WAS1 Productions

“The Daleks are your servants…”

The Daleks with their simple pepper pot construction and modulated voices are probably the most-iconic monsters of the Doctor Who British television series. They could be argued to be one of the best villains, even given that it took them thirty some years to learn how to navigate a simple set of stairs. Even so, they have always been my favorites. It doesn’t matter that one of their mechanical appendages is a toilet plunger, the rotating dome with its single eye stock and the laser weapon always fill me with equal parts excitement and dread,

The Daleks are a wonderful metaphor for the ultimate fascists in their unceasing efforts to exterminate what they consider all inferior races. “Genesis of the Daleks,” a Tom Baker story from 1975 built upon this. It featured the science team and Davros’ secret police, decked out in black SS style uniforms, toiling away in a secret bunker to win an unending war. The World War Two allusions were obvious but they were backed up with a tight story, giving an interesting bit of retroactive-continuity to the cyborg menace. Read the rest of this entry »

I took a break from looking at dystopian futures to watch “Hidden Figures” a story from the promising and tumultuous time in history. The film chronicles three African-American women, working as “human computers” at their jobs providing NASA with rocket trajectory calculations in the beginning of the 1960s, the early days of the space race. As with all films based on true stories, it’s hard to know what is actual history and what is narrative license.

Certainly the work and achievements of Katherine G. Johnson (mathematician), Mary Jackson (engineer) and Dorothy Vaughan (supervisor and programmer of IBM electronic computers) are well known. It’s never sure how many of the details filling in between the facts are genuine or for story. I would like to the book the film was inspired on at some point to find out more of the picture.

Even understanding that history and narrative are usually different animals, and taking that into account. The film is interesting, engaging and entertaining. Besides the human interest and Civil Rights achievements, I also enjoyed seeing a world where space-flight mathematics are carried out on paper and blackboards, as the digital age and the first IBM computers were emerging on the scene. At one point Dorothy Vaughan happens upon a FORTRAN book and that made me smile, remembering my time using the language back in engineering school.

At times the film feels jovial in the face of the daily reminders of dealing with segregation, and in places the tone feels slightly off, but then again that conscious decision keeps the film from being dark and brooding. The mood is upbeat and the story instead focuses on the themes of achievements and progress. Confrontations happen, then the plot moves on. There are both allies and adversaries shown, and while things might be oversimplified for use of plot efficiency, the characters are all portrayed with some nuance and they feel human rather than as caricatures.

The film also shows a few instances where people end up rethinking the status quo, not from moral arguments, but from personal interactions or tangential experiences. Director Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner, doesn’t desegregate the bathrooms because it’s the just thing to do, he does it because it’s stupid and inefficient, and getting the launch and landing calculations completed are more important. I don’t know if those events actually played out as told, but it rings true to human nature.

Overall the pacing is snappy and the plot is tight, with the narrative moving between the characters’ personal and work lives as well as following NASA’s projects’ missions. The film makes good use of archival news footage for rocket launches added along the way, culminating in John Glenn’s historic Mercury 7 flight, with a familiar credits montage depicting what happens in the women’s careers to show the rest of the story.

Our alien overlords just tell it like it is… if you’re wearing the sunglasses.

Given the impending dumpster fire in Washington and the overall zeitgeist of the current news outlets and social media theses days, I have decided to entertain myself with science fiction. I’m planning a blog project to review dystopian films and literature as an escape and also a creative exercise. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it up, but I’m naming the project “Dystoporama 2017” and would love to make it a year-long project, if I have the stamina and attention span.

I watched “They Live” this past weekend. It’s a 1988 film directed by John Carpenter. I’d seen it twice before, but it has been probably eighteen years since the last viewing. It was pretty much as goofy and as fun as I remembered. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently went and saw the new animated movie “Sing”. It was no “Zootopia,” which of course is a high bar, but it was pretty good.

I liked how the world looked believable with all the different animals and they played around with the different species, like gags with fish jumping up a water ladder next to stairs. They played with size differences with the animals as well, like tall giraffes and a couple of small mice.

The animation was quite good and I liked the character designs, and laughed at some of the exaggerated long necks and bodies of the sheep and llamas.
The story was nice and it had some good character-driven plot. It was cute and had a lot of sweetness to it, which I appreciate. I’m happy I saw it.

I was thinking more about “Sing” today. I saw someone it to “Cats Don’t Dance,” which is fair as both movies feature a cast of funny animals putting on a musical show. What is interesting with “Sing” however, is that there is no actual villain in the film.

The premise of the show is to try and save a failing theater, which is a familiar trope, and while the bank wants to repossess the property if they don’t get their money, there isn’t someone, such as a rival business owner or developer, who say wants to tear it down and replace it with a mini-mall.

There is a chaotic element where a Frank Sinatra-esque mouse is pursued by wise-guy bears who he cheated out of gambling money, but for the most part the plot revolves around the characters facing their own issues. There’s the jilted porcupine struggling to find her own voice, the middle-aged pig housewife who wants to recapture some glory of her younger days, the elephant with crippling stage fright, the gorilla with father issues, and even the koala director who may be a lovable dreamer, but is also a huckster.

It’s refreshing to see a film where characters’ struggles and story arcs are enough without needing to invent villains. I’m reminded of another film where this was pointed out to me, in 2014’s “Chef.” It was nice to see a story where everyone was rooting for the main character and the journey about family, creative rediscovery an Americana road trip and celebration of food was enough without needing ridiculous manufactured drama. There are advisories in both films, but they serve to motivate the characters to something better, rather than needing to be the bad guys.

Normally I don’t do think pieces, but this bug got caught in my head and I wanted to share it. It’s a view for diversity representation that I think could resonate to many nerdy white dudes.

I’ve been thinking of the complaints of the diversity of actors in recent reboots/sequels to traditional films which have some people’s undies in a twist. When you’re a white dude, especially a young one, you don’t even think about how all media reflects your experiences, so seeing lady ghost-busters or Furiosa in Mad Max can shake things up.

My formative years were spent in one of the whitest states in the nation, but I think I have a good metaphor to show why wider representation is important. I remember being into obscure and nerdy things in high school and how wonderful it was to find my tribe, people who were into Doctor Who and who liked the B-52s or Devo and who introduced me to punk rock. Even so, I think I was the only person I knew who liked Rush until I went to college. Having people who appreciate and don’t make fun of the things you like is important.

Now given how important it is to find peers who are into the same things and who celebrate them with you, imagine if you were queer or trans, a person of color, or even a girl who wanted to play in the boys sci-fi sandbox. Think of how lonely that would be and why seeing someone who looks like you in the things you enjoy would be very empowering.