Hearty Wheat Meat & the Uncanny Valley

“The Uncanny Valley” is an expression that originated within the field of robotics back in the 1970s. Basically it stated that more human a robot’s features became the more people felt empathy toward to it. But inevitably there was a point where the robot became so realistic—but not completely human, obviously—and at that point the robot became freaky. Scary and repulsive. But the theory of the Uncanny Valley also states that if the robot keeps on advancing then it’ll start to climb out of that valley the closer it comes to bridging the gap to toward absolute resemblance.



In other words, C-3PO is more empathetic than R2-D2 because he is more human. But if you look at the freaky almost-human characters in the Polar Express, then you’ll probably agree that C-3PO still more empathetic than them, even though (or because) he/it is way more abstracted. According to the chart, zombies also fall into this category. There is something about this almost-but-not-quite-human state that triggers repulsion in human beings. It looks real, it sounds real, but it’s not. It’s undead.



This is coming up more these days as Hollywood tries to cast virtual actors in scenes. The new David Fincher movie, Benjamin Button, is trying to create a completely virtual Brad Pitt that they can age with digital makeup. The story is that Benjamin is a guy who is born an old man and gets younger from year to year. They want to create whole scenes with this virtual Brad Pitt, but apparently they are still meeting up with strong resistance from the Uncanny Valley. The rumor is that the footage is absolutely realistic, but the human brain cannot be fooled. Even though all of the sensory input is greenlighting this thing, the human brain knows that it is fake, and feels there is something creepy about it. It will be interesting to see if they will ever be able to solve this problem, or whether the human brain will always somehow know.



It should also be noted that this repulsion applies toward humanness, mainly. Note that in the movie Ratatouille the food and cars and period detail were almost absolutely realistic but that the characters themselves were still somewhat cartoony and abstract. This is probably to keep them out of the Uncanny Valley, but I think this also relates to Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding Comics, which talks about how the more detailed a comic character gets, the less a reader can identify with it because it just becomes more and more different than the reader. Not everyone can see themselves as Prince Valiant (I sure don’t look like that) but everyone can identify with the crudely-drawn Charlie Brown.



A couple of weeks ago Karen and I went to a place called the Veggie Grill down in Irvine. This restaurant is the oddest of birds: a restaurant that fakes meat out of different ingredients and sells it to its vegetarian customers. Now what percentage of vegetarians actually loves the taste of meat and craves it enough to go to a restaurant that attempts to replicate its bloody meatiness, guilt-free? The times I’ve tried to be vegetarian the thought of meat just gets more and more disgusting. So the Veggie Grill seems to be catering to a fairly small niche, but then what do I know.



I had been craving Carne Asada all day and when we went in they had a special of Carne Asada Tacos! The description gave me pause—“containing Hearty Wheat Meat made from 100% wheat protein, textured like roast beef, and marinated in our natural flavors and spices”—but the picture looked good, so I ordered it and got on the meat train barrelling right down into the Uncanny Valley, choo-choo!



I ate about a third of it. Karen’s Chillin’ Chicken wasn’t as bad—“our specially seasoned and marinated veggie protein blend…taste and believe”—but it was still challenging to eat. I just couldn’t get it down. I think my brain was freaked out in the same way it would be looking at one of these robots…or a zombie. It looks like beef, it smells like beef, but lordy it’s not like beef at all…. AAAAAARRRRRGHGGHGHG. Not that it tasted bad, necessarily, but my brain was getting the message loud and clear: “Meat a little off somehow. Do not eat. Rotten meat. You will get sick.” I think if the Hearty Wheat Meat had come out in the shape of a cube it would have been less repulsive. I eat tofu all the time without a problem. And you know, a veggie burger isn’t a problem because it’s just a disc. Tofurky? No problem.



But this, well, I never want to have this experience again. It was the Polar Express all over again, but with my tongue.

Designing Women: Julie Taymor's Across the Universe (Long)

I don’t know how the process works—whether female directors tend towards a certain kind of character-driven relationship-centered drama or whether the gatekeepers filter out everything but this. Few females have been authorized to direct action (Kathryn Bigelow, partially because of her marriage to James Cameron, and Karyn Kusama (Aeon Flux) ) and no one ever seems to cross over into design-heavy science fiction or period films (have not seen Marie Antoinette). I think studio heads still get nervous when too much cash is on the line with a female director at the controls. It would be interesting to see what the largest-budgeted film helmed by a woman is. My guess is Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, but that is just a guess. It seems that women are allowed to direct television and indy-cred relationship movies, but large canvas epics are strictly off limits. No costume dramas, no big set pieces, no toys. Certainly no war movies. Just emotions.



Julie Taymor, on the other hand, seems to be working outside of this confinement. Character is definitely a distant second (or third, or fourth) to her spectacular design in her new film Across the Universe, which plays like 20 spectacularly trippy music videos mashed end to end.

Taymor and her co-writers have strung together two dozen or so Beatles songs into a semi-coherent narrative about a chap from Liverpool (Jude) who comes to New York City as the 60s explode into chaos. There are characters named Maxwell, Lucy, Prudence, etc. You get the idea. But because the narrative is drawn from the original songs and not the other way around, like other musicals, it feels false and contrived. It’s an excuse to go out and cram a bunch of clever musical set-pieces into a not-so-believable story.



But spectacular music video sequences do not a good movie make. I recognized that same worn-down feeling I get after watching 2+ hours of MTV at home (in the late 90s of course, we all know MTV plays no videos these days). Some visionary sequences, some not-so-visionary… but mainly it’s that ongoing rush of plotlessness and lack of character arc that gets to you… not unlike watching two hours of commercials.



The film takes a Forrest Gump view of history, as well, touching on the main events that define the 60s for filmmakers (Detroit riots, Kent State, MLKs assassination, Vietnam, etc. etc). There is a Janice Joplinesque character and a Jimi Hendrix character and references to Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey’s magic bus. But it doesn’t feel emotionally honest—like, at all. You can dress up Vietnam and Kent State with arty, MTV visuals and editing but it doesn’t capture anything honest. It’s history being used as a logo to sell something, and it’s actually kind of offensive. I wondered what a Vietnam Vet would think of the way the war is treated in this film… As a bunch of startling, beautiful/horrific surreal images to drive a rock-n-roll music video forward. But the kids of today who are watching this won’t realize that it’s just wallpaper, of course. For them, these visuals contribute to their (mis)understanding of the period. Indeed, the further we get away from the 60s, the more it seems they are hardening into these 10 or so images/stories that stereotype the decade. Taymor was 14 during the Summer of Love, but for some reason the material feels like it was created by someone born in the 70s. Or 80s.



Across the Universe achieves the strange duality of being both visionary and uninteresting at the same time. That said, I love that this film was made. I am always clamoring for something new, and this was definitely something new. I can imagine all of the meetings and planning and convincing that Taymor had to do to get the money to do this film. And I love the playful challenge of it all. There’s no real precedent to this thing (Moulin Rouge, maybe, comes close) so there was probably a very real sense of “I don’t know how this is going to turn out but lets try our best”. That sense of risk is absent from most things these days, especially in film, so it’s important to commend this true artistic spirit when it shows itself, even if it’s in the form of a semi-failure like Across the Universe. And the film is divisive—the reviews are all over the board on this one—which is always a good sign.



I would have adored this film in high school/early college. It’s a good film for film students—a painfully self-aware, stunningly visual tour de force…And Bono as Neal Cassady is a masterstroke. The older I get, though, the less I want cleverness and the more I just want character-driven films that move me, whatever the gender of the filmmakers.

Robot Love and Ham Contests: Blade Runner, 25 Years On (Long)

Karen and I were late and scarfing down Vietnamese food in her kitchen. “I’m not missing the giant eyeball,” I said. “I won’t be late for the giant eyeball, let’s go.”

Karen’s roommate wandered by. “What giant eyeball?” she asked.

“Oh, we’re going to see the new version of Blade Runner.”

“What’s Blade Runner?”

Huh? Karen and I looked at each other. To us, this was like not having ever heard of the Godfather. Or Jaws. Her roommate is 32, hmmm, but she’s from Alabama. Maybe she’s just an isolated case, I thought. Her friend, though, in his late twenties, had never heard of it either. I explained to them that it was probably one of the top three science fiction movies of all time.

“Is it better than Transformers?” he asked.

My jaw dropped. “Uh, yes!”

“Have you seen Transformers?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t need to see Transformers to know that Blade Runner is better. That goes without saying.”

“Yeah, but how can you make that judgment if you haven’t seen Transformers?”

I stared at Karen. Who were these people? It wasn’t like we were so much older than them. How could a film be so seminal and important to an entire generation and yet non-existent to the next? I recalled that Middlebrow got the same kind of nonplussed response from students at the SLCC, both before viewing and after.

“Maybe the film has really aged poorly,” I thought. Nah.



We missed the giant eyeball and we were seated way up front so we exchanged our tickets for the 10:30pm show and waited it out. Now there would be no excuses. If Blade Runner—one of the films that convinced me I wanted to make movies in the first place—really sucked, then it wasn’t going to be because I was late and seated in front row. I was going to be in the back third, with the screen at eye level, with an emptier theater and fewer chewing sounds in the air.

Well, it didn’t suck. And it is still a visionary film. And although it is dated like all older sci-fi is dated, it wasn’t that bad. At all. The worst was some of the wardrobe, actually, especially a violet and turquoise shirt that Harrison Ford pulls off before he puts the robot moves on the robot Sean Young.



But it was slow. Really slow. I learned that some reviewer called it “Blade Crawler” when it first came out. That’s about right. Although I’m sure it feels like MTV when placed next to 2001, which feels like MTV when placed next to Tarkovski’s Solaris. So it’s all relative. But it is interesting to note that people thought it was slow even back in 1982, back when movies were often more than 90 minutes.

And it was empty. It is really a soulless, unemotional movie. Sure, this can happen when you’re making a movie about robots. Robot love isn’t always as fiery as you’d like it to be. Sean Young is about as fiery as you can get in real life, but this is a movie about robots, goddamn it. Tone it down. You too, Harrison.



And nothing too much happens. Although it still looks and sounds exquisite, it proceeds in the typical noir mode—detective going from place to place, looking for clues—with some campy hardboiled dialogue, a hard drinking antihero, chiaroscuro lighting, and moody sax theme laid in from time to time.

And the final speech by Rutger Hauer—a scene I’ve seen probably fifty times—was hammy this time around. Kind of bad. And he just launches it to it. The hand of the author and the director and the actor and the composer are all over that scene. It’s like a big Ham Contest. Rutger’s trying to live up to the writtenness the scene and Vangeles is plinking his new-age synths and booms in the background and the dialogue is the most scripted sounding stuff I’ve ever heard. And Rutger has a nail through his hand and a dove in the other.

Kind of laying it on with a trowel, as WS would put it.



But hey, Blade Runner is still brilliant, even though it’s emotionally void. Probably because Dick’s source material is so smart. And an exercise in production and art design, it’s still the model that sci-fi films aspire to. Seeing it big is totally different than seeing it on TV. That dirty, rainy production design goes deep deep into frame. Never did I get the sense that the reality of the movie stopped just at the edge of frame and beyond it was a craft service table and reality. There’s extras in the deep background and neon and trash and it keeps going. It’s actually kind of insane, how dense and exact the production design is. Bravo!

And most of the effects still hold up today. There are some clunky looking matte paintings and spaceships in the middle, but the opening flyovers are unstoppable, probably because they still used models back then instead of just doing all of your effects work at home in your computer.



As far as changes? It feels like a cross between the original international release and the 1992 Director’s Cut. Not a lot of new material. One interesting change was the line Batty (Rutger Hauer) delivers to Tyrell before he gives him the skull-crush and eye-gouge, which used to be “I want more life, fucker.”

Now it’s “I want more life, Father.” Which is from the original workprint version of the film, actually, and much much stronger (although I still love the aggressive comedy of a robot really using the vernacular to good effect).

The Wikipedia article has a ton of info on this new version and how it differs from previous versions. Lots of good stuff [HERE].

I suppose the next false god to go down will be Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Mike Leigh’s Naked, or Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. And how I will weep when that happens.

The Pit: Frank Norris and the ALA Underbelly - or - Too Much Theory: Hooking Up at the Academic Meat Market

As you all probably know, Middlebrow came down to Newport Beach a couple of weeks ago to attend some kind of spectacle and give a talk or two. You'll have to ask him for the details. This is his turf, not mine, even though all activities took place in my realm, the LA megalopolis. I don't pretend to understand his world. The ALA conference is the West Berlin of SoCal. Or the North Korea of SoCal, depending on how you look at it. Take your pick.

Here is the breakdown of events:
-John Wayne Airport
-Newport Brewing Company: 1pm Pints
-Intense Fish & Chips
-Checkin in at the Hyatt: Who is That Tall Man With You?
-Laguna Beach
-How Much Do You Think That House Costs?
-Coffee Time
-Dana Point
-Dad's Liquor
-Pay to Pay: Parking at the Hyatt
-Back to the Room
-Boy Am I Tired Already
-What Exactly Is TV-Internet?
-Wifi Stress
-Aborted Oyster Bar Attempt: Too Chichi For Us Proles
-Mexican & Margueritas: Wait, Too Many Proles Now!
-Hotel Bar
-Aborted Shuffleboard
-Two Men, One Bed: No Problem!

Here is a picture of Middlebrow on the beach:



This is a more iconic version of the same picture:



This is a picture of the hotel room sink after visiting Dad's Liquor:



But what I really want to talk about was the conference woman sitting by herself at the hotel bar, mid-thirties, putting the MOVES on a nerdy kid who looked about twenty-three years old.

The Woman: Black knee-high boots. Black leather jacket. Skirt. Makeup. Tall glass of solo Chardonnay.
The Dude: Glasses. Nervousness. Watching TV instead of facing her. Never shaved in his life.

We were wondering why she had targeted him exactly, but hey, academics need lovin too and she didn't have time to be subtle. She touched him on the arm, repeatedly, while he split his attention between her and the TV screen above and behind the bar. We could not see what he was watching nor could we hear what she was saying to him.

"What's his problem?" we said aloud, watching closely. "Go for it, dude!"

But he didn't hear us and he didn't go for it and after about thirty minutes of her attention she got up and left. But, get this, the guy didn't seem relieved to see her go...instead he turned and longingly watched her leave. It wasn't that he wasn't interested...he WAS interested... he just couldn't pull the trigger.

I talked to Middlebrow about what I would have done differently. The gf has been reading "The Game: Penetrating the World of Pickup Artists" as research and I've been privy to some of the techniques. I told MB that I'd have him go in as my wingman and distract the nerd with some juicy literary theory while I sidled up to the bar and complimented the woman on her boots, then offer to freshen up her drink.

"How hard could it be?" I wondered. But then, where was all of this information when I needed it? Why weren't women this readable when I was 23 and truly needed this stuff? Now I'm taken and I can't use all of my astonishing pick-up technique, not that I really want to anyway...

I'm not sure where I'm going with this--I did have a point when I started, but all I want to say is that when someone is interested in you it isn't a big mystery. It's like a teacher who starts the semester giving everyone an A and lets everyone go downhill from there. She's interested in you, you already have an A. Just do the right thing, son. It's a lay-up!

Oh, and yes, I could be wrong, but it seems like these conferences would be a great place to get laid. Lit conferences and tall clubs. If I'm ever single again I'm definitely crashing both of these events, often.

Not that I'm interested in that lifestyle of course. I'm just saying.

The Future of All Cinema, Part II

I would like to apologize for my snarky comments from two posts ago. There is a lot of great stuff coming up, and not all of it is snooty. Like this, for example:

http://www.worstpreviews.com/trailer.php?id=844&item=0

Please watch to the very end to get the full effect!