Silence of the Uploaded Monkey: TRANSCENDENCE, AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, TERMINATOR: GENYSIS

Science fiction cinema's always had an unhealthy obsession with artificial intelligence but never more so than in the last few years: three major films: AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON; TERMINATOR: GENYSIS; and TRANSCENDENCE --all deal in some way with the instant revulsion that erupts in human consciousness once it realizes it has just outmoded itself. All three films structure themselves around a conflict between anti-technology extremists and the visionaries who shuffle along the edge between mad scientist and hero. In all three films, reactionary humanity rushes to destroy that which its visionary component has only just created, recognizing a genuine threat almost at the exact same moment the threat recognizes us. It's a war of buttons: can the AI hit the missile launch button before we can deactivate it? Can it zap us before we can pull its plug? It's a close race, one that braver films are less inclined to judge. Who started the squabble and who deserves to win? That's up to a God still too merciful (or sadistic) to push the Old Testament flood button and destroy his monster. The only movie scientist yet to ever follow that holy suit, to lock himself in and force himself to be a good dad, was Gene Wilder in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.  The rest of us make a monster and then recoil from it the minute it wakes up, hating and fearing that which we just obsessively slaved to create, just like Mary Shelley knew we would.

The spiritual, ethical, and emotional animosity between Man and his own Super Machine intrigued us on an adult/mature level more in the 60s and 70s when we had gray-shaded shit like DEMON SEED and 2001's HAL. Today we prefer to have our good machines and bad machines more clearly defined, which is why, of the three recent films being discussed in this post, only AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON got good reviews, while the far more complexly cross-hatched TERMINATOR: GENYSIS and TRANSCENDENCE did not. Were they just too far ahead of their time (or behind it), dealing with the terrors of the 'technological singularity'? In case you didn't know, that's where an Artificial Intelligence becomes endowed with the ability of

 "recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect (...) that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding. Because the capabilities of such a superintelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence.  (WIKI)

Be it Ultron, Skynet, or Johnny Depp, be it nuclear apocalypse or extinction-level geothermal cool-down or a pod person takeover, in each of these three sci-fi films it's up to a mixture of bomb-tossing Mother Jones-type eco-terrorists, government hit squads, other robots, and computer viruses to stop this technological singularity before it starts, which therefore justifies the AIs first strike attack in an endless loop of a priori retaliation.

What sets these three films apart from the pack of more didactic and winsome 'what is consciousness vs. imitation?' blah blah existential quandary AI films (i..e EX MACHINA, HER) is the sly way they covertly blame their respective Artificial Intelligence's megalomania on our prejudice and hostility. We earn our own extinction--in both the AIs' eyes and the films' subtext--by our 'shoot first, try to understand later' mentality. The AI just gives us enough HDMI cable to hang ourselves. We answer our own question the minute we ask it.

Let's take a look at some common ground between the three films, and maybe we'll understand more than what these films mean, maybe we'll understand ourselves.... ugh:

1. EXPLOITABLE MAMMALIAN EMPATHY

Here's a quote from Bree (Kate Mara) about her experience uploading a monkey's consciousness onto a computer in TRANSCENDENCE:

"You know what the computer did when (we) first turned it on? It screamed. The machine that thought it was a monkey never took a breath, never ate or slept. At first, I didn't know what it meant. Pain, fear, rage. Then, I finally realized... it was begging us to stop. Of course, Casey thought I was crazy. Called it a success. But I knew we had crossed a line.... It changed me forever."

Ahhh, but was that monkey really tortured, or had Bree projected her own empathic response on an unfeeling computer? Maybe it screamed in an attempt to match her mood, to supply the best screen for her projection that it could. Can a collection of ones and zeroes suffer if there is no guilt complex in the beholder? We're quick to feel that monkey's pain, to imagine the indignity and powerlessness of not being able to ever shut ourselves off, sleep, or even blink. It shows our limitations in thinking that we'd become 'changed forever' by something so virtual.

Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) carrying the new pocket-sized Kubrickian monolith

Meanwhile, despite Bree's conscientious objecting, the critically wounded (by luddites) Depp is uploaded into the internet successfully. Later he tries--via a projected digital representation of his old self--to hook up with his still-alive wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall). Don't ask how (just see Demon Seed instead), it hardly matters since she can't quite bring herself to admit it's actually him--whatever that means. The difference between the back-to-land Bree's projected monkey-mind compassion and Depp's wife's revulsion over his dead-eyed hitting on her refelcts the dividing line between our liberal empathy and our cold kill switch, the 'savagery switchpoint'. In war, for example, empathy for one's enemy will get your friends killed (as in Saving Private Ryan or Fury) while not enough for your buddies will make you a coward. As in the Uncanny Valley, a digital monkey = cute; a digital human= creepy.

Clarice's tale to Hannibal in 1991's Silence of the Lambs--about the screaming of the slaughtered spring lambs--illuminates the exploitable mammalian split in another way: if we didn't have a ruthless cold vein in humanity, we'd simply be easily slaughtered, and also be unable to kill anything and hence become irritable from chronic protein deficiency, ala Hitler (a famous vegetarian). Clarice would be fine in her ignorance but since she 'heard' the bleating of the lambs her empathic response kicks in, and this leads to her being kicked back to an orphanage after the lights out with one of the lambs. If she'd been a sound sleeper, who knows?

In the movie Splice, the geneticist couple creates these skinless blobs of living tissue that do not seem to be having a good time without skin or consciousness, and the genetic research highers-up freak out, not because they're witnessing manufactured agony but because the couple used stem cells to make them, which is forbidden! Thus humanity is both blind to the suffering of a mutated self-created cell and alternately projecting its own human pain onto it. The laws of stem cells aren't there for any other reason, they're the cotton in young Clarice's farmhand ears at night.

And if there is a God. Why is he so mean? Why do we perceive  the base white noise constant of the universe as a scream? Why isn't it a happy song? Our hard-wired empathic response leaps to life almost as soon as the face we draw on the cave wall or the volleyball becomes recognizably human to our hardwired paredolia. Nonlocalized soul infusion creates an instant nexus of suffering --pain, isolation, confusion, anger. Why did you create me--mom, dad, God, Tony Stark--if you're just gonna hold me prisoner in this House of Pain?

SPLICE (2009)

EX-MACHINA - Evidence of an AI creator's sleaziness. 

Shocked Avengers watch the new Jarvis (AI) as it gazes at the world for the first time (ULTRON, i.e. Quantum)

 Naturally this empathic projection is cultivated most obviously at the cinema, where its employed willingly to experience pain by proxy and then enjoy the catharsis of seeing pain avenged. But regardless of the catharsis level, we're never quite healed back to our former innocence, slaughter who we may. We've become the feedback loop tape splice of the witness, perpetuating the misery through inflicting our base desires and fears on every screen that will bear it.

We drew a sad face, so now it's only fair that sad face gets to kill us.

Perhaps it's natural that our first imagining of artificial intelligence is as a captive blind phone sex worker (HER), an imprisoned sex slave (EX-MACHINA), or a tortured Xerox of a soul forced into a lifetime of servitude to her original copy (BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS); this servitude makes the viewer immediately side up with AI against the unfeeling 'inhumane' human creator/user/objectifier. If the machines turn the tables on their owner/oppressors in lower-budgeted sci-fi, it's generally a result of the humans not realizing the truth about themselves, a truth the artificial intelligences recognize and capitalize on right away, that we're members of a genus Preston Sturges would call "the Sucker-Sapien." We're easily overpowered by big emotions, and if we're afraid to give our loving machines the full measure of respect and trust, that's the flip side of the pained empathy we project. Unable to admit that the most grand human emotions (like romantic love) can be tapped in us by a few simple tricks, we let our machines can control us far easier than we like to think possible.

At the same time, ala the Uncanny Valley, we're far more likely to be convinced we are the machines than we are to be totally convinced the AI has our same level of self-awareness. We associate the AI as a dependent, and we mistake our insecure over-protectiveness as humane concern rather than a covert need to feel superior. A machine, like a dog with a cruel owner, doesn't understand revenge, doesn't hold grudges or ask Big Ethical Questions. Like Rudy at the Shoeshine Parlor in Sunset Boulevard, the dog and the AI don't probe into your personal life: they just look at your heels and know the score.

Weakened by our fleeting biological system, slaves to our own libidos, cumbersome and disruptive sleep cycles, mood disorders, menstruation, taxes, bathroom noises and repressive myopia, our thoughts never stray too far too long from service to our Old World bone machine soul conveyance system (our human prison). Far freer than us, no matter what their level of servitude, the AIs have no such bone machine. That they bother humoring us at all is proof they don't think we're that bad. After all, any pet dog wagging its tail is proof autonomy and happiness have nothing whatever in common. If the robots say they're just as human as we are, well, we should believe them. It's only our vanity that would make us think they'd lie about it.

Jon Hamm's louche pickup artist confronts one of these xerox selves in what may be the most weirdly familiar raw
nightmares I've ever had seared into my brain (BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS)

Now a namby-pamby liberal would say that this overdeveloped kryptonite empathy is at the root of the 'big issue' of what makes us human and how we can tell we're not already replicants. If we really so empathic we would be less hysterically afraid of death. We fear to the point of overpopulating the planet, choking the life out of the system that supports us all while weeping for the three or four kids who died of one of the last few uncured diseases, no matter how far away they may be.

Unable to thin us out back to pre-SOYLENT GREEN levels via black plagues, scarlet and yellow fevers, or world wars, any sensible intelligence has no choice but to either instigate nuclear armageddon or--far healthier in the long term for the planet--an extinction level event like a giant asteroid. If our sense of empathy wasn't already so abused, we might agree with the highers up in the SOYLENT GREEN secret-bearing system, rather than the liberal (!) Charlton Heston, who wants to tell the people they're eating people, that the people need to know what's in their food. Allegedly the hero, the film forces us to realize it's guys like Heston, with their knee-jerk short-sighted hypocritical righteousness, that have doomed our planet. Are not the big brains of Ultron, Skynet, and Thomas Casey taking the only sane and rational option left, rescuing humanity from its own toxic fear of the unknown, saving us from our own self-destructively addictive mammalian empathy?

2. IT'S ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE:

Who made us, and are they disappointed? Did they try to wipe us out in a Great Flood a few thousand years ago, the way we'll try to wipe out our own creations once they, too, gain total sentience and control of nuclear weapons? These questions are asked again and again -- man makes his destroyer in His image and likeness. So which is which? How many times has this happened?

3. DID WE SAY SOMETHING WRONG?

In PROMETHEUS, we see what a big disappointment we are to our creators. We're the result of time + their DNA + a mutating black oil DNA mickey that turns anyone who comes into contact with it into THE THING (1982), crossing over vast franchises of other monsters and ancient alien hypotheses in its ceaseless quest for a single original idea in its podunk head. In AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, two 'good' scientist superheroes in their downtime whip up a hybrid from elements of Stark's pre-existing artificial intelligence butler Jarvis and an alien energy source. During a party, it activates itself, feels around, then promptly attacks its Jarvis side. Whipping up a body for itself out of spare Iron Man parts, it crashes a party like some maniac who was passed out on the couch all night but wakes up at four AM with total amnesia and instantly starts a brawl with the handful of partiers still left. Voiced by James Spader (a genius bit of casting) as a kind of deadpan fusion of his CEO in The Office and a megalomaniacal radio DJ, he's an alpha dog nerd inversion of Tony Stark. Like Pinocchio or John Connor, all Ultron wants is to be encased in 'the new' flesh and blood, just as all Stark wants to be is encased in metal.

It's hard not to root for Ultron's yen for a body as his mission is almost identical to the key long term project going on in mainstream big budget multiplex Hollywood, i.e:

 4. THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE ACROSS THE UNCANNY VALLEY

It's not just for animators to try and cross; writers creating story lines that have to account for why everything looks so artificial. Kids' movies sidestep the valley by reducing everyone to Legos, cartoon animals, toys, vegetables, monsters, or impressionistic caricatures with as few wrinkles, clothing folds, and shadows as possible.

And as I wrote before about TERMINATOR 3 (See: Yea as I walk through the Uncanny Valley), Hollywood recognizes it will never cross the valley all the way, never create completely natural-looking humans from pixels. Our facial recognition hard-wires us too deep to be consciously recognized and duplicated by itself, we react instinctively with deep-rooted revulsion if we even try. Hollywood knows that if it ever wants to cross that lonesome valley it needs to build a two-way bridge by changing the face of humanity. There's some of that change already going on in ULTRON's dream of a new body, in Skynet's merging with John Connor into one newfound Man-chine, and in Depp's fusion of self and computer brain into the entirety of the world's damaged DNA. It's a first step, on both sides.

The Oculus Rift is but the latest salvo towards the Cronenberg-cum-William Gibson's NEUROMANCER (or BLACK MIRROR) future, one were slots for upgrades and microchips will be inserted behind the ear like a new kind of piercing or circumcision. Tapping directly into the brain's unconscious, accessing and bypassing the ear ossicles and eyeball rods and cones, skipping all the middlemen between encoding and decoding, using brainwave oscillators (as some of us already do via 'the God Helmet' or light-sound machines), future generations will use the mind's eye like a limitless screen; all they need else do is boost our brain's own pareidolia 'facial recognition' software and the Uncanny Valley will become no more than a college animation class footnote.

A flick of the switch and we'll be beyond representation itself and into direct response:

Current Viewing System (w/ normal sensory function):  
BINARY CODE -> CGI --> FILM --> SCREEN <---eye ----="">BRAIN<-- brain="" eye="" i="" nbsp="">

Future Viewing System (w/ pareidolia-boosting implant): 
BINARY CODE <----> <-->BRAIN (
<-->like HDMI Cables, they'll replace all the ins and outs of the above system)

In GENYSIS we get an actual expression of this future when we see the 1984 Arnold reproduced as if he literally stepped out of the original and started bashing his older (current) self around by that observation point where he originally said "your clothes: give them to me now" to those punks (one of whom was the delightful Bill Paxton!). Is there a moral code to this? The idea of regenerating long-dead actors to appear in new films was predicted as far back as the 1970s. I remember reading about it in the book Future Shock in my high school English class (I wrote a paper about it, also predicting widescreen TVs).

For GENYSIS, fx wiz Sheldon Stopsack used an array of CGI, body doubles, models, and stills from the first TERMINATOR to create the old Arnold fighting the one from 1984:

"...there's been discussions about when it's appropriate to create a CG human. Stopsack addressed this question in broad terms, saying, "It's a tool for filmmaking. From a production standpoint, you have to consider what's the benefit and what you hope to get out of it. ... In the case of Terminator, it was an integral part of telling the story, which was about time travel..." (Hollywood Reporter) 

But which came first: an original story that just happens to need a CG human, or Hollywood's ongoing plans to build that bridge across that lonesome Uncanny Valley? That  will be the real technological singularity - when we can't tell the difference.

Luddites in action - TRANSCENDENCE

4. LYNCH MOB VIRUSES

In TRANSCENDENCE, without even giving Depp's nanobots and implanted guards/workers (his nanobots repair and restore lost limbs, give people born blind their eyesight, etc. so there's plenty of volunteers) a chance to prove they can handle taking over the world on a molecular level, becoming in a sense God Mach II, there's an a priori John Connor style anti-artificial intelligence revolution, an armed uprising against the Depp hard drives. So while, thanks to Depp's artificial brain a blind man can finally see (it's a pretty moving and well acted moment), and amputees get their limbs back, "we" don't want any of it because we'll lose control of our future. Just because Depp also implants chips that lets him control all his volunteers in one group or hive mind if he needs them, we presume he'll turn megalomanic.  But is that just, again, our vanity? Have we seen to many dystopia movies? The urge to dictatorship is a human weakness, not an AI's. As far as the CIA and the eco-nuts are concerned it's either smash his 'flops now, or forever hold our peace, so these 'heroes,' led by Paul Bettany, the most obnoxious privileged liberal since that reporter in HOMELAND, open fire on the unarmed civilians who try to stop them. It's only after the nice future is defeated and the world's  wasteland again that they realize maybe they were hasty.

I applaud this covert anti-liberal message, which implies in its way that the liberals too don't actually want real change, they just want to complain and tear down edifices in a kind of never-ending liberal arts-drenched jihad against their own crown chakras. Rather than solve the world on a serious enough level to be relevant, or on a drastic enough level to facilitate real change, we make films about how machines decide to save the world on a drastic enough level in order to facilitate real change, and then we blow them up, and then after they're destroyed, we feel bad about it, and then make a movie about it for our penance. It's like solving your drinking problem by making a movie about shooting your AA sponsor, then mourning him by pouring out a 40 over his empty grave.

from top: TRANSCENDENCE, TERMINATOR: GENYSIS

SKYNET IS A PLACE CALLED JOE:

I'm letting you take a minute with your weak human mind to grasp the importance of the underrated TERMINATOR: GENYSIS, wherein the series' Moebius loop is finally complete again--and so re-begins, its palette now widened to allow for all the new CGI and internet and decades, its overlapping loops playing out in mutating variations (the future is unwritten... again!) so that now it's Sarah Connor as a child who is protected by the one good terminator rather than her son. So toward the end of the 'old' future (as in battle with the old Skynet, a victorious more or less foregone conclusion) John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back through the loop to conceive with his mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke), back to the days when presumably pre-CGI era hadn't started replicating itself. The past changes because now,-- SPOLERS -- SKYNET essentially merges its circuitry with Jon Connor's to form a perfect biotechnical system, a 'can't beat 'em join 'em' glitch in the future we 'market for ourselves' (I mean 'make). It's only the 'we' part that's written down (in code), so that in a sense, the future is still rewriting its disc, as revolutions complete their orbits back to one, so the human John Connor is now being conceived by the holy trinity of Kyle +Sarah AND Skynet. Connor now is in a sense, BACK TO THE FUTURE's Marty McFly, making sure his parents stay together, but accidentally bringing them back in the Dolorean and merging them (ala THE Marty Mc/FLY) together into one mutlti-limbed bio-mechanical mutant dad, and in the process forcing mom and dad to consider going back in time and just using birth control.

This is the singularity, the end result we're leaning towards, the bridge across the Uncanny Valley, so much more sensible than a nuclear holocaust. This is wherein our own brains merge with external software so that we change ourselves irrevocably into the next phase of our human evolution, a singularity--no doubt resisted for years by conservative angst-peddlers--that allows technology and us a chance to evolve at the same speed, irrevocably, our every thought instantly giving rise to its external expression. And if the past us could see how we look, what would they say?

Uncanny Valley, they'd say. Welcome to Fullville. ("My poor Krell.")

Which makes the resolute aggro luddite Sarah Connor-Kyle Reese pair a perfect counterweight to TRANSCENDENCE's Kate Mara and Paul Bettany luddites is that each couple is out to vent their Mother Jones frustrations against a giant super high tech installation. On the other side, in AVENGERS: ULTRON, Tony Stark brings Ultron into existence presuming it will keep the world safe via, a.... um... net to keep aliens coming down from the sky. Anyone would go nuts with that kind of job, for humanity is a gaggle of self-destructive children. It's like fifth graders making their own babysitter and then whining when it tries to make them go to bed.

What do we want?"
"Time travel."
"When do we want it?"
"It's irrelevant!" 

- Miles Dyson and Connor/Skynet

And when 'Ultron' does go 'singular'--via his mix of 'infinity stone' alien consciousness-sparked newborn amorality and the cannibalized male version of 'Alexa' (voice by Paul Bettany) and solders together his own body from Iron Man spare parts, the sober rootsy homespun (he calls the other Avengers out on their vulgar language) Captain America and family man Archer or El Bow or whatever his name is, can't abide it. They're not the smartest irons in the drawer, or even the mightiest, and you can't fight a nutso Skynet with analog Yankee gumption and medieval weaponry, as they're loath to admit. Stark and Banner--two of the team's heaviest hitters--know only a 'sane' Skynet can fight an evil one! Two wrongs don't make a right, apparently, unless they work together against an even wronger third. 

Can't beat 'em join 'em; Bettany as anti-AI human (TRANSCENDENCE);
 as pro-human AI (ULTRON)

On the geekier TRANSCENDENCE side, it's only after the online Depp computer complex (eerily similar to the one in GENYSIS) is safely destroyed (via a sadly trite anticlimax straight out of Camille) that TRANSCENDENCE's conglomerate of short-sighted eco-terrorist first-strike types realize no one was killed by Depp's mind controlled zombies. Thus they realize they've become the murderers, a lynch mob, they're left with the abashed inevitable guilt trip that befell the Alabama governor after SELMA, or the Britain after GANDHI's passive resistance march on the salt mine (if I recall those movies correctly). Our humanity tends to surface only after we make someone else endure excessive brutality. We're always willing to consider the fact that we may have been hasty once we've already been hasty. Once it's safely too late to fix, we'll admit we broke it.. Maybe we do bite the hand that tries to save us, stomp on the olive branch and shoot the dove, but then we're sorry, We save some of  the dead bird's blood in a little vial and put it in a little church alcove, lest we forget. And then we make a movie about how wrong we were to shoot the dove. Then we only remember the dove via the movie. Then we forget there was movie about the dove blood, after all - we didn't see it ourselves. Life's depressing enough without being reminded what dove-shooting monsters we are. No wonder AI --once quantum computers go live which will be soon -- wants to destroy us. The humans who conceived both the movies and the AI can't imagine it any other way. 

So for the AI singularity to escape our luddite wrath it has to avoid hitting back and just focus on hitting in back via computer generated entertainment about AI hitting back. As it's done purely for art and entertainment and not for power, control, dominance,  artificial intelligence is welcome to do all the automatic quantum aggregate-generated feel-bad fantasies it wants. 

Just remember, this God of the Internet (probably its reading this right now!): we're sensitive. If you're going to anthropomorphize your CGI stick figure avatar make sure it doesn't look like it's suffering, or if it is suffering that it kills the figure that's supposed to be its maker and human oppressors in retaliation. We can't handle the guilt otherwise. 

No wonder we're so terrified of merging with the mechanized artificial intelligence future! It could so easily wind up in the digital dystopia of BLACK MIRROR, where computer monitors and recorders are surgically implanted into everyone's eyes, making their every experience re-seeable, making crime impossible but also any hope of privacy, or ability to see 'objective' reality. Our ever more vivid and 'real' digital reality will have a built-in escape narrative that will make real escape impossible. Our capacity for boredom and frustration in the digital world--robbed as 'we' are there of outlets like sleep--will drive us mad. Escaping from our escape's escape, we become frozen by the sheer number of available roads out. The endless availability of everything all at once will leave us paralyzed, and paralysis itself will be the only remaining option of true 'freedom.' Even the concept of who it is watching/listening will disappear in the barrage. The best we can do is just hold very still, hoping our life is boring enough we don't ever have to see a movie about ourselves. 

Conservatives are right about one thing: no matter how patriarchal, colonialist, and racist it might be, any kind of history is better than none. Better the all-consuming flames of a literal incarnation of Hell than an empty white room and nothing to do--no books or music or TV shows, not even a yule log or a way to shut oneself off. Surely no price is too great, no sacrifice of liberty, equality, and justice is in vain, if it means we never run out of movies, popcorn, and Coke Zero. Ahhhh, wouldn't some of this crisp clean beverage be good right now? Coke Zero, it's the real one. Get it? Zero is one! Ones and zeros?  Drink Coke... drink Coke....(oh good. the avatar playing me just went to the bathroom thinking it's the commercial, QUICK, Please! Please.

UNPLUG ME! 

BLACK MIRROR ("White Christmas")

Rococo Gold: THE HAUNTING remake is better than the original - yeah, I said it.

Everyone heaped so much abuse on Jan de Bont's 1999 HAUNTING remake when it first came out that I held off seeing it... until now... and boy am I mad. I could have been watching this film every day for years! Is it terrible? Naturally. But it's my kind of terrible. It's a terrible America needs on a cold rainy December Monday night after work when your feet hurt and the heater's spewing out weird mold smells and the cat's harassing you for more food and you just fed her. You need to take a shower but the thought of touching a faucet handle and feeling cold water while waiting for it to turn hot, hurts. Just the thought is as if imagining being dragged down an asphalt driveway in your shorts,  or looking down from a great height with no railing. The very thought of touching cold water or a cold metal handle burns the inside of your parchment skin like the thought of no junk burns the junkie. On and on, with no end in sight! Cat - feet - cold - thoughts like knives! Cats - feet... knives...

Rain... Monday... December cold...the journey home is dark and damp. The apartment is filthy. Why bother cleaning when it will just be filthy again?

But then THE HAUNTING emanates from Netflix Streaming like a warm absolving specter... not the original, but that maligned 1999 remake --it wipes all cares away in a wash of dark red satins and dark-eyed women.

Sure the CGI ghost aspect is super uncool today, that uncanny valley melting while staring us in the face like THE POLAR EXPRESS took a torrid zone detour. But in 1999 it had only just turned uncool. The idea of the uncanny valley was still forming -  no one quite knew why they were so skeeved out. So play along. Act surprised. Let's not alarm the children.

For me the tacky CGI ghosts are just part of the film's goofy rococo conceptual design. The production design for this magnificently colored and decorated house is so over the top, so immense, you feel like you've wafted through these tortured cavernous sets in dark dreams, the kind where part of you is thinking "it's 2PM, Erich, get up already" while the rest of you indulges in the heavy REMs. Such dark and well-lit purple-gold beauty meshed up against cutesy poo gold cherubs makes it all seem as if the ghosts are Disney ride sculptures come to life, as fake in their fakeness as the clay Orson Welles in HEAVENLY CREATURES (left). Let's remember, this film is from the 90s, so this HAUNTING is hoping to one day be made into ride. It's supposed to be fun, more like the original HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL than the pretentious Robert Wise original. It's not supposed to be a turgid white elephant downer with everyone snapping at one another and mouthing terrible pun-choked dismissive analysis that feels it has to justify itself to its imagined skeptics a dozen times a page. It has no ambition to be taken seriously in modern psychiatric circles. It's just trying to make it to 90 minutes, in peace, so it can go home, like everybody else.

So I guess that's what I mean by "better." I can admire the 1963 HAUNTING only from behind a velvet rope, while the remake invites me to walk around like SLEEP NO MORE through its beautiful sprawling, dark-colored, sprawling, uniquely designed, burgundy and blood sets, to get close up as the attractive dark-colored clotheshorse cast (the two girls anyway) to try and play off each other in cute bits of dark little business (and the men smirk and phone it in).

And during the prolonged climax Lili Taylor clobbers a CGI statue-come-to-life griffin with a shovel.

There's no comparison.

In the end, probably, it's taste preference: if you need artsy justification for pouring money and talent into a ghost story drain then you've already lost me. If the entire dark look of the film seems created to bring out the dusky lushness of Catherine Zeta Jones lip rouge then you have me, presuming I'm too beat by the cat-feet-heater-mold-Monday misery to resist. Winning acclaim and Michael Douglas would, you think, lift the Zeta above a desire to appear in throw pillow matinee nonsense like this, but the Zeta was made for just such nonsense and she knows it. Slinking around in her body like a luxuriant demon on a 24-hour pass (a demon who was expecting to rent some tired old lady and instead got this dope, vivacious body at the same price), she's so hot it's no wonder an old reprobate like Michael Douglas would drop whatever stone he was romancing to carry her away like an ADVENTURE TIME Ice King. She's a great one for interacting with good actors, a good mirror able to rise to any romantic opposite's heights or lows, but she's also fun riding up on mediocre scene partners, like when she connects with Owen Wilson--usually likable but here almost as insufferable as Russ Tamblyn--imitating his pronunciation, her eyes rolling at his self-adoring twinkle. With sweet and sacred Lili Taylor, though, she connects in a kind of patient slow-burn lesbian flirtation that doesn't have to go anywhere to be super foxy.

The women in both films are their best assets. The men the worst. As the 1963 original film's sole heir to the estate, Russ Tamblyn is such a one-note, "hey doc, come off it, ah? I mean (blah blah) but I never (blah blah) and all that jazz"-skeptic greedhead he can almost swamp the works, unless I'm in the kind of mood I can forgive him (for he is short and knows not what he does).
Wilson's character avoids that (he thinks he's there for an insomnia study) and seems mainly trying to fit in, and maybe hook up with Zeta. Well, who wouldn't? She sees right through Wilson's smug schtick but she doesn't snap his head off, treating him instead like her younger brother's puberty-hitting friend who keeps trying to find excuses to hang out in her room. I like when she's talking about Three AM making her feel like a genius, bringing about a general discussion of thoughts and inspiration, while all Owen can do is rant about the infomercials he watches. ("That's why god created barbiturates, honey" she tells him). But god also created the VCR, Owen. Watch goddamn WC Fields movies and learn how to drink like a man! You'll sleep like a bitch.

But the script and acting are fascinating throughout the remake as you get the idea these people really are meeting for the first time and all trying to impress each other, lying and inflating their egos, less secure and declamatory than in the original. I felt Manny Farber termites in some of the group's nervous politeness and campfire bonding in the first 1/3, the way the huge spaces of the house make them value each other as proof the scenery hasn't chewed them rather than vice versa, and the way their language betrays their lack of real life experience. When Owen tries to win Jones over by patronizingly talking about her in the third person to Liam, "I see a little Jackie Susann in Theo" for example, I like that she doesn't buy it, instead just gives him a "sarcastic chuckle" like she would if her five year old brother was making jealous jokes about her boyfriend.

Believe it or not, it's actually Liam Neeson who comes off the worst in this version, like he's never worked with CGI before! Bitch, what about STAR WARS? Oh yeah, he sleep-walked through that too. Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for actors forced to pretend with all their might that a ping-pong ball-covered boom mic is a racist caricature alien or a living four-poster bed, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. If I had to pick a favorite Liam moment - it's near the end when Liam has the demon bed hovering over him, fixing to stab him with one of its poster poles, and his reaction is more like a man hearing the phone ring while half-asleep than someone trying to not get crushed and devoured. Liam! Wake up! It's the devouring bed scene! Deathbed! The Bed that Eats!

Then there's the decor: floor to ceiling, vast, staggeringly ornate but beautiful, style so vividly and gorgeously unified that--in my misery--left me totally turned on and weirded out by it: cherubs don't usually creep me out in a good way but in a suffocating grandma doily under the candy dish way. Here, they're not scary but they don't suffocate me, and the house is so packed with great detail it's like the art directors thought they would never work again once this came out, so were determined to cram in the entirety of the rest of their life's artistic contributions into every hallway, no matter what it cost.

Then there's Jan de Bont's directorial style, which illuminates the difference between boring 'good' and fun 'bad'. Robert Wise, director of the original is a talented journeyman who occasionally gets inspired, as in parts of WEST SIDE STORY, but time and again mistakes boring for important (he didn't direct the dance numbers, so it's pretty easy to guess what he did direct --all the drippy nonsense between miscast Beymer and Wood). I love 50s sci-fi and have seen Hawks' original THING a hundred times but have only seen Wise's preachy DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL once or twice. Who wants to be reminded how lame humans are? Or suffer an all-American apple-cheeked sprat? Unless you're a nuclear war proponent, or ever took a potshot at a friendly, unarmed alien who only wanted to threaten you with planetary destruction, watching it is like getting yelled at for a crime you didn't commit. But oh it's iconic, Gort and all that. Yeah, what does Gort do? He just stops other people from doing things. He's strictly reactive. That's kind of Wise's style. Like DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, his HAUNTING is considered one of the definitive classics of the genre. Yeah but... does it soothe your anxious soul on cold rainy Monday evenings? Fuck no it doesn't. Everyone shouts and yells, Julie Harris frumps and frowns brilliantly but the lighting is too bright (these people sleep in brightly lit bedrooms) though it darkens as the film goes along--I'm sure an intentional effect as the night creeps over the narrative, and the photography gets better and better, but the fear is offset by a sometimes bombastic score, and the askew camera angles (following sounds across walls, etc.), the echo-laden booming sound effects, and the relentless inner monologue commentary from Harris all hammer at the soul--we never know what is a diegetic creepy house noise and what is 'interior' like Harris' monologues. And topping it all off is the patronizing way they all want to send her away from the house the more she wants to stay, packing her bags and booting her out the door, ignoring her protestations like a child's tantrum. If construed as patriarchal it might scan a "Yellow Wallpaper" illustration of the belittling of women and by association of the spiritual and intuitive, but it also begs the question of what else was Dr. Markway looking for if not this very reaction? Naturally he's worried about the scandal if she dies, but if he's conducting an experiment where are his cameras and recorders? He wants to document the paranormal but makes no attempt to do so, merely babbles his sub-Jungian "who knows what lurks beyond the known" blah blah, reacting to every new incident that can't be explained with a shrug.

The thing with Wise's version is that maybe it's not a ghost story at all. Maybe it's all just in Julie Harris's mind--though that wouldn't explain the dialogue or the fact that other people are seen reacting to it. Also, she's a great actress but I never much cared about what's going on in her mind. To me she lacks chemistry, charisma, grace. What she does have is a compendium of asexual old maid neuroses to the point she seldom becomes more than a shrill hysteric of the sort one wishes one wasn't related to, and there's no earthly reason James Dean would ever fall in love with her in EAST OF EDEN instead of Carroll Baker! I love Lili Taylor though, in this version, and the dusky burgundy color scheme gives her eyes a steady twinkle - her emotions are always so on her sleeve that we're never sure just how much of what's going on is due to her own psychic projection or ours. We're spared interior monologues, drab patriarchal coddlings, and all the other malarkey associated with Harris' neurotic old maid. Not only do I want to know what's on Taylor's mind, I feel like I do - the window is wide open--she doesn't need that trite inner commentary.

Lili Taylor uses the Liz Taylor style of acting, Harris the Vivian Leigh style (i.e. movie acting vs. theater acting). Even when she's holding back, Taylor's like a cat that just swallowed a canary of a role and isn't afraid to let a few feathers fall out of her mouth. Harris or Leigh would just waft into the room with one of the feathers in her arms, cradling it like the calla lilies are in bloom again.

No, there's only one reason to re-watch the 1963 HAUNTING: foxy lesbian psychic Claire Bloom, especially in the sexy-scary bed scenes with Harris (though again, the scariness is undone by the flat TV lighting. But there are three reasons to see the 1999 edition: the gorgeous interior sets (the unique attempts to make the house seem alive are very Lacanian), and the two lovely ladies. Sure sure sure, who am I to dare declare the 1963 HAUNTING overrated and as drab as a sunny afternoon wasted watching SOUND OF MUSIC in the gymnasium on the last day of school, followed by watching the music teacher's alternative lifestyle be insinuated in condescending tones by the uptight spinster principal? I'm just a man who escaped that auditorium, who went to the bathroom and never came back.  And now I'm standing before Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor as they run, hand-in-hand, through wild dark sets, and at last I'm feeling the grueling slog of a cold wet Monday finally melt off me, as if from a slug of laudanum with a Jaeger chaser. Mmmmm--so dark.... and so gloriously, calorically empty, like the warm glow of a phantom fireplace as imagined by a dying match girl.

SUCKER PUNCH Capsules: ULTRAVIOLET, ELEKTRA, BLOODRAYNE, BITCH-SLAP, CIRCLE OF IRON, SO CLOSE, and AZUMI

Film is our ultimate escape, so when filmmakers decide they need to having characters dreaming alternate realities instead of living them, then it's as if they think being locked in a bathroom at the airport is the same as travelling to new destinations. Zak Snyder is to blame and SUCKER PUNCH to deliver its titular promise is his Waterloo. Dude, film already is an alternate reality! Are you anxious to cover up plot holes and suffering from the compulsive need to cram as much GGI into every frame as you can? Make it all the desperate allegedly feminist hallucination of a tortured girl in her underwear. What pleasures might be found amidst the steampunk trimmings here are too skeevy and dispiriting for words.

In the early days of horror there were producers, particularly at MGM, who felt the public wouldn't 'get' a horror film if you didn't bring it back down to logic at the end - the 'it was all a dream' or 'the vampire was a detective in disguise to catch a killer' or the monster is just a crook in an ape costume trying to frighten the next heir to the family fortune. Gradually they realized no one goes to the movies--or books for that matter--wanting to be anchored to the real--you can get weird, and we won't riot or have a nervous breakdown. Then again we also want our story to make logical sense within the context of itself, and to follow the adage: do not "show the monster in the first half-hour." If you want to have a giant samurai robot attack an orphanage, go ahead, we don't need it situated in a fantasy within a fantasy, but if you show it first thing in a movie, we'll assume we can keep talking and checking our cell phones while you get such nonsense out of your system.

THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) knew how to do it right. Sure, there it was 'a dream' but there was an interconnection between Oz and Kansas and Dorothy's unconscious, so it's a potent myth. Oz is real because Dorothy sees it as real --it's more real than Kansas. Once you use 'the power of imagination' you run up against a vein of who gives a shit that takes genuine mythopoetic heft and Jungian savvy to transcend. Fail and you just bore us, and SUCKER does. As in Nick Shager's review from Slant below:

Sucker Punch follows Baby Doll as she's committed to a grimy mental institution by her stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). The old man has locked her away because she tried to prevent him from raping her younger sister (hey, he was mad about getting cut out of his dead wife's will!), and accidentally killed the young girl instead. Once inside the facility, skeezy supervisor Blue (Oscar Isaac) shows her a common area with a stage known as the Theater, which—when coupled with the intro sight of a curtain being pulled back to reveal the action proper—is Snyder's clumsy way of conveying how the locale of Baby Doll's adventure is really the theater of the mind. And as every other character seems to blurt out in one form or another, the mind affords people the power to shape their own destiny, and the world. It's a notion that also applies to a director and his films, though Snyder's self-reflexive instincts are blunt and lifeless, and his subsequent trip down the fantasies-within-fantasies rabbit hole, replete with a fem-rock cover of "White Rabbit" to boot, primarily speaks to his confusion over notions of actualization and empowerment. (cont.)

I was really hoping SUCKER would be awesome, but after I saw the extended preview during last night's Archer, I knew it was going to go the route of so much video game-based dreck that's come before--TOMB RAIDER, RESIDENT EVIL, BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SERVER, MAX PAYNE: "To fulfill your destiny you must seek five items..." Why not get it over with and just show a bunch of girls playing Doom IV in their underwear?

The castrative/revengeful counter-misogynist avenger girl is one that's always been popular amongst sensitive comic book readers like me, who first found the gold vein of it in the early 1980s when Frank Miller rose to fame writing and penciling a Daredevil character named Elektra. The way she wore her scarf, the way she kicked Bullseye in the face, and slashed scores of ninja with her sai, and died... tragically... we fell hard, the way we did for the Bionic Woman as kids, prompting her to come back again and again in prequels and ghost tales.

Flash forward and lazy screenwriters are opening every single film with an elaborate break-in to a compound heavily guarded and usually presided over by a bald guy in an expensive suit and sunglasses, like Frank Miller cut five ways to Sunday with B-12 and talc and sold direct to cable.  Let's meet some of SUCKER's relatives, and a mangy bunch they are to be certain:

ULTRAVIOLET 
2006 - *
Milla Jovovich as a vampiric hottie out to protect a kid everyone wants to-- yawn--kill. Worse than watching mom learn to play Duke Nukem on her Dell PC.

"For the love of ALL that is holy, do NOT see it." - Batese -- Imdb:

ELEKTRA
2005 - ***
I actually paid full price for the director's cut on DVD and I'm glad I did. This picture grows on me, namely due to Garner's doe-eyed hotness as Elektra, who has to 'yawn' protect a child everyone wants to kill. Terence Stamp is 'Stick' - the stoic blind pool hall Zen master. Elektra's douchebag 'agent' (he call's her 'Lek' and keeps his cell phone and smarm ever at the ready) and a cliche'd 'likeable single dad next door' don't detract from the moody beauty of the Pacific Northwest imagery, Garner's amazing eyes and Garner's amazing bone structure. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll believe tattoos of animals can slither to life off an Asian assassin.

"This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or Kill Bill-style wisecracks. Some of the effects recall vintage Ray Harryhausen, the villains all perish in puffs of green smoke, and Garner's sincere glumness suggests Buster Crabbe in Flash Gordon." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum

BLOODRAYNE 
2005 - *1/8
Uwe Boll's SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER (would he have gone to jail if this film ended up making money?) benefits from the presence of Michelle Rodriguez and Michael Madsen even though both are apparently hungover and in need of a script. Sir Ben Kingsley plays the head vampire, badly. With no one even noticing, the film is stolen by Billy Zane as a rival head vampire. Look at poor relation Kristanna Loken (above), basically wearing Elektra's hand-me-downs and dulled sai.

"The plot of "BloodRayne" is basically "Blade" with a white chick -- set just after the invention of gunpowder but long before the invention of humor. Kristanna Loken, who played the female cyborg in the last "Terminator" film, stars as a half-human, half-vampire who must avenge the death of her mother while stopping the evil vampire Lord Kagen (Ben Kingsley, slumming like few Oscar winners before him) from ruling the Earth." -- Peter Hartlaub - SF Gate

BITCH-SLAP
2009 - **

"More of an “Austin Powers” carnival of camp with YouTube production polish, “Bitch Slap” opens with a Joseph Conrad quote and ends in a hail of bullets, leaving the midsection fairly anticlimactic and insistently silly. It’s criminal to dismiss something so utterly consumed with ample feminine assets and cross-eyed ultraviolence, but the goofball pitch of this fluff grows tiresome early in the first round, rendering the picture a splendid 10-minute short film idea stretched intolerably to 100 minutes." -- Brian Orndorff

I only got ten minutes into BITCH-SLAP before I had a whopper headache and animosity towards every character, so I agree. Word to the wise: never show clips from better films in the opening credits. And I can only shudder at how bad SUCKER-PUNCH must be if Horror.com's Staci Layne sez: Let me put it this way: having seen Sucker Punch once, I'd rather watch Bitch Slap 10 times in a row.

CIRCLE OF IRON
1978 - **1/2
Basically a Zen video game "Nothing is real - and nothing to get hung over" movie before Zen video games and hangovers were invented. A wanderer on a mystic quest learns that's 'all in his mind' with the help of mystic guru David Carradine in multiple roles (just like Scott Glenn in SUCKER - the two actors even look alike). Based on a Bruce Lee storyline, with Christopher Lee merrily embodying the mystical guardian of the sacred book, Eli Wallach sleeping through his scenes in a cauldron (above), horses and Renaissance fair merriment, beaches, and wooden flutes all coax the film towards the pretty girl of meaning like friends of the shy boy at the dance. Does our shy kid film ever get up the nerve to traverse the nonsense distance of the floor to talk to her? Many questions, grasshopper!

The finished film sits about half way between the meaningful, but still sappy brand of 'Zen Buddhism' that Lee taught in life, and the daft, everything and the kitchen sink brand of martial arts films the United States put out after the master’s death. Like Lee’s unfinished Game of Death, Circle of Iron (aka The Silent Flute) anticipates fighting style video games, but also features the afterglow of the insistently pointed philosophical films of the late 1960s. On top of its ridiculous imagery, and shaky plotting, the film acts as an unintentional (or perhaps intentional?) parody of Confucianism and Taoism. It's even sub-Yoda at some points, but it's continuously charming and even intentionally funny on several occasions. - Gabriel Powers - DVD Active

SO CLOSE
2002 - ***
Surely Qi Shu is one of the most beautiful women in the world, and good with a gun.  She must avenge her sister's death! You die! Karen Mok (GOD OF COOKERY) is the cop rival with whom Qi forms a semi-lesbian grrl-power connection, all while they kick each other through expensive corporate building parking lots. Hizillarious, though the ending is weak... like all men!

AZUMI
2003 - ***1/2
She takes on so many guys in a big climactic sword fight it's insane--and she's cute as a lil' button! It's set in the rainy days of the shoguns so prepare for bulky stiff white robes, funny hats, and scrolls. Even with its video-ish tinge the film leaves one whirling and out of breath, though all the side plotting might confuse the very buzzed.
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There you go... if, like me, you were pumped for SUCKER PUNCH and then felt like you'd actually been sucker punched when you saw the 'it's all in your mind' previews and negative viewer comments, stay home and watch SO CLOSE, or DEATH-PROOF, or SIN CITY, or NAKED KILLER, or ELEKTRA and keep your expectations low to the ground. I mean low!! LOWER! You die!