The Cursor

The cursor must move. This cursor has to move. This blinking cursor will move. I will chase this scampering cursor all across the screen and I will stumble over words and I will look a fool, but I will make this little fucking cursor move. Come ‘ere, you little shit, I say, deftly avoiding loose punctuation. The cursor ignores my call. The hour grows late – the urge to chase often comes at late hours – my mind wearies while the cursor darts. With bloodied knee and dirtied face, I sit in the pale screenlight hunched over and exhausted by all my effort, unsatisfied but for the feeling of living. The cursor cares not. It winks quietly at me, knowing that it will always be just a little ahead of me leaping before I know where I’m going. | _ |

Review 'Avatar' and 'Avatar: The Way of Water'

I drafted this review awhile ago, and while I'd like to have rewritten some, the films are too dull to revisit.

Last year on Mastodon I said, "watching avatar for the first time the way james cameron intended: on a standard def hotel tv where the white balance is fucked up for some reason". Mr. Cameron may be thankful I saw only the ending rather than the whole film in that venue, but he'd be dismayed to learn that a few months later I watched the full film on a friend's much better projection system and I didn't find the experience to be much of an improvement. I've also watched the sequel since then and my reaction aligns with what Cameron served up: more of the same.

The Avatar movies are proven money makers (Cameron has multiple planned sequels), yet their only notable cultural impact appears to be a meme questioning how such financially successful films have had so little cultural impact. As a late viewer who avoided the early hype, the answer is obvious: the films are utterly forgettable in every way other than the technical wizardry required to make them. The plot for each is so basic that a mere reference to one or two other films adequately summarizes the story (e.g., Dances With Wolves (1990) and Fern Gully (1992)). The acting and dialogue fall flat. Fatally, the digital imagery, the film's supposed triumph, the reason to watch them at all, is actually largely uninspiring to my eyes. The blue Na'vi faces are so stiff they may as well be plastic action figures. Perhaps the actors did emote and the technology failed them. Landscapes are occasionally pleasant in a desktop background way. Animals have more creative and visually interesting features, particularly the whale-like creatures in the sequel, which have eyes that are more expressive than the main humanoid characters.

The techno-industrial form juxtaposes, without irony or acknowledgement, the films' own rejection of technology and uncritical industrialism in favor of a natural mysticism. A 2D film pretending to have depth.

Rated: not liked.

Review 'Civil War'

Marketing hype polarizes while this point-and-shoot frames a view from nowhere. Released into a violently charged political moment, A24’s advertising arm promises glimpses of future war-torn America, which distorts writer/director Alex Garland’s story of a journalistic road trip across these disunited states.

The action is reasonably taut and adequately gruesome – a spurt of blood here, hanging bodies there – but not memorable. We’ve seen these images before in other places and other movies. The presentation of the journalists’ still photos is uninspired, leaving them lifeless.

The main cast gives a strong performance, breathing enough life to almost fool you into thinking the characters are more than snapshots. Dunst’s stoicism carries the lead role. Garland, however, refuses any true depth. In a quiet moment, Spaeny’s Jessie runs down the highlights of Dunst’s Lee’s Wikipedia page and asks, “What’s missing from it?” only for Lee to respond with a small insight about her parents before the dialogue drops the topic and the scene soon ends. The film thus squanders the overwhelming boringness of wars and road trips.

Overall Garland errs twice with the structure: first a focus through veteran Lee rather than amateur Jessie, and then an avoidance of any serious contemporary politics. Lee, unfazed and outwardly uncaring (if not inwardly), leaves us with little emotional resonance for gruesome war. Jessie would have been the better vessel for the audience’s struggle to comprehend, but her perspective is not centered until a blunt final scene. Meanwhile, the simple diorama of confused and muted politics – a few lines from Offerman’s third-term president and a gunfight with boys in Hawaiian shirts – lacks emotional punch to justify everyone’s violent anger. The imagery stands as an undeveloped reality.

The film’s lack of humanity and war imagery coalesce to a nihilist message: journalism doesn’t matter. Even after all your journalistic goals are achieved, you didn’t change anything, you just saw a lot of fucked up shit along the way. The public vicariously bears witness to horrors via images from afar, when we choose the momentary discomfort, but nothing changes before we find ourselves on the frontlines, seeing our neighbors and ourselves doing what humans do. Suppose they hyped a war film and no one cared.

Rated: liked.

Review ‘Dune: Part Two’

'60s sociotechno psychedelia spices up '20s cinematic minimalism. Denis Villeneuve assembles his pieces in his desert, his Dune for us to see that the best laid plans of Muad'Dib and women aft gang agley.

Chalamet impresses as he continues Paul Atreides' metamorphosis from mousy-framed prince into prophetic leader and somewhat reluctant warmonger while Zendaya charismatically stares through the bullshit. There's an air of meet-cute between them, but their chemistry, at times, trends more to awkward than passion. Ferguson mesmerizes as the expectant witch-mother who communes with her unborn daughter to guide Paul toward the future she chose for him. Bardem, the true heart of the story, effortlessly drips welcome humor into his performance even as he tragically embodies the skeptical longing for the sublime we feel in our own lives. Still further well-named pawns – Skarsgård, Butler, Seydoux, and more – all command their presence on screen. Walken remains the only questionable choice, offering up a serviceable weak emperor, but perhaps plays it so feebly as to overpower the character with his own presence. One does wonder, though, if his swept back hair and dour face with pursued lips was an intentional gesture at Trump or merely coincidental.

The film's expansive running time avoids self-indulgence, instead giving viewers' eyes time to adjust to the austere beauty of Arrakis. We are encouraged to drink up the desert, become intoxicated with it. Ironically, however, the filmmaker reaches the near-height of his skill under the black sun of the Harkonnen home planet. ("Near-height" because I believe we will continue to see even greater things.) Confident in the powers of cinema, Villeneuve explains the alien sun's optical properties in one shot with a simple fading transition from color to inverted black and white as characters move across the screen from inside to outside. We see a close-up of Seydoux's pale, beautiful face looking through opera glasses at Butler's pale, distorted ugliness as he embraces his sadism in a gladiator pit; but then later we see such beauty, even under normal light, is just another knife here.

The action remains taut, well-choreographed, and tense, serving the story rather than offering mere amusement. Hans Zimmer, though, continues to obliterate everything on screen with noise.

The story, so straightforward that we are told it in advance, still surprises as the film intentionally shifts the landscape beneath us, leaving us with more questions than answers: Who are we? How do we make choices? Where did our ideas and beliefs come from? Summarizing further would be a wasted effort. You don’t understand the desert by inspecting grains of sand – you experience it. A heady mix of human ideals and pure cynicism.

Rated: liked.

Reach For The Book

Several months ago, I saw a complaint on Mastodon about the prevalence of 'AI'-created websites. The poster said they searched Google for a food recipe, but the results were SEO nonsense spat out from LLMs, so the poster had to reach for a cookbook instead. The growing presence, if not outright invasive overgrowth, of so-called 'AI' generated content is troublesome, and how search engines (really, Google) respond is certainly a fascinating and fraught topic. What most piqued my interest, like a fish noticing water, was: why do we use a web search (Google) as the source for everything?

The answer, of course, is convenience. We type a query, spelling errors and all, into a little box at the top of our browser window and voilà: the answer appears. Or so, that's how the story goes. In reality there's some more hunting and inspection of sources ("should I trust c00ks.com or eater.com? wait, are those zeros?") and let's not even think about what level of trust we assign Google's mystery-meat bento boxes shown alongside the heaped slices of spam.

One looks at the modern Google results page and wonders how did we get here? Painting a full picture is out of scope here, but it's the same as it ever was. In the beginning, Google was simple and good, but it grew until, like any good megafauna, a shaped environment coevolved around it, crushing some and showering others with nutrients in the life of the web, including the SEO symbiotes. Eventually, the search page disappeared into the little box at the top of browser. Bit by bit, we stopped thinking about primary sources and left everything up to the best algorithms a global ad monopoly could buy. Now even starting to type in a source first sends the results off for analysis by your search engine of choice. This is all rather stultifying.

Since seeing that post on Mastodon, I've tried to change my habits. When I catch myself about to search, I first try to think of a primary source for the information instead. Often, I go to Wikipedia and find what I want there. If I want news, I go to the publisher most likely to carry the coverage I want. Skip the middleman. Find places you trust and use bookmarks. I personally don't want to be so beholden to Google (or DuckDuckGo, my actual search of choice) that I flail around trying to cook dinner. Maybe I need to pick up a book first.