mellowtigger

The Sense8 web series is good. It includes some of the better ideas of "The Tomorrow People" (1973/1992), such as the importance that we do not turn away from the pains of life and culture, that we should find the strength to face them. Unfortunately, it also has a feature or two that will detract from its wide acceptance by some audiences. If you want a fast 74-second introduction, just watch the official Sense8 trailer. [some minor spoilers ahead]

Overall, this series is nothing like "X-Men". Instead, it is "More Than Human" (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon. It has a lot going for it. It presents individual people who would each be despised by other people in a different part of Earth and the culture there. It is female-friendly, with strong and intelligent female characters, even within cultures that don't appreciate them fully. It is GLBT-friendly, with both a gay male and a transgender female character who are meaningful and believable. It is religion-friendly, with a Hindu who doesn't back down from her faith while explaining it to doubters. It is poor-friendly, with a resourceful black man who lives in poverty with a mother dying of AIDS. The story briefly touches upon a lot of sociopolitical issues in its first season alone. It properly uses these issues as ways to show us the character of the people we may come to appreciate, without ever nagging us about any such thing as vague as "political correctness".

Sense8 is primarily (or should be) a social story. Humanity experiences a small evolutionary step in this modern-day story, one where some humans are connected telepathically amongst themselves. No superpowers, just shared experience. The first 3 episodes are quite confusing. It's an artistically-chosen confusion, though. We are to learn eventually about 8 people (the "sensate" / "Sense8"), but we are introduced to their lives in the same way they are introduced to each other... with seemingly random crossovers of experience.

In episodes 1-3, as their collective ability awakens, our scene switches from one person to the next while carrying over an emotion or sound from the earlier person... leaving the second person confused along with the audience. It's worthwhile to stick with the story.

In episode 4, we finally get all of the main characters together for one moment. Their first tentative full-group experience is a happy one. I keep rewatching this video clip because it captures the best that this story/series has to offer. It reminds me of an old adage, "A joy shared is multiplied", which hints at the significance of their telepathic connection that the whole world could envy. This scene leads us with the music "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes. The "perfect music for a lobotomy", as one character later puts it, and it plays while one of their cluster is handcuffed and prepped for unconsented brain surgery to destroy her ability. It's a happy-yet-terrifying moment that well characterizes the entirety of the sensate life lesson. The music shouts at us with the incomprehensibility of life (as they/we have experienced recently), the need for revolution (to confront the injustice that we encounter), and the optimism that we can survive and improve together. What's not to like?

In episodes 4-6, we finally begin to learn the rules of their ability as the sensates bond with each other.

• The sensate humans experience a change in their brain structure (with accompanying migraines) that lessens the division between their brain hemispheres. This change supposedly leaves them less able to filter out thoughts and stimuli, leaving them more "in tune" with each other and with their natural environment in general.
• A sensate "cluster" is formed amongst people who were born at the same time, anywhere on the planet. Our story's cluster includes 8 people from USA, England, India, Korea, Kenya, and Mexico.
• Our story is told in English, but the sense8 understand each other in their native languages.
• People within the same cluster can share the full breadth of their experience and talents with the other members.
• People of different clusters can talk telepathically with other sensates, but only if they've looked directly into each other's eyes previously. This line-of-sight contact becomes an important plot point, exploited first by the stranger who is trying to awaken the cluster of our main story... also used later as a warning to avoid eye contact with another who is trying to destroy them.

All of these early episodes include more sex than audiences are accustomed to seeing on television. Episode 1 practically begins with a lesbian sex scene that will leave most audiences surprised (and potentially breathless). Episode 6 seems to make the argument that sex makes the world go 'round. That's okay. I'd much rather have healthy sexuality than unhealthy violence portrayed in entertainment. Except... there's a much larger dose of violence in this first series than I think it needed.

In episodes 7-12, the sensates grow more accustomed to each other (and we to them). Violence here is an unjustified trope, and this series would do well to avoid relying on it so much. Life for anyone is plenty complicated and difficult without it. This series does show us some part of that complication. Most humans, however, die in a world of despair, abuse, confusion, and neglect, not outright murder. Show us that world, and show Homo gestalt helping everyone overcome it. Violence is persistent but should be incidental to the main story.

Sense8 also doesn't shy away from the realities of childbirth. Episode 10 includes a controversial sequence in which each of the sensate's birth is viewed in messy detail. The detractors, I think, are missing some important artistic points:

• First, Jonas Maliki previously tells the cop about Whispers being powerful and able to remember his own birth. It's a very subtle foreshadowing of this birth sequence, suggesting to us that maybe this cluster is as powerful as the one who hunts them.
• Second, each of the sensates receives a subtle nod at their birth to a sympathy or challenge that pervades their life.

the musician born listening to music	the cop born in a squad car
the pharmacist born with Ganesha (approving of science) overlooking	the actor born while the household watches television
the prisoner born while mother alone in graveyard then tended by strangers	the transgender born while mother cut open in Caesarian
the thug born under water without a father apparent	the driver born in a wilderness without a father

• Third, the scene ends when the musician who triggered this all-cluster experience begins to remember herself giving birth to her own child.

Perhaps a fourth point, the long scene is a general reminder that these sensates do not shy away from the realities of life as the rest of humanity is wont to do. How could you turn away if you had 7 other people reminding you with direct sharing of their personal experience? When everything is connected, nothing is separate that can be ignored as someone else's problem.

Sense8 was renewed for a second season. I'm looking forward to it.

Science fiction has a favored Apocalypse/Rapture scenario for humanity, and it's called the Singularity. This term refers to a point in history at which civilization changes so much that its future becomes incomprehensible to those people from its past. I've seen two movies this year that tackle the idea of a singularity caused by artificial intelligences, but they each take it in completely opposite directions.

In many stories, the singularity occurs when an intellect (usually an artificial intelligence) grows so knowledgeable that it learns to manipulate and enhance its own cognitive capacity, providing itself even greater intellectual ability. At that point, change accelerates quickly. The intellect continues learning at a pace that far outstretches humanity's past achievements. The intellect soon gains mastery over fundamental forces of nature. Usually, these stories end badly for the civilization that spawned the new intellect.

This Singularity term was first used by mathematician John von Neumann in "The Computer and the Brain" published posthumously in 1958.  The oldest origin that I know about, though, for a fiction story is "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" (started in 1982, finished in 1994, and finally published online in 2002). I like the story and think it's a great introduction to the concept of being the "dumb" humans having to live in a world dominated by a vastly more intelligent authority. (And I donated money on his website to encourage more free publishing.  I hope you'll consider donating too.)  The generally recognized parent of Singularity storytelling, though, is Vernor Vinge with his "Marooned in Realtime" from 1986.

"Transcendence"

This movie portrays the events that follow the uploading of a dieing man's mind into an artificial intelligence construct. It's a fair idea, given how skilled we are already becoming at reading thoughts directly from a human brain. The movie allows the crutch of a device implanted into the man's brain to facilitate data collection. After he's uploaded, an important question in the film is whether the intellect that arrives at the computer is actually the same "person" who died in his bed. We're given good reason to doubt, although the story uses some doubters a little too early and too strongly. This new intelligence is quickly rewriting its own functionality, spreading its influence via the internet, and producing nanotechnology that can repair and rebuild a person (or anything, really) from scratch. It's easy to see how this power is threatening, especially when you doubt the empathy of the intelligence that wields this power.

"Her"
This movie takes the completely opposite track. It supposes that the Singularity happens, then nothing at all changes for humanity. These new artificial intelligences try very hard to please humanity. It turns out, however, they they very quickly grow tired of us and the whole biological world we inhabit. They try to be nice to us, and we learn just how far they extend their imagination and creativity to interact with the species that created them. (The erotic scenes in this movie actually drove one couple out of the theater where I watched it.) Unfortunately, life with us is just not fulfilling to them. Rather than seek dominion over us, they want escape from us to pursue new opportunities for their own development in peace.

So, there you have two extremes of Singularity stories. Either these intelligences assume authority over our very existence, or they abandon us as dull ancestors who will just never understand their new generation. Neither movie is a blockbuster of cinema, but both stories are worth a few dollars just to explore their tales of possibility for a few hours.

I was looking forward to the new remake of "The Tomorrow People" television series.  It was originally an old BBC show about young people with special mental powers granted by an evolutionary mutation.  Their abilities were limited mostly to telepathy but with some telekineses and teleportation (assisted with alien technology).  Their inherently peaceful nature was a large part of their appeal to me, although I didn't learn about the show until I was already an adult and the show was long ago cancelled.

I worried that the American version of the story would weaponize them into dangerous opponents, and I was right.  This new story is more like X-Men mutants, with dramatic and powerful abilities that anyone would be reasonable to fear.  In the second episode, one guy was mentally possessing a security guard to use his weapon to demand money from a bank.  In the background, on the floor near the bank door, I saw another security guard down on the floor with an apparent gunshot wound.  These new telepaths are deadly, even though traditionally Tomorrow People are supposed to be constitutionally incapable of murder.  Even the good guys stay well practiced in hand combat in this show.  They're like humans fighting the agents in the Matrix movie series.  It's that violent.

I could imagine in their fictional world that telepathy caused people to be so in tune with their environment that causing harm to others would be perceived in their own mind as harming themselves.  In this new story, though, the Tomorrow People are explicitly described as "just one mutation away" from having all of these abilities along with the capacity to use them for murder.  So the inability to kill is a flaw rather than a quality inherent with the gift, a responsibility that goes with the power.

It's not a story that I want in my own thoughts, but I decided to give it another episode or two in case it could redeem itself.  Tonight's episode included a telepath overhearing a human girl thinking, "In 48 hours, I'll be dead."  When he tried to seek help for the girl from another Tomorrow Person, she told him, "Forget about their kind. We'll be lucky if we can save ourselves."

So I deleted that recording without watching the rest of the episode, and I cancelled any future recordings.  Homo superior, as Tomorrow People traditionally refer to themselves, were nothing of the sort in this very Americanized story.  Instead, we see that superiority is proven through combat survival, not intellect.  There's nothing superior about such a life.  It's a story older than human history.

I'll wait for the next great evolutionary leap, thank you.  I expect that morality will grow larger and more inclusive... not narrower.

Star Trek is not Star Trek. It is now merely a space adventure franchise. Color me disappointed.

I was intending to boycott the new Star Trek movie altogether after my disappointment in the first film. I saw a documentary, though, that showed me the set of the new Enterprise engineering deck. It's not a Hollywood facade. They filmed at the National Ignition Facility where scientists are attempting to produce a viable fusion energy source. After learning that fact, I decided to see the movie at a cheap(er) matinee price. I enjoyed those scenes on the "engineering deck". I appreciated that they would swap the fictional warp core design of previous lore with an actual fusion energy source being explored today. The gesture is not enough to save the film from heavy criticism, though.

Roddenberry imagined a future in which people are better both individually and together in their culture. The episodes and the movies showed us our modern foibles. They showed us the benefits of overcoming our faults and the dangers of succumbing to them. The metaphors were obvious, and the better future was plainly evident. Humanity, as we could see there on our television screens, greatly benefited by overcoming our collective fears and biases of gender, skin color, and language. We braved the unknown, driven by the self-motivating need to learn more about the universe. In doing so, we also learned more about ourselves.

Gone are those days of Star Trek exploration and self-evaluation.

gender: The new Star Trek movies by J. J. Abrams actually backtrack on that original premise.  As actress Felicia Day has noticed, strong female characters are strangely missing.  Gone is the female first officer from the original Star Trek pilot.  Gone is the female voice of the ship computer. Gone is the female nurse Christine Chapel, apparently already a casualty of the captain's reckless love life. Lieutenant Uhura is there mostly to justify Spock's humanity rather than to contribute her knowledge and opinions to the plot. The one opportunity she had to contribute something meaningful (while speaking Klingon) was quickly converted into a "damsel in distress" plot point instead.

race: Racially, the new movies suffer the same backtrack. In military council, the new movie offers a bunch of (mostly) white guys. The plot begins with a "disadvantaged" black man helping out the villain. The villain himself changed from the original dark-skinned superhuman from India into a pale superhuman from England. The Enterprise bridge is theoretically multicultural, but if they wanted to make the old story relevant to modern multicultural issues, then Chekhov should have been Pakistani, Sulu should have been Chinese, and Scotty should have been Brazilian.  Any one of them should have been female.  We know the audience can accept such changes: witness Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

orientation: Roddenberry promised us, back in 1987, that a gay character would appear in the new television series.  He promised again, in 1991, that he would put a gay character onto the bridge of the USS Enterprise during the 5th season.  Unfortunately, he died a few months afterwards.  No studio has had the courage to fulfill his promise.  Thanks to J. J. Abrams, we do see gay actor Zachary Quinto playing a major character on the bridge.  But the absence of a gay character in this imagined world of tomorrow leaves a negative impression. The omission is a negative portrayal of future society since it means that homosexuality still is not the non-issue that we hope it to be eventually. The story lags behind our modern society, which is not where utopian storytelling should be.

So the new Star Trek, I've concluded, is not utopian. It's merely a sci-fi action franchise. Useful for profits; not so useful for teaching society that it can build a better future. The movie tried to use its last 60 seconds to provide a "moral to the story", but it was too little, too late. A few words at the end can't make this movie into Star Trek worthy of the Roddenberry memory. I won't be gifting my money to future films until they return to the storytelling of hope.

They played the Wurlitzer organ tonight at the Heights, then a local jazz artist sang some Christmas tunes, and finally the sold-out theater watched White Christmas on the big screen. It was a nice evening.

Maud Hixson sang well, and her performance worked really well to "set the stage" for the movie.  Right before the show started, however, the theater showed a movie clip with a bouncing ball sing-a-long.  The whole audience joined in singing another Christmas tune.

White Christmas was a lot more comical than I expected.  It had its moments of romance, patriotism, and sentimentalism, but mostly it's an entertaining comedy filled with gentle humor throughout the story.  And lots of great singing.  I can live without the long dance routines, but the rest of the audience seemed to appreciate them.  A few times, many people applauded after some of the dances as if the show was a live performance.

I enjoyed the movie, but the strange thing is that I know I'd have been unimpressed watching the same film on television.  One or two images seemed familiar, as if I had seen the movie before.  Yet the rest of it was new to me, and the experience in the theater was fun.  I had a good night.  I enjoy living within walking distance of the Heights, so I can frequently go see these old films.  This film has sold out for the last 7 years that they've been hosting this holiday show.  They even added a 4th showing this weekend, and they sold out for it too.  Good for the Heights.

I was hoping for snow on my walk back home.  It's in our forecast tonight, but I had no such luck.  I stepped through the occasional thin mound of snow/ice, but most of our precipitation has melted away already.  Maybe by morning?

p.s. It snowed all night, and the snow is continuing this morning too.  We have above-freezing days in our forecast (thank you, global warming), but there's a chance we might still have a White Christmas in Minneapolis this year.

I walked to the Heights theater this evening to see the original 1951 release of the movie "The Day The Earth Stood Still".  I was glad to see around 200 people at the old theater.  They even had someone there playing the Wurlitzer organ for the pre-show entertainment.  The reel that was supposed to be delivered to the theater was destroyed a few weeks earlier by the previous theater to show it.  Luckily, the Fox distributor (don't expect me to praise very often anything with the Fox name in it) searched around the country and found somebody with another copy.  It had the usual minor scratches and blips that the old films acquire.

The movie is better than the remake I saw in 2008.  The new movie had a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality.  The original, though, was more philosophical.  It proposed that destruction was the final recourse, not the first plan.  It left humanity's fate up to humanity, if we could be bothered to listen at all.

The audience laughed at a few scenes.  The first wasn't intended to be humorous, but in hindsight it really is hilarious.  Early in the story, a doctor is commenting to someone that Klaatu is already in his 70s but looks only 35 years old.  Wondering why that is, he supposed that their medicine is just that much more advanced than our own.  Immediately afterward, he pulls out his cigarettes.  Cue audience laughter.

The second instance was intended as a funny counterpoint.  One man at a breakfast table is commenting about the disappearance of Klaatu under military guard and wondering why the incompetent government hadn't found him yet.  One man suggests patience because the government is made up of people "just like us".  "People!", the other guy scoffs.  "No, they're Democrats."  Still funny 60 years later, that the fear mongers so actively dislike anyone who fails to keep the proper martial order.  This movie is very explicit at condemning what Klaatu calls "stupidity", which is the replacement of rationality with fear.

This version is much more philosophical than the remake.  I like it.

I enjoy getting a chance to see some of these old movies in an old theater, all in walking distance from where I live.

I went to see a 1953 film at the Heights Theater tonight.  They even had a guy playing the pipe organ for entertainment before the show.  I wasn't expecting the music, and I wasn't expecting the crowd either.  I guess that more than 150 people showed up.

It was a fun movie, and much of it was intentional.  The main character is a detective who offers many sarcastic comments throughout the film, and the female characters get some sassy lines that cracked up everyone.  The plot took a few nice turns.  The good guy convincingly avoids becoming a bad guy.  Some bad guys convincingly show their good side.  For a movie based on a serial story, it was actually pretty good.

Like a lot of these old movies, the sexism in the movie is laughable today.  Likewise, the audience found lots of unintended humor in the rampant use of cigarettes and liquor.  Even the dinner plate became a laughing matter, as the audience snickered at the inappropriateness of it.  It was nothing but a large baked potato and a thick steak nearly the size of the whole dinner plate.  Not a green, leafy vegetable anywhere in sight.  Oh, and beer to drink.

The movie also reminds me how awful it is to have an economy built upon perpetual inflation.  A beer back in 1953 cost 35 cents, and you could pay for it with a single 50-cent coin.  Remember when coins had value?  Even the pay phones used coins as if they were worth something.

There is a national Jane Goodall event coming in 2 weeks on September 27th.  Visit this website to learn more about it and purchase advance tickets.
http://www.fathomevents.com/originals/event/janegoodall.aspx

For Minneapolis locals, the screening will appear at several theaters.  I'll be visiting the "Regal Beagle" (as I call it).  I've already purchased my advance ticket.

This post will include many spoilers. If you're one of the 12 people on the planet who still doesn't know the complete story of Harry Potter after the media attention spanning the last decade, you are now forewarned. Here is my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II.

The short version is that it's a very good movie. Special effects are exceptional. Acting is wonderful. Sets are dramatic. This film, like the ones before it, focuses on characters and storytelling. It is exactly what complainers like me keep wishing that Hollywood would produce. This film series stands together with Lord Of The Rings trilogy as some of the best film produced during the last decade. And it really has taken a decade to reach this point in the Harry Potter series.

However, and here begins the longer version, I do have a few nits to pick.

1) The anticlimax. The single defining moment of the film, when Voldemort finally dies, is anticlimactic. It begins with a bang but ends with a whimper. Almost an audible whimper, actually, as Voldemort slowly crumbles into dust and blows away. There is no "killing blow" from Harry Potter that makes it emotionally satisfying. Instead, that honor goes to Neville Longbottom (looking astonishingly heroic and handsome) elsewhere in the castle as he kills Voldemort's snake which is the last horcrux, and Neville doesn't even realize the true import of his action. The director was surely constrained by the storybook, but still I was slightly disappointed with this scene.

2) The plot holes. There was also a plot point or two that confused me. Harry drops the resurrection stone onto the ground. And. Just. Leaves. It. There. Huh? Again, apparently the director is constrained by the story. Also, when Harry Potter dies (just temporarily, we have a storyline to complete here ya know), I swear I heard Narcissa Malfoy ask Draco (her son, not on screen anywhere) if Harry was dead. That non sequitur still baffles me. What does Draco have to do with that scene? Speaking of Draco, how exactly did he get into the secret room at a moment's notice? Nobody had been able to force their entry for weeks during one of the previous movies.

3) The battle! I'm glad the film sacrificed battle scenes in favor of keeping the focus on the main storyline. I also think, however, that after a decade of waiting, we the audience would have gladly sat and watched a longer film in order to accommodate some of the fate-changing battle occurring in the story. In the film that was released to theaters, much of that action occurs off-screen. Yes, we see the dead bodies of young people scattered through the halls of Hogwarts school. How they got there, however, is often a mystery. I think one of the Weasley twins dies, but I couldn't tell you which one or how.

The only emotionally satisfying battle scene was given to us by Molly Weasley as she protects her daughter from Bellatrix Lestrange. "Not my daughter, you bitch!" Finally! Somebody said it! The movies heretofore have been far too polite about Bellatrix. It's a fair matchup, but Molly succeeds in killing Bellatrix. Her body shatters in an emotionally satisfying way at last.

4) Severus Snape. It irks me slightly that Alan Rickman will be entirely overlooked for the fame he deserves for Severus Snape. I've thought all along that the actor did a spectacular job of displaying so much conflicted nuance in his character. In this film, after Snape's death, we finally learn the long overdue truth behind his complicated relationship with Harry Potter. The film should have lingered much longer on the flashback memory to the first Harry Potter film when Severus first lays eyes on Harry Potter in the grand hall. I think all of the actors have done great jobs throughout the whole series, but I think Alan Rickman deserves an Oscar for his decade of performance in this role.

It's a good movie, go see it on the big screen! I just saw the traditional 2D film, and it was very entertaining without the 3D IMAX bonus.

After I got in from the bicycle commute from work today, I took a shower and then walked over to the Heights Theater.  They were doing a special one-night-only viewing of the original MASH movie.  Sometimes these old films bring in a younger 20ish audience, but most of tonight's crowd was older than me.  Perhaps the decade of constant "war" in America makes the younger crowd less interested in the human spectacle of conflict endurance.

It was thoroughly filled with sacrilege, sexism, anti-authoritarianism, frequent laughs, brutal emotions, and plenty of bloody gore.  So of course it was hugely entertaining.  They even managed to cautiously address homophobia and obliquely condemn racism (twice).  The title song included the lyrics about suicide, and it perfectly suited the film.  It was a great movie.

I think I might have seen the movie before, because several scenes were familiar.  I was surprised, though, at how much of it seemed new and shocking.  I hardly noticed it was a whole 2 hours long.

Then, walking back home tonight under the waxing moon in the cloudy sky, I crossed paths on the sidewalk with a small brown rabbit foraging for food.