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The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

2024-11-09T00:00:00-08:00

Recent Cinema

2024-08-12T00:00:00-07:00

On Friday night I went to a screening of Chungking Express. On Sunday I went to a different theatre to see the new restoration of Seven Samurai. That’s a pretty good weekend for film. It made me curious to see a list of the films I had watched in theatres over the past 12 months. I queried the Expenses:Entertainment:Film register of my ledger to put one together.

Newly released blockbusters:

Newly released arthouse films:

Classiques du cinéma:

All About Eve
Apocalypse Now (Final Cut)
Blade Runner (Final Cut)
Chungking Express (with pineapple cake by Fear the Feast)
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Le Samouraï
Night of the Living Dead (with live score by Sleepbomb)
RoboCop (Director’s Cut)
Seven Samurai
Sunset Boulevard
The Abyss

This is a pretty decent collection, and these past 12 months have not been unusual in that regard. I had the sense that I saw fewer new films in theatres, but that appears not to be the case. I think going to a revival screening of a film I already know is just more memorable as a theatrical experience. I enjoy living in a place with a robust culture of cinema, where I can go see some IMAX spectacle one weekend and a 35MM noir the next.

I met someone the other day who asked what my blog was about.

2023-11-29T00:00:00-08:00

I was briefly stumped. I try not to be about. I replied “Well, I think the last few posts were about notebooks, opera glasses, tea, and bicycle mirrors.”

If I wasn’t me, I would be in to me.

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I watched a few episodes of Dark Angel for the first time since puberty.

2022-11-28T00:00:00-08:00

In the pilot episode of the show, the titular hero teams up with a pirate television journalist in the cyberpunk dystopia of Seattle. They broadcast the dirt about a Rich Bad Guy™, and protect a witness from being silenced before she can give her testimony in court. The implication being that facts are meaningful, and that the criminal justice system is functioning.

From the vantage of 2022, the show’s dystopia is looking pretty optimistic.

Recent Chick Flicks

2022-10-30T00:00:00-07:00

Kimi was described to me as Rear Window crossed with The Conversation. Both are great films. Kimi isn’t as great, but I still enjoyed it. It delivered on that description.

Watcher is another riff on the Rear Window thing. There were a couple times I found myself talking back to the screen because a character did something irrational, but overall I enjoyed it. The two main actors, playing the watcher and the watched, were great. The ending was great.

Emily the Criminal is a film full assholes. But likeable assholes.

A Good Woman Is Hard to Find starts out sort of meh, but then the main character makes an excellent life choice that really kicks off the plot. The score is by Makeup and Vanity Set, and you know how I feel about that.

Swallow shows us that all is not well in soulless bourgeois suburbia. This film was super weird and discomforting, but is exactly what I imagine the lifes of Goop customers to be like.

Catch the Fair One is a perfect film. 10/10. No notes.

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I’m not much into boxing films, and this isn’t one, but there’s a sparring scene in the beginning in which I couldn’t identify much in the way of acting. I had to pause the film and lookup the actors who play the main character and her trainer. Either they should be winning Academy Awards or they are professional fighters. Turns out, they’re professional fighters.

Four of these films were scored by Nathan Halpern, who does excellent work.

Recent Tech-Noir

2021-11-07T00:00:00-07:00

Two of my favorite artists on Bandcamp are Makeup and Vanity Set and Pilotpriest. Both were recently involved with tech-noir films.

Pilotpriest scored, directed, and wrote Come True under the alias Anthony Scott Burns. This is the first feature length film of his that I’ve seen. His previous short works include a Tron sequel and, with Ash Thorp, Lost Boy. Both are excellent. Come True follows a teenage runaway who joins a sleep study at a local university in order to have a place to sleep, and proceeds to awaken some sort of demonic universal id. It is full of neon and moody lighting and retro tech and hex dumps and I loved it. I think of it as a sort of Strange Days by way of Stranger Things. There’s not much dialogue, but I thought the lead actress did a great job of selling the character’s path from confusion to discomfort to terror.

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Makeup and Vanity Set, using the nom de guerre Matthew Putsi, scored the third season of The Girlfriend Experience. The show follows a neuroscientist hooker who uses her sex work experience to help build a manipulative artificial intelligence. It is quite weird, but I enjoyed the aesthetics of the show. Reviewers seem to criticize it for feeling very cold and sterile and antiseptic, but I think that fits with the theme of sex-divorced-from-emotion. I enjoy my tech-noir, and this is that. It felt somewhat Gibsonian. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn at the end of the show that Huburtus Bigend was orchestrating things. The score, as expected, is excellent.

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The only previous film score work I’ve seen from MAVS (excluding the three seconds he had in Godzilla vs Kong) is Hit TV, which also satisfies.

Haight Street Preacher

2021-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

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Neither Jesus nor his lamps find welcome among the junkies on Haight.

ZeroZeroZero (or triple aught, as I call it) is something like a blend of The Godfather and Sicario.

2021-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

The series follows a shipment of cocaine from Mexico, through Africa, to Italy. Like the other series I’ve recommended recently, it can be described as a stylish, slow burning neo-noir with just the right amount of gunplay.

I usually consider Mogwai to be a poor substitute for Godspeed, but their soundtrack isn’t bad.

Giri/Haji is a stylish, slow burning neor-noir crime drama set in Tokyo and London.

2021-01-03T00:00:00-08:00

The story concerns a police detective, his yakuza brother, and their series of poor life choices. Everything about it is very well done. The show is described as “cancelled”, but the first season is a complete story and, as excellent as it is, I think continuing with the characters in a second season would only lessen the experience of the first.

Isolation Report, Day 2020.07.29

2020-07-29T00:00:00-07:00

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One hundred and thirty nine days of Operation Fuck Off I’m a Hermit Now. Bacon and chocolate supplies restocked.

All systems nominal.

Isolation Report, Day 2020.03.16

2020-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

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All systems nominal.

And now for a reminder from Dr. Rollins on the dangers of Nerve Attenuation Syndrome.

2020-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

Persons with a history of repeated instafacetweeting may be predisposed to the Black Shakes. Consult your doctor today.

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Holly Herndon composes music with machine learning.

2020-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

I learned of her thanks to Bruce Sterling‘s mention in his 2020 State of the World, wherein he defines her music one of the few current examples of “genuine technical novelty”.

She used machine learning to train a program (referring to it as “AI” seems popular but I’ll refrain) that could reproduce human voices, and then used that software as a vocalist for PROTO. Neat.

Rams

2020-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

In 2018 I went to the San Francisco premier of Rams at The Castro Theatre.

I’d previously seen the other documentaries made by Gary Hustwist, but had not found them to be especially relevant to my interests. Rams, however, I greatly enjoyed. On the whole I think that German industrial design is best industrial design, both functionally and aesthetically. I was familiar with many of the designs of Deiter Rams that the documentary highlights, but seeing all the objects together in Rams’ home – not as a museum display, but as practical tools for living – really drives home his skill and vision.

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I’d been wanting to watch the film again for a while. Last month I decided to purchase it on Vimeo. I’d never done this before, and was nervous of the experience. Vimeo claims to provide a DRM-free download, but I was concerned that their definition of “download” may be different from mine, or that they would attempt to serve it through some some platform-specific crapware. Fortunately this was not the case. After completing the purchase, it was simple to navigate to the download link, which was a straightforward URL to a DRM-free 1920x1080 MP4 file. Purchasing and downloading the video on Vimeo was just as simple as purchasing and downloading music on Bandcamp, which is the standard against which I judge all other digital media distributors (it is a low bar, but many seem to fail).

The Watchmen TV series takes place in an alternate dystopic timeline where there are locking holsters that are even worse than the Blackhawk Serpa.

2019-12-23T00:00:00-08:00

I fully expected the next frame to be this guy shooting himself in the leg, but the scene just ignores his sloppy trigger finger and complete disregard for safety.

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Other than that scene, I’ve enjoyed the first couple episodes of the show and its soundtrack so far.

Around the turn of the century there was an ambient music transmission called Blue Mars.

2019-11-17T00:00:00-08:00

It and Rant Radio Industrial were important sources of music in the early days of streaming. Blue Mars described itself as Music for the Space Traveller:

Long ago, when the waters of Mars were still under the ground and above the sky, our ancestors came to this place and called it “Home”. And from the high Plains of Tharsis to the Elysium Ocean, from as high as Mount Olympus to as deep as the floor of the Hellas sea, one can still hear the song of our brothers and sisters chanting to us throughout the ages.

This melody is one that is made of hopes… It is sang with the voice of nostalgia, and looks ahead with pride. Listen…

The transmission ceased some years ago. For a time, recordings of the stream were rebroadcast at a site called Echoes of Blue Mars, but that too seems to have come to an end. Recently I stumbled across someone who had created YouTube playlists of much of the original music.

There are also playlists for Blue Mars’ two alternative stations. Cryosleep, which was described:

Most people who underwent cryosleep have reported that the mind seems to naturally retreat into a place of infinite tranquility, where the experience of Time itself is distorted in a subtle way.

Although there is no trace of conscious activity in the brain of sleepers, it appears that Experience itself never ceases, creating atemporals bubbles of memories of transcendental calm when the subject awakes.

It may be possible that chemicals used in the cryosleep process alter the outer cortex in a way that is not yet understood, however we believe cryosleep is a perfectly safe means of interstellar travel.

And Voices from Within, explained:

In these days of stellar explorations, encountering alien lifeforms is the dream of many space-travellers, but Language will always hinder the realization of the full potential of such an event.

Thus, Voices from Within tries to prepare cosmonauts for the experience by focusing on the abandonment of Words in favor of Vibrations, which, being uniquely suited to channel your Emotions, will usher Comprehension into the Mind of your new alien friends.