Category: Pop culture

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Pop culture Sci-fi

[2993] To enjoy Reversi, you mustn’t work too hard

Time travel as a moving picture subject has experienced a resurgence in popularity over the past decade or so. The final chapters of the Avengers movies (especially the associated Loki series) are likely the most well-known franchise exploring the idea while incorporating the many-worlds thesis. DC does the same thing through The Flash with a slightly different (but more interesting) interpretation. On Apple TV+, there is Dark Matter adaption although it is primarily less about time travel and more about the idea of many-worlds. On Netflix, there is the insanely complicated German sci-fi Dark that requires anybody to draw up a chart to keep the story straight.

So I would think it is only natural the same fascination with time travel would hit the Malaysian film scene. It comes in the form of Reversi. That is not to say the local industry had not explored the theme before. There is XX-Ray all the way from 1992. Whether there is anything since then (notwithstanding XX-Ray sequels), the layperson in me is unaware.

I watched Reversi in the cinema recently, on the account that I thoroughly enjoyed Imaginur and that both are starred by the same lead actor, Beto Kusyairy.

But to appreciate the two-hour+ long Reversi, one must suffer an hour of tedium coupled with rude audience afflicted with boredom… before the work reveals its brilliance somewhere in the middle of the story. Just in its second week of release, Reversi was already put up in small cinema halls with an even smaller watching crowd. The slow hour was enough to have some members of the audience to be rude by scrolling their brightly lit phone or conversing above whispering level as the movie dialogue pushed its way.

When the brilliance came, it came as a shock therapy, smashing the boredom and pulling the audience’s attention back to the silver screen. That brilliance is the fact that Reversi is not a simplistic time travel story in the style of Back to the Future or XX-Ray. It is one of many-worlds with central branch that all other possible branches gravitate toward. If a person goes back to change a decision in the past, he would create a new branch where events there would attempt to mimic the consequence realized within the main branch. Fate refuses to be changed by too much.

I had trouble accepting the premise. Explanation given by various characters in the movie are dissatisfying. Questions flew everywhere in my head and so engrossed was I that I began getting distracted by my attempt at rationalization.

Before I went too deep inside the rabbit hole, I remembered that all fictions require a little bit of the suspension of belief if they are to be enjoyed. So, I pulled up and understood that my search for perfection was becoming the enemy of good.

I stepped back in mind, sat straighter in my seat and savored the brilliance of the second hour.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

It is impossible to discuss Reversi without talking about the influence exerted by other movies.

The futility of changing history runs parallel to the message of The Flash. The Flash is a terrible movie but its interpretation of many-worlds is interesting enough for me. In this way, Reversi implemented the idea in a much, much better way. If you strip the many-worlds aspect, Final Destination does come to mind too.

The inheritance of time travelling ability along family line sounds familiar, but I cannot for the life of me recall the exact movie. (I’ve been informed this is About Time.)

And I think the influence of Everything Everywhere All At Once could be seen in the background. The clearest reference is the scenes where Beto Kusyairy’s character time travelling; I see Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Quan Wang jumping across realities.

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Books & printed materials Pop culture Society

[2987] Outsiders, disruptions and mainstreaming

The central theme of Michiko Kakutani’s The Great Wave is simple. It is written on the cover: outsiders drive innovation and they have been the cause of various disruptions in human history. It is not a groundbreaking argument to make.

The unremarkable observation would have made the book an uninteresting read for me, except she manages to pull me back in with her comment on arts and culture, an area where she is clearly an authority. Kakutani formerly worked as a book critic at the New York Times.

She tells how those living on the margin of US society—blacks especially but also immigrant communities generally—were cultural innovators who eventually dictated mainstream tastes in music, movies, literature and comedy. They were innovators because they were less bounded by orthodoxy of the (white) majority and that the dual nature of their identity (that as a member of a minority community and as an American) allowed them to reach out to multiple sources for inspiration.

Kukatani cites a long list of authors and artists to show just how prevalent the outsider-turned-insider phenomenon is in the US. The list feels like a long must read recommendation that reminds me of another book of hers, Ex Libris, which is a list of 100 or so modern-time books that she believes worth reading.

While going through that cultural section of The Great Wave, my mind wanders to another book I read earlier this year. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties also has the outsider-insider theme, although it appears more implicitly within the context of the 1990s. Klosterman’s discussion is specific to the the evolution of the rock genre, which began as the favored noise among youth with marginal taste in music (in the 1950s if I recall correctly) and then turned into billion-dollar megabusiness that Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana rebelled against.

So, I find The Great Wave interesting in the sense that it is a companion to The Nineties. Kakutani provides a generalized theory that explains Klosterman’s specific cases.

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Books & printed materials Politics & government Pop culture Society

[2986] Maybe it was Klosterman’s The Nineties

Klosterman’s generation may believe in something or they may not. But they more likely to believe in it, if not by too much.

That something could be almost anything and that is the attitude taken throughout The Nineties, a 2022 book written by Chuck Klosterman. That is not to say he takes no position on an issue. He does and I feel he understands the 1990s (from Gen X perspective) exactly through this prism: a prism that suggests disagreements during the decade (in the US) was never too big to matter by too much. This idea is repeated several times throughout the book but the point achieves clarity at the very end when he discusses the competition between George Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 US Presidential election.

Klosterman argues that in the run up to the election, both candidates were really standing on the same policy platform and that made it impossible for many voters to decide who should be voted in based on substantive matters. So difficult it was that Klosterman highlights that voters were deciding who to decide based on whom they prefer to have a beer with. The answer is Bush, who was more affable and less aloof than Al Gore. So similar were the two that a third candidate—Ralph Nader—became the credible second candidate, as Bush and Gore merged into one candidate in the mainstream consciousness.

Of course, things changed after the election and definitely after the 9/11 attacks. And that was really the last time politics were taken so unseriously by US voters, or so Klosterman argues. Differences since began to become so big that that kind of ambivalence during the 1990s could not exist anymore.

But the book is not primarily about politics. The Nineties mostly tries to capture the mood of the decade and that means multiple references to hit songs and major movies. While I regularly refer to Wikipedia or YouTube to immerse myself into a book, this the first time I went through Spotify to listen to songs while reading. Nirvana’s Smell Like a Teen Spirit gets an early mention as the author explains how the band from Seattle changed everything we understood about rock music. Yes, Nirvana is more grunge than rock, but Klosterman rationalizes songs such as In Bloom evolved as a rebellion against the overcommercialization of rock, which itself was pioneered by unruly teenagers in the 1950s. When rock stars of the 1990s wanted fame and wealth, Nirvana (and Kurt Cobain especially) represented a new breed of artists who despise those. It was uncool to be famous and wealthy. Feeling so guilty of his success, Cobain took a gun and shot himself in the head. There are several other songs that Klosterman goes in detail. Alanis Morissettte’s You Oughta Know. Tupac Shakur’s is another. Each has an outsized influence on the 1990s US.

Reiterating the ambivalence of the 1990s, Klosterman discusses Seinfeld in a segment of the book. It is a comedy sitcom famously about nothing. What follows is a discussion on television programming, on how many sitcoms received high ratings only because they were aired in certain prime slots and that those slots were in high demand because many viewers were too lazy to switch channels after watching something earlier. People were watching only because, to paraphrase Klosterman who in turn quoting George Costanza, “because it’s on TV”, in reply to the question why would anybody watch it. Not because it was good or anything else.

But not all fell into that logic. Some drove the market and were ‘Must See TV’. Friends did that. Here, Klosterman describes Friends in the ambivalent contradictory way: “None of the characters were supposed to be cool, so the audience didn’t need to be cool in order to understand why they were appealing.” And there is Frasier, described as “a white-collar show openly obsessed with intellectual sophistication. Characters casually joked about Jungian philosophy, Sergei Rachmaninov and Alfred, Lord Tennyson… But its dynastic grip on critics and Emmy voters galvanized a paradox: Frasier was seen as brilliant television because it focused on characters who would never watch television.”

Again, later on the author’s commentary on the Star Wars prequel that came out in 1999: “Movie critics disliked The Phantom Menace, but diehards hated it more… Lucas tried pretty goddamn hard to satisfy an entire generation of strangers who likely wouldn’t have been satisfied by anything he delivered. Did such a mean-spirited categorization bother him? Maybe. But not really.”

You get the drift.

I find the yes-no-maybe noncommittal construction as slightly offputting. Yet, beyond the noncommittal statements are brilliant assessment of the 1990s. Maybe, the decade was that complex that it is difficult to be sure what was really going on, unlike the decades after that seem to be governed more by black-or-white logic; either you’re with us or against us even in the face of ever more complex world.

Maybe, the possible lesson here is that in order to solve our contemporary divisions, we just need to be less sure of ourselves.

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Pop culture

[2974] Watching Oppenheimer

During my graduate years, I was surrounded by friends having extensive knowledge of films. Inside their mind stored what seemed to be a thick encyclopedia, with complete entries of titles, dates of release, actors and actresses, directors, languages, plots and every tiny things of interest. While I tried to keep up during our conversations over meals, or just lazing over grass during bright summer days, my less than broad education meant I regularly found listening instead of contributing. It was my luck these friends were kind and happy to entertain quizzical looks from me, and what might have seemed like noobish questions.

I have since developed a little more interest in moving pictures. Parts of that education have allowed me to name every Christopher Nolan’s movie now. Though I cannot say I have watched all of them, the ones I have watched impressed me at a very deep level. Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy redefined Batman into a serious superhero movie, that could spark serious discussion of watch-ifs, and the motives of each character. In The Dark Knight, the second installment of the trilogy, there is an application of game theory. His doing of Superman through Man of Steel raised the prestige of the superhero, after years of being dragged through the ditch on television. Inception is mind blowing, playing with my understanding of reality. I remember watching Momento when I was young, and did not understand it (due for a rewatch). Interstellar is amazing, and it redefined the appearance of black hole in the popular mind, and made everybody a modern lay physicist. The Prestige, I just love it, and the movie probably convinced Hugh Jackman that he could be more than just Wolverine (or Van Helsing). I thought Jackman grew after, in Les Misérables, in The Greatest Showman, and in Logan. As for Tenet, let us ignore it here.

Together with Dunkirk, I think his latest, Oppenheimer, are probably the least cerebral among the whole collection. The storyline is direct, and there is not much of a twist. That does not make both of them any less amazing.

But I think, what makes Oppenheimer stands out out of the two is its sheer noisiness. I may suffer from incomplete recollection to make a complete comparison, but I would venture to claim his latest does not give my ears a rest from the very beginning, right up to the successful test of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in the middle of the movie. For a movie that runs for three (freaking) hours, that is quite a long exposure. Not one second is there a pause. There is always background music, or it might better be described as loud pounding foreboding ambience music.

Combined with a fast paced story, and a dialogue that keeps going, it feels like watching a race car movie! When I was in the cinema watching it, my heart was beating faster than usual trying to match the tempo of the ambience music. It is a confusing feeling, given that Oppenheimer is a very talky movie that shows off its nerdiness by citing Einstein, Bohr, Teller, Feynman and several other big names, with the only big visual spectacle is the atomic bomb test explosion.

When the silence came, it came as a relief. But of course, seconds later, an even louder shockwave came afterwards.

And I watched Barbie afterwards. You should too. Your ears need that rest with happy songs.

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Pop culture Sci-fi

[2971] Of Imaginur and Vanilla Sky

There are several post-1990s Malaysian movies that really impressed me. I want to say Malay, but the heavy English-Malay mixed medium convinces me to use the label Malaysian instead. But very, very few if any plays with your mind the way Imaginur does.

Imaginur, showing at the movies now, starts with a relatively linear storyline. But what I noticed first was the aesthetics. Being a child of the 1990s, I love the aesthetics. Equipment and vehicles seen are all quaintly in the way the 1990s is. Old Macintosh, maybe Commodore 64 or something similar, and other machines with yellowing white exterior exposed too much to sunlight decorate the room in which the hero meets a medical expert. The hero drives a dulling white (or was it red?) 5th generation Corolla, with the same sunlight turns the car’s paintwork to the same color as the Macintosh, or Commodore 64, in that room, probably in Petaling Jaya. I actually want to say one of those depilated 1960s homes near LRT Bangsar, but I digress.

The settings, for much of the movie. tells you nothing about the time. You would assume it is in contemporary period. 2023 or somewhere thereabout. After all, the clues in the background suggests all characters appear to have a tough life. A struggling copyeditor not earning enough to buy a new car. A psychiatrist dismissed as a quack by the government and so, failing to get research grants. With so little money. he is unable to purchase decent computers and equipment; hey, government hospitals still use Windows 2000 after all. There are KTM Komuter station, and various MRT running through parts of Petaling Jaya. Yes, it all appears contemporary.

Then things get weird. A Groundhog Day-like loop happens. And then another loop. And another. Each storyline reloops itself, except there are minor changes to it. It is as if there is an unreliable narrator telling the story repeatedly, and the protagonist realizes there is something wrong with his reality. He thinks he is losing his mind.

It keeps going several rounds, making it all confusingly intriguing, that you get suck into it, trying to solve a puzzle. What the fuck is happening?

I have seen similar puzzle before. The presence of a mind machine reminds me of anime Paprika. But Paprika is not a puzzle Inception is, a movie that borrows heavily from the former. I want to draw parallel with Inception, but my mind brings to a time long ago when I found myself watching Vanilla Sky on one miserable snowy Minneapolis night.

Yes, Imaginur plays with your mind the way Vanilla Sky does.

I exited the cinema, humming (really, singing) Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill, because I was convinced Imaginur messed up my mind the way Vanilla Sky did. And I like Vanilla Sky.