Ehh... nope

I usually review things I've seen all the way through, and I thought it would be fun to talk about the things I've noped out on recently. As you can imagine I've been watching a lot of stuff. I'll do some more positive reviews next.

Jessica Jones, Season 3. This was sort of disappointing because I felt like S2 built on and was somewhat better than S1. When you're centering an antihero - in this case an alcoholic who really doesn't want to be a hero - there are always challenges. But the cast was interesting and they did some hard-good things, so OK. Season 3, though... ugh. I gave up because I basically hated everyone. Five or six episodes in everyone is being awful to everyone else and there's just nobody to like and no reason to care if any of them crash and burn.

Bojack Horseman. Didn't even make it through one episode of this. It came highly recommended by several Arisians who, I guess, just have very different senses of humor from me. I found none of it funny; the main character is a raging asshole and again there's nobody to care about, nobody to root for. I don't feel like it's worth my time to watch someone be nasty to others.

Breaking Bad. I really wanted to like this one but it was tough going. Made it through five episodes where I thought they dragged out a number of things that should've been resolved more quickly, but fine. I gave up at the start of 6. The deal-breaker for me was the main character's constant lying. I couldn't see a motivation for it. I thought they did a good job of exploring why a person with potentially terminal cancer would make certain (bad) choices but I just don't grok - and cease to care about - a person who is married to a partner long enough to raise a child to teenager-hood and yet has separate bank accounts and no problem just flat-out lying about crucial stuff.

Altered Carbon:Resleeved. An animated one-shot set in the universe of Altered Carbon. In fact, it's just a rehash of plot elements that the live series did so much better. It's formulaic and copycat. The live series dives deeply into what it means to have a personal relationship with a human when that human can wear any body, and what it means even to be human in a world with effective immortality and sentient AIs. The cartoon has none of that - it's just an attempt to do action anime with characters and settings some audience will recognize. BO-RING.

Black Mirror. Another one that came highly recommended. I watched two episodes. One featured a lot of pointless humiliation and ... just, why? The other walked right up to the line of exploring gender identity and attraction and then veered away because Reasons. Also, spending 60 minutes watching something that would've been fixed in five minutes if adult people had used their adult words to talk to their close adult partners is so very NOT my thing. I dislike how much modern entertainment turns around infidelity to begin with, but seriously talk to each other. I almost shouted at the screen, never a good sign.

We interrupt your reviews for some sad (music) news

The NY Times is reporting that Bill Withers has died (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/arts/music/bill-withers-dead.html) at age 81. Withers was the master - three-time Grammy winner - of what I always called "rhythm & soul". It's a kind of soul singing with a strong beat in the music, rather than just in the voices as you find in more traditional soul.

I always tear up hearing "Lean on Me", so let me share these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOZ-MySzAac - the original
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZR4cVE0Htw - the Glee! cover

I am still surprised this song is so short:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PeyzXvvdmw - "Ain't No Sunshine" with full orchestration

And maybe a little happier something to end with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEy6MGu3bIA - "Just the Two of Us" which shows how rhythm & soul drove early disco

Double shot of identity fiction

I recently saw Her and I want to talk about it and Altered Carbon at the same time because there are interesting similarities. I'm going to avoid spoilers here but feel free to comment as you like.

In "Her", writer/director Spike Jonze gives us an interesting premise: what if you had an AI (they call it an operating system) that was theoretically designed to meet your every (personal) need. Wouldn't it be better if it was intelligent to understand your needs better? And if it was intelligent, what might happen?

I shied away from this film for a while because I was afraid that it was going to go in the "robot slave" camp, of which Hollywood has produced too many. It does not, even a little. "Her" is a film I rank with Lost in Translation as a unique exploration of humanity and human relationships. I expect it will bear re-watching. 4.5/5 stars, down from 5 because I was reminded of the ending I disliked.

The casting is also brilliant. Joaquin Phoenix is our protagonist, a lonely man who struggles to keep relationships and unexpectedly develops one with this AI. Phoenix is awkward without being embarrassing or buffoonish. He's good at what he does, and people aren't his strong suit. The AI is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. This is a great choice because she is someone visually well-known so it's easy to imagine her speaking these lines and she's conventionally very attractive so I immediately see how Theodore (Phoenix's character) can visualize her as an attractive woman even though her on-screen presence is limited to an audio device. The choice never to visualize Samantha - the name given to Johansson's AI - is particularly good. If you are at all a fan of radio plays/podcasts you know how well sound can be used to convey even subtle things. I can't think of another Hollywood film where that has been done so well.

This set-up works especially well when Samantha begins to develop a real personality and to drive things. She has desires; she's petulant. She's not just there to please Theodore in a trivial sense. She pleases him by being a 'real' person really interested in him, his life, his activities. She misses him when he's away, just as he misses being away from her. The movie posits this as a relationship with an AI but it's a lot like I imagine a relationship might be between people who are separated by necessary distance. Imagine Samantha and Theodore as people on opposite sides of an uncrossable war zone and you'd get a very similar story, at least at first. This brings us to the question of what it means to be human. We know Samantha is computer code, but she relates as a human.

Now let me jump to Altered Carbon. I promised to write this up but never did, so a bit of background first. I really liked the novel and its premise. Season 1 of the show took a lot from that source material and did wonderful things with it, if you don't mind on-screen graphic violence. Also, nudity. The core premise is that on traveling to other worlds humans discover an apparently long-gone alien species that had developed technology to encode a mind into an implanted device, as well as allow the encoded minds to be cast between these devices, at supra-light speeds. These devices - stacks - become the real representation of a person and the physical body becomes just a sleeve. Organic damage can still be repaired; destruction of the stack becomes "real death". Imprisonment means putting your stack "on ice" for a period of time; your sleeve gets rented out to pay your debts.

Rich people can pay to have their stacks backed up and their bodies cloned, effectively becoming immortal. The class of meths (from Methuselah) are this reality's 1% with all the vices and deviances you'd expect. The series protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is the last Envoy, one of a class of highly trained rebels whose rebellion was crushed long ago. A meth brings Kovacs back and in exchange for Kovacs' services, this meth arranges to have Kovacs' record expunged and his crimes pardoned. In Season One Joel Kinnaman, who you might remember from Suicide Squad (Rick Flag), plays Kovacs' sleeve.

He's very good and he's surrounded by a great cast, including Dichen Lachman as Reileen Kawahara, the stunning Martha Higareda as Detective Kristin Ortega, and Renée Elise Goldsberry as Quellcrist Falconer, the woman who founded the resistance movement that comes to be called Quellists, and who trained the Envoys. In Season 2 the sleeve is played by Anthony Mackie, who is just awesome, Goldsberry reprises her role, and Higareda is replaced by Simone Missick as Trepp, a bounty hunter with a heart. I loved Missick's work on Luke Cage and she's every bit as good here.

The writing is quite good, with Season 2 picking up themes and ideas from Season One but not being a strict repetition. Again, Kovacs is hired by a meth and again things go wrong but in ways that fill in much backstory and allow characters to develop. Also, the ending of S2 is just *chef's kiss* perfect in that I totally didn't see it coming but as soon as it revealed I was like "oh, of COURSE they could do that" because it lined up very neatly with the things that had come before.

Altered Carbon also features intelligent AIs, like "Her" does. Most of these AIs are created to serve people for specific things. There's a class of AIs that manages human-centric facilities like hotels and nightclubs, another class that serves archaeologists on dig sites, and presumably more. There's a subtle class system in place in that even the lower-class humans don't seem to treat the AIs as equals and the AIs associate mostly with each other. They're long-lived and tend not to get attached to humans, who do still have comparatively short lifespans. Chris Conner plays Poe, a hotel AI with a quirky Edgar Allen Poe fetish, who gets attached to Kovacs and ends up playing pivotal parts in both S1 and S2. Poe and some of the other AIs form friendships with humans, and it's left open (so far at least) how far the emotional relationships might go. Clearly Poe has emotional attachments to a couple people as the seasons unfurl, and it's also clear that the AIs have emotional relationships to each other.

Where "Her" zooms in close on the relationship of one (human) person to one AI (person) and asks us to see them both as people growing to love each other, Altered Carbon also asks us to imagine what it's like to relate to one person who has multiple bodies over time. There's a brilliantly painful scene in S1 during which a relative whose sleeve died is "spun up" to join the family for holidays but since the family is not well-off they have to use whatever sleeve is available. Still, that's "Grandma" even though she looks like a thug now and the family behave as if this was normal. It's a little creepy and yet so very effective.

There you go - two pieces of fiction that dive way into the notion of what it means to be human/to be a person, each excellent though very different.