Squander Or Masterpiece?
Thanks to the Netflix subscription gifted me a month or two back, tonight I finally watched Shane Acker’s 9, and while it’s one of the most visually beautiful films I’ve seen (ragpunk?), I mainly wondered why the story didn’t appear to make any actual sense.
Central to the story is the mysterious talisman, which as near as I can tell serves only two purposes: to wake the machine and grant it the power literally to suck the souls out of the dolls, and to release those souls up to some heavenly hereafter should the correct sequence of buttons be pressed.
Which is all well and good until you really take a look at it, since the second purpose is necessary only if someone is stupid enough to allow the talisman to fulfill the first. And “wake the machine and grant it the power literally to suck the souls out of the dolls” seems a fairly daft thing for anyone to want, so the inescapably problematic question is: why does the talisman exist anymore in the first place?
For that matter, even if it exists, why would the scientist specifically set out to create a race of dolls, each possessed of a portion of his own soul, and then leave behind for the ninth and final doll a device whose first purpose — the resurrection of the machine responsible for destroying humanity — is horrifyingly counterproductive?
I could come up with only one answer: the scientist saw this as his only means of spiritual escape and redemption for the role he played in creating the machines which ended all human life in the first place. But what that means was he was willing to create life in order for that life to die so that the pieces of his soul would be released unto heaven.
What that explanation in turn means, ultimately, is that the scientist suffered from a rather terrifyingly selfish and manipulative sense of his own spiritual needs. One that, no less, would seem to undermine that suggestion that he’s even deserving of any sort of redemption. If so, the story certainly then makes sense, but turns out to be not only almost rampagingly cynical, but almost completely deceptive about being so.
Humanity, the film would then be saying, not only would destroy itself through the creation of and self-interested manipulation of machines, but would then respond to doing so by extending that self-interest and manipulation into the creation of new life whose sole purpose is to be left behind and die in order to set free the soul of the destroyer.
“We had such potential,” the scientist says. “Such promise. But we squandered our gifts.” I’m left to wonder whether this also describes 9 itself, or whether Acker is a mad genius who smuggled into the nation’s movie theaters a near masterpiece of human misanthropy.
Nominate Unofficial M.E. (Again)
Back in November, I tried to cajole people into nominating Not The Official Twitter of Mutant Enemy for “Best Brand Use of Twitter” in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.
Despite failing to convince enough people it was worth their while, I’ll try again now that the nomination period for this year’s Shorty Awards is underway. My argument is the same now as it was then.
It’s a long shot — a ridiculously long shot, in fact — but I thought it would be interesting to see how far we could push an unofficial account promoting a given brand that doesn’t have an official one.
The larger argument for the utility of the unofficial account in question is outlined in On Mutant Enemy And Social Media, also posted back in November. Most of the case for the account’s successful, if unoffocial, representation of the Mutant Enemy brand in social media is made by spending some time browsing the past several month’s worth of its updates.
Unlike the Mashable awards, as near as I can tell from the rules, you can only nominate once for a given account under the Brand category in the Shorty Awards. Or, rather, you appear to be able to nominate a brand multiple times, but I believe it simply replaces your previous nomination with your new reason (you have to supply a reason with your nomination).
So, please consider nominating @UnofficialME for the Brand category in this year’s Shorty Awards. It’s still a long shot, but it’d still be interesting. Just remember: You must include a reason for your nomination to count.
Update: In addition to the official Brand category, I invite you also to nominate @UnofficialME in the community category Fan Brand, created as a kind of fallback position. If there’s enough support for a given community-created category, the Shorty Awards might convert it to an official category.
Update: See the @UnofficialME profile on the Shorty Awards site for the instructions on which categories in which to nominate.
The Flat And Lifeless Riese
I tried to like the web series Riese, which premiered in November with a substantial production budget behind it. But it’s a problem for any show when its lead goes about her business looking nothing so much as bored for the entirety of the roughly 45-minute story.
I should explain up front that this is the second version of this review. I went into my first attempt intending a piece mainly about disappointment. I feel bad about it, but upon my re-watch of the entirety of the just-concluded Chapter One, it’s become a piece that can’t help sum itself up at the start with the bluntness above.
It’s true that the strange quietness of the almost dialogue-free opener, embedded above, and the vague intimations of steampunk in the series’ design and promotion, intrigued enough for me to want to see what the series had in store. But it didn’t take long for that initial interest to turn, mainly, into a sort of impatience. What little online discussion I read tended to gravitate to the same early criticism: poor pacing. Too little seemed to be happening in a series whose episodes clocked in at around eight minutes in length each.
By the time we got to this week’s release of the fifth and final episode in the series’ first chapter (the second chapter shot in December for a release cycle to start in February), that frustration expanded to a more encompassing theme: almost everything in the series — pacing and energy, action and dialogue, the performances themselves — is, in a word, flat.
There’s an almost complete lack of variation in tone, events happen at more or less the same speed, and no one seems particularly invested in anything they are saying or doing. For all the attention the project has generated — whether due to its creator’s use of social media and a sort of alternate reality game (ARG), or through some attempts at comparing it to Sanctuary, which went from the web to television — the end result has been something of a disappointment.
Where there should be a serious attempt to generate a real and palpable tension, Riese instead presents us with thumping music played over lugubrious camera work. On occasion, an actor apparently was told to breathe heavy. In essence, the series indicates tension but never actually presents tension.
That might be the crux of most of the series’ deficiencies: it indicates rather than presents. There’s no sense of who any of the characters are as people, until and unless we get one of the stray moments in which one character says to describe another. Indication instead of presentation.
During my re-watch, my notes for this, the second version of this post, became increasingly staccato. It might make sense just to combine by theme and offer them up here as bullet points.
- Over-reliance upon thumping music to tell you to be interested, or to try to compensate for flat movement. Pointless Batman-like camera angles, to go with the thumping music, to try to get you interested in nothing happening on screen. Endless shots of Riese walking through the forest, or walking through hallways, or walking outside buildings, or standing around breathing heavy isn’t tension, especially not just because there’s thumping music. It’s just monotonous.
- Unfortunately, the lead mainly comes across like she’s playacting, not acting. Everything she does is exactly the same, via the exact same lack of expression. Half of the time when Riese is in danger, she just looks, in fact and instead, bored. The only variation comes when the director apparently told her to breathe heavy to indicate tension.
- Dialogue is stilted, or too on the nose, or too clunkily expository, delivered with no life in it. Why does everyone talk so slowly? Countless pauses (in conversation or even within a single character’s lines) and laconic delivery isn’t, again, tension or interesting character dynamics. It’s just boring.
- No sense of character comes from the performances.
One realization that struck me during the re-watch necessitates a comparison. While my introduction to web series came through Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild, it was After Judgment which convinced me that dramatic science fiction not only could successfully take to the form, but be done well.
The first season of After Judgment (leaving out the intertwining, and semi-separate Before Judgment), consists of sixteen episodes totaling around an hour of story. While a bit more happens in terms of plot development and exposition in that hour than happens in Riese’s forty-five minutes, it isn’t enough more to explain the differences. After Judgment, unlike Riese, flows smoothly and offers a clear sense of an entire range of characters just from the performances alone.
But in Riese, I have no sense of even just the title character beyond what someone else says about her — unless I’m supposed to be getting something from the fact that she’s bored all the time and breathes heavy.
For all of Riese’s much-vaunted budget, After Judgment manages to best it on almost every count — proving, if nothing else, that it isn’t money or connections or marketing savvy that makes for a good web series. All things considered, I’ll take a lively script and dynamic performances but no real budget over the opposite any day.
There was some chatter from the series’ creators on Twitter that they were reading the criticisms from certain quarters and taking some of them into consideration as they put together the second chapter. Most of those early criticisms were generally about the pacing issue, but my re-watch made it clear to me that the pace of Chapter One is inextricably bound together with a larger set of issues.
And casting a number of recognizable genre actors for the upcoming episodes (see the series’ blog for details), as much as additional talent can often prompt others to step up their own game, isn’t going to be enough.
Addressing the issues above would invariably have an effect upon pacing, sure. But the problems aren’t that limited, or simple. It remains to be seen if in Chapter Two the series graduates from merely indicating to the audience how they should consider a given scene to actually presenting something which will instill the intended reaction.
I do still plan to check in with Riese than the series returns in February. But given that Chapter One led me from mere disappointment to something far more critical, they’ll have to overcome a fair amount of skepticism to snag me for all of Chapter Two.
Happy Anniversary, Spirit
Six years ago tonight, I sat amongst hundreds of people at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. The standing room only crowd had surged past the capacity of the auditorium, forcing the facility to open up the planetarium next door for the overflow.
Nearly everyone there likely could have stayed at home, enjoying the comfort of their own living rooms or dens, thanks either to cable television or the Web. Instead, all of them deliberately went out of their way not to watch the evening’s events on their own, but instead in the company of others who also deliberately went out of their way not to watch the evening’s events on their own.
Six years ago tonight, the Mars Exploration Rover named Spirit approached the red planet for entry, descent, and landing. In two rooms at OMSI, hundreds of Oregonians watched NASA TV together. They held their breath in sync with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers on screen during the so-called Six Minutes of Terror. They burst into applause when the indication came that the airbag-cocooned lander was bouncing on the surface. And they settled into the anxious rhythm of bated breath and ecstatic applause as the EDL team reported each new indication of success.
Three weeks later, what I can only assume were mostly the same hundreds of people descended upon OMSI all over again, as the EDL team repeated their success with Spirit by landing its sister rover, Opportunity, on the other side of Mars.
As most should know by now, the Mars Exploration Rovers were never designed to operate much past three months. It’s anyone’s guess who actually knows this, because the attention of the press, and the public long since has drifted elsewhere.
I’ve said it ad nauseam, and I will continue to say it every time one of the rovers marks another milestone: In any civilization worthy of that term, the scientists, engineers, and technicians of the Mars Exploration Rover program would be considered as rock stars. In my book, there was no greater human accomplishment in the past decade than successfully landing not one, but two, rovers on Mars to conduct groundbreaking scientific exploration — and then have them still plugging away as best they can, despite countless obstacles and painful setbacks (Free Spirit!), a full six years later.
If for some reason you’ve never done so before, do yourself the favor of watching two editions of the program NOVA: “Mars: Dead or Alive” (Hulu or Netflix) and “Welcome to Mars” (Hulu or Netflix). The achievement matters, and should be remembered. If you’re anything like me (the first job I ever wanted was Outer Space Moving Van Driver), you probably won’t make it through dry-eyed.
Spirit and Opportunity: some of us are still watching, as we have been all along. And our grateful thanks continues to go to the entire Mars Exploration Rover team for giving us the gift of being witness to this mission in our lifetime.
Note: The graphic at the top of this post is taken from this MER@6 collection of posters and desktop wallpapers.
About My Best Photograph Of 2009
Taken at the May 26 protest against the California Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Proposition 8′s prohibition of marriage equality, held at Salmon Street Springs. The full photo set contains a total of twenty-four photos, including several others featuring this particular subject, but it was this one which The Progressive paid to use in their July 2009 issue.
Oddly, or perhaps not, marriage equality also was the subject of the coverage of which I am most proud from back in my Portland Communique days. Uninterested in marriage myself, but able to legally obtain one if I wanted to, the subject for some reason sparks some of my best work in any medium.
More generally, my best photographs — although I’m still judgmental enough to cringe any time I succumb to using “best” and “photograph” when discussing myself — tend to be those that capture moments, not objects, and certainly not (although there are apparent exceptions) subjects aware that they are being photographed.
Out of all my photography over the course of last year — of television panel events, high school plays, teabagging, comic book conventions, zoo animals, and even bicycle races — ultimately the visual happenstance of this shot comes first in capturing a moment not just from the event, nor just from that singular day, but from the necessary motion of history.
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