17 + Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) + blog break

"The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too." This is how "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", ended in 1991, 33 years ago. Now, after these 33 it looks to me that the world is more worried about hypothetical scenarios, either like being wiped out by the AI like in the movie, or getting back to the dark ages when the demographics of a place didn't matter in face of any invaders, or other apocalyptic outcomes. The essence of the last phrase above is sort of lost, given that in the objective reality some die stupidly in overfinanced armed conflicts while others die stupidly in underfinanced hospitals. But when I started this blog, 17 years ago, I didn't do it for politics...

When I started this blog 17 years ago I did it with a personal top 5, and "T2" was just out of it at that time, after watching "The Jacket". I don't have a top 5 anymore, and I'd like to rewatch "The Jacket" because I don't remember it very well. But, by chance, I recently got to see a TV screening of "T2" that somehow came at a moment when I needed it. So, I thought it's the proper time to fix the issue of including this on my blog. I doubt, however, that it does make much sense to discuss the subject of very well known movie, so I'll just stick to a couple of ideas.

I had the privilege to watch "Terminator 2" for the first time in a movie theater, I think in 1992, when in Romania the distribution of made in Hollywood movies just started expanding, with some delay after the official release dates. I was either 9 or 10 years old, and my father decided to take the family out to see a movie, despite the fact that he never was too much into SciFi. The motivation were the visuals, which it was said they're over anything that was released to cinema until then. Re-watching the movie many times, and many years after, I can only say that from this perspective, it sticks to a very select category, maybe together with the first two in the "Alien" series and a few others, where the effects don't show much of their age. The visuals are complemented by one of the two scores (the other being "The Serpent and the Rainbow") that impress through their expressivity considering the specific minimalism of Brad Fiedel, a synth oriented composer, who wasn't used much in the Hollywood mainstream, given that the specific sound lost its trend afer the '80s.

I was saying above that my father was never much into SciFi, but "T2" somehow got to him. And probably it did because the script of "T2" is not one of a deep SciFi, like the "Matrix", which builds up on the same ground idea, but a script that's anchored in a real life context, and besides the credibility factor this creates as well an empathic factor. It's also using the concept of time travel in probably the most direct way, by making an effective journey to the past in order to change the future. But "T2" is not out of nuances, some of which I only see now. For instance, for somebody who watched the first movie in the series in chronological order before "T2" (not my case), at a first watch of this one, excluding spoilers, for a good part of the movie, you couldn't know that Arnold isn't still the evil character and not the positive hero. And there are others too.

Probably what makes "T2" detach from other movies directed by James Cameron, generally lacking depth, is the the contrast it brings at the end on this. A terminator cannot self-terminate, but it can pragmatically decide when it would be the proper time to end its existence, even though it understands the tears of the child who attached to it. In some sense... you could interpret this as not being our right to decide when it's the time to leave, but we could though pragmatically evaluate when it would be most "appropriate" to have an exit from this world, and if that's really the the case, we might get it from -somewhere- ... The problem is that I don't really know who has the right to evalueate this, and maybe sometime it must be considered that a sequel is needed ( "T3" wasn't that bad :) ). Well... it's a way too look at it, a movie is a movie, life is life, and I'm not very objective these days...

It's the first time in the history of this blog when I'm going to close the entries for this year at a number of one digit only, so I'm going to make a wish of "Happy Hollidays!" in advance. I've had blog breaks before, but now I think it's the moment to say stop for longer time. Still, as pragmatic I could see an exit at an anniversary moment, a sequel might be needed someday. So, depending on how -somewhere- it will be decided or on how I will decide, "I'll be back"

Rating: 5 out of 5 ( I said I must fix leaving this out in 2007 ;) )

The woods...

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

(“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, Robert Frost, 1921)

(“Telefon”, 1977, written by: Peter Hyams, Stirling Silliphant, Walter Wager)

Dune: Part Two (2024)

Better late than never.. I know that it's probably not of much use an entry about "Dune: Part Two", now, at almost five months after its release, but this year I didn't have much time for movies, and even less to get to see one in cinema. So, finally reaching a couple of less busy days since a while ago, I'm trying to catch up on what I messed. And I'm trying to be selective.

I think there's not much to be said about the subject. Probably for who doesn't know already what's this about, the best recommendation would be to watch "Dune: Part One", or to go for a cliche line like: before "Game of Thrones"/"Star Wars"/"any other epic SciFi involving an empire and a twisted fight for power between rival factions" there was "Dune". At least since 1965, when the first volume written by Frank Herbert was released. Its latest adaptation is completed in the 2nd part, directed and partly written by Denis Villeneuve. The movie resumes the action from the exile of Paul Atreides joined by his mother in the desert along the indigenous fremens population, hunted by the raids of house Harkonnen, the established ruler of planet Arrakis.

I don't remember what I wrote exactly about the first part, but I think what impressed me most were the visuals and less the rest. The impact of the visuals holds here too. I have a major regret that I didn't manate to see this on big screen. As a complete mix of cinematography + art direction + video editing, it's probably the best SciFi I've seen since "Sunshine" (with a mention for "Inception" in this interval). And I didn't forget about "Avatar" or others, but for any visual appreciation there's a dose of subjectivity. In any case, here the camera work goes more deeply as meaning, as in the references before - it's enough to have a look at the contrast between the visual tone warmth of the desert scenes compared to the monochrome coldness of the fight in the arena under the sight of barron Harkonnen.

I stick to my opinion that both Paul Atreides as well as Chani didn't get benefit of the best character casting, and the previous "Dune" versions nailed this better. The rest of the cast compensates this, and I believe it delivers for all the new introduced characters this time. The part that surprised me most in a positive way though, is that the whole tone of the adaptation deviates less from the line I knew from the original "Dune". There are still elements that seem to be changed for no particular purpose, like the execution of baron Harkonnen, which made me to Google search to confirm which is the written version. But it's not something that changes that much a general feeling, like it was somehow expected after the first part. Maybe Denis Villeneuve heard some criticism about it and changed the course towards a more conservative approach concerning the original material. But besides that there's also a perfect way to handle the "mise en scene" of the written stuff. I think it's extremely difficult to find an optimal way to handle the complexity of "Dune" that doesn't seem too stretched or too brief. Here, in thi "Part Two", I think we can see the optimal way.

Maybe I'm either too old or nostalgic, but for me the most impactful overall adaptation of the "Dune" universe remains the "Children of Dune" mini-series, with all its liberties taken from the written part. From what I remember, there they tried compacting more than what's in the volumes corresponding to the title. The series is, however, the sequel for what we have in this movie, and the story has its role in the impact. So, it remains to be seen how "Dune: Messiah" will turn out, which seems to follow. For now, leaving aside the technical part that cannot be compared, what I can say is that among the adaptations of the original novel, Villeneuve managed with "Dune: Part Two" to provide the best, overcoming clearly the previous two versions. And what we have here it's probably going to stick as a reference SciFi for many years to come.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Summer-Fall 2024 Movie Preview

With some delay for this year, I'm trying, however to get through a lightning fast preview of some titles announced for this summer-fall season. So, without further ado, what caught my eye is in the list that follows.

With a change in the cast, in June we have a prequel, "A Quiet Place: Day One", which is actually the third part of one of the few horrors that I found to be ok during the latest years. John Krasinski keeps his writer role for this, and as director we have Sarnoski, whose previous activity includes mainly "Pig", again ok-ish. Maybe we get something at least ok-ish here too.

"The Convert" was produced during last year, but its mainstream release date got set to this July. And since it's something different than the typical summer blockbusters...

In August we have the release of "Alien: Romulus", a new iteration of the series, without Ridley Scott as director. Fede Alvarez, replacing him, has more background on classic horrors than on SciFi ("Evil Dead", "Don't Breathe"), and the trailer seems to drag into that area. But, we'll see..

Probably the headline for September is "Wolfs", starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, in a thriller with a promising trailer.

Unlike the other sequels/prequels above, "Joker: Folie a Deux" to be released in October, keeps Todd Phillips as director. Therefore, I'd say it's not to be missed.

I'd close this entry for November with "Gladiator 2", even more considering that I was complaining that we lost Ridley Scott from directing "Alien", but we don't have a trailer yet. And I think the expectations for this are higher than for a SciFi, which pretty much everything that could be told was told in the previous episodes. So, let's wait a bit more for this one.

Gojira -1.0 (2023)

"We'll need a miracle to make it work." "Doing nothing won't cause a miracle, either." - That's an exchange of lines in "Gojira -1.0", which somehow catches the essence of this monster movie, in some way like a metaphor, in the sense that I wouldn't have expected that some Godzilla iteration to be so different, positively speaking, from the rest. In any case, we shouldn't forget that what we have here is not the typical made in Hollywood. Even so, I don't remember hearing a lot about the drama depth of the Japanese series. Because, if we draw a line, what we got here is much more drama than monster movie.

The subject is set at the end of WW2, in a disintegrated Japan, where in the beginning of the movie a deserting kamikaze pilot lands on an island hosting a maintenance post for planes, which during that evening is wiped out by a creature risen from the ocean. But our guy survives, together with the chief mechanic, who accuses him of cowardness on confronting the monster, and blames him for the death of the others. What follows is the more consistent drama part, where guilt follows the pilot when returning back to Tokyo, where he tries to find a meaning to live in the ruins left after the war, together with a woman and an adopted child who lost their parents in some enemy raids as he did. When thing look like beginning to settle somehow, Gojira returns, bringing back the memories about what happened on the island. And from here, the movie starts to resemble more a Hollywood monster movie, but still what follows doesn't lose the much more complex drama tone built up to that moment.

"Gojira -1.0" does not have the standard VFX of a summer box-office, where if you take some scene with explosions and shrapnels, you have good changes to interchange it with a some other from a different movie. It's much more particular what we have here, because first of all it moves onwards from a visual experience that seems more real precisely due to lack of exaggeration in what you can see. We don't have all the possible colors splashed over the screen when something blows up. Besides that, I didn't watch the last Hollywood encounters between Godzilla and Kong, but here the monster looks more like extracted from the old Japanese stop-motions and brought into the modern VFX age. You finally get more "blueish" effects when Godzilla starts using its weapons, but even so what's on screen keeps a much more credible look than what you get in many other movies.

To conclude, the movie deserves watching for the story, out of which I didn't reveal much, and which has a decent density, for its visuals and audio, but mostly for the very good intertwinning between drama and action, and for its continuous metaphor that favors life, which comes in a strong contrast with an idea of exaggerated sacrifice oftenly met in the Japanese culture.

Rating: 4 out of 5

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023)

I'll continue the series of brief entries, with one that's again a bit different from the rest = a short: "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar". I don't know if I had another subject within this category in the history of my blog, but moving over the motivation + the matching with my lack of time, here I really considered that this movies deserves noticing. After "Fantastic Mr. Fox", from 2009, this is the 2nd adaptation by Wes Anderson of Roald Dahl's work, a short story, and what the movie does is precisely to narrate that story. The central part over which it develops is the history of a hindu magician with capabilities of seeing without his eyes, who apparently drains some influences from a real character. The other half of the story I'll leave for watching, it's not that long anyway. The movie is recognisable as a work by Wes Anderson = it has the typical display of colors and the ensemble cast, with transitions from one character to another as protagonist, even if at the scale of a short. But it's especially filled with the typical optimistic tone doubled by fine humor nuances, sometimes barely noticeable. Somehow, in brief, it's like an episode of "The Outer Limits" or "Black Mirror", but in a much more positive light ;)

Rating: 4 out of 5

Chasing (Quantum) Rabbits

I don't have a movie this month, but I need a break (more or less) from other activities. My last entry tagged "chasing rabbits" from 2021 if I'm not wrong, was linked to the first part of "Dune" back then, without much connection to the movie though. Now, I didn't have time to see the second part of "Dune" so we can skip that completely. What made me spent some time during last month was a bit of research on a subject that I wouldn't have touched unless I really had to, but it's not the first time it happens to get on my agenda something unconvenient...

I'll prefer staying more cryptic on the background of all this, but who catched some of my previous entries tagged the same as the current might remember that I was speculating around time travel, unexpected randomness in life, and others (or maybe I remember it wrong, because I'm not in the mood, and I don't have the time either, to re-read my own ramblings). The point is that what follows fits with the same "category".

This time I'm gonna stick to an enumeration of short ideas, probably with a very weak basis, but which connect somehow between them, as much as to produce some questions. So, let's start, with apologies in advance for where I'm completely off-track (that's why we have links to external sources).

We can say informally about a particla in a reference system observed from a quantum physics perspective that it's in coherence at the moment when it's simultaneously in multiple states in isolation (aka in a superposition), and when it decoheres it "chooses" one of these states following the contact with the external environment (getting basically into a typical mechanical physics reference system).
Links: What is Quantum Coherence? + the Wikipedia entry.

There is something called the Penrose/Hameroff model aka Orchestrated Object Reduction (or in brief Orch Or), which again, informally, states that the conscious thinking might be influenced by a physiological process taking place at the level of some microparticles in the brain = micro tubules, following their passing with a certain frequency, from quantum coherence to a decoherence state (= losing their superposition). By extension, we could speculate that the subconscious activity is linked with the period when these particles are in coherence (in superposition).
Links: Orch OR and the Quantum Biology of Consciousness + the Wikipedia entry.

Caveat: As many theories in the realm of quantum physics Orch Or is .. a theory. There are even practical experiments contradicting it, but these also bring up the idea that the model could be extended to something plausible.
Link: Quantum theory of consciousness put in doubt by underground experiment

In a semi-obscure journal, more than 10 years ago, there was another theory based on Orch Or, which in brief says that within the brain of a schizophrenic the physiological processes of micro tubules activity might be altered, more precisely the switches from coherence (superposition) to decoherence (a single state) do not produce quick enough, or at the frequency they're supposed to normally, the consequence being the altered behaviour = basically the delirious state, which again speculating, might originate from the person's subconscious. The journal might be semi-obscure, but it's not the only publication which somehow heads into this direction.
Links: Quantum Logic of the Unconscious and Schizophrenia + altceva prin zona Understanding Schizophrenia as a Disorder of Consciousness: Biological Correlates and Translational Implications from Quantum Theory Perspectives.

Up to this point we can say we have known facts. Actually now we start speculating (much more)...
In somebody's subconscious we don't know what can we find, that's why it is called a subconscious. But typically, what someone who's diagnosed with the above condition says in a delirious state is, or seems outside the reality that all of us know. Now, there's a question - why in a quantum coherence of some micro tubules in subconscious, the brain produces something that's not in its known realm of reality, but outside of it?

In a completely different direction we have something called the Everett-Wheeler model or Everett-DeWitt or Many-Worlds-Interpretation (MWI), which in brief, tells us that from a quantum perspective, anything that might decohere to a certain state it actually generates a new reality, and consequently a new distinct temporal line with its own evolution, and practically... we don't actually have a loss of superposition to a certain state - we have a continuous superposition, but the realities are somehow distinct and do not interact.
Links: Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics + the Wikipedia entry.

Now, wrapping (well, time is limited in this reality), we can ask two questions:
the light one - how does time flow in each distinct reality? (there are probably hypotheses for this but I didn't have time to look)
the hard one - if Orch Or and MWI wouldn't be just theories, and somehow we could have a possible intersection between these models, meaning not being completely incompatible, could someone with deranged micro tubules get somehow access in a subconscious state to a different image of other realities? (from where could extract firm beliefs about stuff that does not exist in the current reality)

To note that what's above is sheer speculation, and the undersigned with all responsibility does not have any firm belief about their validity. I have a background as researcher, but it's not in quantum physics, and the linked resources were barely skimmed, not read in detail, so I don't have any claim that what's above has much soundness in it (by the way, if there's any error on any interpretation of some reference, please send corrections). Besides that, sometimes is dangeorus to speculate over sensible matters.

Still... even though I finished writing this entry on April 1st, I dated it when I started it = on March 31st ;)

Anatomie d'une chute (2023)

I don't know if my subconscious was guided by some late problems to choose "Anatomie d'une chute"/"Anatomy of a Fall" as subject for the current entry, but what is certain is that I don't have any other subject left that I've seen this winter, for which I could give a higher rating. Besides that, I also don't have the time today, in the last day of this February (luckily it's a leap year), to put something on the blog for this month too. This movie has the advantage that it can be summarized quickly. We have a german writer, in a remarkable interpretation of Sandra Huller, relocated in a mountain area in France, together with her husband a son left almost blind after a former accident. The woman gets charged as a suspect when her husband is found dead following a fall from one of the floors of the chalet they're living in. What follows is a trial revealing the background of a disfunctional family, untangled, at least as it seems to be, in the end by the son who proves a surprisingly mature objectiveness in analysing the case. Cinematographically, the movie doesn't really stand out. Maybe the editing raises a bit more above the average. However, it's a production that overall can be perceived as... consistent, or better said, heavy, concerning the analysis of a family's life. What's contradictory though is that sometimes is too thin - besides the appearances, there are some parts where it is superficial compared to what can, unfortunately, exist in reality. What's certain is that's good to be watched as warning. But I get to contradict myself on what I was saying years ago about a movie being meant to remove you from reality, at least for a couple of hours :) Maybe I'll get back with something more optimistic next month ;) It depends up to where the falls go.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Fast Charlie (2023)

If I should make a top for the discrepancy between the feel a trailer leaves you with and a movie, for what I've watched in the last two-three years, "Fast Charlie" would probably come up somewhere among the top positions. Now well... the impression is subjective after all, both concerning the trailer, and the movie.

At least the subject you can get partially from the two minutes attached at the end of this entry. Charlie Swift (Pierce Brosnan) is a "fixer" for a criminal outfit from.. Biloxi, Mississippi (fact: the city has less than 50k inhabitants). Which organization, after 30 years of dominating the territory under the rule of the "godfather" Stan Mullen (James Caan in his last part), becomes the target of a "hostile takeover" by a young gangster who decides to eliminate everybody close to the leader. The story is predictable if you look at the trailer, Charlie escapes and seeks revenge. What's not that predictable is that this action thread is less major than it looks to be, and the movie is actually quite far from the typical standard B-series payback action thriller. First, we have plenty of nuances of black comedy. Second, we also have another set of more fine nuances of slow drama with insertions related to the late midlife chrisis of the main character. In some way, it feels a bit like the movies of Martin McDonagh ("In Bruges", "Seven Psychopats", etc.), but it's not really on par with these. However, you can feel there's a novel behind it = the story is not as thin as it mai seem at a first sight. We also have romance insertions and others, leaving the main thread somehow in background as I said.

It's not a movie that I could recommend besides the reasons written above. The actors do their job fine. The director (Phillip Noyce) does his job fine - the movie progression keeps you there, you don't feel any unnecessary length. Still, especially from a technical point of view, there's nothing remarkable about it. Maybe just the final minutes when you get a visual/audio arrangement meant to get a final thumbs up from you. Otherwise, it feels more like a made for tv movie, from which you expected a bit more. In the end it probably depends a lot of your mood. And in my case it came up in a moment when what I can do is to say again :) the impression is subjective.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5