Boing Boing » Entertainment

Paul Verhoeven eyes director's chair in new Schwarzenegger Conan flick

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:37:14 +0000

Robocop director Paul Verhoeven, noted for his films' ultraviolence and politically-tinged black humor, wishes to direct Arnold Schwarzenegger as an older, grayer Conan. 65-year-old Schwarzenegger starred under Verhoeven in the original version of Total Recall; no director has officially been selected for the new project, provisionally titled Conan The Legend.

Here are the top 5 movies that should have been directed by Paul Verhoeven, but were not.

1. Dredd (2012)
2. Hunger Games (2012)
3. Machete (2010)
4. Avatar (2009)
5. Hollow Man (2000)

Just think how awesome those movies would have been if Paul Verhoeven had directed them.

For sale: "Rocking Machine" phallic sculpture from A Clockwork Orange

David Pescovitz — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:58:46 +0000

Japanese designer toy firm Medicom worked with Herman Makkink to recreate an edition of his iconic sculpture "The Rocking Machine," famously seen in the film A Clockwork Orange. It's almost three feet long and more than a foot wide. You can have one one of your very own for $1600 or so. "The Rocking Machine" (via Death Waltz Recording Company)

Slurring BBC radio presenter yanked from air

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:15:48 +0000

The BBC, in an unbylined report:

"Paula White was removed after 30 minutes of her afternoon show on Friday, which was to be her last show in that slot. ... A BBC spokesman said she had been "unable to continue as she was under par". The spokesman would not say if any other action had been taken."

"I'm not drunk. I've had a couple of drinks, but I'm not drunk! [squeaks]"

Brave director slams Disney's sexy Merida makeover

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:16:12 +0000

Paul Liberatore in The Marin Independent Journal:

Marin filmmaker Brenda Chapman, who won an Oscar for writing and co-directing the animated feature "Brave," blasted Disney's sexy makeover of her movie's feisty heroine, Merida, as "a blatantly sexist marketing move based on money." ... "I think it's atrocious what they have done to Merida ... When little girls say they like it because it's more sparkly, that's all fine and good but, subconsciously, they are soaking in the sexy 'come-hither' look and the skinny aspect of the new version. It's horrible!"

It's really blistering, bridge-burning stuff, and I salute her for it: "I forget that Disney's goal is to make money without concern for integrity."

Previously: Disney gives Brave princess a body makeover

Not so great Gatsby

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:44:16 +0000

Gloomy reviews from critics? It won't matter.

Movie posters with the working--often much better--titles

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:29:08 +0000

What if movies had kept their provisional/stealth titles? [via Reddit]

Game of Brogues

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:14:16 +0000

From Max Read's fantastic article nitpicking the inconsistencies in Game of Thrones' deployment of regional British accents:

"The show has dragons, who cares if the accents don't match?": Well, first of all, I care. Second of all, the cornerstone of science fiction and fantasy fandom is nitpicking. Third of all, the fact that Game of Thrones doesn't take place within our collectively agreed-upon reality doesn't release it from its responsibility to verisimilitude or the maintenance of internal consistency within its own systems.

"Oxyana," new doc on how Oxycontin addiction is destroying Appalachian communities

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:21:14 +0000

"Nothing here but Oxy and coal," says one of the subjects of Sean Dunne's new documentary Oxyana, which just won Special Jury Mention at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. From Capital New York's review: "The 'here' is Oceana, a once-bustling mining town in West Virginia, now decimated by Oxycontin addiction to the point where the media have rebranded it 'Oxyana.'" More at Indiewire and Cinema Blend. Dunne is the same director behind the Insane Clown Posse doc "American Juggalo." (HT: nils_gilman)

Repo Man: Criterion release and interview with director Alex Cox

David Pescovitz — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:08:23 +0000

Here's Alex Cox, director of Repo Man (1984), interviewed recently by psychotronic film buff and master poster artist Jay Shaw. Criterion just re-released Repo Man on DVD and Blu-ray, featuring original package art by Shaw and Tyler Stout of Austin's Mondo Gallery scene. Repo Man: Criterion Collection edition (via Mondo)

Sound of Oblivion

David Pescovitz — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:08:02 +0000

I love hearing about sound effects in films and the work of foley artists, soundtrack composers, and sound designers. Back in 1997, I interviewed David Cronenberg for the bOING bOING print 'zine, and we mostly talked about the squishy oozy sounds he likes to use in his movies. Here's an excellent SoundWorks Collection interview with Oblivion director Joe Kosinski and the sound of his new movie. Some of his collaborates included composer Joseph Trapanese, Anthony Gonzalez (M83), re-recording mixer Gary Rizzo, and re-recording mixer Juan Peralta.

Man of Steel trailer #3

David Pescovitz — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:05:48 +0000

New Man of Steel trailer with scenes of Krypton, Jor-El, Lara, Pa, young Clark, bearded Clark, shirtless Clark, supervillains, Lois, Superman, and the icy Fortress of Solitude which this time, I hope, can only be unlocked with an enormous key disguised as an airplane flight path marker -- as it was written. In theaters June 14.

Iron Lady delays Iron Man

Rob Beschizza — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:23:29 +0000

Organizers of the UK premiere of Iron Man 3 delayed the event due to its conflict with Baroness Thatcher's funeral.

The New People: 1969 TV drama à la Lost and Lord of the Flies

David Pescovitz — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:00:59 +0000

The New People was a 1969 TV series about a group of college students whose plane crashed on a small island. The accompanying adults perished, leaving only the young people. Fortuitously, the deserted island had been the planned location for a nuclear test, so the government had left buildings and supplies behind. For the stranded students, this is the start of "Year One" and an opportunity to create a new kind of society. Rod Serling wrote the pilot for the show that was a cross between Lord of the Flies, Lost, and a JG Ballard story dosed with 150ug of 1960s counterculture.

Fake Web sites on TV

David Pescovitz — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:02:15 +0000

Almost as much fun as fake software user interfaces on TV are fake web sites on TV!

Game of Thrones S3E2: Ladies, leave your men at home

Leigh Alexander — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:00:31 +0000

The Game of Thrones universe is all about how disadvantages are balanced against advantages: Every major character or faction has a unique set of challenges, and then a trump card. Tyrion Lannister's unfavorable height, scarred face and status as the family black sheep is balanced by his superior wit and endless disposable income; as Queen Regent, Cersei almost has the power she wants -- but then of course, she's tasked with mothering and managing awful Joffrey. Daenerys' dragons were her trump card even when she had nothing else. And young Bran Stark has lost everything, including the use of his legs, but he has "green dreams."

Magical phenomena in Game of Thrones are applied with a light hand, generally. You could almost forget you're watching a show about a fantasy universe instead of a show about medieval wartime politics until it asks you to believe in undead wights, or in skin-changing wargs, people that have the ability to project themselves into the bodies of animals. Bran's dreams of a three-eyed crow and a peculiar, small young man are more than ordinary dreams. When he sleeps he roams the world in the body of his direwolf, Summer.

After fleeing occupied Winterfell, Bran, along with the wildling woman Osha, his dear steward Hodor and his little brother Rickon, plans on going to the wall, from whence Bran doesn't know his half-brother Jon Snow has defected on a spy mission against the wildlings. But in this episode Team Bran meets the crannogfolk Jojen and Meera, who've presumably found Bran through the boy's nighttime searching in Summer's skin, and we get the impression this three-eyed raven of his dreams might become a more important quest.

The lost Stark children seem endlessly to orbit their family -- mother might be at Riverrun, Jon at the Wall, Robb on the warfront -- and as the courses of their travels attract new potential allies (will Littlefinger really help Sansa reunite with Catelyn, or use her for his own ends?), they seem always a step behind. The Stark family's wish to reunite drives what might be the primary narrative arc of Game of Thrones. We just want to know if their mother is going to get her children back.

Things aren't good for Lady Catelyn right now. Her eldest son blames her for the fall of Winterfell, the rest of her children are missing or captive, and she's just gotten word from Riverrun that her father, Hoster Tully, has died.

To make matters worse, Robb has broken an alliance with the Freys that saw him promise to marry one of their horrible daughters in exchange for passage at the Frey-owned Twins holding last season. He's married a Volantene girl, and you see how deeply Catelyn mistrusts this choice. If there weren't already enough people blaming her for the botched-up war effort, she confides she thinks the gods are exacting vengeance on her because she once wished for Jon Snow, her husband's bastard, to die, and then failed to be a mother to him.

Robb decides to divert his troops toward Riverrun so that the family can attend his grandfather's funeral. Family is core to the Starks' identity, and yet Robb's consistent choice of love and loyalty and the noble pursuit of vengeance over strategy is clearly threatening his bid for the throne. Northmen loyal to the Starks are getting restless, and grizzled Arnolf Karstark tells Robb of his bride, "I think you lost the war the day you married her." Ooh, was that the prickle of foreshadowing? I sure hope not.

Legendary swordsman and charming incestor Jaime Lannister is, at the behest of Lady Stark, remains in the custody of Brienne "The Beauty" of Tarth. She's clinging doggedly to her mission to bring this incredibly high-value prisoner to King's Landing, believing he can be traded for the Stark girls. The Lannisters, of course, have made sure nobody knows they only have one Stark girl -- Arya is, of course, posing as a sword-wielding boy in the countryside with her friends -- but let's worry about that later.

The characters discuss the late Renly Baratheon and his "degenerate" "proclivities" often during this episode. Renly, of course, was gay, and in love with Loras Tyrell, the handsome Knight of Flowers, but the books always made that fact implicit. The show's decision to deal with it explicitly, and even to portray the physical relationship between Renly and Tyrell in earlier episodes, is an interesting one.

I always felt dealing with issues of discrimination and oppression through period dramas is sort of the easy, or lazy thing to do -- of course everyone is racist and ableist and sexist and homophobic, that's just the world they live in, and so forth. But the show has taken pains to create empathy for the ways characters try to move within the limitations their universe has prescribed, so we feel for Loras and Renly's unexpressed love, and the fact that most characters seem to feel Renly's orientation would have made him unfit to be king.

Jaime insults Renly to Brienne and makes fun of her both for what he perceives to be her own "masculine" qualities, and for the fact she fancied Renly, but it seems he really just wants to upset her. Jaime is someone who behaves in an openly-arrogant fashion, but may conceal a more thoughtful moral code, if a personal one, than many of the other characters.

You can almost forgive him for having children with his sister Cersei, because through the horrible circumstances of a ruthless, motherless Lannister childhood, he's genuinely in love. When he's had his fill of tormenting poor Brienne, he relents, with probably this episode's finest quote: "I don't blame you, and I don't blame him either. We don't get to choose who we love."

You don't get to choose what your kids turn out like, either. It's hard to say what's a bigger challenge for Cersei: Her monstrous son, or the inconveniently young, beautiful and merciful Margaery, who stands a chance of upsetting the Queen Regent's sloppily-constructed power balance.

Desperate to control Joff, Cersei's expelled all of Tyrion's efforts to undo the damage the boy's done, and has replaced her most intelligent counsel with the kind of thugs and sycophants that will tell her what she wants to hear. Sad to see Cersei digging herself into a trench of destructive paranoia when there's someone out there who really loves her, but this isn't a series that likes happy couples.

The appealing Tyrell family represents a meaningful threat to Cersei, but Joffrey's so excited at the military power the Tyrells add to his kingdom that he derides his mother's insecurity. Luckily it's his very disgust for women that makes him utterly blind to any threat Margaery and her family could pose to his rule. He just sees a lady to impress and control.

The Tyrells also represent the possibility of salvation for Sansa, who, disappointingly, is still too much in love with fantasy courtly ideals for her own good. It's clear she's attached to the idea of picture-perfect Loras Tyrell helping her out, here -- she doesn't know she's not his type.

Book fans have been eagerly waiting this episode's introduction of Olenna "Queen of Thorns" Redwyne, the Tyrell family's intriguing matriarch (her son, Mace Tyrell, is Margaery and Loras' father, mostly renowned for eating too much). Her power seems to be in plain speech -- "the cheese will be served when I want it served, and I want it served now," she tells a manservant, and that's that.

She's summoned Sansa presumably to hear the truth about Joffrey. Terrified into silence at court, it's the Stark girl's first chance to speak anything other than the pleasant lines she's been parroting for her own survival, and she even has trouble at first, before at last she can confide to Joffrey's monstrousness. It's a risky move, of course, as the Tyrells are ostensibly Lannister allies, but with this woman in charge, you get the sense that if they have their own agenda, they have a good chance of executing it.

Speaking of executing, this episode brings us the most awkward conversation about anal sex that's ever taken place over a crossbow. Awful little Joffrey is clearly much more comfortable with weapons than with women, and we see Margaery tread into dangerous territory as she pretends to show an interest. There's a lot of subtext going on in this conversation -- unless she confesses her first husband (and her brother's love) Renly was gay, Joffrey might think she consorted with a "traitor", and failed her "job" of bearing a child to boot. A displeased Joffrey is a physical threat, but Margaery defuses it by claiming to share his appetite for violence.

Yet I wonder how much pretending Margaery's actually doing. We heard her grandmother tell Sansa that it's Margaery's father who insists the girl needs to become a queen, even if that means marrying whichever contender is the closest. When Joffrey tells her that she no longer belongs to her father, the reaction this elicits seems genuine, and when she lets Joffrey embrace her over the weapon, it looks like there's a real thrill there, a secret desire to claim some of that shameless, violent male power for herself -- even if it's at their own reflection in the mirror she ultimately ends up pointing the thing.

Ah, and Theon is back. Alfie Allen's portrayal of the character, desperate and insecure and ultimately hunted to a cliff, was among my favorite things about the last season. But his pointless seizure of Winterfell means Robb Stark's supposed ally, Roose Bolton, is sending his people to clean up the mess, and now Theon is a prisoner who'll continue to pay for his juvenile error of judgment and his betrayal of the Starks.

House Bolton has some issues. I mean, their house sigil is a flayed man bound to an X-shaped torture device. Now we see why. And when we see Jaime and Brienne set upon by a posse bearing that flag, we know suddenly the Beauty and the Kingslayer have much bigger things to worry about than one another [*].

Arya is in trouble, too. She and her companions (including Gendry, who doesn't know he's one of Robert Baratheon's black-haired bastards), encounter the Brotherhood Without Banners, a ragtag group of unaffiliated freedom fighters led by Thoros of Myr, a red priest. We were supposed to presume the posse pro-Lannister, as they were singing "The Rains of Castamere," but not so. Arya and friends were going to be allowed to go on their way, but unfortunately an inconvenient prisoner arrives just in time. Sandor "The Hound" Clegane's nightmarish brother, Gregor "The Mountain," has been wreaking havok all over Westeros, but it's the Hound that gets dragged in by the brotherhood.

Recall how, terrified of fire, he fled the battle of King's Landing and has, we assume, been drinking himself into a stupor ever since. Despite everything else Arya has tried to be, Clegane immediately outs her as a "Stark bitch," and we're left wondering what this will mean for her future.

A strong theme in this episode is what women can do with the poor hands they're dealt in this world; one can become ruthless like Cersei, charming like Margaery, or, like Catelyn Stark, root oneselves in motherhood and prayer. We see how the wrong marriage to an apparently-excellent, loving woman can do Robb just as much harm as a decisive battle, and we see how the blunt, fearless candor of Lady Olenna is what makes people fear her. Even Shae, who seems to be interested in securing some genuine safety for Sansa, wields a certain power over Tyrion, easily able to twist him into begging for her forgiveness when it comes to the roving eye of his past.

I'd hardly call Game of Thrones a feminist story, but it does emphasize the way that while the power and movement of women in this world is limited, they use whatever resources they can find to tilt a little favor in their direction. Throughout this episode, we see the male heroes disadvantaged -- Robb making every wrong decision, Theon in brutal torture, Jon Snow lost in a foreign society -- in favor of examining what the women are able to accomplish behind the scenes. "Men use brawn, women use wiles" is the sort of trite concept typical of reductive fantasy universes. And the exceptions to this rule -- Brienne's nobility and incredibly-confident sword hand, Arya's warrior ambition -- are somewhat blunted by the fact that in order to have access to that type of power, they need to essentially pass as men. And at the end of the day, what matters most about Arya on a practical level is simply that she's a "Stark bitch."

But there's still enough nuance to make it a pleasant journey for the heart, if one is willing to suspend some disbelief. Terrible things happen to everyone in this story, and we can find a point of empathy for everyone we're watching thrash in the grip of inevitability. We had a lovely discussion in the comments last week, so I'll ask you a question in the hopes of fostering another: Who's your favorite woman in the series, and why?

Finally, another reason it's fun to follow along with Game of Thrones is the social media culture. Here and there I'll try to direct you to neat things I find online, like Marissa Nadler's awesome, haunting a-capella cover of the opening theme. Or Arrested Westeros, my current favorite site, which combines Game of Thrones with quotes from Arrested Development. You wouldn't believe how well it works.

[*CORRECTION: I originally (incorrectly) presumed it was Ramsay Bolton who'd led the party capturing Brienne and Jaime, but friends remind me it's supposed to be the Brave Companions that take them captive here. The book's creepy Vargo Hoat seems to have been replaced with a Bolton-affiliated man-at-arms called Locke who's in charge of recapturing Jaime Lannister, whereas the novel's Brave Companions were mercenaries ostensibly favoring the Lannisters, if I recall. Was Vargo Hoat too awful for TV? Did the writers worry that introducing the Brotherhood Without Banners and the Brave Companions simultaneously would confuse people about unaffiliated teams? Either way, they're probably going to Harrenhal, and awful is awful, right?]

KISS/Hello Kitty TV show in development

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 03:05:56 +0000

2010's KISS x Hello Kitty clothing line has spawned a TV show about a Hello Kitty rock band that dresses in KISS makeup:

Yes, I'm serious: Kiss Hello Kitty (working title) is now in development, and it's based on this line of Kiss x Hello Kitty products, which made its debut in 2010. The show will feature "four Kiss x Hello Kitty characters living their rock 'n' roll dreams and bringing pink anarchy to every situation they are in."
Kiss' Gene Simmons is slated to be one of the executive producers, and the band sounds pretty pumped about the project. Says Paul Stanley: "Knowing and viewing The Hub as I do daily with my three children, it is the perfect home for us to bring the Kiss Hello Kitty juggernaut to yet another generation."
You heard it here first, folks. I'll keep you posted on when the series will make its debut.

So, on the one hand, this is a delightfully weird popculture trainwreck. On the other hand, Gene Simmons is a misogynist asshole, and I can't get all that enthusiastic about his executive producer role in an entertainment project aimed at little girls.

Exclusive: Hello Kitty and Kiss team up for a TV series [USA Today/Whitney Matheson]

(Thanks, Prezombie!)

Raiders of the Lost Ark original brainstorming sessions

David Pescovitz — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:37:24 +0000

In 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan had early brainstorming sessions around Lucas's outline for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." They recorded the conversations and had the tape transcribed. Here it is (PDF). Over at the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe provides a summary and excerpts some choice bits.

The hero, Lucas explains, is a globe-trotting archaeologist, “a bounty hunter of antiquities.” He’s a professor, a Ph.D.—“People call him doctor.” But he’s a little “rough and tumble.” As the men hash out the Jones iconography, they refer, incessantly, to other films, invoking Eastwood, Bond, and Mifune. He will dress like Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lucas says: “the khaki pants…the leather jacket. That sort of felt hat.” Oh, and also? “A bullwhip.” He’ll carry it “rolled up,” Lucas continues. “Like a snake that’s coiled up behind him.”
“I like that,” Spielberg says. “The doctor with the bullwhip.”

"Raiders of the Lost Ark: Story Conference Transcript" (Mad Dog Movies)

"Spitballing Indy" (The New Yorker)

"Fake" tax-scam movie won film award

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:09:55 +0000

When British authorities began to suspect that a movie production was in fact a massive tax scam, the producers were forced to cover their tracks by actually making the movie. It even won an award from the 2012 Las Vegas Film Festival; an award only rescinded after tax inspectors nevertheless swooped in. The movie's name? Landscape of Lies. Enjoy the trailer! [Daily Mail]

LEGO Star Trek Into Darkness trailer

David Pescovitz — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:53:47 +0000

(Spoken in the voice of Don LaFontaine): You may have seen the Star Trek Into Darkness trailer, but have you seen it... in LEGO!? Directed by Antonio Toscano and Andrea Toscano.

Tricky Dick meets RoboCop

David Pescovitz — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:19:04 +0000

Richard Nixon and his pal RoboCop in 1987. Photo snapped by Chuck Pulin during a charity event promoting the movie's VHS release. (via Mental Floss)

Star Wars trio to reprise roles in Disney/Lucasfilm "Episode VII"

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:16:58 +0000

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published today, George Lucas more or less spilled the beans: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher will reprise their roles as Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia in the new "Star Wars" film. All three had signed on for the forthcoming "Episode VII" project before Lucasfilm's $4 billion purchase by Disney.

"We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison — or were pretty much in the final stages of negotiation," said Lucas. "Maybe I'm not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-de-do."

WHOAH, SPOILER, DUDE.

Fisher had confirmed her reprisal in an earlier interview.

Dazed and Confused is 20!

David Pescovitz — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:25:53 +0000

"That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age."

Dazed and Confused is 20 years old! Esquire has a package of features tied to the anniversary. And if you're in Austin, there's a big screening, reunion, and cast party happening at the Marchesa Hall & Theatre!

Star Trek-themed online art sale

David Pescovitz — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:14:25 +0000

Q Pop is holding an online Star Trek art sale with more than 100 piece most of which are less than $100! Above, Doug Gauthier's "Mugato" plushie ($100) and Peter Paul's "Uhura" watercolor ($50). "Beam Me Up: Star Trek Art Show"

Short documentary on Patton Oswalt: "To Be Loved & Understood"

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:11:46 +0000

Julien Nitzberg's short (10 minute) documentary on comedian Patton Oswalt is out today, via Thrash Lab. Ashton Kutcher executive produced, but don't worry, it's still great. I've written previously about Nitzberg's film, "The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia," which I thought was a terrific film.

Django Unchained: "A white revenge fantasy"

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:54:08 +0000

Noah Smith (who is white) saw "Django," and loved it. "Not for the cartoonish violence (which was OK, nothing special) or for Tarantino's trademark witty banter (which was a bit subdued)," he says, but for its politics. "I'm pretty sure that for all its elements of blaxploitation, Django's politics are all about white people," writes Smith. "It's not a black revenge fantasy; it's a white revenge fantasy." Django isn't black people's story of slavery: it's white people's.

Black Mirror episode 2: White Bear and the culture of desensitization

Leigh Alexander — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:56:01 +0000

The last episode of Black Mirror’s second season airs tonight on UK Channel 4.

Do you remember the first profoundly shocking image you saw on the internet? Perhaps it would have been something you came across by accident; perhaps you followed, half horrified and half compelled, a trail of digital whispers to see if you could handle it.

Maybe you don’t remember the first one, but you remember some of them. Maybe you shut the window, sick at yourself, at the glimpse of a woman’s eyes glassed with something unsettling, not staged. Maybe you lingered on eruptions, lacerations, in spite of yourself. To see if the image could possibly be real.

You could have even been one of those who chased the rush, gaze fixed on the spectrum of human mortality suddenly available for analysis and consumption in ways far beyond what you will hopefully ever witness in your actual life. If so, you’ve probably seen someone’s victim, someone’s child, flicker by in your shock-zoetrope. That person is probably okay. It probably wasn’t real. It wasn’t really your problem. There was nothing you could’ve done anyway. You went to bed.

Now, you know that the world is full of upsetting and graphic things. You have seen communities form in dark little digital caves, faceless audiences forever upping the ante, worrying at a numb nerve ending that adapts, that wants ever more elaborate stimulation. . It is hard to feel shocked anymore; it is hard to feel moved. If you wanted to join them you wouldn’t have to dig through secretive channels; it’s just there, right over your shoulder. You probably already know where to look.

In the exposition of Black Mirror's season 2, episode 2 ("White Bear"), a woman awakes bound to a chair, alone in a house where the television radiates a stark, inexplicable sigil, an ominous whine. Disheveled, amnesiac, and clutching a photo of a child she can barely remember but who must be her daughter, she stumbles out into a suburban neighborhood, shouting for help. What greets her instead is an eager scattering of spectators wielding camera phones. Unmoved by her pleas, they film her from house windows, follow her down the street.

The voyeurs are possessed of a visible, quiet eagerness that you’ve seen on anyone looking at the world through a smartphone’s video recorder. Like what they’re seeing is just a moment to be captured, unreal. Immediately our heroine learns she’s being hunted; a masked man with a shotgun coolly advances, fires at her with no particular urgency.

No one helps. They just follow along and watch, like they’re hoping to be the first one with the video of someone dying. Who’d do that? Oh, yeah. You, maybe. It’s not that implausible a projection.

This episode is only tangentially about voyeur culture and our desensitization to the individual fostered by mass communications, though. It deviates from the usual structure of the series -- usually an episode opens with a scenario, a premise, an imminent reality enabled by our relationship to omnipresent social media and technology, and then explores the implications of that premise.

This one favors a long, action-intensive exposition that, beneath all the fleeing and gasping, the slow dread of violence, throbs toward a twist conclusion. It starts by placing us right into the circumstance of Victoria, shaken and bereft of her memory, fleeing the voyeurs and the videogame-like, masked “hunters” who seem to want to kill her for the benefit of the viewers. She’s assisted by Jem, a tough gal who explains that everyone’s under the influence of a signal being broadcast from a transmitter called White Bear (hence the episode’s title). The pair’s objective is ostensibly to evade the sadistic hunters and disable the transmitter.

All the while, Victoria has flickers of memory: Of viewing the child she scarcely remembers through a video screen, of being accompanied by a man with a sigil tattoo. And all along, the viewers, disturbingly gleeful, like they’re touring a theme park.

The reveal at the end doesn’t feel totally unexpected, but it’s still uncomfortable. Ultimately you can view the episode as a critique of all kinds of themes: Mob mentality, reality television, even the complicated treatment of women in the justice system, or the assumptions we bring to the things we see – we can capture nearly any issue from all angles and pin it to virtual glass forever, but still only own a piece of the story, the unknowable remainder filled in by our own preconceptions.

Primarily, though, this episode is a critique of our deep, often-unexamined mass desensitization, or at least a dread portent of its potential to grow. It aims to ask: To what extent can you stand by and watch horror before you are complicit, punishable?

Black Mirror decodes our modern dread of technology

Leigh Alexander — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:04:48 +0000

The English have a coy euphemism for addiction: “moreish.” It summons the delightful anxiety in surrendering your control to something else, the ambivalent cocktail of desire and guilt. We feel it flickering in the periphery, and we feel our smartphones in the middle of a restaurant dinner.

We live with the inability to fall asleep without a glassy black object nearby – you don’t need your phone when you’re going to bed, exactly, but you take no ease unless you know where it is. We lock our phones without a concrete reason besides the fact that letting someone else pick it up and look feels violating, too-intimate. It summons a nonspecific anxiety.

Game designer and critic Ian Bogost’s iOS-centric installation, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, aims to explore what the designer sees as a relationship between technology and religion; he likens the iPhone to a rosary, something we thumb automatically, observant. As a journalist on games I once craved the mainstreaming of designed interaction – now I startle to enter a silent subway car full of passengers with heads in laps, faces illuminated by screens, tapping.

The role of horror media in our culture is to show us our fears, to illuminate unspoken anxieties. Charlie Brooker’s Channel 4 series Black Mirror, something of a spiritual successor to The Twilight Zone, takes up the mantle for the digital age. Launched last year and now in its second season, it was inspired by the popular satirist and presenter’s own ambivalence to the increasing proliferation of these dark little screens; he found himself sincerely conversing with Siri (“a servile asslick with zero self-respect”), routinely performing the thoughtless tug-and-pop of Twitter refreshes.

Black Mirror's format is one I wish more American series emulated; rather than spooling shows into endless seasons of quick hits, it’s more common in the UK for quality TV to air robust, brief seasons. Black Mirror’s first season consists of three hour-long episodes, united by tone and theme instead of recurring characters or settings.

The third episode is called The Entire History of You, and it’s the one everyone talks about the most, with a sort of hushed dread (Robert Downey, Jr. reportedly optioned it for a film. Get the Arcade Fire to lend their song to the credits?). You ought not to watch it if you’re in a couple, they say, with a stricken look. This show has that kind of power: to rub your face in the viscera of everything about the modern world that you don’t want to think about. It is many things, but it is not pleasant viewing.

The boyfriend I’m in London to visit did not want us to watch The Entire History of You, which apparently involves a near-future where devices embedded in your body record everything you see, say and do – including your past relationships – for later viewing. In the browsing history of his iPad are several articles offering advice on overcoming jealousy of a partner’s past. He doesn’t know I’ve seen them, and he hasn’t told me about them; I know his mind from that black tablet.

The recently-aired first episode of season two explores just how much of a person can exist in the digital ether. It’s called Be Right Back, a play on the "BRB" notification people leave when exiting chat windows to go do real life.

A better title might have been Be Right There.

“Are we going to watch the new Black Mirror?” I asked my boyfriend.

“Be right there,” he said, immersed in a pretend city he was building on the iPad. I picked up my iPhone to kill time on Twitter until he was done.

“Are we watching it?” He asked ten minutes later. “Be right there,” I said. The irony of negotiating with our devices in order to watch a program about our relationship to our devices was pretty embarrassing.

Be Right Back is about a social media widow. Martha and Ash have moved in to a pastoral country house; Ash’s constant palming his stark black phone highlights the contrast between his social media use and the couple’s tactile life, framed in neutral tones with touching notes of green and turquoise. As characterization goes, Ash’s compulsion is wisely sketched with a light hand; he uses social media a lot, but not apparently dangerously so. No more than any of us.

The story begins in earnest when Ash is killed in an accident. A friend or relative–it’s not clear, as Black Mirror tends to place viewers directly into the flow of an episode without lavishing on background or irrelevant details –intrudes upon Martha at Ash’s funeral with an unsettling suggestion: There’s a new service that lets you talk to the dead.

Using the manifold digital fingerprints, photographs, voice recordings and text interactions he’s left in the social media space, this tech can serve Martha an interactive AI of Ash’s personality. It knows how he talks, his tastes and his memories – so long as he has shared them.

You can’t help but be gripped with the unease of wondering how much the black mirrors know about you. If it’s enough to resurrect you, how much of your essence have you divested onto the infrastructure? Twitter and Facebook obsess us with ideas about “sharing” and socialization, but is that really your life “on there,” or a thin, troubling simulacrum?

As we watch Martha, who learns she’s pregnant, succumb to her own grief-stricken urges to contact Ash’s memory through technology, the AI learns. It gains enough data to talk on the phone to her, and she reminds him of certain memories he’s meant to have, which he retains. When she nearly breaks her phone – and the increasingly-crucial lifeline, we feel her raw nerves.

We understand the ill junction of compulsion and disgust behind the mad, grotesque decision she makes next – a flickering car dash advertisement for synthetic body parts that we see at the episode's outset foreshadows a key clue. The episode’s best moment is a lovely exercise in restraint: Martha waiting restlessly in her living room for what she’s wrought to leave the upstairs bathroom. The calm, gentle voice of the man she loves pleads urgently with her not to turn the light on.

I won't spoil the ending, but I’ll tell you it’s not the shambling Night of the Living Dead you’d expect of typical horror. It is more subtle, more gently terrible, sawing slowly at the heart like a dull knife. Martha’s “resurrection” of Ash ultimately suggests that the parody of authentic-self that we serve to social media is unholy, a violation.

Black Mirror’s gift is that it presents a world where anything is possible thanks to technology -- and prickles our skin regarding the inevitable complications of that possibility. We are ever on a quest for advancement, and it’s quite likely that we’ll figure out how to do things we’ll end up wishing we never learned how to do and cannot unlearn.

This is a show about our fear that some line may loom in the story of humankind that we ought not cross, for our own good. Such a line feels tangible, near; maybe we’ve even crossed it already. It is considered unenlightened and luddite to fear technology, but Black Mirror makes it startlingly easy to admit that there is much to be unsettled about these days, quietly, ambivalently.

The newest episode airs on Channel 4 on February 18. Brooker’s said it’s “not for the fainthearted.” I know, because I follow him on Twitter. Can't wait. Show is moreish.

Previously: Black Mirror is black, and it's brilliant - best sf on TV

Watch Criterion films for free this weekend

David Pescovitz — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:06:47 +0000

All of the Criterion Collection films on Hulu are free for viewing until February 18. (US only, unfortunately.) Time to stock up on Jiffy Pop, Gitanes, and Blue Bottle. "Watch the Criterion Collection films online" (via @criterion)

Forging the Game Of Thrones sword

David Pescovitz — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:55:11 +0000

Master blacksmith Tony Swatton of Sword & Stone is Hollywood's favorite weapons maker. Here he is forging Jaime Lannister's sword for "Games of Thrones."

Between Two Ferns, Oscars edition

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:36:03 +0000

Zach Galafianakis' Oscars coverage is pretty much all the Oscars coverage I want to watch. In part one, Zach sits down with Jennifer Lawrence, Anne Hathaway, Christoph Waltz, Naomi Watts & Amy Adams. In part two, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Chastain, Sally Field and "another special guest from Lincoln." (HT: Chris Sacca)