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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| The RNG is messing with me again, this time pointing me to another movie link. This one's from cnet. This is the Ultimate '90s Cyberpunk Movie (No, It's Not 'The Matrix')  Strange Days showed off a gritty, realistic VR dystopia that feels surprisingly relevant today. Remember yesterday, I mentioned that The Italian Job is one of my favorite movies? Well, Strange Days is another, for different reasons. That's why, when I saw this article, I knew I had to talk about it. The cyberpunk movement has given us some of the best science fiction movies: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and, yes, The Matrix. I would argue that Blade Runner (the Director's Cut of which is my absolute favorite movie, if anyone cares) predated and influenced cyberpunk, as the subgenre didn't really coalesce until the novel Neuromancer (William Gibson) two years after Blade Runner. Its roots stretch back into the 1960s, though, including the short story that eventually became Blade Runner. But I'm not here to argue about the history of cinema and literature. What's generally meant by "cyberpunk" is a dystopian vision of "the future" (relative to when it was written) that puts technology and corporations into primacy over people. Sound familiar? It should. We're living in one. But there's one great tech noir flick that came out at the height of the cyberpunk craze -- and then all but disappeared. Maybe that's partly because of its title. So, part of the problem with public reception of near-future SF is that it appears to obsolete itself very quickly. Blade Runner, for example, takes place in the unimaginably far future of 2019. Low-imagination viewers (I've known a few personally) see that and dismiss it, because "it didn't happen that way." That's not the point. As I know I've said before, SF isn't about predicting the future, any more than Fantasy is about being true to the past. So part of the problem with SD, as I'll call it from now on because I'm lazy, was that it was released in 1995 with a setting of 1999. Most of the film takes place in the last days of the year/century/millennium (yes, I'm aware the millennium actually started in 2001, but I'm not being pedantic today). This isn't unusual for SF. One of the most famous SF movies has the year right in the title: 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it was a cinematic and literary masterpiece that had several years to become lodged into the collective consciousness. Similarly, Blade Runner was set nearly 40 years after its release. Strange Days, however, imagined something only four or five years away. Though Strange Days was released back in 1995, it looks and feels like it could've come out yesterday. It's one of those rare old movies that imagined the technology of virtual reality without turning it into a gimmick. I wouldn't call the tech macguffin in SD "virtual reality," but that's a semantic argument. The movie wasted no time dropping me into its jarring setting: The opening scene is an armed robbery filmed in first-person perspective, with the robber running from cops and jumping from one rooftop to another. What the author here doesn't mention, or perhaps fails to realize, is that this was brand-new technology in the real world. That is, pro-grade video cameras had finally become light enough to be handheld. This isn't remarkable today, when almost everyone in the developed world carries one in their pocket, but, at the time, it was a Big Deal. Basically, the movie practically invented the "shakycam" style that was destined to annoy me for the next 30 years, but absolutely worked for this movie. Director Kathryn Bigelow was influenced by the 1992 LA riots and incorporated those elements of racial tension and police violence into her work. Which leads me to another speculation as to why the movie was all but forgotten, even among SF fans: sexism. A woman? Directing a science fiction flick? Horror! And don't try to tell me that's not a reason, because we still see it happening today. As I alluded to yesterday, I don't give much of a shit about the personal lives of movie stars or directors, and I absolutely don't care what gender they identify as (though I guess I do care, at some level, because I notice that sort of thing). But it might be relevant to note that she was briefly married to the far more famous James Cameron. Not that relevant, though; she's a brilliant director in her own right. So yeah, there's more at the link, though with possible spoilers. Yes, there are anachronisms, and the movie isn't what I'd call perfect, but it's still one of my all-time favorites. So I was pleased to find it still has other fans, though the lack thereof never stopped me from enjoying a movie before. One final word of warning, though, if you haven't seen it before and want to: it's dark. As the article alludes to, it's Black Mirror-level dark. Today, it would generate numerous trigger warnings, and there's one scene in particular that stands out in my mind as really abyssally fucked-up (not the cinematography, but the subject matter). It's a scene among several that, if a dude directed something like it today, he'd probably never work in Hollywood again. And yes, I'm saying this as someone with a very high tolerance for horror scenes. Unlike most of Black Mirror, though, and unlike many other dystopian stories, though (some of which I also enjoy), the final message is one of hope. I don't know about you, but I could sure use some of that right now. |
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