The Matrix

Of all the movies I have seen this semester, this remains the best. Certainly the movie raises questions of our existence and how machines control us. But the special effects used in the movie were out of this world, and no doubt would this film fail if the SFX were not top notch.
The question of what is real and how we perceive things sure do make you think.

That is practically all I need to say, everyone in the universe have seen this movie so I will not blab about it.

See you in the Matrix. :)

The Truman Show

Probably the best dramatic role by Jim Carrey. The world is watching a show that follows the life of Truman Burbank. A gigantic set built as an island and several actors and cameras watches Truman live on with his life. The show has been going on for nearly 30 years without him realizing that everything and everyone is fake and only he is real-until now.

What amazes me is that the "show" thought ahead as to keep Truman on the island, his fear of water. At the end when he finally sails, it is as if he realizes that since his father is fake, then his fear is fake too.

The morale of entertainment can be strenuous. The idea in this movie is about what is considered reality television. Something as dramatic as stage a human being's entire life may not be impossible compared to what shows are on now. The biggest line in the movie is "How's It Going to End?" Meaning that whatever is popular will end eventually. A good example of shows trying to squeeze as much of the show as possible to get ratings are the X-files and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Both of these show stretched out far too to give any amusement left. Which is why it is best to know when to stop, like LOST.

Personally I think this is a good movie that shows how far we might go for entertainment. Nothing negative about reality television, but unless it is Candid Camera, nothing is considered real.

Conceiving Ada

3/4 of the class who saw this movie saw it as an intention to women. But the technological aspect of this movie is not so far fetched. The use of computers to go back in time and communicate with the past using certain energy. The woman wanted to talk to great think Ada Lovelace in order to continue her wondering through her unborn child.

Ada Lovelace was considered the first computer programmer, she had a love for learning and she complained that her body could not last as long as her passion to learn. When she was asked to have herself cloned, she refused, because she lost her family, her love, her own body, but her essence is all she had left and would part with it. This brings up the idea that we all sacrifice things for anything, but our essence, our humainty, is the one things we should keep sacred in ourselves.

The virtual sets used in the movie were pretty cheap but it gives the idea that you don't have to go anywhere to film in a certain place, of course the downside of this is that there is no real feeling of being there, no extra oomph in the experience. Conceiving Ada also had the great Timothy Leary in the movie, who also believed that computers were the new drug. This movie was pleasant at first, but I would only watched it again with my girlfriend.

Johnny Mnemonic

This is one of the movies where the idea sounds great but everything else fall below satisfactory. Where TOTAL RECALL's acting was decent, JOHNNY MNEMONIC's was too much to slide by. Keanu Reeves needed to do a lot of movies like this to make his acting satisfactory in THE MATRIX (coming soon).

In a world where corporations are the rulers of the world, and a brain disorder (NAS) infects most of the world, JOHNNY MNEMONIC is about a hacker who had a hard drive implanted in his brain but has a secret file, the cure to NAS, that was too much for his brain to take. Soon everyone is after what is in his brain, the corporation Pharmakon, and the rebels, the Loteks.

This cybernetic underground world states how we sacrifice our humanity to be a part of technology. And that corporation believes in this motto: "What is right isn't as important as what is profitable". In fact so do people.

Total Recall

In Total Recall Quaid decides to have a memory implant about being a secret agent on Mars. But then Quaid goes berserk and the implant wasn't installed yet. Then when Quaid wakes, everything changes, his whole life was fake, and apparently he was told by himself (you'll see) to go to Mars to find rebel Kuato.

A Schwarzenegger film, first thing I thought was that it will be a cheap action flick. And in many ways it was (Arnold's acting, a chick with three breasts, and a midget firing a machine gun on a bar table). But surprisingly all that was held up with a very intriguing story. A story that leads the question not just to Quaid (Arnold) but to the audience as well, was it all just a dream? The memory implant is seen as a virtual reality, or maybe even an artificial reality that can screw up the mind wondering what is real. Like Mark Dery said, in comparison to the Internet, people are staring a computer screen but feel like they are somewhere else.

The best thing about this movie is that the audience is fooled as well. It brings up all sorts of questions like, was the berserk scene all part of the dream? There seems to be a clue to that when the final second of the movie showed a dissolve to a white screen, symbolizing maybe the ending of a dream.

This movie certainly surprised me, an action flick that still has the visual effects and gun violence and explosions, yet it is balanced nicely with a story that makes the audience think hard. They really don't make movies that these days. Maybe I should writing a script like this, see what happens.

BLADE RUNNER

One of the rules about making the future in a movie is to base it off what is going on today. That sense of "the future is now" exists in all futuristic mvoies, just like BLADE RUNNER, where Sgt. Deckard is ordered to hunt down and kill all cyborgs in the city.

Cyborgs are seen the same way in the movie as a computer, although a great innovation it always has to follow up to humans. What is interesting about the cyborgs is their quest for perfection, a life longer than four years. But the last surviving cyborg, Roy, talks about how precious life really is, before he dies. What make the Director's Cut of BLADE RUNNER is that it gives the notion that Deckard himself is a cyborg. Of course the real dillemma is that in technical ways, we already are cyborgs.

In Chapter 6 of "Escape Velocity", Cyborging the Body Politic, it talks about how the human body has been changing and improving with cosmetic surgery and and mechanical organs. The human body is also being morphed into perfection. Usually in society the strive for perfection can people seem hollow as a doll, like Prisa in BLADE RUNNER where in the beginning she is a nice looking pleasure borg and in the end she puts on make-up and hide as one of the genetic toys in the room.

Humanity has always strive for perfection through innovation, from the first tools to the the first book to the first computer to the first blog space. The one thing I do believe we all need to ask ourselves how far do we go for perfection before humankind becomes obsolete?

TRON

With the power of computers reaching to homes everywhere in the early 1980's, the new frontier of computer generated imagery is introduced to the film industry in full feature form. The movie may lack in story, but their message of the computer world becoming more a part of our lives (like the last shot of the LA skyline) is evident.

The ability to make organic shapes created from MAGI (one of four computer companies used in making the CGI) and interacting with a human being had never been done before. Only sparingly was CGI used in earlier films. Steven Lisberger was certainly inspired by the visual effects done with breakthrough films Star Wars and Jaws. Lisberger then created the idea to bring humans from the real world into the electrical world where he knew CGI would do its job. The electronic world was certainly a very simple place, where every landscape was flat and jagged, and the heroes and villains were simply displayed in blue (hero) and red (villain) outlines. The back light animation and the technical effort to make a landscape look more real with distant shadowing was certainly a trying effort. It was the bareness yet vastness of the electronic world that makes the movie more memorable in time.

With how CGI has been throughout the years since TRON, there has always been a chance to expand on the ability to make CGI more astounding. And it is quite interesting that years after TRON, George Lucas actually started a CGI company he later sold, named PIXAR. Guess what happened after that.

THX 1138

The future is now. That is the idea used in creating the movie THX 1138, a dystopia run be recordings and computers. The environment in the movie was an underground city where people spent their days doing what recordings tell them. People take pills all day and there is no sense of humanity in this world, not in mates or even in a pre-recording in a confession booth. The only sense of humanity seen in the movie is love (making). What makes this place scary is that every dystopic feature is actually found today, at least at the time of production.

The pills people had to take in the movie to go on with their lives are just like all the ads we see on TV for Xanax, Prozac, and Zoloft, anti-depressant pills. The pre-recorded "priest" in the booth is just the same as TV evangelists who use TV to get people to believe and ask for a lot of money in return. Even the hologram of the naked chick is the same as Internet porn. Dystopic films like this show the audience a reflection of what their world is now. Unfortunately in the film, when THX reached the surface and sees the sunset, it seems that it is too late, unless the audience can make a difference.

The technical aspects of the film is understandable. George Lucas created the movie at a time where he didn't have the money or the shots to get his picture the way he wanted. By going back and re-editing the film, and adding more special effects, like the robot fixing, he gives his movie the right vision, and unless you have a keen eye on what was added even if you didn't see the original, like me, it appears seamless. How far CGI has gone to give detailed objects.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Now I remember watching this movie before the class screening and it just did not make sense to me. Now that I watch this movie again, while still believing the movie to be more of a moving artwork, I realize the deep meanings. The fear of going too far with technology. It really is amazing how manking went from 1900 to 2000. From phonograph to mp3 palyers, from libraries to the internet, and from old filmmaking to digital cinema. It is quite something the no matter how much better the new technology is, it is not enough until it becomes as realistic as possible.
In 2001: A space Odyssey, the brilliance was with the breathtaking visuals of space travel, people were blown away with the detailed futuristic look, shortly before the real moon landing began, and the new computer generation travel scene where bright colors where flying by fast through some kind of narrow hall. In fact not until Star Wars did a space film do so successful with its visuals.
I certainly love going to theaters and see things that are beyond this world yet looks so real. Lev Manovich wrote about the changes in filmmaking and how the sense of what is real begins to blur. He certainly does paint a picture about how filmmaking has changed to computers for postproduction, creating realistic objects that a live actor never saw to connect his dialogue with. The idea of having something there that you know is real is just the debate of whether the Itunes style movie library will replace DVDs in the future.
I don't know what is in the future, nor do I fear it. Because if people want to continue to give people a digital cinematic masterpiece, it works even better when there something real to work on. (ex: Gollum in LOTR)