Blade Runner November 2019

Blade Runner (1982) was set in November 2019.

Yes, progress has been a bit slow.

Blade Runner got one thing very right -- the two most important technologies of this century are AI and Genetic Engineering.

Where is the AI in Blade Runner, you ask? Not evident until Blade Runner 2049? Alien and Blade Runner take place in the same universe. A universe which contains the AI David as well as the engineered Replicants:

... a special feature on the Prometheus Blu-ray release makes the film even more interesting by tying it into the Blade Runner universe. Included as an entry in the journal of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), who in the film was obsessed with creating artificial life, is the following gem:

A mentor and long-departed competitor once told me that it was time to put away childish things and abandon my “toys.” He encouraged me to come work for him and together we would take over the world and become the new Gods. That’s how he ran his corporation, like a God on top of a pyramid overlooking a city of angels. Of course, he chose to replicate the power of creation in an unoriginal way, by simply copying God. And look how that turned out for the poor bastard. Literally blew up in the old man’s face. I always suggested he stick with simple robotics instead of those genetic abominations he enslaved and sold off-world, although his idea to implant them with false memories was, well… “amusing,” is how I would put it politely.

The mentor is Eldon Tyrell (Blade Runner), of course. See also here and the Tyrell-Weyland Connection.

Brexit, the movie: Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings

The Brexit movie, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, is really good.

I was able to watch it online for free: Channel 4 in the UK. (Perhaps you can do that as well if you don't get HBO.)

I had to see it this afternoon before heading over to Dom's for dinner tonight :-)

See Dom's blog On the referendum #20: the campaign, physics and data science

We created new software. This was a gamble but the whole campaign was a huge gamble and we had to take many calculated risks. One of our central ideas was that the campaign had to do things in the field of data that have never been done before. This included a) integrating data from social media, online advertising, websites, apps, canvassing, direct mail, polls, online fundraising, activist feedback, and some new things we tried such as a new way to do polling (about which I will write another time) and b) having experts in physics and machine learning do proper data science in the way only they can – i.e. far beyond the normal skills applied in political campaigns. We were the first campaign in the UK to put almost all our money into digital communication then have it partly controlled by people whose normal work was subjects like quantum information ...

If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about ‘data’ unless you can independently verify it. Physics, mathematics, and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting which satisfies neither of the necessary conditions – 1) enough structure in the information to enable good predictions, 2) conditions for good fast feedback and learning. Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people. It is no surprise that they can successfully invade politics and devise things that rout those who wrongly think they know what they are doing. Vote Leave paid very close attention to real experts. (The theoretical physicist Steve Hsu has a great blog HERE which often has stuff on this theme, e.g. HERE.)

More important than technology is the mindset – the hard discipline of obeying Richard Feynman’s advice: ‘The most important thing is not to fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.’ They were a hard floor on ‘fooling yourself’ and I empowered them to challenge everybody including me. They saved me from many bad decisions even though they had zero experience in politics and they forced me to change how I made important decisions like what got what money. We either operated scientifically or knew we were not, which is itself very useful knowledge.

See also these old posts Brexit in the Multiverse: Dominic Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign and Brexit: victory over the Hollow Men.

From Dom himself (physicists appear at 13min40 ;-)

Life and Fate, Before Sunset

This Hollywood oral history tells the story of Richard Linklater's "Before" Trilogy: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. The films appeared 9 years apart, and tell the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. I find the second film to be the most interesting, really a masterpiece of filmmaking (I have a copy on the hard drive of the laptop I write this on :-). The events in Before Sunset take place in real time -- i.e., the story transpires over the run time of the movie, a single afternoon. Shooting it must have been extremely challenging for Delpy and Hawke, and for the crew.

The video above should start at 23:30, and explains how Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke came together to do the sequel. I think that event was, in some sense, the most contingent of those responsible for the trilogy. The first movie made very little money, and hence the idea to make a second, very different film -- about the complexity of life, the passage of time, lost chances -- was neither obvious nor inevitable.

The first movie is about a one night tryst between 20-something travelers, but the second movie takes place a decade later. The protagonists, while still young, have experienced more of life and the second film is richer and more complex, despite taking place over an even shorter period of time. I remember being excited to see it, not so much because of Before Sunrise (which I found entertaining, but not as special), but because of the intriguing premise of two lovers meeting again by chance after losing track of each other for so long.

Here's a scene from Before Sunset: a long take of walking and conversation in beautiful Paris, camera following Hawke and Delpy in a totally naturalistic way.




I hesitate to include this trailer because it's kind of cheesy, but if you're not familiar with the trilogy it explains the premise of the first two films.




The video below is a nice discussion of the trilogy. Just now I learned (thanks, AI!) that Before Sunrise is based on actual events in Linklater's life -- see here for the poignant story of the real life muse for these films.




Richard Linklater also directed Dazed and Confused -- one of the greatest high school movies ever made, and a beautiful evocation of adolescence in late-70s, early-80s America.

Blade Runner 2049: Demis Hassabis (Deep Mind) interviews director Villeneuve

Hassabis refers to AI in the original Blade Runner, but it is apparent from the sequel that replicants are merely genetically engineered humans. AI appears in Blade Runner 2049 in the form of Joi. There seems to be widespread confusion, including in the movie itself, about whether to think about replicants as robots (i.e., hardware) with "artificial" brains, or simply superhumans engineered (by manipulation of DNA and memories) to serve as slaves. The latter, while potentially very alien psychologically (detectable by Voight-Kampff machine, etc.), presumably have souls like ours. (Hassabis refers to Rutger Hauer's decision to have Roy Batty release the dove when he dies as symbolic of Batty's soul escaping from his body.)

Dick himself seems a bit imprecise in his use of the term android (hardware or wet bioware?) in this context. "Electric" sheep? In a bioengineered android brain that is structurally almost identical to a normal human's?

Q&A at 27min is excellent -- concerning the dispute between Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford as to whether Deckard is a replicant, and how Villeneuve handled it, inspired by the original Dick novel.

Addendum: Blade Runner, meet Alien

The Tyrell-Weyland connection

Robots (David, of Alien Prometheus) vs Genetically Engineered Slaves (replicants) with false memories

The Loveless (1982) and Born to Run

The Loveless (free now on Amazon Prime) was the first film directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Zero Dark Thirty) and also the first first film role for a young Willem Dafoe. Dafoe has more leading man star power in this role than in most of his subsequent work.

Loveless was shot in 22 days, when Bigelow was fresh out of Columbia film school. The movie could be characterized as a biker art film with some camp elements, but overall a fairly dark and nihilistic mood. The video above is a fan mash up of Loveless and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. It works well on its own terms, although Born to Run is more romantic than nihilistic, at least musically. The lyrics by themselves, however, fit the film rather well.

Born To Run

Bruce Springsteen

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway nine,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin' out over the line
H-Oh, Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
`Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Yes, girl we were

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims
And strap your hands 'cross my engines
Together we could break this trap
We'll run till we drop, baby we'll never go back
H-Oh, Will you walk with me out on the wire
`Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta know how it feels
I want to know if love is wild
Babe I want to know if love is real

Oh, can you show me

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard
Girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors
And the boys try to look so hard
The amusement park rises bold and stark
Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist
I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight
In an everlasting kiss

One, two, three, four

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody's out on the run tonight
But there's no place left to hide
Together Wendy we can live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul
H-Oh, Someday girl I don't know when
We're gonna get to that place
Where we really wanna go
And we'll walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us
Baby we were born to run
Oh honey, tramps like us
Baby we were born to run
Come on with me, tramps like us
Baby we were born to run

American Psycho

Author Bret Easton Ellis, Christian Bale (Patrick Bateman), and Director Mary Herron discuss American Psycho.




This is a rare 1999 documentary about Ellis. It mixes interviews with dramatizations of scenes from his writing. The American Psycho bits are terrible, especially compared to the actual movie, which was released in 2000. Rewatching the movie today, my main reaction is that Bale is simply brilliant as Patrick Bateman: e.g., Hip to be Square (reprised by Huey Lewis himself here).




It seems likely that the title American Psycho is partly an homage to the late 1970s film American Gigolo, which had a big impact on Ellis. (I highly recommend BEE's podcast to anyone interested in film or literature.)

Rolling Stone: 'American Psycho' at 25

Before American Psycho came out, 25 years ago this month, it was already the most controversial novel of the Nineties. Its vivid depictions of gruesome murders of women, men, children and animals preceded wherever it went. The original publisher dropped it and told author Bret Easton Ellis to keep the money — but to please go away. The New York Times titled its book review "Snuff This Book!" On the opposite coast, Los Angeles Times begrudgingly wrote that "Free Speech Protects Even an 'American Psycho.'" The National Organization of Women attempted to organize boycotts. Stores refused to order it. And Ellis, who turned 27 around its release, received death threats. ...

Has the way that Patrick Bateman has become a cult character surprised you?
What if I said, no? [Pause.] I'm kidding [laughs]. Of course, it was surprising to me. American Psycho was an experimental novel. I wasn't really quite sure, nor did I care, how many copies it was going to sell. I really didn't care who connected with it.

Why is that?
I created this guy who becomes this emblem for yuppie despair in the Reagan Eighties – a very specific time and place ...

... Beginning in the Eighties, men were prettifying themselves and in ways they weren't. And they were taking on a lot of the tropes of gay male culture and bringing it into straight male culture — in terms of grooming, looking a certain way, going to the gym, waxing, and being almost the gay porn ideals. You can track that down to the way Calvin Klein advertised underwear, a movie like American Gigolo, the re-emergence of Gentlemen's Quarterly. All of these things really informed American Psycho when I was writing it. So that seemed to me much more interesting than whether he is or is not a serial killer, because that really is a small section of the book. ...

... Patrick Bateman, who was obsessed with Donald Trump, would likely be pretty happy with his campaign.
Or would he be embarrassed? Trump today isn't the Trump of 1987. He's not the Trump of Art of the Deal. He seemed much more elitist in '87, '88. Now he seems to be giving a voice to white, angry, blue-collar voters. I think, in a way, Patrick Bateman may be disappointed by how Trump is coming off and who he's connecting with.

To the guys that I was talking to in the Eighties when I was researching American Psycho, Donald Trump was an aspirational figure. That's why the jokes are throughout the book. It wasn't like I pulled that out of my hat; that was happening. And so I just thought it was funny that "OK, well, Patrick Bateman's gonna be obsessed with Donald Trump. He's gonna want to aspire to be Donald Trump." And I don't know if he would think that today. ...

Mind Out of Time: Arrival, Ted Chiang, and Sapir-Whorf

Arrival is based on a short story by Ted Chiang: Story of Your Life.

Despite what some have said, the main plot idea (as I remember from the story; I have yet to see the film) goes well beyond the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- it also requires that human consciousness (potentially) extend beyond the confines of the usual time span we perceive. This is a modification of fundamental physics, not just of cognitive linguistics.

See also A Modern Borges? and Beyond Human Science.

Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis on American Gigolo

https://www.podcastone.com/episode/B.E.E.---Paul-Schrader---10/17/16-1685639

Highly recommended to readers with literary or cinematic interests. Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis discuss American Gigolo. (Best brief summary of the movie and its impact is @5-12 min.) Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho. Schrader wrote and directed American Gigolo (1980), which had a huge cultural impact and made Richard Gere a star. (Intro soundtrack is Blondie's Call Me.)

This is an old interview with Ellis (translated from the French):

ALEX ISRAEL - We've spoken about your interest in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo. Tell me about your relationship to the film.
BRET EASTON ELLIS - I Was 16 when it came out and back then it seemed very shocking. It was Paramount's big spring movie of 1980 and it reverberated through our cultivation and started to change things. What Was shocking Was That there HAD never-been movie That Looked at a male beauty in the way American Gigolo DID. We'd seen women bed, Addressed, and undressed fait que fashion, we aim'd never seen a movie about Essentially male beauty. It was the first metrosexual movie. I think it has Anticipated changes in culture, That Would Be seen with more clarity later on in Calvin Klein ads and in the photographs of Herb Ritts.

ALEX ISRAEL - So it offered a new way of thinking about male sexuality's role in mass culture?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - A lot of movies-have Dealt with male sexuality. Purpose Does American Gigolo really deal with male sexuality? Richard Gere plays a prostitute in it. It's a film noir. Regardless of what Paul Schrader Was going for at the time, it: has a heavy homoerotic element. Purpose It Was not a gay film. It was Saying, look, this is Where We're headed as a culture male beauty in straight Culture is going to be Embraced in this way - not as it is in gay culture, in order --other this way. I remember seeing the movie a number of times, Knowing That It Was not a great film, That goal It was very suggestive. Now, 30 years later, it's a key THE movie.

ALEX ISRAEL - An Especially key movie for you, right?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - Completely, right down to the fact That I named Julian in Less Than Zero after Gere's character in American Gigolo. For better or worse, in 1980 I Began working on Less Than Zero. There Was not really a character Julian in the first draft of That book. When That character Began to announce Itself in subsequent drafts He Was named Julian - in homage to American Gigolo.

...

ALEX ISRAEL - What you Influenced When You Were writing Less Than Zero, other than American Gigolo?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - I Was a Southern California kid Who wanted to write about youth culture and about the people I Knew. The language of movies and it cam from punk rock and from Joan Didion. I do not know if There Was a specific cultural influences That inspired Less Than Zero. I do not know what it Would Have been. I knew that I wanted to write a novel, and I Was That very much Influenced by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway, not that much profit by Fitzgerald.

Happy Birthday Roy Batty (Blade Runner)

Gizmodo: According to Ridley Scott’s 34-year-old (!!!) scifi classic Blade Runner, January 8th, 2016, is the day the replicant designated N6MAA10816 was first incepted. But you may know him better as Roy Batty, the philosophical, sociopathic antagonist played by Rutger Hauer in the film.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to die.

Vangelis and Tangerine Dream

Eighties forever! :-)

Tomorrowland

I watched this on the flight back from Asia. It's a kid movie but it operates at more than one level. The girl robot Athena is really fun.

So Money

An oral history of Swingers (Grantland).

Jon Favreau (Mike): When I set out to write Swingers, I didn’t know I was even writing a movie. My dad had given me a screenwriting program and I started the script just as an exercise to see if I could write a screenplay. Swingers is what came out.

Ron Livingston (Rob): Jon was really busted up over his breakup. That’s right about the age when your first long-term thing comes apart. Having your heart ripped out like that — that’s a lot different than the cheerleader who doesn’t like you back.

Favreau: I started writing, just drawing from the environment I was living in. I had characters loosely based on people I knew. None of the events were real; it was all a story that came out of my head without an outline.

Alex Désert (Charles): I like to say Swingers was us times 10. I wish I could be that cool.

...

Livingston: Vince and I, and a couple of other people — Alex Désert, Ahmed Ahmed, who’s in the movie — we started doing all of these staged readings for potential buyers of this script. They came in all shapes and sizes. Every three months or so, we’d get together in somebody’s living room and rehearse for a while and then go to some empty theater space and do it for some guy who had Saudi parking lot money. ...

Vaughn: The reading would always play phenomenally. We did this for over a year and would get huge laughs, great responses. But the business model was always a problem. You have a bunch of guys that don’t really mean anything to Hollywood. Jon had done more than the rest of us, but wasn’t a big enough name to open a movie. ...

Wurmfeld: Literally every single word that comes out of Vince’s mouth is on the page. That’s what totally blows me away about Jon’s writing — his ability to get someone’s voice, because I think that’s not an easy task. One might think that Vince is improvising, and certainly he can, but I just was amazed that all those jokes and stuff were actually on the page.

Livingston: He grabbed “You’re so money” from the Spike Lee–Michael Jordan commercials, where Spike Lee called Michael Jordan “Money,” you know, “Like the shoes, Money.” Nobody was really doing that, I think, other than just Spike Lee and Michael Jordan. So when the movie came out, that was still kind of a new thing.

Making Oblivion

I just caught Oblivion on cable -- it's visually stunning. The Skytower or glass house was shot in a very interesting way, as shown in this video. If you like modern design and architecture you'll love this.

Her: Singularity as romantic comedy

Can't quite decide whether this is a dystopian or utopian future  :-)

New Yorker ...Spike Jonze’s movie, which was shot in Los Angeles and Shanghai, is set in a near but dateless future, where the rough edges of existence have been rubbed away. The colors of clothes and furnishings, though citrus-bright, are diluted by the pastel softness of the lighting, so that nothing hurts the eye. People ride in smoothly humming trains, not belching cars. And Theodore’s cell phone reminds you of those slender vintage cases for cigarettes and visiting cards; if the ghost of Steve Jobs is watching, he will glow a covetous green.

This little flat box, plus an earpiece that Theodore plugs in whenever he wakes up or can’t sleep, is his portal. It links him to OS1, “the first artificially intelligent operating system,” which is newly installed on his computer. More than that, “it’s a consciousness,” with a voice of your choice, and a rapidly evolving personality, which grows not like a baby, or a library, but like an unstoppable alien spore. Theodore’s version is called Samantha, and practically her first request is: “You mind if I look through your hard drive?” She tidies his e-mails, reads a book in two-hundredths of a second, fixes him up on a date, and, when that goes badly, has sex with him—aural sex, so to speak, but Theodore will take what he can get. No surprise, really, given that the role of Samantha is spoken by Scarlett Johansson.

... And it is romantic: Theodore and Samantha click together as twin souls, not caring that one soul is no more than a digital swarm. Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, “Her” is the right film at the right time. It brings to full bloom what was only hinted at in the polite exchanges between the astronaut and hal, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and, toward the end, as Samantha joins forces with like minds in cyberspace, it offers a seductive, nonviolent answer to Skynet, the system in the “Terminator” films that attacked its mortal masters. We are easy prey, not least when we fall in love.

Hollywood discovers theoretical physics

Hollywood Reporter: Fox Searchlight has optioned The New York Times feature The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble and has set Film Rites' Steve Zaillian and Garrett Basch to produce.

Written by Maxine Swann, the piece ran in the Sunday magazine March 10.

Described as a modern take on Lolita, the story follows Paul Frampton, a divorced theoretical particle physicist, who meets Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. Milani's pictures on the site show a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. The two begin to correspond and plan their perfect life together, but first, the woman asks the British professor if he would deliver a special package to her, setting him on a course of danger. ...

I am available to consult on this project :-) See this research article, co-authored with Professor Frampton.

Given the success of Sheldon Cooper and The Big Bang Theory, I anticipate a flood of dramatizations of the lives of sexy theoretical physicists!

Lore

This is a beautiful but difficult movie. You can watch it right now on Google Play. Interview with director Cate Shortland.

See also Bitter Defeat.

Prometheus: meeting your maker

I finally got to see it over the weekend. Re: plot, there is a way to interpret the story that actually hangs together (suspension of disbelief regarding workings of Darwinian evolution that produced mankind still required, however).

This is one of my favorite scenes. Michael Fassbender is fantastic as the android David.






Some interesting stuff here:









"Please fund my startup!"






See also this old post: Prometheus in the basement.

Cloud Atlas movie

This New Yorker piece describes the Wachowskis' adaptation of Cloud Atlas, coming soon to a theatre near you.

In an earlier post I wrote about the Sonmi 451 chapters of the book, which describe a dystopian future and genetically-engineered "fabricants":

My vote for best recent dystopian fiction featuring genetic engineering goes to the An Orison Of Sonmi 451 chapters of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Can't wait to see the big budget movie. Will they retain the Korean peninsula setting?

Honorable mention: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

The trailer is visually beautiful, but the complexity of the plot might be challenging for most viewers.




From the book:

Popular wisdom has it that fabricants don’t have personalities. This fallacy is propagated for the comfort of purebloods.

“Comfort”? How do you mean? To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes. ...

Did your second day outside provide any answers? Some: but yet more surprises. The first stood across the anteroom from my cot as I awoke. A pylonic man, over three meters tall and dressed in an orange zipsuit, was studying the bookshelves. His face, neck, and hands were scalded red, burnt black, and patched pale, but he did not seem to suffer pain. His collar confirmed he was a fabricant, but I could not guess his stemtype: lips genomed out, ears protected by hornvalves, and a voice deeper than any I heard before or since. ...

Prometheus

I'm really looking forward to this prequel (sort of) to Alien. It promises to reveal the secret of the space jockey :-)

You'll also notice some Blade Runner influences -- Ridley Scott directed Alien, Blade Runner and now Prometheus.


Trailer:




Teasers:

Margin Call

I can't believe they shot this for only $3.5 million. A lot of star power for such a tiny budget. NYTimes review.