People complain about AI slop – but it is really good at generating unsettling concept pieces such as this one. There’s even courses on how to make these kinds of shorts.
“You were always a rounding error in the equation of eternity”
The 1993 movie Sneakers (currently free on Youtube) is one of my favorite movies. It has an amazing cast and one of the better soundtracks I’ve run across. It is one of the first great movies about hackers – and it’s largely very accurate for the 90’s era technology. Back when phone phreaking, cracking and copying games, pirate BBS boards, satellite TV hacking, building computer viruses, and breaking into early computer systems was all the rage.
One of the scenes in the movie involves a mathematician talking about large number theory in relation to cryptography. I took such a grad course on cryptography at Purdue back in the 90’s; and remember listening to his prattle about Artin maps, prime factorization, and a possible breakthrough of Gaussian proportions. Little did I know, however, his little diatribe and the slides were written by no other than Leonard Adleman – a 2002 Turing Award winner – as one of the creators of RSA encryption.
He recounts his interaction with Larry Lasker who approached him to consult on the movie and write the scene. Here Adleman shares his memories:
He told me that there would be a scene wherein a researcher would lecture on his mathematical work regarding a breakthrough in factoring – and hence in cryptography. Larry asked if I would prepare the slides and words for that scene. I liked Larry and his desire for verisimilitude, so I agreed. Larry offered money, but I countered with Robert Redford – I would do the scene if my wife Lori could meet Redford.
I worked hard on the scene. The “number field sieve,” (the fastest factoring algorithm currently known) is mentioned along with a fantasy about towers of number fields and Artin maps. I was tempted to name the new breakthrough the “function field sieve,” — since I was actually working on a paper at the time which would later appear with that title – but I decided against it, for reasons which escape me now.
I made beautiful slides on my Mac. This took a great deal of time (graphics programs were not as user friendly as they are now) but I wanted the stuff to look impressive. As it turns out, Larry had them redrawn by hand by some guy on his crew – he said that hand drawn slides looked more realistic. Of course he was right – but I could have saved a lot computer time had I known in the first place.
Len Adleman
Le ravissement de Frank N Stein is a little art film made in 1982 before computer animation would have made the perspective drawing much easier. Today you could likely make this in an afternoon.
These sort of bizarre art films remind me of going to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The top floor had lots of random video shorts like this. It’s interesting what gets considered ‘art’ – and 99% of it is forgotten by the next year. Maybe that’s why we’re seeing the dramatic collapse of the art world.
One could point to the austere minimalism as an early form of Backrooms, but the Backrooms was inspired by the unease of liminal spaces and not this particular work.
The movie Sicario starts out and seems to indicate Kate is the movie’s protagonist. We see the story start through her eyes. But we experience people, operations, and goals that are confusing and often very violent – what is going on? As Film Thought Project points out – it’s because she is NOT the protagonist. This storytelling method is meant to draw us into a familiar story in a very different way. Instead of the classic Hollywood narrative that makes the protagonist the center of the attention, we find out she is brought in almost as a piece of necessary but meaningless equipment so that others can do the things they want. The plan was started long before she was involved. The movie isn’t even sympathetic to our, or her, confusion as the real story unfolds.
This method of following someone who is in the dark to only to later figure out they are minor/unimportant to the real, much bigger story is something I first saw in 90’s era Japanese anime. I remember how many times it unsettled and confused me. American movies almost always follow the plucky young protagonist’s adventure as they grow through the challenges in the story. I think that’s why many people find 80’s and 90’s era Japanese anime so confusing. What’s going on seems arbitrary and things change and twist with no seeming reason.
I remember thinking that besides the bigger story arc it tells, this kind of storytelling mechanism shows you the experience of being a person who is a cog. I think this mirrors the average person’s experience in many highly authoritarian cultures. Many Asian cultures have extremely strong social norms about following and not questioning superiors or orders – even if they cost you your life. Leaders do not ask your opinions or input, invite you to the planning meeting, nor do they bother wasting time to explain themselves or the goals. Your job is to carry your orders and job out at peak efficiency – for good or ill.
Only later do these people even brush elbows with the real people in power when the plan fails or succeeds. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Berserk, Psycho Pass, and many other anime fit this bill. Blade Runner 2049 does this when you find out that K is not the protagonist he imagines himself to be. There’s a sense of disillusionment that hits very different – often leaving the viewer with a sense of powerlessness, confusion, and anxiety. Your life is controlled by forces you don’t have access too.
How Stories Work with Jay Sherer shares how the story works from a writer/director’s perspective. When you see how well these narrative structures and writing are done – you see why most modern movies (superhero movies, cheap series cash grabs on Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, and Preditor series for example) are so bad.
Here’s a great side-by-side of how the 2015 James Bond movie opening for Spectre was filmed.
Man – they don’t make musicals or movies this good anymore
Sean Cunningham, the director of Friday the 13th, is very vocal that Friday the 13th’s theme is not the one that many pundits and horror ‘experts’ have claimed – namely that “sinners must be punished”. They often cite the fact many of the teens that are engaging in sex or other activities die, while the one that did not survives. Instead, Cunningham saw the whole story as “bad things happening to good people for no apparent reason.” He also rejected Gene Siskel’s complaint that the film was “misogynistic”. Cunningham said the film is not meant to be sexist, and both males and females get punished equally in this movie.
John Carpenter was similarly dismissive when critics complained that Halloween was pushing an old testament puritanical sex-must-be-punished-by-death moral code on the audience. Debra Hill, his co-producer and screenwriter on the project said in response: “I think people are reading moral and sociological messages into a simple horror story that has no agenda to lecture the audience in any way.”
So, all those pundits and critics that say early horror movies were puritanical are just projecting their own interpretations on something that was never intended to be the case.
I recently had a flashback to my own college days when The Gamers movie from Dead Gentlemen came up in my Youtube feed. No series has captured the personalities and real-life nonsense of 90’s and early 2000’s DnD playing with friends so well.
Sit down and give them a watch. This is what the internet was originally designed for. Not monetization and influencer videos, but sharing passions and having fun.
One of their follow-on movies:
Even in mid-2000’s people waxed nostalgic about old DnD:
and of course – the original Summoner Geeks:
A wonderful example of comparing how Hollywood portrays things and the way real life people who lived through the actual events tell the story.