cannot say. Anyway. We're still waiting on Funeral Parade of Roses to arrive from freakin' Bangkok, and I'm going to bo travelling for a bit, so it might be a while before we proceed to the second part of our Sans Soleil follow-up. It's likely that we'll be finishing up with the Production Design Blog-A-Thon first... Labels: body, media commentary, science_fiction
Friday, May 09, 2008
Yesterday I went to go see Minority Report, and I enjoyed it, although not without some reservations.
I found just about every escape that Tom Cruise pulls in the movie to be implausible, even by action-movie standards. (If you want details, check out the fake memo drafted by Jane over at Umami Tsunami (thanks, Judith)).
I also found that the film failed to put forth a coherent ideology about the future world it depicted. The film seems to almost function as a critique, but it always then seems to step back. The messages that the film communicates most strongly are "it's good for people to love one another," "it's good to love your children," and "killers are bad," none of which are especially provocative, and all of which are particularly, uh, Spielbergian. My concerns in this regard match up roughly with those put forth by the Chicago Reader's film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, in this lengthy, intelligent piece on the film.
Rosenbaum comments about the tendency of this film to cram the visual field with active details—he describes trying to concentrate on all the details as being akin to trying to concentrate on all three rings of a circus. This is something that this film shares in common with Attack of the Clones (which I also saw and enjoyed, although with a separate set of reservations), so I've been thinking a lot about the way that films are starting to do this. As an audience member, I share some of Rosenbaum's irritation—I hated the digital revamp of the initial three Star Wars movies, the way gags or gimmicks (or what Eisenstein would have called "attractions") were stuffed into spaces that formerly served as neutral background. (Rosenbaum traces this aesthetic back to Mad Magazine, which is interesting.)
I have to admit that the interfaces in Minority Report are a delight to look at. Alex Wright calls the film "interface porn" (and he also got his hands on Katherine Jones' original prototype sketches; thanks to BlackBeltJones for the link.)
Labels: information, media commentary, science_fiction
Monday, July 01, 2002
tales of nevèrÿon
I spent some time this weekend reading Tales of Nevèrÿon, one of the books in Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon series. Delaney populates this book with by fantasy-character archetypes (the hulking slave, the child empress, the old woman of the village), but then proceeds to focus more on the invisible flows that surround them (power, language, capital). A handful of allusions to critical theory are sprinkled in for flavor. So far, it's brilliant: like leaving Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and some Foucault book out on your radiator all night only to wake up in the morning and find that they've melted together into a single text. For a while, it seemed like Wesleyan University Press was keeping this and the other books in print, although it doesn't appear on their most recent list. Further reading: poking around online reveals some science-fiction novels and stories that incorporate linguistics. (And any time I think of Delany I am reminded that I should read more Bellona Times.) Labels: book_commentary, science_fiction
Monday, February 04, 2002
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