I’m still not entirely sure if this project which “aims to spread human ride robots” is in earnest or some kind of satirical sci fi art concept. Sometimes in Japan it’s hard to tell. It’s also entirely possible for any given thing to be both. I think “both” is probably the answer here although if it is a joke or has jokey elements, then it’s a joke carried out with unusual thoroughness and commitment. Well, unusual if you’re not Japanese, anyway. Obviously as usual any humour, intended or otherwise, has been missed by 90% of the lumpencommentariat on YouTube. As I’ve pointed out before, like the British the Japanese have an international reputation for being somehow both joyless stiffs and unpredictably eccentric, but in fact both nations across all social classes share a deep affinity for daft, surreal, mocking humour that doesn’t necessarily register in the USA, or with their neighbours in mainland Europe/mainland Asia respectively.
If you’re reading this at work you can visit the comprehensive and quite pretty Suidobashi Heavy Industry site to design your own Kuratas. My effort can be seen in the picture above, a $1.8 million/¥190,813,241/€1.38 million super-kawaii ‘Hello Killy’ model that would be ideal for attending a lipsync meet-the-fans appearance by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu at a shopping mall or annihilating the last cowering remnants of the human race on the orders of Skynet. Again, perhaps both at the same time.
The people behind Suidobashi definitely have tongue in cheek for parts of the video below, one example being the unsettling and slightly deranged “smile shot” function at about 3:00. The robot will also hit targets only “from time to time.” On the other (robotic) hand, the prototype seems to be an actual and quite impressive thing that the artist has really built. It appears you can buy one from Amazon. You can also buy– via the related purchases on the same page– an 8.6 metre long Stegosaurus. Obviously.
Minor spoiler warning because this is a discussion of Christopher Nolan’s new film Interstellar, if that kind of thing causes you angst. Nothing that wouldn’t be seen a mile off by any intelligent viewer of the trailer or the film itself, nor is there anything that wouldn’t be seen coming at interstellar distances (GET IT?) by any science fiction fan.
Thanks for all your help, sarcastic robot!
Interstellar is the story of three middle-aged white rappers who talk and gesticulate into a fish eye lens while a giant octopus monster fights a huge robot… no, wait… this is the plot of the video for Intergalactic.
The real Interstellar is a really well-crafted film with some beautiful imagery and design. Despite being an overlong and self-indulgent movie, the nearly three hour running time doesn’t feel like you’ve been wasting your life, despite parts of it seriously dragging on and outstaying their welcome. Certainly it’s better for a film like this– i.e. one that tries to be at least somewhat thoughtful and credits its audience with a little intelligence– to be hyped as the film of the moment than it is for utter shit like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or some ghost train jump scare horror movie to dominate the landscape. Apparently working out how to depict some of Interstellar‘s spacetime phenomena has directly helped the understanding of real astrophysics, and there can’t be many films or film makers who can say that.
The bad news:
Interstellar is actually about an intergalactic space mission via a wormhole, so its title is wrong for a start. Probably we have The Beastie Boys to blame for making it impossible that somebody as pathologically serious as Nolan could use it as a title for his film. On the evidence of his films to date, including Interstellar, he and his brother obviously also have major parental abandonment issues that they should work out with a therapist so they can move on with some new ideas in their scriptwriting. Like all of Nolan’s films it’s far too long and somebody ought to have the guts to make him lose at least 45 minutes from his running times. It’s ironic that Interstellar mentions relativistic time dilation so much, because each one of the scenes involving action or movement seemed to go on for longer than the entire three hours I was sitting in the auditorium, and not in a good way. He is not a great editor, or director of editors. Inception played to this weakness, or at least masked it, because time being stretched out was part of the plot. In general, though, action sequences shouldn’t make you want to look at a clock to see when they’re going to end.
Matt Damon in Interstellar: “They all think I’m crazy, but I know better. It is not I who are crazy. It is I who am MAD! Can’t you hear them? Didn’t you see the crowd?”
From the moment he appears on the screen, Matt Damon is obviously suffering from the SPACE MADNESS that countless good, bad and indifferent sci fi films have hammered to death as a plot device, not to mention it being a fixture of Star Trek, and every other sci fi show getting around to it eventually, as satirised perfectly in the eponymous Ren & Stimpy cartoon. No amount of Nolan solemnity can divert from the fact that this character is not very far away from floating around raving and eating soap like an animated chihuahua, especially with Chekhov’s manically disassembled robot (cf.The Black Hole) prominently featured just before Damon’s character appears. The carefully described relativistic physics and kitchen sink futurism of the first two thirds are unceremoniously airlocked in a ridiculously anthropocentric and cheesy final act because apparently love can break spacetime in your favour. A black hole is no biggie if you do a Peter Pan and simply believe enough, although Interstellar is still about 90% less saccharine than the similar Gravity. It’s not quite as logical or realistic as the All You Need is Love denouement of Yellow Submarine, though.
Michael Caine. Again. We get it, Chris, you want him to be your dad. Take it somewhere private.
The entire film could be compared to a pizza with lots of toppings; it’s clearly one item, quite a delicious one in fact, but it’s still basically junk food and all the pieces it’s made from are unavoidably obvious. To mention just a few: Transcendental space trips from 2001. Also HAL 9000 and the black Monolith from the same film, mashed up into a sardonic cuboid Jonathan Ives iRobot. On the subject of clunky, sardonic robots the most direct and therefore laughable comparison is again with Disney’s atrocious The Black Hole, but there’s also Moon, Wall-E, Forbidden Planet, K-9 from Doctor Who and even, shit, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Oh, hey, there’s the scene from Aliens where Ripley wakes up on a space station. There’s the space hangar from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, et al. I wonder if somebody’s going to sneak in and steal one of the spacecraft because the hangar has inexplicably lax security? The barren inscrutability of alien planets from both radically different film versions of Solaris– somehow– plus a large dollop of the latter Soderbergh version’s 12 step-esque emphasis on transcendence through hitting rock bottom. There’s the romantically run down dustbowl near future farm house from Looper. Blatant self-plagiarisation of the gravity-shifting punch up, upside down buildings and nested timelines from Inception, though with greatly diminished returns.
There are even some large, distinct and undigested chunks of Farscape, although I doubt Nolan would ever admit to watching Farscape. He did use a Muppet as part of the main cast, though (Anne Hathaway). She urgently needs to learn more than two facial expressions, but she deserves some sympathy for having to deliver the mostly incredibly cheesy speech about love, in which both the love and the speech itself come from absolutely nowhere. It’s one of several sermons that bring the film to a screeching halt, but she does the best she can with it. Not last and not least– sardonic cuboid robots preserve us– there’s a last act story beat involving a deliberate plunge into a black hole, ripped whole from The Black Hole. At least there isn’t a wild west style shootout with laser guns.
It’s a tribute to Nolan’s strengths as a film maker that Interstellar is at least worth slightly more than the sum of its parts. It would just be nice if those parts were assimilated enough that it didn’t feel like a stumbling Frankenstein’s monster made of sci fi tropes and not the more philosophical, internal exploration it’s obviously aspiring to be. The same plot could have led to a wonderful, genuinely moving film under the directorship of somebody who approached it as magical realism instead of having the mentality of a kid playing with toy spaceships.
I’ve just rationalised (in most cases reducing) the prices of my books and ebooks so they’re consistent across like formats. Since I’m based in Britain and price things in pounds the prices may still translate into odd amounts in foreign currency, but they will at least now translate oddly and consistently.
Career Suicide is my memoir of working as an artist and film maker for most of my adult life, while experiencing almost every misfortune except popularity. I’ve been told it’s funny, a good read and it contains valuable insights on the art world’s foibles and failings. And slightly less valuable insights into my own. My adventures in gonzo art criticism continue at my other blog, of the same name.
Uncanny Valley collects my published short stories from various anthologies and magazines circa 1996-2006: among other things, a magic talking dog castrates the Estuary Gaffer Tape Rapist with his teeth, a robot maid trades housework for sabotage, and the last living intellectual escapes from his cage at the zoo and goes on a rampage of contemplation…
Normal nonsense will be resumed shortly, and if you’re on the front page you can scroll down to see the newest posts as normal. In common with most bloggers I do this in my free time with no great expectations because I enjoy it and because I relish the knowledge that thousands of people share my interest in the things that I post, and probably also because I’m a bit of an attention whore. As many of you probably do, I use an ad blocker and I tend to switch right off when people try to sell me stuff or talk to me about my responsibilities, so I understand that some of you might not want to hear this little lecture from me.
Also in common with most bloggers I have to make a living and I rarely make any money from blogging, although in my case one of my day jobs is also writing so sometimes I do get paid tiny amounts for blogging elsewhere. But the fact remains that there’s no such thing as free; everything you get on the internet cost somebody something, at some time. I know very well from the last hellish eighteen months I’ve just battled through that times are hard, but hard times for most of us make it more important– not less– that we should all try to support people whose work we like, whether it’s paying for a download or CD of a band we like, donating to the programmer of the app we use all the time, helping out with somebody’s Kickstarter project, or– yes– by purchasing a book by a writer whose work we appreciate.
Know what I mean?
Career Suicide is my memoir of working as an artist and film maker for most of my adult life, while experiencing almost every misfortune except popularity. I’ve been told it’s funny, a good read and it contains valuable insights on the art world’s foibles and failings. And slightly less valuable insights into my own. My adventures in gonzo art criticism continue at my other blog, of the same name.
Uncanny Valley collects my published short stories from various anthologies and magazines circa 1996-2006: among other things, a magic talking dog castrates the Estuary Gaffer Tape Rapist with his teeth, a robot maid trades housework for sabotage, and the last living intellectual escapes from his cage at the zoo and goes on a rampage of contemplation…
They’re not expensive, they’re professionally designed and copy edited so they look a hundred times better than your average self published bunch of shit, and they’re available in various print and electronic formats. Even the Apple Store, although they had a bit of a wobble at first because they interpreted mention of a rapist getting his nuts bitten off as “erotica.” Really, Apple? Really? This blog isn’t stopping, I’m not on strike, the books sell OK already and I’ll still love you even if you don’t buy something after I’ve blatantly whored myself out like this.
But please do buy something, if you can afford it, and do the same for other people whose work you regularly enjoy and follow. Me love you long time if you do.
… like a startled moose, about to be hit by a truck, in which there is a considerably more startled driver? … like a disco Nefertiti luchador? …. like somebody’s making a transgender blacksploitation biopic of Aleister Crowley? … like I really need to stop taking so much coke and agreeing to these completely mental photo shoots?
This ridiculous picture comes to you courtesy of the fact that I am still researching my disco show for next year. I will bus stop, hustle, YMCA, roller disco, etc. and so will you. Be afraid.
Semi-related note/semi-related eulogy
When Donna Summer died earlier this year, (Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch) Chaka Khan (… Chaka Khan… Chaka Khan) offered this non sequitur tribute to her late friend:
Tausend dank, Chaka! You should get yourself over to Germany, love. There’s loads of women who speak German over there, even with the weird stipulation that they have to be black. What about Boney M, why don’t you give them a call?
Semi-related Afrofuturist error of judgement made by the production team working on Doctor Who in 1979
Doctor What the Fuck?
I believe we were meant to take this look seriously. See also “Grandad, why was there a disco backlash?” In this story the Daleks take the “disco sucks” mentality to the Nth degree, devoting considerable effort to exterminating these Egyptian disco androids. Although the Movellans were armed only with spandex catsuits, a selection of dayglo sex toys and a limited repertoire of stilted dialogue, apparently they beat the Daleks in the end. Henceforth the Daleks grudgingly admitted that they’d been listening in secret to the Bee Gees, Sylvester and Gloria Gaynor all along and actually quite fancied having their head turrets refurbished to resemble disco balls.
If you like this blog and have been intrigued, titillated, surprised or disgusted by anything you've seen here then please consider sending a few £/€/$/¥ etc. my way by getting one of my books. They're written by the same person who writes this blog, so you will like them too. They're available in print, or as ebooks for every existing type of reader and tablet. You can also tip my films on Vimeo, if you want. Thanks.
ADOXOBLOG 