The Oncoming Hope

Martha Marcy May Marlene takes what should be a simple character study and transforms it into an edge-of-your-seat thriller. The very premise is compelling; a lost girl escapes from a cult and struggles to adjust to "normal life."

Where other films with similar themes would simply blame Marcy's personal failings for her susceptibility to the cult, MMMM draws a much more detailed picture. John Hawkes could not be more charismatic as the cult leader. Her relationship with her blood family is tense at best.

That she escapes into the materialistic hell of an oversized lake house seems to feed her peculiar mix of paranoia that the cult's coming after her, and longing for the cult's simplicity. There's a sense that she hasn't just been programmed, she's attempting to make a rational choice between an uncomfortable and unsympathetic blood family and a loving cult family that only makes inappropriate demands of her body in return for bounty.

Even the worst moments with the cult seems less tense that the charged encounters between Marcy and her sister Lucy, played by Sarah Paulsen. They dance around each other like electrons in search of a nucleus, always repellent yet inexplicably attracted. The closer that Marcy gets to opening up, the less sympathy that Lucy has for her.

But while the movie itself is excellent, the real revelation is Elizabeth Olsen (yes, she's one of those Olsens). At first she reminded me of Scarlett Johanssen, back when she had that nebulous "thing" in Lost in Translation and Ghost World. But as the movie went on, I realized that Olsen has something a bit weirder about her, like she's channeling Sissy Spacek. Spacek's early films are a great touchpoint for many of the goings-on in MMMM.

Marcy seems dragged along by an insurmountable current, barely able to control her position in the river. And yet, all the while, Olsen's eyes register everything that happens, and provide the only clues to what Marcy's thinking at any given moment.

The controversial ending makes it clear that, perhaps, we do not understand how Marcy's actually experiencing events and how they've imprinted themselves on her. I loved it, but I'm curious how the rest of you interpret it.

Play along in the comments!

In Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James executes a vicious assault on Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen and all those who love them.

There's a vicious murder on the grounds of Pemberley, and if you manage to care after 250 pages, then more power to you. For the murder occurs, then Colonel Fitzwilliam recounts the incident, then he and Darcy recount the incident at the inquest. And in case you're not thoroughly bored, there's also a trial, wherein we hear the same story yet again.

Meanwhile, lifeless, witless, self-regarded gold-digger Elizabeth Bennet sticks to the shadows, behaving like the dutiful, conservative women she has never been. Why, P.D., why?

The essential transformation of Elizabeth might have been acceptable if James doesn't herself establish that a) the novel only picks up 6 years afterP&P and b) she makes it clear that Lizzie is having the time of her life, completely free of hardship.

But wait! James isn't content with dragging our beloved P&Pers into this disaster! Poor Harriet Smith, Robert Martin, Sir Walter Elliot and the Knightleys all appear in this mess.

Even that isn't enough. She has to throw in irritating meta comments.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

A ha ha ha ha ha...yes.

Now, let me take you on a journey through exposition city:

"Fitzwilliam listened in silence, then said, 'You are mounting quite an impressive expedition to satisfy one hysterical woman I daresay the fools have lost themselves in the woodland, or one of them has tripped over a tree root and sprained an ankle. They are probably even now limping to Pemberly or the King's Arms, but if the coachman also heard shots we had better go armed. I'll get my pistol and join you in the chaise. If the stretcher is needed you could do with an extra man and a horse would be an encumbrance if we hae to go into the depths of the woodland, which seems likely. I will bring my pocket compass. Two grown men getting themselves lost like children is stupid enough, five would be ridiculous."

Did you get that? No? Then repeat after me: SHUT UP, FITZWILLIAM!

And then there's so many lectures on "social justice".

"Ignoring him, Georgina turned to Darcy. 'You need have no anxiety.  Please do not ask me to leave. I only wish to be of use to Elizabeth and I hope I can be. I cannot see that there is any impropriety in that.'

It was then that Alveston intervened.  'Forgive me, sir, but I feel I must speak.  You discuss what Miss Darcy should do as if she were a child. We have entered the nineteenth century; we do not need to be a disciple of Mrs Wollstonecraft to feel that women should not be denied a voice in matters that concern them. It is some centuries since we accepted that woman has a soul. Is it not time that we accepted that she also has a mind?'

Hey guys, remember how Jane Austen was kind of funny? How she'd couch serious social issues in compelling drama and lively wit?

Ok, I will cease the assassination of this novel, out of respect to the reader.

But when Darcy starts lecturing about the morality of the death penalty, I rolled my eyes so high that the heavens could not have missed my irritation. When the servants polish the 8 millionth candlestick, imagine poor me, resisting the urge to throw my Kindle against the wall.

You can file this one under "legally protected terrible ideas."

*I wish I'd come up with that graphic, but full credit goes to The Guardian. If you think I'm being harsh, you should read that review.

In case you thought the soft robot wasn't quite creepy enough, meet our new robot overlord: the hexapod.

Norwegian engineer Kare Halvorsen designed the hexapod, which appears at first like a giant ball, but then sprouts legs and walks (SO SCARY!). He details his process on his blog, which you should check out if you're interested in the technical process.

As of now, this robot can only put out, retract, and crawl. Next, Halvorsen is working on its rolling capabilities.

Watch it in action here (I assume there's a porno soundtrack to distract us all from THE HORROR!):

Cargo cults are a fascinating phenomenon in pre-industrial societies that have come into and then lost contact with more technologically advanced cultures. The most famous ones sprung up in the South Pacific after WWII, but they've existed for centuries.

Islands in the South Pacific played a key role in the war between US and Japan, who frequently air-dropped food, weapons and other supplies to aid their troops. This cargo often ended up in the hands of the islanders. Then, as you can imagine, when the war ended, so did the cargo drops.

The islanders, by that time, had come to perceive cargo as the root of the Western and Japanese wealth and power, and ascribed the air drops to blessings for ritualistic practices. So what did these cargo cults do? They copied the soldiers.

The built air strips, control towers out of bamboo and planes out of straw, and even mimicked airplane sounds in the hopes that, by following the "rituals" of the soldiers, they too would be blessed with cargo. They marched with bamboo spears cut in the shape of guns and carry American flags like soldiers on parade.

In a nutshell, they went through the visible motions without taking into account any of the underlying principles. Some of these cults still exist today, most prominently the "John Frum" cargo cult in Vanuatu. (It is rumored that they named their cult John Frum after the frequently spoken introduction from soldiers: "I'm John from Cincinnati, John from Alabama" and so on.

Since then, the phrase "cargo cult" is frequently applied to both science and design. Richard Feynman defined cargo cult science as science that goes through the motions of scientific investigation without any critical thought. Similarly, cargo cult programming is defined by The Jargon File as:

A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood.

Smashing Magazine has a great article about how "cargo cult" thinking has contributed to the slow erosion of creative design.

Best trivia of all? Serge Gainsbourg wrote a song about cargo cults!

"I know of the the magicians who call to jets
In the jungle of New Guinea 
They scrutinize the zenith coveting the guineas
That the pillage of freight would bring them

On the sea of coral in the wake of this
Machine those creatures not deprived
Of reason those Papuans wait for vapour
The wreck of the Vice-count and that of the Comet"

Some of my favorite books explore what happens when you take a group of people who have co-existed for years and interrupt their already mixed-up relationships with a total wild card. Wendy Scott-Carr, our resident Dead-Eyed Smiling Psycho (DESP), is that wild card.

On the surface, "What Went Wrong" sets up the new normal in The Good Wife, closing the door on one relationship and opening up a whole mess of them (and not a few cans of worms). How's that for a mixed metaphor? Anyway...

Really, the so-called "normal" is the establishment of battle alliances (the mob should be so lucky as to have Diane Lockhart as their wartime consiglieri). The final beats of the episode reveal DESP's long-game: the downfall of Peter Florrick, who's making it easier for her by returning to his favorite pastime: quietly and calmly threatening people.

Meanwhile, Alicia does some less calm threatening of her own on behalf of Team Kalinda (woohoo!), while Diane draws Alicia into her inner circle (also sounding vaguely threatening).

DESP attempts to draw Will into her team by forcing out all his basketball buddies (say it with me...POOR WIBBLE WILL!!!) and then threatening him. When that doesn't work, she attempts to seduce him with the promise of Peter's downfall.

Will, proving once and for all to be the better man, says no. For now.

May I take a moment to congratulate Anika Noni-Rose on a truly fantastic performance? She's the first villain in this show that feels worthy of the opposition. Neither Bond, Blake, nor Glenn Childs felt quite so...dangerous. She has an agenda, and she'll do whatever it takes to achieve it.

That single-mindedness is completely new to this show, where everyone is dancing between a hundred different motives, trying to figure out which is most serviceable right now. Not her. She's all long-game. Don't be surprised if the entire city of Chicago goes up in flames by the end of this season.

OTHER

-In an episode that had Alicia getting wasted with Owen, you may ask, what drinking team could possibly be better? You got it -- Alicia and Diane.

-I'm counting down the moments until Kalinda punches Dana in the face.

-Owen is the best (via Karamelka):

Even better thing? Alicia and Kalinda, finally thawing.

Haywire, if you aren't aware, is Steven Soderbergh's new action extravaganza, starring such non B-listers as Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and poor Gina Carano, photoshopped into oblivion. The American ads aren't really much better, but it's been a long time since I've seen such amateur work for a Hollywood movie.

If I didn't already know about Haywire, I would look at this poster and assume it's produced by the people who created this fictional film:

or a sequel to Frank Wrench:

Soundtracked by this guy:

As if the bad photoshopping isn't enough, check out the title font in the full poster!

InStyle commissioned ten fashion designers to sketch their own interpretations of the "fire dress" from The Hunger Games, and the results are stunning.

I've written previously about my disappointment at Katniss's dress in the trailer from the film, which took:

"The creature standing before me in the full-length mirror has come from another world. Where skin shimmers and eyes flash and apparently they make their clothes from jewels. Because my dress, oh, my dress is entirely covered in reflective precious gems, red and yellow and white with bits of blue that accent the tips of the flame design. The slightest movement gives the impression I am engulfed in tongues of fire."

and gave us:

...ahem...moving on...It's hard to choose a favorite, but a hat tip goes to Joyce Azria, who not captures the magic of the outfit but shows the clearest understanding of Katniss as a character:

The Blonds take their assignment and vamp it up to a fairly ridiculous extent, but I think they capture an essential theme of the novels: the dark side of constantly being in performance mode:

Tadashi Shoji's design is another favorite. Oddly, she's the only one who understood the assignment, designing Katniss's performance dress, not a hybrid of Katniss the warrior and Katniss the reality tv star. It may not be as creative as some of the other designs, but it's definitely elegant.

TIBI designer Amy Smilovic has made the mystifying choice of aging Katniss up by approximately 80 years, which works on a symbolic level but led to a pretty ugly image:

Nicole Miller has designed to fashion Katniss as a native American bird, or something:

But the award for "I really didn't give a shit about this" goes to...Tommy Hilfiger! It's a weird supermodel kimono/poncho hybrid that's as ugly as it is uncreative.

What do you think? You can see the rest of the designs here: http://www.instyle.com/instyle/package/general/photos/0,,20542054_20549206_21085613,00.html

Also, if you're interested in the intersection between fashion and film (and tv) I highly recommend Hello, Tailor, which has wonderful analyses of things most delightful.

Bet you all were expecting me to choose "Winter", weren't you? Well you know me. I like to keep things...unpredictable. The delicate piano part mirrors the settling of the snow, as the flakes freeze into something harder, colder. And then they let go into Spring, in a magnificent release (the song also describes a whole other kind of release in great detail ::blushes::).

I cannot tell the story of the song better than Tori herself can (oh how wonderfully witty she used to be before her "earth mother" phase). The blasphemy comes free, as does the Robert Plant impersonation.

American Psycho's getting the remake treatment, just eleven years after the original film.

According to Variety, it's a "low-budget" project that "reimagines" the novel as a modern-day bloodbath. It hasn't been greenlit as yet, but it's such a bad idea that I have no doubt that it will be made, and probably in 3-D. "It's so relevant! It's about an evil investment banker!" will declare a series of movie executives and advertisers until it lands on our screens, an empty and flat turd.

While I'm kind of intrigued by the conceptual updates that would have to be made (will Patrick Bateman hold a dick-measuring contest over his LinkedIn page instead of his business cards? Will he murder to the sweet dulcet sounds of Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga?), I cannot be convinced that this is necessary, mainly because the original film is so damn good.

It took a book that, frankly, wasn't very good, and flipped it into a satire rather than a celebration of soulless nihilism.

But on the plus side, I get to quote David Foster Wallace! He criticized Ellis and Psycho in this interview:

"I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that."

I agree entirely about the book, but the movie is so much more than that.

Thanks to Stale Popcorn for the hat tip.

What do you guys think?

It seems fitting that since I've added an unofficial "robot" beat to this blog, there's been tons of exciting robot news and a visit to the wonderful Robotville festival at the Science Museum.

Of course, as with the soft robot, many new robotic developments seem just as likely to bring us to the robopocalypse as to a better society. You can file these new prison guards with the former.

South Korea is beginning a month-long trial of new robot guards, 5 foot tall machines designed to appear friendly to inmates. They're not designed to engage with the prisoners, but will report observations back to a human guard on duty.

The advantages are obvious: they're immune to prisoner taunting, they won't exploit prisoners, and they'll be unbiased observers.

However, I'm guessing they aren't terribly immune from that most basic thing that all prisoners will have access to: water.

The prototypes were designed by The Asian Forum for Corrections, in concert with Kyonggi University. And they assure us that "the robots are not terminators".

Isn't he cute?