BURU SURI

This post’s title is inspired by a skit from Azumanga Daioh which has for some reason stayed with me, even if it’s been more than 10 years since I watched the series in 12th grade – proceeding to draw Sakaki-san on the Eastpak school backpack I used to carry around back then.

I don’t remember who says what, but the characters make fun of the fact that “Bruce Lee” sounds exactly like “Blue Three” in Engrish: both are in fact pronounced buru suri. Just give me a second to google that and have something to back up my words with.

…there.

So, how come? Last week some indomitable urge to rent a movie took over me. Yes, rent one. Legally. Amazing, right? I couldn’t remember how many years it had been since I had last actually gone to the video club, browsed the available titles, having to weigh in rent duration as a factor – to decide if I should rent a newer movie for a single day or a slightly less recent one for three.

In an age of instant gratification and unlimited libraries (Steam, Netflix etc) small limitations such as these can be truly relieving. It’s the same kind of ease of mind you get when you only have one book to read and all the time and energy you would otherwise put into deciding which book to read is converted into actual time for reading!

But, as usual, I’m being overly romantic about anything that does not exist in purely digital form or exclusively on the internet, or which had already existed before I was born: only while typing out the lines above did the numerous instances of the same archetypical memory of arguing about which movie to rent with the same, but different, friends, in the same, but different, video club, come rushing back. So, you might disregard all the nonsense I wrote above, if you wish.

Anyway, what inspired me to go out and watch films legally was that I suddenly realised that I have a Bluray player (my PS4) sitting under my television, but I’d never actually watched a fim in Bluray, something I realise is not entirely unsimilar from declaring in 2011 I’d never watched a DVD. “Why not get with the times”, I thought.

I didn’t go to my neighbourhood movie club, Video Blue, which I must say would have been rather apt, but chose Seven instead. Looking around for a bit, I saw that they had an offer for three movies for three days for only 5€. Their advertising offer worked on me and rent three movies I did.

Without further ado now then, here are my brief opinions on what I watched. If you are to keep something from this post, may it be that media consumption can be more beneficial and memorable if done mindfully and with some kind of artificial limit placed on it.

Ex Machina (2015)

I’ve been meaning to watch this since Autómata, which dealt with similar themes: true AI has come about; what do?

I’d like to divulge as little as possible about this one. The pacing, the dialogues, the setting, the characters, the music, the feelings, the effects, the acting, the twists… all top-notch, no beats missed whatsoever. I really can’t think of a single thing I didn’t enjoy about it. If you like soft science fiction and a slower film that will give you a lot to think about but even more to feel about, give it a shot.

While you’re at it, watch Arrival, another sci-fi film I watched recently, that one at the cinema, which single-handedly made it very close to the top of my list of all-time favourite science fiction films.

Boyhood (2014)

Richard Linklater, maker of Waking Life and the Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight, started filming Boyhood in 2002, when the movie’s main character Mason was only 5 years old. He kept filming as the boy grew older, and what we got by the end is a movie about the mundane little moments of growing up.

It’s true that Boyhood could have been a lot more than the uneventful story it turned out to be, namely about a kid more or less like any other American kid, but watching it I didn’t get bored at all. Apart from the fact that it worked as a real-time recap of events that marked the ’00s and my own earlier years, it was fun watching characters develop and age, and I could more than relate with the whole broken family and mother-in-search-of-replacement-father thing, even though I must say I did feel pangs of jealousy at the appearance of so many (step-)siblings.

It was a long movie at ~150 minutes, but in typical Linklater style, the most banal conversations were somehow the most engaging and I didn’t feel it draw out at all.

Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

This one’s probably the best known out of my buru suri films. Grand Budapest Hotel is an experience, like all Wes Anderson films. Intense colours, over-the-top aesthetics, completely wild situations, humouristic, heart-warming, clever little touches that challenge and reward the viewer… it’s by no means a bad film. On the contrary.

However, there’s something in Wes Anderson’s work I can’t quite put my finger on that I find obnoxious. I would like to look into what it is exactly that puts me off films like this, give it a name, cause I think it’s fascinating how a film I should theoretically quite enjoy didn’t work for me – how whether you’ll like a movie or not depends on such little factors that work together to create a satisfactory feeling… or not.

REVIEW: IN OTHER WORDS: SF AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a neat little collection of Margaret Atwood’s history in the field of science fiction. It’s split into three parts:

1) Her thoughts on science (speculative?) fiction and the persistent problem of defining the genre; thoughts on how science fiction is a continuation of much older, mythological sorts of fiction; commentaries on her early life in rural Canada, what made her move into the field and inspired her to write the novels that marked her career.

2) Reviews, articles and talks she’s written and given over the years on seminal works and writers such as The Island of Dr Moreau and H. G. Wells, Nineteen Eighty-four, Animal Farm and George Orwell, Brave New World and Aldous Huxley, She and H. Rider Haggard, The Birthday of the World and Ursula K. Le Guin (her name is seriously pronounced “gwin”?) and others.

3) A selection of her own short stories, some of which I remembered from reading Bones and Murder some weeks ago.

Listening to this wise old lady speak of her long life and pose difficult questions about SF in general was very pleasing for the mind. I also found it quite revealing, and I’m hardly versed in her work. If you are more familiar with it than I, you know what to do.

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REVIEW: NEVER LET ME GO

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read this on my phone.

This book is quite remarkable. For more than half of it it gives off very few clues on what it’s all about, what these weird kids were doing cordoned off in a special school somewhere in a remote corner of an apparently alt-universe England. You go through their lives through Kathy’s -the protagonist’s- memories, which are incomplete, the possibility always hanging that her memory’s playing tricks on her. She says so herself. And if we don’t grow fond of the characters per se, it’s because there’s something terrible about them being left unsaid, politely ignored. It is something that makes people surrounding them, their “guardians” in that odd sub-space Hogwarts, cry when these children inadvertently show emotion and, say, sing and dance to Judy Bridgewater’s Never Let Me Go I’ve added above – a song that doesn’t strictly exist in our timeline, mind you. I’ll let you unfurl its story on your own.

The whole style of the book was reminiscent of Murakami. Is it a Japanese thing or is my mind playing tricks on me pigeonholing Ishiguro precisely on the basis that both authors are Japanese? But wait a second: more-or-less short and simple sentences, matter-of-fact, every-day situations, relationship- and memory-focused narrative… maybe it’s not just me.

Anyway. Once the secret of the book is revealed, just as matter-of-factly as anything else the characters might be talking about, the genius of Never Let Me Go is truly made clear; I can’t recall ever reading a story with less hand-holding on its central premise, such slow exposition and thus such complete suspension of disbelief. So I’m left here thinking that Its story is precisely what would happen if what’s true in the book was true in real life. And as a wanna-be writer of a similar kind of fiction, I can think of no praise more sincere.

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REVIEW: HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read this on my phone.

Hey look! A novel about a guy in a corporate time machine killing/getting killed by his future/past self and getting all paradoxanalytical about it! That’s a word I just invented, by the way. It describes the way a lot of science fiction novels try to express and explain paradox just by throwing more words at you. It sort of works like writing a recipe for a cake just by using the chemical compounds and formulas involved, complete with instructions using moles for ingredient mass and the Kelvin scale for when it’s time for the cake to hit the oven.

Let’s get back to the book. It was just a ceaseless bout of self-reference. The premise was interesting and the writing had some inspired moments idea-wise, at least when it didn’t come out as narrated by a completely socially incompetent nerd – which the protagonist actually was, by the way… huh, maybe he was a well-written character after all and not just mirroring Mr. Yu himself… It didn’t take long, however, for all the meta to become too much for me. That and the oddly-used jargon too rigid to peer through, or the “science fiction” part of the story too often spoken about, described, but not represented in an engaging or memorable way. “Oh, this machine has permitted the existence, trademarking and patenting of entire universes”. Sounds great, it does, but where did you go with that Mr. YU?

It all felt like reading the diary of a Companion Cube (yes, I’m old) that suddenly through some bug in Portal’s code (the 2007 game we all loved) turned into a sentient hypercube and got existential agony. I respect the cube’s feelings but, yeah, I have no idea what being a hypercube would or should feel like. The protagonist was human, but his feelings came off as little more than the hearts the Companion Cubes have painted on them in Portal. Programmed into him, just like they were programmed into them, and just like they were programmed into the couple of sentient-like operating systems he had in his TARDIS – I mean time machine – I mean TARDIS; it even says in the book the time machine had the shape and size of a phone booth. Come on.

While in theory I should have enjoyed reading page after page of convoluted twisting thoughts on the paradoxical nature of time as part of the physical world and then some, I just couldn’t get into it.

Yes, left-brained. This book was left-brained through and through.

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JODOROWSKY’S STAR WARS

The new trailer for Star Wars VII came out just yesterday and it’s racked up more than 30 million views already. Not bad eh?

Here it is for good measure.

I used to really, really love Star Wars. It was about the same time I really, really loved Harry Potter and Pokemon, give or take a few years. Today, as a more or less adult man, in the same way I will still enjoy but find it difficult to really get into Harry Potter and Pokemon for prolonged periods of time—even for nostalgia’s sake—, I cannot really get Star Wars the same way I used to anymore. It feels comfortable, it feels familiar and easy, but comfortable and familiar is not necessarily what I need or want. Of course I’ll enjoy the movies anytime (I had a blast re-watching A New Hope on VHS a couple of months back—seriously, give let’s VHS a chance— and listening to Verily, A New Hope immediately thereafter) and I’m sure that the SW fan lying dormant somewhere inside of me just waiting to be Awakened will duly do so two months from now, hand-in-hand with the rest of geekkind and the very Force itself, apparently. That much is a given.

But sometimes I do wonder what the world would look like without Star Wars. There, I said it.

Jodorowsky’s Dune. Here’s a link to the full movie. I can’t recommend it enough. Watched it on the train from Belgrade to Thessaloniki. The thumbnail with ole Alejandro sticking his tongue out doesn’t do it justice—or maybe it does. Depends on you.

Imagine a world where there was no Star Wars yet, no original sci-fi blockbuster. Imagine a world where Moebius, Pink Floyd, H.R. Geiger, Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and others had all been gathered together by pioneering film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky with the ambition to create a film that would change the world. A film to “simulate an LSD trip” and change young minds, redefine what was possible for cinema at large visually and thematically. A movie that would play the same technical and cultural role Star Wars played for us, just taking us down a completely different road. A more spiritual and artistic road if you will.

Even though it got as close to production as a film can possibly get without actually making it to the other side, Jodorowsky’s Dune indeed was never shot because of financing troubles: basically nobody in Hollywood possessed balls big enough and the right shade of gold to support the astronomical $15 million budget and all the associated risk. I don’t blame them really.

Think about it though. Star Wars is great, of course, we all love it, but it’s true that as a film it doesn’t exactly have any kind of message, it’s just a superbly made fairy tale with a generic fairy tale good vs evil plot. In fact it has grown into a marketing and merchandising monstrosity, especially in the last five years or so where you can’t throw a rock without having the rock come complete inside a Darth Vader helmet or better yet have it transform inside your hand into an overpriced Lego brick.

What if our Star Wars had been Dune? The documentary above draws all the parallels, ultimately how this spectre of a movie influenced Star Wars itself as well as other significant films in ways we’d never suspect—another reason I would encourage you to watch it. But get this: the universe where Jodorowsky’s Dune was made is the universe where not only Star Wars would have been completely different, if it had been made at all, but also one where we’d never have seen Alien or Blade Runner.

Would you rather stay in our universe with Star Wars, Blade Runner and Alien, or move to one where Jodorowsky’s Dune had been as successful as Star Wars in ours and had spawned all kinds of stories and ever genres we had never thought possible? If you believe that life imitates art, it would definitely be an interesting universe to experience in a broader sense. Would Muslims be seen under a different light? Would psychedelics or ecology play a more important role in pop culture or even make people vaguely more environmentally-conscious? Will we ever be able to traverse parallel universes and find out for ourselves?

If you enjoyed going down this mental path, I would recommend reading Replay, the book that inspired Groundhog Day, but basically spanning the 26 years between 1963 and 1989 instead of just 24 hours. There is a film in it too that gets big instead of Star Wars and changes the world.

LINK: IT’S NOT CLIMATE CHANGE–IT’S EVERYTHING CHANGE

Article by Margaret Atwood.

When I read things like this, I tend to regress to my “what’s the point?” mode. But then I realise there’s still so much road to pave for the possibility of a prospect of a better future for those who make it, those who weather the crumble. The article mentions this and focuses on the importance of positive narratives. There’s little we can do to reverse the situation now, so shouting at the top of your lungs “we’re screwed!” won’t help, and anyway, people at large who have elected to ignore reality thus far will go all the way before they reality grabs them by the face and locks stares with them forever. So a positive message, ideas for transition, building suitable, sustainable communities for preserving the good parts of what we have created seems to me like the only viable, or at the very least productive, idea we can start working on right now.

Cli-fi though… Apart from clitorises, it reminds me of JMG and preparing for the Long Descent, which will have its ups, down, needs, challenges and inevitably present new opportunities. The world will be much more unpredictable, ugly and much easier to get you caught up in misery, but people will still be (mortal) people, such as they always were. Music shall still be played—a mix of AI-produced synths and traditional ethnic music? Dinners will still be cooked—vegetarian meals based on new recipes that take into account the limited variety and availability of ingredients? Laughs will be enjoyed over new jokes or memes—much needed black humour at the sorry state of humankind that couldn’t resist taking its own daydream for the truth?

Life will move forward into the unknown. But this unknown is being shaped right now by the collective force of our species. Each one of us is steering this force as much as a spec of sand can choose, or not choose, to take part in a destructive sandstorm. But a spec of dust in the right place can allow vapour to condense around it and become a drop of rain.

Sandstorms, wind, rain… like different moves in a poi dancer’s repertoire.

I should read more of Atwood’s writings.