I'm getting into writing reviews now, and I probably shouldn't.
After all they seem like a particular waste of time to write if
nobody's paying. Sure I feel like that about most of the time I
spend writing here, but just doing so to talk about what someone
else made, it's subservient to another work before it's even begun.
Even if I hate the work I'm reviewing, at least its creator
bothered to spend their time making something, and if people cared
for what I thought then they'd pay for it, or ought to if I wasn't
dumb enough to give it to them for free while I sit here under two
blankets rubbing my hands to keep warm because I don't want to pay
the cost of electricity for running the heating. Only an idiot
would waste his time doing that when he's got a long list of urgent
jobs for the weekend which can theoretically benefit him physically
for days to years in the future. Not to mention he's been spending
time typing at a keyboard all week already coding/debugging
endlessly, mostly one bug where writing to a global variable with
_definitely_, _verifiably_, _inevitably_, the same value, but only
when within a separate function call, causes a hardware module in
the microcontroller to somehow get confused. Some sort of compiler
optimisation gone wrong? _Another_ memory overflow due to an
implied integer conversion that the compiler unexpectedly failed to
handle correctly in a completely separate part of the code? I don't
care anymore, frankly, that variable didn't need to be written
again with the same value, and now, after much re-engineering, it
isn't. But now next week I'm still at the point where I expected to
be by Tuesday and I haven't got more time so I'll have to pause
that project yet again.
Huff, well there's me suddenly venting again like a steam train
arriving at a station. What's a lighter topic to ramble about? I
know, I'll review a film I've watched...
UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991)
What does it mean when the front cover of the VHS rental release
for a two and a half hour science-fiction drama sells itself with a
long list of sixteen bands who recorded the film's soundtrack? In
fact it's not really a never-ending music video, but it doesn't
really have the narrative of a typical film either. Something about
this movie by filmmaker Wim Wenders does follow more of an emotive
state of mind akin to a long musical work, than the clarity of
purpose one expects in cinema. That is to say, the plot leaves
intercontinental dead ends willfully wherever it goes across
countries and continents in the barely-followable course of its
road trip narrative.
Pehaps this is improved in the five-hour director's cut which is
apparantly now available online, although some reviews suggest that
this isn't the case, but working as usual just from what the 1990s
home entertainment industry left for me, I'm only going from the
original cut. This original vision of a free-spirited woman
following a wanted man across a pre-apocalyptic globe while being
followed by her boyfriend and a detective whose motivations are
about as clear as his fate at the end of the movie, somehow seems a
good fit for what I feel is the general Gopherspace audience. I'm
probably wrong, but there are some themes in this movie that just
made me think "Huh, Gopher would like that" (yes reader, I pretty
much see you as a component of the protocol). Of course there's the
near-future setting, 1999 seen from 1991, which in an excuse for
ample quaint not-quite-on-the-mark tech gadgets starting with a
sat-nav that guides the leading woman through the title sequence in
an old Rover, then onto a variety of somewhat less accurate tech
predictions which are nevertheless entertaining. To this end the
Russian bear computer has to get some sort of special mention
because that surely deserves an award for the most hillariously
ridiculous bit of future tech ever appearing in a scene of
otherwise unflinching seriousness. I'm guessing it was a substitute
for actually filming in Moscow, which they clearly failed to
achieve since it was right at the time of the Russian communist
government's collapse, but a 3D animation of a giant talking bear
walking around the city's famous landmarks? OK so any 3D computer
animation circa 1991 was cool, but what level of intoxication makes
_that_ animation seem like a serious alternative to a few location
shots?
But in spite of that, the movie actually predicts, rather more
accurately than the tech itself, a sense of unease about how future
technology would shape the world. There's definately a pervading
theme of technology contributing to a destruction of the world that
the film is moving through, though this exists more in the
narrative than seen in any of the actual scenes. It's most
obviously embodied in the background news reports, never
acknowledged by the main characters, of an out-of-control
nuclear-armed war satellite set to trigger Armageddon at any
moment. But more facinating today is the rather separate story in
the last third of the movie where, cut off from the world in the
middle of the Australian outback, the leading woman, more
disillusioned than ever, falls victim to the addictive power of a
portable electronic tablet device with which people can replay
their own dreams to themselves. Today this strikes me as a perfect
metaphore for the population's addiction to smartphones and the
echo-chamber of social media reflecting their own thoughts back at
them. I'm not crediting the movie with predicting the rise of
social media, the dream replaying is obviously supposed to
represent drug addiction, and the script actually seems to have
wholely missed predicting anything like the internet - it doesn't
even show anything like a BBS. But even as a fluke, I think it
makes an otherwise somewhat dry end theme on drug addiction and
recovery far more interesting to modern eyes, at least provided
you're skeptical enough about social media to see the connection
today.
Overall this movie is a long way from perfect, but as I've said
before sometimes even a movie that's not quite right (or worse) is
just different enough from the average hollywood nonsense to make
up for its flaws. Throw in the occasional taste of retro sci-fi
nerd tech, and a story that sometimes feels like it's almost about
to tell us something genuinely important today, and I think this
film's a pretty good fit for the sort of audience that might hang
around here on Gopher. Oh yeah, that and the music is really good.
