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TheMatrixWarrior
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Name: Rohan
Country: India
Metro: Mumbai
Birthday: 2/22/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: Movies, movies, movies, books, books, books, repeating the same words thrice, PlayStation and being a verbose, boring, obnoxious prick with very badd speling
Occupation: Student
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message meEmail: email me
MSN: rohanjoshi@hotmail.com
Member Since:
11/6/2003
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| Driving stoned.
Test of skill.
Texting while at it.
Bonus level.
Wading through a parking lot on the night of a party, while at it. While stoned.
Extra credit.
"Where are the crocodiles?" the nephew asks. In the swamp, where they belong, darling. And for that we should praise the lord and pass the ammunition, for here there be tygers, in the forest at the razor's edge.
What a world. What a world where every move at once causes a bit of win and a bit of lose.
Booze?
News. Everything you think has happened, has. Everything you think will, won't.
Some will. For your sake, I hope it's the parts you want most. Anything else is a compromised facsimile of the most perfect life you could have had.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Nope, that's all the instructions it came with. I guess they wanna keep it interesting.
The sentient human is a funny thing. He is the only one who can conceive of a wrong, sentence it at the court of moral judgement, and then perform it anyway. He aspires to glory but often achieves only madness. He reaches for all that he cannot grasp. He builds the world in all of his images, wondering which of them looks most like a mirror to his soul. He'll search for brides on reality TV, when he's not off making soup from the rock kitchens of science .
It's funny but when you think about it, there's no real way to quantify our sentience, our intelligence. There is no formula or measurement that definitively fences us off from other species.
The only physical thing we do that other species don't, is cook.
You salad-eaters should reconsider your stand.
Death.
It's the strangest thing that happens to us. The only part of our lives that we insist others participate in, even as we beg off. Ironically, though, as a race, here we are, participant in our own trek to oblivion.
We'll wait for the sun, wait for the nova, and we'll put on our Ray-Bans and turn to go home, saying thank you for the show and we'll be sure to tell the neighbours to watch it, oblivious that we have arrived at the logical end of our line and it's not the show that's over, it's us. And humanity's eye will close for the very last time and the universe will be informed, a light year at a time, that dinner service will resume shortly.
Sit back and enjoy the ride. You may as well, I mean, it's enjoying you. | | |
| There's a moment in Neil Blomkamp's District 9, where a character blasts another off their feet by shooting a pig at them, arguably the funniest improv bullet since Charlie Sheen bow-strung a chicken into someone years ago. As a moment, it's darkly funny, or would be if it weren't underplayed as part of a giant, very real shootout. It's a brief ray of light in an otherwise dark telling, like that moment in a videogame where a cheatcode can turn guns into bananas, or (as in the case of Silent Hill) lead you to a faux-ending in which an alien spaceship takes you away.
The alien ship we see at the start of District 9 though, isn't going away. Like a car that breaks down in a hick town you had no intention of spending any time in, it's just showed up, right over Jo'burg, and brought with it the Prawns, a race of grasshopper-like creatures who, as a welcome gift, get not only a racist nickname, but also most of South Africa's political realities. And so they live in a closed-off ghetto called District 9 (hat-tip to Cape Town's District 6), jones like junkies for cat-food, and sell their weapons tech to slightly twee Nigerian gangsters in exchange for the stuff.
(Why the Prawns never use this advanced weapons-tech to leverage a better standing in society is either a plot-hole or one of those troubling questions about the Prawns' nature that humans never pause to ask themselves. I'd like to believe it's the latter.)
But after 20+ years of matters festering in District 9, the humans decide that they want the Prawns (all 1.8 million of them) to live even further away, and put in motion a planned, forced relocation campaign to move them to a sealed, policed refugee camp that's essentially a concentration camp without the gas-chambers. To make matters look above board, they even put in place bureaucratic bullshit that involves collecting signatures from the evacuees.
We learn all this in the first twenty minutes, when we're introduced, through mockumentary talking heads and news-footage, to Wickus Van De Merwe (Sharlito Copley), the spearhead of this campaign and a hapless "aww shucks" sort of bureaucrat who's fifteen years away from becoming Milton from Office Space. District 9, Blomkamp, and indeed Copley himself court greatness early, and with confidence, in the film's opening twenty minutes. Blomkamp sets a tone that's part satirical, with Wikus' smiling, bureaucratic, arm-twisting of residents as he coerces them into signing up for the refugee camp, all the while nattering away to a film crew (either news or corporate film. It's scary that I can't tell which), and part hellish, as angry Prawns act out and skewer soldiers, only to get a bullet in their skulls for their efforts. It's Cloverfield meets Starship Troopers, by way of Hotel Rwanda.
Without going into spoilerific detail, things spin horribly out of control for Wikus. It's not just the fact that he's forced into a situation where he's forced to see things from the Prawns' point of view. It's the fact that he's forced to see some things at all.
The idea of the alien as allegorical outsider isn't exactly new. It's been done before, in everything from Enemy Mine to Starship Troopers, but Blomkamp scores here by playing his first two acts straight, letting a bunch of poker-faced mockumentary clips and talking heads guide us through this world. Even when he switches to more traditional narrative, he doesn't overplay his hand, quietly lighting a bunch of narrative fuses as Wikus slowly discovers an inner steel that only desperation can uncover and forges an alliance with a WASPishly named Christopher Johnson, a Prawn with a plan.
D-9 works strongest when it's playing its Battlestar Galactica card, using its sci-fi setting to make situations filled with political realities look like they're hypothetical. It's easier to look at something and question it when you can pretend like it's happening in a fictional world. But D-9's questions, if unoriginal, are very certainly real. How do you decide who the Other is? How do you decide what humanity is? Why do you get to control and crush another life just because you were once humanitarian to it? And why oh why, as a race, do we want to isolate anything we don't understand, only to hungrily seize upon it if it can satisfy our appetite for destruction? Watch closely, a scene in which a trapped Wickus bleats pithy legalese when asked to fire a weapon against his will. "No sir, I will not," he says, both polite and terrified, "This is illegal." he says, as his entire world is turned against him.
By act three though, all Blomkamp's narrative fuses go off and D-9 dives straight into shoot-em-up territory. That disappoints some people, but I can't for the life of me see why. I, for one, am thankful for a film that makes me question my politics, but is also filled with glorious alien ooze and makes me want a weaponized Exosuit. Even The Dark Knight, with all its bleak moral play, needed a Batpod and an exploding hospital to make the medicine go down. Besides, Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson were originally set to direct Halo before financing fell through, and the third act is them showing off, wagging a finger and going "You know, you really should have let us make that Halo film." The weapons in this thing are BFG-delicious, and some of the camerawork wouldn't be out of place in an FPS.
Best of all though is Blomkamp's assured debut. He's cut his teeth doing special effects work, and so, as a director, he knows how to make them work, how to shoot and edit in a manner that makes it all believable. And then there's Sharlito Copley, a friend of Blomkamp's who's *never* acted before, outside of Blomkamp's short film Alive in Jo'burg (also the basis for D-9). Expect his Wikus Van De Merwe to make a lot of "Ten Best" character lists. Sci-fi needs to archive this character and Copley's performance of it.
So on now, to the inevitable sequel, and the fevrent pleas I make for it. One, please Mr Blomkamp, don't Wachowski the mythos and overthink your politics. Don't turn any sequels into a bloated mess of shoehorned ideology. And two, dear Hollywood, please don't do to Mr Blomkamp what you did to Gavin Hood, another South African import you took and turned into... well, Wolverine.
Did I love District 9? Yeah. Hell yeah. Why? I'd like to say it was its allegories, it's uncomfortable exploration of politics and ethics, and it's banging third-act action. But it's more than that. I loved it because I love the moment it represents. That moment where a generation finds and forges a new cinematic myth, a new set of cult figures to geek out about. Like that first audience that ever saw Star Wars. Or like when The Matrix first came out ten years ago. That's why I love District 9.
Well, that, plus I really want an Exosuit.
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| If I were stuck on a horrid reality show where they asked me which one person I'd take with me if I were stuck on an island, I'd say James Cameron.
Now that probably doesn't seem like the best idea, given that the last time anyone asked him to do something, he went and sank the world's biggest ship (but only after an unnamed character had had a chance to fall off it and hit its propeller with a delightful "BING" sound), killed Leonardo DiCaprio, and left Kate Winslet bobbing on someone's front door.
So, for a start, life on the island would always be interesting. Twenty minutes after getting there, he'd do something that'd cause half the island's continental shelf to fall in. Into a time warp. At warp speed. Following which, the bits of land that fell in would reassemble to form an unstoppable evil robot played by Robert Patrick.
Besides, he strikes me as the sort of guy who'd go into the forest with a pen-knife, and come out two hours later with an iPhone he fashioned from coconut leaves. And it'd have a better camera.
The thing is, Cameron's not a big fan of technology. Well, at least not the sort that exists. He wouldn't look at current technology and think to himself, hmmm, if I strung all those computers together, I might be able to make a movie about lots of giant robots that come to earth to repeatedly interupt footage of Megan Fox running in slow motion.
Cameron's conversations, I'm guessing, go more like this:
JC: I want to make a movie.
Minion: Given that your last one made bajillion dollars, I'm not surprised sir.
JC: More specifically, I want to make a movie that has a race of nine-foot tall blue humanoids that live on a planet that's a cross between King Kong's Skull Island, Princess Mononoke, and the UFC.
Minion: Um, that sounds... tough, sir.
JC: You're right. Tough's no good. Tough is for pussies. We need for it to sound *impossible*. Okay, so let's shoot it in the richest, most dimension-bending form of 3D ever.
Minion: Sir, that's impossible.
JC: Perfect! We start Tuesday!
Nah, Cameron prefers to think "I want to make THIS", and then sets about inventing the technology it's going to take to achieve that vision. And so, here we are, three months away from Avatar, his first crack at a blockbuster since he sank the Big T twelve years ago. And given that the internet's been lunging at the scraps the super-secretive project's shed over the last few years, now, at the top of what promises to be a punishing, relentless marketing push Cameron's thrown us our first real bone. A full twenty minutes of footage, a collection of entire scenes in 3D, a preview that's as much a throwdown of the gauntlet as it is a marketing exercise.
Upon its online debut, Avatar's trailer was greeted with a collective "eh?" from the fanboy community. While the staggering enormity of the film's scale was never in doubt, it didn't seem like the game-changer we were promised.
And now that I've seen twenty minutes of Avatar plastered across (and indeed, within and beyond) a giant screen, the world makes sense again. It doesn't matter what you thought of that trailer when it streamed down your computer screen. You were wrong. Because James Cameron has tired of cinema's flatness, it's inherent lack of multiple dimensions. The same theater screens that once seemed like the only canvasses big enough to hold his blockbuster dreams seem to him now almost claustrophobic, restrictive. So now he's doing a spot of remodeling, stretching those spaces, bending them to his will, to give the movies a sense of visual breadth and depth that they just haven't had before.
So, half an hour after it was supposed to start (Dear Studios, stop waiting half an hour for Bollywood bigwigs attending your screenings. They aren't going to give you geek repeat business, and six years from now, they're going to remake your movies in Hindi without paying you a dime. Thanks for the free popcorn and Pepsi though.) we were ready to watch Avatar.
The gentleman who addressed the audience before the footage kicked off gave us an obligatory (and rehearsed) "This is Sparta!" pep talk about how we've "never seen anything like this before." Rubbish little speech, but I'll give him one thing.
He was right.
I could throw an entire dictionary at the screen, and it'd do me no good, because sometimes, words just don't cut it. Avatar is like The Matrix. No-one can be told what it is. Not that that's going to stop me trying.
First up, we got a little message from Cameron (also in 3D) about what we were watching, with a two-line explanation of Avatar's setup. Avatar happens on the planet Pandora (clunk goes the symbolism), where humans are attempting to mine an extremely rare element. Pandora is a hostile environment, and its indigenous folk, the Na'vi live in a kind of savage harmony with this eco-system. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a crippled soldier signs up for an "Avatar", essentially a farmed Na'vi body into which he can transport his consciousness so as to blend into the surroundings while at work.
Cue apocalypse.
The first sequence we saw was Sully's arrival at what appears to be a military base on Pandora. "It is my job to keep you alive," barks a battle-scarred chief to his new recruits.
"I will not succeed."
It's a quiet moment, nothing showy, or well, nothing that should be showy under ordinary circumstances. But given the 3D Cameron's working with, it was unreal. The first thing we see is Sully wheeling himself down an aisle, rows of tables on either side of him. The way the tables were staggered on-screen, I actually felt like I could rest my cola on the table closest to me. It just popped off the screen and seemed like it was an inch away. And as if that wasn't cool enough, every subsequent table in line felt like it was part of the same three dimensional space, like I was standing at the bottom of the aisle Sully's wheeling himself down. He didn't look like he was wheeling himself down the screen. It looked like he was wheeling himself towards a meeting with *me*.
The next clip pushed things up a notch, with Worthington talking to Sigourney Weaver, who plays the doctor in charge of getting his consciousness into his Avatar. Their conversation starts at what looks like a futuristic MRI machine, and the action slowly shifts to the entire lab. There's a mind-bendingly cool moment when you have three transluscent (think Minority Report) computer screens on screen at once, and the sense of perspective you get from all three is just... mesmerizing. Information on the screen in the foreground just sort of scrolls down right before your eyes, almost teasing you to reach out for it, while the other computer screens look like they're placed further back, not just in the same cinematic space, but the same *physical* space, even.
The clip continues with Worthington transfering to his Avatar and waking up.Maybe it'll be longer in the final print, but from what we saw here, they underplay the transfer to the Avatar nicely, wrapping it up in one quick "Welcome to Questworld"-style effect instead of some long drawn-out faux-epic origin piece. The doctors want Worthington to take it slow, get used to his Avatar. The catch is, Worthington's a disabled soldier, so this is the first time in ages that he's ever been on his feet. I liked the tone of this scene, the way Worthington tries out his new body with a fair hint of arrogant recklessness. He's bumping into things and staggering around, but Cameron isn't going for slapstick here. Sure Worthington's newfound tail knocks over vital equipment, but it doesn't play out like the payoff to a Buster Keaton sketch. He just sort of gets used to what he's doing, and then busts out of the room to play some more. End clip.
We were just about to get to the good stuff, but I was already immersed in this world, its tables, labs, people filling the space around me, changing my idea of what spectacle could be. But I hadn't seen anything yet.
We cut then to Worthington out in the forests of Pandora in Na'vi form, and he's being guided by Sigourney Weaver's Na'vi Avatar. Good thing too, because he needs some serious advice. He's standing in the crosshairs of a very angry looking carnivorous beast, and he's being advised not to run because the animals moves are aimed only at intimidating him. "Stand your ground" Weaver says, "Don't run away". Worthington makes it up as he goes along, choosing instead to charge the animal, screaming at it. It slinks away, afraid of his belligerence. No, wait, it's actually afraid of the giant. fucking. creature. behind him. Worthington finds himself face to face with this new foe, and turns to Weaver. "Well?! Do I stand around or run this time?" Run, she says. Definitely run. Good advice, because it leads to my absolute favourite bit. Worthington's running through the forest, the camera right ahead of him. Behind him, the beast thunders ever-closer, and the 3D gives the footchase a sense of depth unlike anything I've ever seen. There's a moment in there where Worthington runs into a copse of trees before bursting out of it. It's fair testament then, to the quality of 3D that the second he hits that copse, my first instinct was to raise my arms to brush the branches out of the way. There's a sense of urgency and clarity that the 3D lends the chase, a clearer sense of geography that adds to the sheer sense of danger in the scene. I love how Pandora seems to be this devious mix between Princess Mononoke, Skull Island and Dagobah.
The next bit gave us more of a sense of what Pandora is all about. As Worthington is running through the forest, he's attacked again, essentially because as a human in a Na'vi body, he's still being too loud, too brash, too annoying for any of the planet's creatures to recognize him as a real Na'vi. And if you're not Na'vi, you're meat. It's at this point that Neyetri (Zoe Saldhana) a Na'vi girl, rushes to Worthington's aid, killing the beast and saving his life. As he thanks her for her help, she turns to him and sets up the Na'vi's take on life and harmony perfectly. She's angry, furious with herself and with him, for making her kill. There's no thanks for this, she explains. Everything that happened was bad, that creature didnt need to die, she explains. This is not a time for thanks, she says, it's a time to be sorry.
We then see a bit more from the same sequence, where Worthington's just following Neyetri around because it's night and he really doesn't know where to go. She grabs his torch and tosses it away, and he's upset because he wonders how he's going to see in the dark. Except it doesn't really get dark, with Pandora's plants and water giving off this gentle luminescence that allows him to see clearly. By night, Pandora looks like someone lit Dagobah with the spaceship lights from Close Encounters (or ET's finger). It's a beautiful sequence this, popping off the page with the 3D work.
The final scene was Worthington's attempt at finding a Na'vi steed. The process obviously involved finding a nest of winged creatures, from which Worthington needs to find the winged-steed that has chosen *him*. "How will I know if it chooses me?" he asks. "It will try to kill you" Neyetri replies.
And try it does.
In glorious 3D.
The battle between Worthington and the beast plays out like a clash of egos, each of them trying to best each other; the bird trying to throw him off and almost sending him thousands of feet down into a ravine, and Worthington doing all he can to hold on and tame his steed. The moment he succeeds, the moment he calms the creature down and claims it, he's told he must take it out flying immediately. The Na'vi explain that making a first flight immediately cements the bond between rider and steed, and so Worthington takes off. Or, well, plunges.
It's one thing to give a screen 3D depth, it's one thing to send computer screens flying off-screen, but to get the 3D right while falling through the sky with the camera swinging wildly, now that's just showing off. Worthington's initial fall through the sky triggered my vertigo and fear of heights. And I'm not entirely certain I had either before the screening. His recovery and subsequent flight? Even better. When the beast soars, so do you. When it drops, you nosedive with it. Clouds waft past and the wind's in your face.
This wasn't a viewing, it was an experience. For twenty minutes, I was immersed. I forget the popcorn, the cola, the seat... the theatrical experience just faded away. It was like watching the missing link between old-fashioned-on-screen-cinema and the Holodecks on Star Trek. It's the sort of experience that's intriguing on some fundamental biological level, in that my brain actually struggled to cope with the scope of what was going on. At the end of twenty minutes, I actually felt (dare I say it) tired. And that's a compliment.
Could Avatar change the future of film-making? Yup. If all my cinema could be this immersive, this... sensual, I'd sign up in a heartbeat. There will be a catch here, of course. I was so spellbound by the sheer sensory overload of what was going on on-screen, that I didn't spend much time focusing on the characters. Now that I think back to it, they were actually pretty decent. But if this tech becomes popular, for the first few years, while you're still oohing and aahing over the technical genius of it, studios are going to sell you some rubbish plotless product just because they'll notice that you don't care.
But here's the good news. Everything we saw at that preview, high-octane as it was, was from the first half of the film. So nothing's been massively spoiled for you, and it gets you wondering... if this is what the first half looks like, can my brain actually handle the second half before it melts and runs out my nose in sheer joy?
Well, as long as I don't come across Kate Winslet floating on a door anytime soon, I'll be just fine.
Avatar hits India on December 18. I don't know what distribution will be like, but if you have access, make it a point to watch this thing in 3D. To watch in 2D would be like picking the ICL over the IPL. I mean, you could do it, but why, if you've got half a brain, would you? Besides, if you don't watch it in 3D, James Cameron will be mad, and he'll kill me the second we get to that desert island.
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| A friend of mine Tweeted me about Fraggle Rock, and two seconds later, we were re-tweeted (that's copied and re-posted by someone else, but with credit to us, for you people who had normal childhoods), by a Muppet Fansite. True story. How did they know so quick? Who was watching us?! Muppet Ninjas?
Ever had that happen to you, where you go hey, What's up?
And they go, "I'm fine, thanks."
And you go, ohkay, how's it going?
And they go "Not much"?
Pure Magic (Chocolate) is the greatest chocolate biscuit in the world. I hereby order all Oreos to be found and shot.
How do we live in a world where television programming for babies is the most sanitized, scrubbed down and neutered it has ever been (think Teletubbies, and another frighteningly named show my nephew watches, "In The Night Garden"), and yet, our adult programming has inversely become more filthy, tasteless and ridiculous than it ever was?
Ogden Nash is awesome.
I'm going to run the Mumbai Marathon.
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| I just told a friend I've become a "twitter whore" (www.twitter.com/mojorojo).
She read it as "bitter whore".
And said "Yeah, I know, what's up with that?"
Sigh.
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Speak so you're spoken to.
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