My rating: *
Imdb link
All I can say is that Joan Chen and David Warner must have been paid a lot to appear in this shocker. It’s a totally amateurish cyberpunk science fiction ‘thriller’ filmed in Singapore about evil corporate goings on in virtual reality. The acting and scripting are wooden to say the least.
My rating: ***
Imdb link
This live action film starring Charlize Theron and New Zealand actor Marton Csokas, bears no resemblance to the MTV anime series from which it is derived, apart from the names of the characters and places and its science fiction setting. The costumes and sets are beautiful to look at but the film is really of not much general interest beyond that. What made it for me, however, is the way the love story between the two main characters Aeon Flux and Trevor Goodchild is handled. Goodchild allows Aeon to take the initiative and reverses the usual power balance of romantic relationships by not taking on the usual male role. He is soft and yielding rather than domineering in the relationship – even if in the public social sphere he occupies a position as one of the city’s leaders. Csokas mentions in an interview that this was a deliberate acting choice on his part – and he plays it in a satisfyingly subtle manner. It really works and highlights by its difference from the norm just how used we are to seeing entrenched gender roles and hierarchies playing out in romantic relationships.
Incidentally Csokas also plays one of the main roles in a wonderful but extremely bleak 2007 Australian film Romulus my father (2007) which I will write about later.
My rating: ***
Imdb link
A film from the pen of Neil Gaiman set in an amusingly modernised fairytale world. What really made this film for me, however, was the performance of Robert de Niro as a cross-dressing pirate. All bluster, walk the plank and aaargh me hearties to the exterior world, in the privacy of his cabin this pirate is a kind-hearted man with a love of fine (female) clothes, culture and music. He is anxious to preserve his reputation as a ferocious take-no-prisoners marauder however – a reputation much admired and upheld by his motley crew. He only learns late in the piece that his crew are well aware and perfectly tolerant of his proclivities and quite happy to play along with the charade.
The theme of a menacing, or alternately bumbling, public persona which is used to disguise a heroic, cultured or highly intelligent real person is one that has always fascinated me. Characters such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Pimpernel Smith (from a 1941 film both starring and directed by Lesley Howard), or Severus Snape from Harry Potter are all characters who fit the bill. Somebody who does this in real life is Christopher Walken. His menacing screen persona belies his mild but sometimes eccentric conduct off screen.
Michel Foucault. (1994) [1967]. Qui êtes-vous Professeur Foucault? In Dits et écrits: 1954-1988. Vol I. D. Defert, F. Ewald & J. Lagrange (Eds.). Paris: Gallimard. (pp. 601-620).
Michel Foucault. (1999) [1967]. Who are you, Professor Foucault? In Religion and Culture. J. R. Carrette (Ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. (pp. 87-103).
The page numbers below refer to the French edition.
Foucault argues that the polemical force of his work comes from showing that things that are considered as purely contemporary are very much a product of the past and of past ideas and practices that people thought were dead and gone. (p. 607) For example, in The Order of Things it was a matter of looking at the historically specific nineteenth century origins of an object called ‘Man’. The human sciences which see themselves as thoroughly contemporary are centred around this nineteenth century concept. Advocates and practitioners in the late 1960s and early 1970s of some of these human sciences were none too pleased at Foucault’s exposure of their historical roots .
In order to understand what is going on ‘today’, Foucault argues that we need to undertake a historical excavation of how the current universe of thought, discourse and culture came about (p. 613).
In view of the aforementioned polemics around Foucault’s work, I think another lolcat might be in order.
Posted on my site michel-foucault.com
Interviewer: Structuralism was not born recently. It was around at the beginning of the century. Yet it is only today that people have started talking about it. For the general public you are the priest of ‘structuralism’. Why?
Foucault: At the very most I am the altar boy of structuralism. Let’s say I have rung the bell, the faithful have genuflected and the unbelievers have uttered cries of protest. But the service began a long time ago. The real mystery was not celebrated by me. […] One can talk of a kind of structuralist philosophy which could be defined as the activity which allows one to diagnose what today is.
[Michel Foucault. (1994) [1967]. La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘aujourd’hui’. In Dits et écrits: 1954-1988. Vol I. D. Defert, F. Ewald & J. Lagrange (Eds.). Paris: Gallimard, p. 581. This passage trans. Clare O’Farrell]
Random thoughts in response
These remarks are most interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, this passage indicates a certain degree of playfulness in Foucault’s work which usually emerges in the form of subtle irony. In this instance however the fact that he is having fun is clearly on the table.
Secondly, from these remarks, it is quite obvious that in 1967 Foucault was perfectly happy to allow himself to be described as belonging to the structuralist movement, contrary to perceptions in the secondary literature that he was never associated with this movement and had always strenuously rejected it. This perception is of course the result of Foucault’s later pronouncements on structuralism – particularly in the English preface to The Order of Things where he notes:
In France, certain half-witted ‘commentators persist in labelling me a ‘structuralist’. I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of the methods, concepts or key terms that characterize structural analysis. I should be grateful if a more serious public would free me from a connection that certainly does me honour, but that I have not deserved. There may well be certain similarities between the works of the structuralists and my own work. It would hardly behove me, of all people, to claim that my discourse is independent of conditions and rules of which I am very largely unaware, and which determine other work that is being done today. But it is only too easy to avoid the trouble of analysing such work by giving it an admittedly impressive-sounding, but inaccurate, label.
[Foucault (1970) [1966]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Tr. A. M. S. Smith. London: Tavistock. p. xiv.]
Foucault distanced himself from the structuralist movement in so far as some forms of structuralism sought to construct universal methodological templates which could explain every and any situation. Foucault’s own approach is resolutely historical – one only discern patterns of order in events that have already taken place and these patterns cannot then be applied to describe future configurations of events.
The third interesting point here is that we see the beginnings of what Foucault came to formulate as ‘the history of the present’. This is the idea that one can practise historical and philosophical analysis in order to examine what is happening now, to examine how the current ‘cultural conjuncture’ (p. 582) works to perpetuate particular relations of power through a variety of institutions, and the various networks of social prohibitions and limits which bound current society. The idea is to draw attention to how relations of power and social regulations operate and decide which are acceptable or unacceptable in the current context. One of the problems is that people get so used to a certain configuration that they take it for granted and fail to see the injustices it perpetuates. One needs to emphasise that Foucault is not advocating the abolition of all social regulation, simply that we need to keep a constant eye on what is going on.
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
My rating: ****
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins
This is the seminal foundational text in terms of academic studies of fandom. Even if it was published in 1992 before the explosion of internet fandom and a more mainstream (even if still grudging) recognition of fan practices, it is still chock full of useful and current ideas.
This well written and highly readable book has done a great service in single handedly promoting the possibility of academic fan studies an invitation which has been taken up by numbers of others since.
My rating: ***
Imdb link
This film is a collection of science fiction clichés. The style is pure Matrix and the writers have gone the whole hog and recognised the long black coats of the heroes of The Matrix as priestly soutanes, calling their wearers Clerics. It is the job of the Clerics – Fahrenheit 451 style – to incinerate all artefacts of culture – books, paintings, music, pets (!) anything which can provoke an emotional response and therefore lead to wars. The voice and face of the obligatory Big Brother figure (or ‘Father’ in this case) which appears on big screens everywhere is the always excellent Sean Pertwee departing from the cliché in so far as he is a fairly young and good-looking dictator. Angus McFadyen is also a young and good-looking Vice-Counsel (acting as Regent for Father) of the clerics. Yet for all the clichés, the film works and looks great and the ‘gun kata’ fights with Christian Bale in the central role are very aesthetic.
My rating: *
Imdb link
It is very hard to know what this low budget science fiction film is actually about. It involves two engineers who develop a backyard time travel device in their spare time. Through using the machine their time travelling doubles develop a life of their own (I think!) and something, but it is not clear what, goes wrong. I like elliptical films but I found this one absolutely incomprehensible and drearily tedious. It is also a mystery why it won a prize at the Sundance Festival in 2004 and why so many of the user reviews on the imdb are so positive.
Cheryl Harris, Alison Alexander (eds). Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1998.
My rating:***
Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity by Cheryl Harris
This is a rather useful edited collection about various media fandoms and fan practices. There is the usual stuff on slash included. Of course the book’s appearance in 1998 means that it was published before the real take off of online fandom.
I particularly enjoyed (non slash focused) chapter 10 by Cinda Gillalan on the TV series War of the Worlds fandom and its rejection of the hero codified by the makers of the series as being attractive to female viewers in favour of a character in the series with more marginal attributes.
My rating: ***
Imdb link
This is an entertaining time travel thriller where a butterfly accidentally trodden on by a time traveller in prehistoric times leads to catastrophic results for the present. It is a race against time, re-evolution, monstrous plants and dinosaur-like animals for our scientist heroes to get back to the past and undo the damage. Nobody is taking things too seriously in this film and it is an enjoyable but forgettable ride. Ben Kingsley enjoys himself hamming it up outrageously as an evil corporate money obsessed mogul.
The film is an updated and very loose version of a short story of the same name published by Ray Bradbury in Colliers Magazine in 1952. On the origins of the popular term ‘butterfly effect’ used in chaos theory see the Wikipedia article. Bradbury’s story helped to popularise the metaphor.
Refracted Input 