REVIEW: Blade Runner

As further explored in the Fifth Element, Blade Runner demonstrates that as society advances into the future, chicks dress sluttier and sluttier. Daryl Hannah’s character, in keeping with the times (2019), is sartorially confined to revealing outfits throughout the entire film. A near-naked Hannah, might have seemed provocative to audiences in early 1982, but flashing forward two years to Hannah’s performance in Splash, and then on to the next six films where Hannah appears naked, it becomes pretty obvious to the aged audience that Hannah was most likely wearing a push-up when she appeared as Pris Stratton, the “basic pleasure model” robot, alongside Harrison Ford, in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic.

But this futuristic crime drama about a cop whose job is to hunt down fugitive, robotic humans created and enslaved to manually serve real humans, isn’t about tits. It’s, shockingly, not even about the ethical repercussions that arise from synthetically manufacturing life. It’s really about death and how we (both human and robot) are afraid of it. We don’t want to be nothing. We don’t want all our memories and thoughts and feelings to dissipate like everything else in the world. We would prefer to live forever.

For the first 75-minutes of this movie, I thought for sure Blade Runner was going to dribble down the same path that dozens of others movies have already warn thin (A.i.; Bicentennial Man; The Stepford Wives; I, Robot, to name a few). But, really, the theme of the movie can be summed up with the words Edward James Olmos eerily shouts at Harrison Ford right before Ford frantically rushes to the aid of Rachael, the female robot he loves, “It’s too bad she won’t life, but, then again, who does?”

I hope Ridley Scott's upcoming Robin Hood remake is half this good. THUMBS UP!

Doesn't everyone deserve to be young and in love?

Against Me! played a show at Higher Ground on Sunday I drove up to Burlington with Jillian to see them. Dead to Me (S.F.) openned. They were okay. I know it's a punk show, but they were a little too punk. Punk punk. Not at all hardcore. Punk like The Unseen or The Casualties. Then Against Me! It was my fourth time seeing them. The first time was about 6-years ago when I was a sophomore in college. Kids at punk shows are always weird, but the Vermont punks are especially weird. In most American cities, punk is a specific faction of sub-culture youth, but in Burlington, it's a hodgepodge of many sub-culture youth factions. So, for example, a mohawk is equally as punk as giant, heavily pocketed raver pants. Not just Against Me! songs were played. 'Amputations' from the Gabel solo EP was included in the setlist.
At the end of the show I got one of Andrew's picks! The phrase on the pick corresponds with the phrase on the amp. INTO THE SHELTER OF THE JUNGLE NOBLE SAVAGES RUN

It was an awesome show. I love going to concerts. At this point in my life, I've gone to so many that I've become really good at it. Like really good at it.

REVIEW: Brick

You know that part in A Charlie Brown Christmas special where Lucy dispatches Charlie and Linus on a trek to secure a “big, shiny aluminum tree.” The flow of the film then sort of derails as Charlie Brown wanders through that abstract, drug-induced Christmas tree lot and that meandering piano psuedo-melody comes in. Up until that point, the scheme of the movie was pretty clear: Christmas was coming up, everyone was in the Holiday Spirit, and preparing for the annual play. That whole Christmas tree search scene is almost like the Rob Zombie animated peyote hallucination part in Beavis and Butthead Do America, where the presented reality of the film dissipates, and then reforms later on. But in Charlie Brown’s case, its roundabout, oblique piano, rather than industrial heavy-metal.

That off the wall Charlie Brown Christmas tree hunt is pretty much what the entire duration of Brick feels like. I can't say if it’s Rian Johnson’s use of perplexing, neo-noir, slang-heavy dialogue, J. Gordon-Levitt’s undemonstrative performance, or Nathan Johnson’s soundtrack. But it just feels surreal. My advice to people about to view Brick is “expect to be confused, but just go with it.”

Overall, it’s a compelling re-hashing of the classic Hollywood crime drama, that at times comes off as a little gimmicky, but once you realize Rian Johnson’s not using a southern California high school as the setting to pander to The O.C. crowd, but rather to throw the seasoned, seen-it-all, veteran off their game, it's quite gripping. Plus, how can I disagree with a laudable protagonist named Brendan? Thumbs Up!

I make my way back home to you

Ashley and I finally put my Christams present to use.
We made french fries
And Isa's "Beer-Battered Tofu" which coincidentally was taken from a Christmas present I got for Ashley. The beer used in the batter (and then later to accompany the meal) was Wolaver's organic Brown Ale. I visited the Otter Creek Brewery where Wolaver's is made last semester. It was a splendid brewery visit and I left with a mix n' match sixer. All of which were great. I like Wolaver's and I liked this Brown Ale for two reasons: (1) It's from Vermont, and when in Rome...; and (2) As a vegan, I, without seeking it out, come into contact with a lot of organic products. I suppose marketers presume the vegan consumer is the same as the organic consumer. That's fine with me. I'll take organic if they got it, but I'm really just at the health food store/co-op/farmer's market for the vegan goods. The one gripe I would lob at organic products, if I was pressed to do so, would be that organic products seldomly are comfortable with just being conventional products that just happen to be organic. You'll often find ingredients in organic products that you wouldn't find in conventional products like flaxseed, or spelt, or nutritional yeast, or brown rice. I know as a vegan, I'm viewed as just another hippie. I'm not. But it's like explaining to a 50-year old that you're not gutter punk, or death punk, you're hardcore. Hippies, health nuts, tree huggers, vegans, and raw foodist all sort of get lumped together. What I like about Wolaver's is that they don't try to appeal to all of these people. I imagine their organic beer is just as unhealthy for you as Budweiser, maybe even worse. They're not trying to re-invent the beer wheel. I think they're just old-fashioned brew enthusiasts that simply want to make organic versions of the beer they already love. Their Brown Ale didn't blow my mind. It was just really good. A really familiar traditional English ale, that probably tastes a lot like the English ale brewed by the English farmers that inhabited this part of New England a century ago. Both versions just happen to be organic.

REVIEW: Donnie Brasco

Johnny Depp was good, but Donnie Brasco didn't really bring anything to the already exhausted Mafia-film genre. The movie doesn't have an ending and it made me realize that Al Pacino is kind of a hack. Sorry, Al. THUMBS DOWN.

We're Breaking Up

As mentioned in a previous post, I made a submission to Hearsay, the law school art journal. Here are some other submissions I made:
They're not real people and it's based on stuff that never happened. That's the beauty of "art."

Bitter Divisions

Today was supposed to be the annual S.A.L.D.F. Furry Family Fun Day (formerly Furry Family Day), but it was cancelled due to poor weather, which is a real bummer because up until yesterday, the weather in VT had been unseasonably pleasant. It's a shame. Here's the flyer I made for the event:
It was based entirely on this band, and specifically, this poster:

The future is passing you by

I drove down to Boston last weekend for the Future of Animal Law Conference held at Harvard Law School. On the way down I listened to the new (and as of April 15th, still unreleased) I really enjoy, and find nothing offensive or backstabbing about, Against Me!’s shift into unapologetic pop-rock fit for Top-40 radio. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m smarter or less interested in distinguishing myself from others because of an elite, and unapproachable taste in music, but as I get older, I enjoy straight ahead guitar-based pop music more and more. Doesn’t everybody? Green Day, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, the Beatles. That’s all good shit. The recreational practice of listening to music shouldn’t be an exercise in self-inflicted punishment. I just want to listen to some good tunes that I can sing along to while I drive. I invite anyone to challenge me on that assertion.

Getting around the conference kind of sucked because I’m still on crutches, which effectively makes already socially thorny circumstances all the more ungraceful and awkward. The crutches simultaneously impair my ability to partake in the conventional set course of moving from classroom to classroom and banquet hall to cocktail lounge, while drawing attention to my clumsiness. Being able to walk would’ve undoubtedly improved the conference by 25%.

The worst part of the conference was probably the first night at the Sheraton Hotel. It was the cocktail hour meet n’ greet which sucked because it’s impossible to hold a cocktail while commuting on crutches, and it’s impossible to hold a conversation with a stranger without a cocktail. And you can’t really confidently stand alone when you’re suspending yourself with crutches. It just looks dumb. It was cool, however, to see Emily Lewis, the person whose job I took over when she graduated. The best part of being an adult is hanging out with friends you know from one state in another state. Particularly when you each came separately from other states. When I was in 6th grade, the only place I saw my 6th grade friends was in our 6th grade classroom. Now I see friends 3,000 miles away from where I know them from. It’s the coolest.

The first panel was the only one I really remember. But it started off really bad. The first speaker was Peter Stevenson. He was some British guy that talked about enacting international legislation that would limit animal abuse which was essentially like standing up and reading a Spiderman comic like it was fact. First of all, enacting international legislation on anything is nearly impossible, secondly, enacting animal abuse legislation in any arena is even more impossible. I was amazed that a guy so out of touch with reality even made it on to the plane that took him to Logan Airport. Furthermore, I didn’t know there were direct flights to Boston from Fantasyland. Zing!

Everyone else on the panel was really good. Dr. Norwood was some agricultural sociologist that had a cartoonish Okie accent that made everything he said hilarious. Dr. Brown, from Stanford, had some sort of science background and gave a predictably science-y talk. Carter Dillard and Bruce Myers were both attorneys (I think) and gave true to form smug lawyer lectures, which I of course found totally relatable.

The rest of the conference was sort of a blur. It’s easy for 30 different talks about animal abuse and the law to bleed together. And with 2-days worth of incessant lecturing, it’s easy to drift off and focus on something totally unrelated, like this woman:

Bob Barker was supposed to be the keynote speaker, but I guess there was some medical emergency. I started the rumor that he OD’d on Columbian Marching Powder. This guy filled in:He was no B.B., but he did land an extremely well placed, and well timed “the price is wrong, bitch!” that brought the house down.

At the end I walked away with the feeling that animals are screwed for atleast the next half-century and a nagging sense of regret for not having tried to go to a better law school.

At least I got a meal out of it. And a Hearsay submission:
Thank you, A.L.D.F.

Looking for God

Monica asked me to make a logo to go on Secular Law Student Association T-shirts. This is what I came up with.

REVIEW: The Matrix Reloaded/The Matrix Revolutions

I think I saw The Matrix in theaters when it first came out. I sort of thought so at the time, and am now convinced years later, that it was one of those rare products that is culturally popular, and justifiably should be culturally popular. Even if you thought the movie was lame, you have to admit the bullet time filming was revolutionary and no one had done anything like that before. And even if you thought the bullet time filming was lame, you’ve got to at least admit that since The Matrix came out in 1999, the use of bullet time filming, or similar post-modern filming techniques, has grown exponentially.

The Matrix is an action movie that can be enjoyed even by people that don’t really like action movies. It’s like what Mastadon is to metal. Along with the groundbreaking cinematography and kung fu action sequences, The Matrix had an exceedingly well developed backstory. Science Fiction movies are rarely as thoroughly realized as this. There’s a complex preamble that encompasses a calculated smattering of eastern religion, philosophy, and technology, that surpasses Star Wars, without coming off wooly.

In the future, human beings have been subversively enslaved by sentient robots that harvest people in pods as a bioelectric energy source. An alternative reality has been cultivated by these robots to control the minds of the humans in order to keep them in their submissive state of inertia. This alternative reality is a computer programmed cyber world (like the Sims) that all people are involuntarily locked into at birth. The name of this cyber world program is “The Matrix.”

Therefore, the essential dilemma presented in The Matrix is The Matrix. People aren’t actually living their lives and are plugged into this alterna-reality while their bodies are fed off of like livestock. The protagonist of the story, Neo, is the One who’s objective is to defeat the robots in their cyber world and restore humanity to true reality. Neo completes ½ this objective in The Matrix when he ascends to the level of supreme Oneness and defeats the primary bodily manifestation of The Matrix: Agent Smith.

If The Matrix was the only movie ever made about The Matrix, it would be presumed by viewers that Neo goes on to liberate the rest of humanity after defeating Smith in battle. However, after the success of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers decided to extend the series into The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution.

In The Matrix Reloaded we discover that there is still a long way to go before the objective goal of the first film (human liberation from The Matrix) can be accomplished. There’s still an army of machinery set on defeating the Neo-led human uprising against their robot overlords. This alone would have made for an ideal plotline for the trilogy: humanity’s overcoming of their technological oppressors. That’s essentially where The Matrix Reloaded begins, and where you think the trilogy’s going to end, but the story becomes muddled in the third film, The Matrix Revolutions, when we learn that Agent Smith has evolved into a rogue virus that threatens both humanity and the machines. Initially, I thought this would just be the C or maybe B subplot to the A plot (human liberation from The Matrix), but in the final act of the final film, the Agent Smith virus subplot becomes the main plot, that the story ultimately concludes when Neo, rather than striking the death knell to his mechanical tormentors, strikes a truce with them to focus on eliminating the Agent Smith virus threat.

This is extremely frustrating, because the principal predicament established in the first act of the first film is never resolved. The Neo/machine truce allows for the robots to presumably continue to enslave humanity in their façade cocoons indefinitely. Eight/ninths of the movie is focused on the struggle between humans and machines, but in the last hour, a new struggle materializes and quickly resolved, and the filmmakers play it off like that resolution was the one we’d all been waiting for.

Look, it’s science-FICTION. That means the plot of The Matrix could’ve been about anything. Anything. But the primary constraining condition is that it needs to be a story, i.e. a beginning, middle, end. You could’ve gone Pulp Fiction and shown the beginning, middle, and end out of lineal order. But you still MUST have the beginning, the middle, and the end somewhere in the movie to fulfill the story requirement. The Wachowski brothers failed this fundamental prerequisite by totally changing direction shortly after the middle part, leaving the viewer sorely unsatisfied. THUMBS DOWN.

Je Me Souviens

Here are Brian's pictures from our Spring Break vacation to Montreal where I lost my camera.