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DeimosRising posted:I'm hoping for relentless fuckup manchild gosling from The Place Beyond the Pines personally. I'm hoping for "jock older brother" Gosling from the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode, "The Tale of Station 109.1" (I'm sure he'll do fine. After Arrival, I trust the poo poo out of this director.)
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Dec 25, 2016 21:08
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A Deacon posted:I have a feeling that this movie is just going to be a futuristic John Wick. Though less ambitious than I'd prefer, John Wick also rules. A version of John Wick shot by Deakins sounds amazing. If it is nothing more than you're saying, it'll still be loving awesome.
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Dec 31, 2016 07:55
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Snowman_McK posted:John Wick is also super pretty. No, no disrespect to the way it looks, Deakins is just a visual genius. I'm essentially picturing the Hong Kong skyscraper fight from Skyfall, in an 80's retro-future. If this movie doesn't look incredible, I'll be so disillusioned.
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Jan 1, 2017 08:02
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Basebf555 posted:Villeneuve just signed on to direct a Dune reboot after Blade Runner. Whether these movies are good or not, I don't think "sinking his career" is a realistic concern. I mean, sure, they might stop trusting him with big blockbuster-y properties. But Sicario and Arrival are the loving poo poo. He's already proven he's goddamn great at making movies. (I'll believe Dune when I see it. That's one of those movies that's juggled around a dozen directors over the last few decades. It's like Neuromancer...there'll be a report of some attached director, before it winds up right back on the shelf.)
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Feb 1, 2017 23:41
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Sgt. Politeness posted:It's really not the "is Deckard a replicant" of our generation. To be honest, and you won't like this probably, but "is Cobb still dreaming?" probably is. In the sense of, "a critically well-received genre film by a respected director ends on an overtly ambiguous question about its central character's reality." That article is making a pretty disingenuous argument w/r/t JOI. Firstly, that Ana de Armas somehow isn't *actually* Cuban because that better serves the author's point. But also, that JOI being a sexualized consumer product is somehow to be taken at face value. The entire point of her arc is to explore how "real" or "not real" that personality actually is. She's designed to be a sexist male empowerment fantasy, just as K is designed to be a cop or Luv is designed to serve Wallace. But she has a personality, has unique feelings and motivations, despite this...the entire humanist underpinning to this film and to the original. Criticizing it as sexist or anti-feminist ignores that it's self-consciously commenting on those very topics, the tension between the patriarchal forces that programmed her and the meaningful subjectivity she developed in spite of it.
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Oct 6, 2017 23:01
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Sgt. Politeness posted:And but what if she didn't? I can see that argument. I interpreted it as, "JOI struggles to operate within the parameters they allow her." A ton of her thoughts and motivations are influenced by her programming. But at the same time, she tells K to erase her from the console and break the antenna on the mobile unit, betraying her manufacturer to keep K untraceable. If she was literally just a product, I don't think she'd do that. She wasn't designed to be unique, but became unique. My interpretation of the giant hologram scene is that K saw JOI's marketing as a parody of her, a counterpoint to the fake Rachel that Deckard likewise rejects.
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Oct 6, 2017 23:55
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fspades posted:Yeah. And? This is Blade Runner, everything is hosed up there. Joi is self-aware and yet she is a prisoner of the customer, just as the replicants are the property of a mega-corporation and the whole system goes on because humanity pretends they are not real persons. Pretty much. The setting is explicitly dystopic and systematized dehumanization of thinking beings is the bread and butter of the film's villains. JOI is a product of a company whose CEO awakens a replicant for literally no reason other than to menace and disembowel her. The power holders of this setting are bad guys. I concur with the assessment that JOI demonstrates personhood in spite of her programming. If she was literally a non-person with no internal motivations, I doubt she'd have shown spite or jealousy towards Mariette, or insisted K delete her from the console/break the emanator antenna. The advert using "Joe" doesn't contradict this to me...her persona is informed by her programming, but that isn't the whole picture just as is the case with K or any other replicant. Serf posted:Also, Joi was definitely a person. This is like... Blade Runner's whole deal. ...this is a more efficient way of saying this. "Actually, the fake people are still real," is pretty much a central thesis of all cyberpunk.
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Oct 8, 2017 10:09
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Fallen Hamprince posted:3. Joi is a ‘strong’ AI, conscious and just as much a person as the other characters in the film. Joi having consciousness makes her relationship with K a lot more meaningful and her death scene way more impactful, and thematically the idea of a genuine, unconditional love packaged and sold as a product is extremely fitting with cyberpunk as a genre. As others have mentioned, it also creates an interesting parallel with Batty: both are products created for a specific function (her loving, him killing), both grow beyond their intended design, and both of their deaths precipitate the end of the film, Joi’s less directly than Batty’s. In that sense, she is more like Pris, who was likewise a literal "pleasure model." They're both designed to be passive sex workers who exist for other's pleasure, and they both go off-program alongside their replicant boyfriends. I'd contend that JOI insisting K offload her from the console and break the emanator antenna is a similar moment of rebellion. What's interesting is that I doubt anyone would argue that Pris isn't "real," or that she's merely operating under sexbot guidelines at Roy's behest. But somehow JOI is different...not being traditionally embodied, people are less likely to accept her seeming personhood as real. Obviously, I don't agree.
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Oct 13, 2017 00:38
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Blade Runner posted:To be fair(And I'm 100 percent on the side of Joi being a real being who loved K), I think that's because Priss goes off program by trying to kill Deckard and Joi doesn't. The big issue is that Joi never does anything that goes against her inherent nature as a loving being; she loves K, and continues loving K until she is eventually killed. Compare this to every other being who is seen to ascend to sentience; Roy and K are murderers, made for murder, who decide to save a life when they have every reason to try and end it. Pris is a pleasurebot made to love and give pleasure, and tries to kill Deckard. Even Joi's biggest moment of rebellion is still a moment where she is acting out of love for K; she wants to protect him, and so she insists he break the emitter. She never does anything particularly hateful or outside of her inherently programmed nature. True. My counter is that I read JOI's purpose as more to coax the user into passivity. To maintain a complacent domestic lifestyle, to consume passively, to direct feelings of dissatisfaction or lust or ennui onto this product so people don't act out in more disruptive ways. She's built to love him, but I got the sense it was in a very specific way that might discourage him from self-actualizing, or going against his superiors, or doing something dangerous or subversive. JOI definitely *does* help him do those things, which I read as more than programming. I suppose you could also say that she was following her program in ways her programmers didn't intend, but isn't that still a way of saying that "free will" asserted itself? That she became more than the sum of her parts by doing something "she wasn't supposed to," etc. Xealot fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 01:35
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Obviously, there are only duplicates when it serves the film's themes. I'm sure IRL, there'd be 50,000 alternate models for JOI in particular, half of them otherkin. But that's not where they went with it.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:10
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Not actually. First, your brain never actually ‘turns off’ during sleep. It’s actually quite active, which is why dreaming is a thing, and you can be woken up with relative ease. You may not be [/conscious, but your brain is only ever off when it’s dead. But second, what happens to Joi 1 is not analogous to sleep. She has her mind’s information broadcast over wi-fi and then downloaded into a different body, so that there are (temporarily) two Jois. When this process is complete, Joi 1 is then shut down and discarded. I agree with your argument on the second point, but this is an extremely facile way to look at persistence of consciousness or continuity of the self. Your brain absolutely "turns off" during sleep in the sense that your brain isn't one unit, it's a byzantine assembly of parts that function in tandem, and which function differently while asleep. A phenomenological approach to consciousness isn't claiming the brain is a sense-computer that runs Consciousness, it's looking at consciousness as a process or experience that exists as it's happening, *because* it's happening. Your brain continues to exist physically, but the continuous experience of consciousness does not. "Sleep" could still be analogous to "death" in that framework, regardless of the whether or not the brain is still doing stuff in a neurochemical sense. Definitely, though, JOI copying herself to a totally different device is not quite the same as sleep and evokes all the copy/delete Transporter Problem poo poo.
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Oct 28, 2017 01:20
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:LatRG is ultimately a liberal film that doesn’t take things to a logical anticapitalist conclusion, but it’s much more advanced in its politics than Blade Runner 2. "Advanced" or "nuanced"? It seems to me that BR2049 caters to a pretty unmistakably anticapitalist perspective, where consumption leads to slavery and decay, the proletariat are more capable of ethical good, and the avatar of entrenched capitalist power is a blind demiurge who venerates the Pharaohs. Hard disagree on your read of the billboard scene. It's an intentionally grotesque doppelgänger of the JOI that K knew, set against K's recollection of Sapper talking about "miracles." It's not that K is disturbed that he doesn't own this version of her, he's internalizing the extent to which the JOI he knew transcended whatever she was designed to be. The context of the scene is K, a replicant designed to kill things, deciding if he'll kill Deckard in service of the resistance. His next act is to martyr himself to save Deckard's life instead.
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Nov 9, 2017 01:02
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Advanced. Yeah, that's not what I said. I said the film's perspective is an anticapitalist one, because it depicts a setting where consumption has led to slavery and decay. I can be more specific: The city is a glowing funhouse of ads for sex workers, all of whom purpose-built slaves that are referred to as "products." JOI is one of them, whose murder is presented as tantamount to crushing an iPhone. At one point, K travels to a city-sized trash dump where child-slaves pull scrap metal from consumer electronics, while their caretaker yells that they will only have value if they produce enough wealth for him. After that, K travels to Vegas - a place infamous for enabling consumption - that is now an abandoned wasteland full of ruined statues of sexy girls...basically a graveyard for the consumer culture of the first act, that evokes "Ozymandias." As for Wallace, he's a tech CEO with a God complex, whose villain speech is about how he wants to perpetuate slavery forever to acquire the stars. Essentially, to perpetuate the replicant's subjugation forever, and to do to the universe what has already happened on earth. In a movie obsessed with eye and vision imagery as a shorthand for self-awareness or humanity, he is blind. The film depicts a dystopia that is that way because of capitalist greed. Meanwhile, there is a Revolutionary movement of slaves who are "more human than human." Their primary fixation is protecting a child who represents their ability to reproduce on their own...essentially, to seize the means of (re)production so they can overthrow their masters. I don't see how that is insufficiently anticapitalist, or otherwise politically unexamined.
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Nov 11, 2017 22:18
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brawleh posted:So starting from the idea that 2049 is anti-capitalist because it's dystopian, how does the movie depict the idea of an anti-capitalist shift in the end? What changes after Joe dies? You’re right, strictly speaking nothing does outside of Wallace believing Deckard to be dead (and the last lead for the child going with him.) But my argument is that the revolution is inevitable anyway. Both BR films are about disenfranchised characters who “wake up” in personal and political ways. K’s entire arc is about this; he starts as a tool of the LAPD who “didn’t know [disobedience] was an option.” He dies in an act of disobedience, in service of his own ethics. What’s politically relevant to me is the scene where K learns he isn’t Rachel’s child. Prior to that, K’s personal revelations were based around that belief - that he was special, but only because he was born. In this scene, that illusion is shattered, but what replaces it is a broader class awareness. “We all wish it was us. That’s why we believe.” The main tool of Wallace’s oppression is the belief that replicants aren’t special, aren’t capable of insurrection, or are powerless to change the status quo. But all of them are, and the Revolution is the collective of replicants who figure that out. And we’re given no reason to think they’re going away. I’m kind of ok with not seeing it happen, in part because it’s extraneous to K’s story, but also because it’d probably come out like Matrix Revolutions.
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Nov 12, 2017 03:41
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Maxwell Lord posted:But surely capitalism is inexorably tied to greed- all capitalist systems will have greed because capitalism incentivizes it, it IS greed. Like I don't get what the distinction is. This was definitely my meaning, yeah. The film doesn’t give us some more moderate form of capitalism as an alternative. There isn’t, like, a VP of WallaceCorp who’s gonna “make some real changes.” Or a pro-replicant Senator with a dream or whatever. The future possibilities as presented are perpetual slavery or revolution.
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Nov 12, 2017 23:25
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Sinding Johansson posted:Synthetic farming can only really be interpreted as the literal farming of (materials to build) synthetic people. Wallace’s “synthetic farming” is presented as a specific solution to environmental collapse and famine. Presumably it’s actually food.
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Nov 16, 2017 04:45
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Edit: double post, sorry folks.
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Nov 16, 2017 04:46
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Proprietary agricultural biotech is an actual thing in actual life. Monsanto are definitely corporate technocrats whose motivation is not simply to feed people out of the goodness of their hearts.
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Nov 16, 2017 06:38
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Snowman_McK posted:I thought that's what made it work. He's playing someone who's building off the work of someone who was much better than him in the movie. Also, the delusions of grandeur kind of worked for me. Leto himself comes off as incredibly self-impressed, so playing a tech bro who thinks he's a God-king actually makes a lot of sense. Though, yeah, Bowie would've been cool as gently caress. Maybe they should've leaned into that and cast Tilda Swinton. The stillness and emptiness of the setting totally fit the movie, for me. It does feel austere and lifeless compared to the original, but that seemed like the point...the Earth is a desert, nearly abandoned. The only "life" remaining are the layers and layers of artifice, literally replicants and holograms and synthetic farms and trash. Meanwhile, the primary driver of the plot is a child who shouldn't exist, born to a sterile mother. Which is ironically similar to Children of Men, but obviously approached very differently.
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Jan 19, 2018 00:26
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FWIW, since it’s not remotely important to follow 2049, the supplemental short Blackout 2022 dramatizes the immediate post-Blade Runner period, and speaks to some of these topics. Its premise is that the Blackout is actually an intentional act by rebellious Nexus 8’s to wipe digital records of who or what they are, so as to continue living in obscurity on Earth. In lieu of other records, the eye is the only easy way to identify N8’s after that point, hence why the one-eyed woman is that way in 2049. It’s mostly cool because Shinichiro Watanabe, though. The other short prequel things are...fine. Totally unnecessary, but fine if you want to kill a few minutes.
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Feb 2, 2018 02:25
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Basebf555 posted:The boat horn is a subtle indicator that BR2049 is actually a direct sequel to Arrival, signaling the beginning of The Villanueve Cinematic Universe. It’s the Villeneuverse.
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Feb 19, 2018 23:28
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Basebf555 posted:I don't like Leto's performance but I'm not sure it was really his fault, I think the Wallace character was poorly written. Overly eccentric but without the screen time to really establish any of the eccentricity or incorporate it into a fully formed character. I feel similarly. It felt more like a casting problem to me, than Leto loving it up. They cast an actor known for big, strange performances in a role that's already big and strange, so it's hardly surprising that he went loud and operatic with it. An actor who doesn't do that, or who doesn't *need* to, might've left some room for other character notes. Bowie would've been stunt-casting, but at least he'd have brought charisma to a profoundly offputting character, which might've been an interesting tension. My weird fan-casting thought would've been someone who conveyed real warmth or kindness, so Wallace's cruelty would be more shocking. Rather than presenting a menacing douchebag who's megalomania feels kind of like a cartoon.
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Mar 26, 2018 19:49
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