My Favorite Take

This blog is going to go back to "business as usual." Tomorrow. I felt like I couldn't just jump right back into my normal thing without first saying something about why I'm choosing to do that.

In my copious doomscrolling of the last 36-or-so hours, I've come upon hundreds of takes about the results of the U.S. presidential election. One in particular has resonated with me above all others:

There were no winners. We all lost. It's just that some of us aren't going to understand that until later.

The more I think about this, the more impressed I become about just how much is packed into that punchy summation.

The thing that really resonated with me on first blush is the whole "forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" tone of it. I have always felt that non-evangelicals and atheists understand and demonstrate Christian values more than the performative evangelical crowd. I believe that most voters did not cast their vote as a personal "fuck you" to me. (Though side note -- here in Colorado is evidence of around 921,000 losers who very much did.) A lot of voters, and absolutely a lot of non-voters, "knew not what they were doing."

There's clear proof of that in the results. Montana and Missouri passed ballot measures they think will protect abortion access, even as they elected a president almost certain to curtail it at a superseding federal level. North Carolina voters rather emphatically rejected a candidate for governor who clearly did not align with their values... while choosing for president a candidate who espoused all the same values of (and who explicitly endorsed) the reject. It seems to me that any split-ticket voters in these states "knew not what they were doing."

But back to the take:

There were no winners. We all lost. It's just that some of us aren't going to understand that until later.

As I pondered that even more, a new layer hit me -- one I'm really going to strive to embrace. Later. That word is carrying a lot of weight.

For one thing, nothing I say (no matter how long I might spend laboring on exactly how to say it) is going to change anyone's mind now. People are going to have to come to the realization of what has happened later. We've "fucked around." It's not time yet to "find out."

I believe that so much damage is about to be dealt to the United States that I question whether it can even be repaired within my lifetime. But... it's happening later. As in, literally, not today. For my own mental health (if nothing else), I think I must choose to squeeze every bit of joy out of the two-and-a-half months we still have before our newly-reelected, self-described "dictator on day one" takes office. There are going to be enough bad days to come without me giving potentially good days I have right now over to dread.

And so, to the best of my ability, I am choosing not to. Business as usual (for now, at least).

As for later, we'll all see.

"Health Care"

Ordinarily, I try to steer clear of politics here on the blog. But the "Health Care" bill being voted on in the U.S. Senate this week is a travesty. It will cost tens of millions of Americans their access to care, thanks to increased rates and changes allowing insurers to deny (or charge premiums to) people with preexisting conditions.

This really shouldn't be politically controversial. If you're pro-cancer patient death, I don't care if I'm offending you with this post.

For the rest of you, don't take for granted the talk in the news that this bill is "dead on arrival," that enough senators have already pledged to vote against it. With lives literally on the line, it simply shouldn't be left to chance. Especially not if you live in a state like Colorado where it seems possible to pressure a senator into doing the right thing. (It seems for too many that their conscience -- or the empty hole where a conscience should be -- isn't getting the job done.)

Call your senator!

"How do I do that?" you may ask. Here's one guide. There are many others. It only takes a few minutes. For even a slim chance it might make a difference, it's worth that time.

Tomorrow, back to your regularly scheduled pop culture stuff.

Competitive Endurance Tickling

In documentary film making, it's not uncommon for the director of a movie to start out with one intention only to wind up making an entirely different movie. But rarely is that experience so translated to the viewers in the finished product as with the unusual documentary Tickled.

David Farrier is a television reporter from New Zealand. He's the type of guy that does those "lighter side" segments that usually appear in the final 5 minutes of a TV newscast on a slow day. And he thought he was onto just another story when he stumbled onto the world of "competitive endurance tickling." I'm not sure if that's what you think it sounds like, but if you think it's young, athletic men holding each other down and forcibly tickling each other, then you're on the right track.

Farrier's efforts to research a story on the subject were quickly and strangely rebuffed, as he received a nasty email from Jane O'Brien Media -- the force behind the... uh... "sport?" -- an email insulting him for being bisexual and protesting (too much) about the legitimacy of competitive endurance tickling and the complete lack of anything homoerotic about it. This got Farrier's hackles up, and what started out as one more segment for his TV show suddenly became a deep dive investigative documentary film.

At the risk of spoilers (and also at the risk of stating the obvious), this entire enterprise is far from legitimate. Tickled soon morphs into a film about sexual proclivities, and a criminal endeavor to coerce, blackmail, and dox young men. Along the way, Farrier takes side trips to examine computer hacking, a bizarre family history, and even the legitimate tickle video industry. That the whole thing clocks in at a coherent and complete 92 minutes is a testimony to the reporting and editing of Farrier and his co-director Dylan Reeve.

HBO picked up the film for broadcast in the states, so if you've got HBO (or are using a friend's account) in anticipation of Game of Thrones, or to watch their current can't miss show, then you can check out Tickled for yourself. I'm not exactly sure who to recommend it for, but it lands pretty squarely in my wheelhouse, at the intersection of true crime, stranger than fiction, and LGBT interest. I'd give it a B+. It left me, well... the title says it all.

"Lost" in Adaptation

You might recall my recent account of re-watching Raiders of the Lost Ark (this time, with the score supplied live by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra). It shoved Raiders to the front of my mind, which in turn pushed me to watch a documentary I've had on my list for a while -- Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made.

Raiders! is the story of two best friends who in turn cajoled their friends into helping them create a shot for shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. What makes this notable is that they did it as teenagers, pouring into it all their allowances and spare time over a seven-year period (from 1982 to 1989). In the present day, as adults, they've reunited to shot the one scene they'd never completed: the fight on the airfield.

As a documentary, Raiders! reflects on many intriguing topics. There's the passion of fandom, and how it can transport people of all ages away from the trials and tribulations of life. There's a coming of age component, and one example of how friends can drift apart over the years. There's a look at obsession, and the examination of how much a person is willing to risk to achieve a lofty goal.

Mostly, though, the documentary gets me quite curious to see the actual fan film itself. That's because the real appeal to all this is in what these kids were actually able to accomplish. I don't know about you, but I definitely went through a phase where I begged my parents to let me play with the camcorder so I could make my own rudimentary films. I know the scope and quality of those efforts, and I also know the attention span I had for sticking with any given one.

In the snippets of the teens' film that you see in the documentary, any of my childhood movie aspirations are put to shame. I mean, think about some of the amazing visuals Steven Spielberg packed into Raiders of the Lost Ark -- fleeing from a giant rolling boulder, a fist fight in the middle of a burning bar, an action sequence that sees the hero crawling over and under a moving truck. These kids actually did all this stuff! Quite unsafely in many cases, but they actually did it all. I mean, I can understand that they never shot the airplane sequence as children, but there are tons of other sequences they never should have been able to pull off either.

So ultimately, Raiders! (the documentary) is an oddly inspirational little tale about following your dreams, even if the specific dream in this case maybe isn't as inspiring. I'd grade it a B.

Foot Notes

The saying goes that truth is stranger than fiction. Documentary films often set out to demonstrate this, but rarely find a subject that proves the point better than Finders Keepers.

Finders Keepers is the story of a custody battle over a human leg. The saga begins when John Wood is in a serious plane crash that kills his father and results in his own leg being amputated at the knee. Through a turn of events best left for the film to detail, he keeps his own severed limb... but stashes it in a storage unit and subsequently fails to pay the bill. When Shannon Whisnant buys the contents at auction, he acquires the foot, and is determined to ride it to his 15 minutes of fame. A legal battle over the severed limb ensues.

This is ultimately a movie about people with a serious void in their lives needing to be filled. For Wood, it's the loss of his father -- a void he initially tries to fill with alcohol. For Whisnant, it's the need to be somebody, to have the world see him as the brilliant entrepreneur he sees himself when looking in the mirror. So the documentary is in some ways a meditation on all these serious matters -- alcoholism, grief, inferiority complexes, longing.

But you really have to read a lot of this into the film yourself, between the lines. You have to open yourself to the possibility of feeling sorry for these people. And neither the situation nor the way the film presents it make it easy to feel that way. It's far easier to point and laugh at the Carolina rednecks, and feel superior from the comfort of your couch.

Yes, the documentary features lots of interviews with the families of Wood and Whisnant, and tries to show how these men are tearing things apart through their actions. But it spends just as much time showing footage of snickering newscasters covering the story, talk show hosts seizing at the chance to fill an episode's time, and generally presenting the sideshow aspect of the tale.

It's an intriguing story, but perhaps no more so in a deep dive than it is just to hear in summary. I give Finders Keepers a C. It's a sometimes fun diversion, but also a bit of a missed opportunity to say something more.

Sun Screening

A strange short film has been making minor ripples in entertainment and tech news over the last week: Sunspring. It was created for a short film competition, Sci-Fi London's 48-Hour Film Challenge -- one of many worldwide contests in which filmmakers are challenged to create something in a short period of time.

Director Oscar Sharp took an unconventional approach to the contest. He contacted his friend Ross Godwin, an AI researcher at NYU, to see if a computer program could be crafted to produce a filmable script for a 9-minute short film. After all, there are plenty of tropes in science fiction, plenty of familiar techniques for a computer to extrapolate from in a manner akin to a predicative text algorithm. So they loaded several dozen film and television scripts into "Benjamin" (some of them questionably or definitely not sci-fi), and "he" spat out the script that became this movie:



Needless to say, computers won't be replacing humans in the field of creative writing any time soon. The script is a terrible, jumbled mess... but watching the film is also kind of an intriguing experience. On the specific end of the scale, it seems that a lot of characters in science fiction are asking each other "what do you mean?" and complaining that they "don't know what you're talking about." (Or maybe it's that a lot of X-Files episodes were fed into the algorithm. Mulder does spend a lot of time justifying wackadoodle theories to Scully.)

But far more interesting than anything so particular is what Sunspring might say about the human element in movies and art in general. For example, very little in Sunspring's actual dialogue implies science fiction; we have mainly just the knowledge of the movies that fed the algorithm (and the production's choice to costume the actors in sparkly clothes) to put that genre in our minds. Also, while the script is largely incoherent, the director and actors inferred from it a sort of love triangle between three characters, saying a lot about what subtext humans will seek as signal within the noise.

Most of all, Sunspring demonstrates the power of actors to do a lot with a little. There are only three in Sunspring, and by far the most recognizable one is Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch. But what Elisabeth Gray does in this movie is really off-the-charts amazing. The movie ends with her character delivering a lengthy monologue straight to camera. It's utter nonsense, introduces a lot of strange ideas telegraphed nowhere earlier in the film, and has no meaningful conclusion. But as an actress, Gray finds some way to make it personal and powerful. It's almost like watching a key dramatic scene from a foreign film without subtitles. You have little or no sense of what's being said, but you can plainly see the weight of it.

Don't get me wrong, Sunspring is all but unwatchable, and if I assigned a conventional letter grade to it, it wouldn't be kind. But in exploring the limits of what today's technology can do, the film does expose to some extent the wonderful things that people -- artists -- can do. For that, it might just be worth 9 minutes of your time.

Institutionalized

I recently watched an unusual documentary film called The Institute. It was another case of "I put the movie in my Netflix queue when I heard about it, but forgot where I heard about it before I finally got around to watching it."

Produced in 2013, the movie looks back on the "Jejune Institute," an alternate reality game (ARG) that ran for several years in San Francisco, starting in 2008. For those unfamiliar with the idea of an ARG, it's a sort of puzzle/scavenger hunt that unfolds over time in the real world, with actors sometimes hired to interact with the players. But this game in particular defies so simple an explanation; having over 90 minutes to work with, the film doesn't ever make it explicitly clear what the Jejune Institute was or what its creators hoped to accomplish with it. It was part art installation, part philosophical thesis, part memorial (maybe?), part self-help seminar... and part many other things too.

The documentary features interviews with different participants in the game, each with very different perspectives on the experience. Some found it a fun diversion from everyday life. Others found it increasing frustrating and weird. Some found it to be a quasi-religious experience. One was convinced it wasn't really a "game." There are also interviews with the creators behind the Jejune Institute... but their comments are often guarded and vague. As is so often the case among artists, they want their art to speak for itself. (And yet, why be interviewed for a movie at all?)

The film also features footage of players participating in different sections of the game, each instance stranger than the last. You get to see the bizarre induction video that kicked off the entire experience. You see people caught up in a staged protest in the San Francisco financial district. You see people trading spy movie-style code phrases on a pay phone. You see a guy dance on the street with a Sasquatch. No kidding.

The thing about the movie, The Institute, is that it seems to be extension of the game, the Jejune Institute. Only parts of the film seem like an objective telling of the story from a reporter's remove. The majority of the film feels like it's trying to make you the viewer have the same blurring-of-reality experience as the game's original players. You get the distinct impression that at least some of the interview subjects are playing for the camera. You're never sure if what you're watching are actual participants, or some staged reenactment for the purposes of this documentary. The entire film itself is "meta" -- part Blair Witch Project, part Punked.

On some level, I suppose I appreciate that a film about a game that wanted to transcend into reality would itself try to mess with the audience and be more than just a film. But it can't really change the fact that you're sitting there comfortably for an hour-and-a-half, taking the movie in and not really interacting with it as you would with a game, ARG or otherwise. I'm not saying I wanted to be force fed, but neither did I feel like I was toyed with in a way that amounted to much.

So all told, I think I'd give The Institute a C+. The idea of actually participating in an ARG sounds compelling to me. But the film seemed like a pale imitation.

The Story at the Margins

I recently finished reading a book that I can't recommend, and have to recommend. I found it a bit of a slog, and I was intensely intrigued. It's a tough one to review, needless to say.

The book is titled S, written by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams. Yes, that J.J. Abrams. First published a couple of years ago, Abrams actually originated the idea, handing it over to novelist Dorst to bring to fruition. And it's that idea that's incredibly compelling. (We'll get to the execution in a bit.)

S comes in a slipcase with a seal you actually have to break to release the book. Once it has been slid from the case, there's no further hint of the book's true identity. Instead, a masquerade has begun. You are holding in your hands a decades-old library book entitled Ship of Theseus. The cover is worn (and bears a Dewey Decimal filing sticker on the spine), library checkout dates are stamped inside the cover, and all the pages are stained at the edges from the ravages of time.

Ship of Theseus is presented as the 19th and final novel published by the mysterious and reclusive (and fictional) V. M. Straka. It was completed just before his unusual, possibly staged, death -- and may actually have been finished by a longtime collaborator who he never met face to face, F.X. Caldeira. Caldeira, fluent in numerous languages and responsible for multiple translations of each of Straka's novels, annotated this final novel with extensive and cryptic footnotes. It's believed among literary scholars that these footnotes hold a secret key to Straka's true identity -- or that they at least were an attempt by Caldeira to reach out to the still-alive-but-in-hiding Straka after his "death."

But we've only just started down the rabbit hole. This particular copy of Ship of Theseus comes from a university library, and has been the object of intense scrutiny by two people. Eric is an expelled graduate student trying to uncover Straka's true identity. His thesis advisor has stolen Eric's work and plans to publish a book revealing "his" theory. Jen is a college senior who works at the library, suddenly realizing that the life waiting for her after graduation may not be the one she truly wants. Taken by the writing of V.M. Straka, she finds this copy in the library, filled with Eric's penciled-in investigative notes, and decides to write back. The result is an entire interaction between Jen and Eric, avoiding a face-to-face meeting, passing the book back and forth every night via the library and gradually filling its margins with their hand-written exchanges.

Every few dozen pages or so, there's an extra surprise waiting for you -- something actually inserted into the book by Jen or Eric. You get letters each wrote to the other. There are postcards from travel, photos and newspaper clippings that accompany their research into Straka. There's a napkin with a crudely sketched map, and an actual code wheel used in trying to crack the hidden footnote messages.

This multi-layered experience is, quite simply, an incredible idea for a book. It's very cleverly presented, too. Jen and Eric's comments appear to be authentically hand-written on every page. They come from a period spanning several months, and are not strictly chronological from cover to cover. Through the use of different colors of ink "over time," you can delineate different comments as coming from different points in the relationship: there's Eric's original notes before "meeting" Jen, remarks from early in their friendship, comments from when their joint hunt for Straka's real identity has begun to bear fruit, and comments from when that fruit has attracted unwanted attention both from Eric's scheming thesis advisor and a shadowy organization that may be out there trying to protect Straka's secrets.

One of the remarkable things about S is that you can choose to read it in any number of ways. You could first read Ship of Theseus itself, perhaps looking at Caldeira's footnotes but avoiding Eric and Jen's margin notes. You could read those margin notes page by page, or use the "color coding" to read them chronologically. You could read the entire thing cover-to-cover, mentally locking all the pieces into their proper spots in the timeline (as I did). The reader has incredible agency in reading this book.

The problem? It's not a very good book. Eric and Jen's storyline is fairly engaging, even if several bumps in the road seem to resolve too quickly and neatly. But Ship of Theseus is, quite simply, terrible. The conceit of the entire affair is that this book would somehow have inspired scholars all over the world to speculate about the man behind the masterpiece. But the writing isn't dense in the way of a classic piece of literature, it simply ambles all over the place. Tedious and monotonous, it feels contorted (as in truth, it is) simply to provide sentences for Eric and Jen to underline and either scrutinize for clues to Straka or wink at parallels in their own lives. Ship of Theseus is so snail-like in plot that it's hard to remember what you've just read on the previous page. At numerous points, I strongly considered abandoning that element of the book just to complete Jen and Eric's story; finishing it was a relief, not a resolution.

So, in terms of dramatic satisfaction, I simply can't recommend S to anyone. It's too dull, too dry. But in its narrative structure, it's one of the most compelling ideas for a novel I've ever come across. And it's so lovingly produced, with the "aging" of the book, the authenticity of the included bits, and the appearance of the "hand-written" notes. It's just so damn clever and cool, it's a shame it couldn't be better.

Forced to put some kind of grade on S overall, I suppose I'd call it a B. But that's a strange synthesis (not average) of an A for concept and presentation, an F for Ship of Theseus, and a B- or so for "the trials of Eric and Jen." If it sounds cool to you, you should pick a copy and try it for yourself. If it sounds like a gimmick to you, it's certainly not going to win you over.

A Startling Omission

Not long ago, I took a look at a most unusual book, Gadsby. In crafting this oddity, Gadsby's author laid out a conspicuously difficult task: to draft a work of fiction without using that most common symbol any child would know from his "ABC"s -- that traditionally found twixt "d" and "f." It sounds absurd, but Gadsby runs almost sixty thousand words without a solitary intrusion by that taboo symbol.

In a harsh bit of irony, I can only supply this author's patronymic whilst complying with his own lipogrammatic constraint -- so "Wright" must satisfy. My hat's off to Wright for consummating his wild vision. I must say, mimicking his form for just a fraction of Gadsby's duration is profoundly taxing. If you doubt it, an introduction pinpoints many pitfalls you'd indubitably avoid if you took on this particular orthographic proposition. (That introduction also proclaims his motivation for doing it at all: it was a goal that critics thought no author could attain.)

Lots of fun follows from Wright's dizzying syntactical contortions. You'll find substitutions for broadly known sayings, such as "music hath charms to calm a wild bosom." Also built in: a handful of playful fourth-wall violations, noting how normal word options can't apply in this book. For illustrations, Wright taunts you for many paragraphs about throngs of animals that can't crop up in his fictional city's zoo; and portrays unions of holy matrimony (you'll find as many in this book as in a humorous play by Stratford-upon-Avon's famous Bard!), highlighting just how many contraband words usually crop up in chronicling such an occasion.

What isn't so stimulating is Gadsby's plotting, or that is to say, its total lack of anything you might distinguish as a plot. Wright arrays this book as fiction, but it drifts around akin to random scribblings in a diary. This author roughly follows Gadsby's administration as mayor of Branton Hills -- a city which blossoms in his guardianship. But Gadsby's story has no arc. Affairs don't climax in any substantial way. No significant antagonists or hardships pop up. (Wright so quickly whisks away small intrusions involving war and alcoholism that no impact sticks around.) Basically, Gadsby wants things for his town, and his plucky Youth Organization aids him in making it so. Branton Hills grows ad infinitum. Yawn.

Wright's book is also simply too florid. It first hit around World War II, and favors an archaic approach to yarn-spinning. Winding thoughts carry on too long, with run-on construction. (Though mayhap it's a natural instinct Wright has to show off his virtuosity with lipograms. I admit, I am drawn to do it too!) Still, with as much difficulty as is intrinsic to crafting thoughts without that most common symbol, you'd think succinct wording a short cut worth a king's ransom. (Gadsby also contains a sprinkling of musty chauvinism against womankind, but that too is unsurprising for its day.)

Gadbsy is truly a triumph of linguistics... but as a work of fiction, it's all but bankrupt. From his own introduction, I doubt that Wright would contradict my analysis. This book is a curiosity that warrants a C-. Hunt it down out of fascination, not for satisfaction.

Waiting for the Big Opening

Remember the movie Stand By Me? "Want to see a dead body?" Well, yesterday's call to action was slightly different: "Want to smell a dead body?"

Right now, the Denver Botanic Gardens is the talk of the local news (and botany fans all over) for the "corpse flower" in its Orangery. This strange plant from Sumatra is classified as "vulnerable" on the endangered species list, and its infrequent growth cycle isn't helping that. When first planted, the flower takes on average 7 to 10 years to first bloom. After being open just 24 to 48 hours, it promptly wilts, and then doesn't bloom again for several more years. The one here in Denver is an especially late bloomer -- it's 15 years old and blooming only for the first time.

It's that month leading up to the bloom -- and the bloom itself -- that's especially strange. The flower grows several feet in just a few weeks. (This one has had days where it grew five inches in a single 24 hour period.) After around a month, and somewhere around the five and a half feet mark on average, the blooms peel open. It then emits the smell from which it gets its nickname -- a strong odor of rotting meat, apparently designed to draw in the carrion insects that pollinate it.

The corpse flower has been in local news over the last month during its rapid growth. One of the local news stations has even set up a camera where you can watch it live on YouTube. But near the end of last week, the talk intensified. The cultivators were fairly confident the flower would bloom on Sunday... maybe Monday. So my boyfriend and I (along with a friend) decided to get tickets for Monday night to see what the big stink was about.

Perhaps it's no surprise that a 15-year old flower that should have first grown around 5 years ago is late now that it's actually about to bloom. No bloom by the time of our visit. A crazy looking thing to see, to be sure, but no crazy smell.

Fortunately, there were other beautiful things to see around the slice of the Gardens. I now have enough desktop backgrounds to last a year. My one complaint would be that most of the flowers were unlabeled, so you didn't really know what they were.

For now, I guess I'll keep checking that webcam. We'll see when the corpse flower finally does decide to open up. Maybe there will be another opening -- in our schedule -- in the 24 hours after it does.

Maniacal

I'm going to defer the continuing adventures of San Antonio for a day to cover something far more adventurous I was involved in right here in Denver, just yesterday.

I don't remember exactly how old I was -- 13? (give or take a year?) -- the only time I ever participated in a 5K race. In a random prize drawing based on race bib numbers, I won a gym bag that I used for overnights years and years afterward, until it fell apart too much to be useful. And since throwing that bag out, I haven't given that race any thought. I certainly had never given any thought to doing another one.

Enter a couple of my friends, who caught us back in March with word of the Rugged Maniac obstacle race -- a 5K event involving two dozen obstacles and a lot of mud. They'd decided to do it, and sent a big e-mail blast out to a bunch of people in our group, inviting us to join. It probably wasn't expected that anyone would do it; shockingly, a great many of us did -- 8 in all.

So yesterday morning, this gang (who, by virtue of our complete lack of training beforehand, definitely put the "maniac" in Rugged Maniac) lined up at the start line for the departure of the 10:15 wave:

It wasn't exactly a "race" for us. We walked the entire three-plus miles, and we certainly weren't threatening any records. But that was hardly the point. We all stuck together and helped each other through steep hills, heat exhaustion, mud crawls under barbed wire and through pipes, balance beams and boards, a gauntlet...

...jumping over both pits and fire...

...and plenty of climbs over cargo nets and walls of various heights. All along the way, we were boosting each others' spirits with jokes about the things we'll do differently when we don't do this again next year. But in all, though it was exhausting, it was surprisingly fun. And all eight of us made it to the finish line.

I'm off to nurse a few small scrapes and bruises.

Congressional Discord

The two posters you see to either side are for the same movie. That alone should tell you a lot about the confused mess that is The Congress. A foreign film with both French and Israeli origins, The Congress was made in 2013, but is only just seeing distribution in the U.S. thanks to a deal with the Alamo Drafthouse's "original programming" branch, Drafthouse Films.

It's incredibly hard to describe what The Congress is about, in large part because the face it presents at first does not reflect the movie it ends up being. Here's the "Being John Malkovich"-like pitch that sold me on wanting to see it in the first place:

Actress Robin Wright, of The Princess Bride and Forrest Gump fame, is at a career crossroads. She has passed over enough acting jobs during the prime years of her career to jeopardize her "brand," and she is now faced with only one option. Her studio is beginning to branch out into an exciting new area, digitizing performers and using their computer avatars in perpetuity to make new films. Wright is offered the money needed to help her son's medical condition, in exchange for giving up acting and allowing her digital avatar to carry on making movies in her stead -- movies Wright herself was too picky to agree to in her prime.

I'm sure that sounds plenty odd to you, but here comes the really odd part: that describes only the first 40 minutes of the film. The second act picks up 20 years in the future, when Wright's studio wants to extend her contract for all sorts of new technology, and she agrees to enter an "animation only environment" to finalize negotiations. The remainder of the film then becomes animated, and is a hallucinogenic screed against the perils of dehumanizing technology.

This second half of the movie is what completely lost me. To be clear, the animation is absolutely beautiful. An imaginative and stylized world is lovingly rendered, a bizarre hybrid of old black-and-white Warner Brothers cartoons and Japanese anime. But aside from the tenuous thread of "out of control technology," this section of the film has absolutely nothing to do with the first part. Where the live action intro relies on Wright's reputation as a choosy and "difficult" actress, leveraging it into a quirky narrative, this animated film could easily be about anyone. The result is a very pretty, yet incoherent, jumble.

But Robin Wright, playing "herself," gives it her all. It's a strong and deeply emotional performance, both in the live action and animated chunks of the film. The strangeness of the film makes it awfully hard for the audience to care, but there's never any doubt that she cares very much. Similarly committed performances come from Jon Hamm as the voice of Wright's "character animator" in the animated section, and Paul Giamatti as a doctor in the live action section (himself no stranger to actors playing "themselves" for the sake of a gimmick).

Still, the performances -- no matter how good -- can't save the confusion of two incompatible films being forcibly stitched together. If you're a fan of painstaking animation, there might be some compelling visuals in this for you. Otherwise, I really can't recommend the film for anyone. I give it a D-.

Plutocrazy

I had a peculiar dream last week, especially notable for two reasons. First, I woke up in the middle of the dream, but almost immediately went back to sleep and resumed the dream where I left off. Two, that brief interruption completely altered the trajectory of the dream.

I was an astronaut on the first manned space flight being sent to land on Pluto. I was with something like four or five other people (I'm not certain exactly how many), only one of whom had ever been on any manned space flight before. It took us a long time to reach Pluto, of course, but in movie-like fashion, the dream skipped over the "boring parts."

Our ship landed on the surface of Pluto, and we began our first EVA out on the surface. But then there was some kind of horrible calamity. I don't really know exactly what it was, so frenetic was the pace of the dream. But I know it was some sort of fire/explosion sort of thing that disabled much of our vehicle, and killed the one experienced astronaut on our mission. The rest of us frantically scrambled back into the vehicle and rushed to launch back into orbit -- which somehow was going to mitigate the damage and at least allow us a chance of getting back home.

So intense was this part of the dream that I snapped awake in bed, kind of doing one of those cliche gasp-and-sit-up sort of things. Just a dream, I told myself. And actually, kind of a stupid dream, now that I thought about it. Why the hell would anybody plan a manned space flight to Pluto of all places? I laid back down and went back to sleep so quickly that my dream continued.

But the fun part was that that momentary intrusion of real world logic somehow pierced the haze that normally allows nonsense to go unquestioned in a dream. When the dream resumes, I'm suddenly questioning everything about this supposed mission. How could everything go so catastrophically wrong so quickly? And in what seemed like such a specific way as to kill our one experienced astronaut? How did we really get all way to Pluto so fast anyway?

In a short period of time, I've figured out that this entire mission was a hoax meant to fool the world, and even we the "astronauts" on the mission. Our leader, the experienced astronaut, had figured it out first, and so he was murdered as part of an elaborate cover up! We haven't really gone to Pluto, which explains how we got there so quickly, and how a fire was somehow able to spread so horribly in a place that should have no atmosphere! The gravity was all wrong, the time delay of our communications with Earth was all wrong! Actually, if this was meant to be a world-deceiving hoax, they did a really poor job of setting it up. But maybe they meant for it to be exposed?! Why else would they recruit someone like me to be an astronaut? Who would believe that?

And that's more or less where I woke up again, this time to start my day. This strangely cinematic dream, possibly inspired my recent viewing of Europa Report (but actually more like Capricorn One) would go without an ending.

Into the West

Over the years, I've written about a series of HBO documentaries called Paradise Lost. The original movie and its two different follow-ups chronicle the case of the so-called West Memphis Three, a group of outcast teenagers who in the early 1990s were convicted of murdering a trio of 8-year-old boys in an allegedly Satanic ritual. The three films paint a compelling picture that demonstrates the innocence of the Three, and shows the ineptitude and corruption among the police and judiciary that led to their wrongful incarceration.

Did the world need another film about the West Memphis Three? You could argue no. But if that film is West of Memphis, you'd be wrong.

Over the years, the West Memphis Three attracted a number of celebrities who used their fame and resources to raise awareness about the case. Among that group were Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, the power couple behind The Lord of the Rings film series. This documentary, released last year, comes from them.

West of Memphis does right by its subject matter, but is also a very clever bit of filmmaking. It assumes (and rightly, I think) that a significant portion of its audience will already be aware of the West Memphis Three case, and will have already seen one or more of the Paradise Lost films. It does summarize the case for anyone who might be new to the story, but it does not try to pretend that it's the first documentary to cover the subject. So, after spending about 30 minutes catching everyone up on the main elements of the case (in some instances with very unsettling and shocking photos), it moves on to another agenda.

This documentary is primarily a chronicle of the efforts to exonerate the West Memphis Three and produce another credible suspect. The most notorious of the Three, if you will, married while in prison, and his wife worked tirelessly with Jackson and Walsh combing through the original case, looking for holes. Of course, the Paradise Lost documentaries have already demonstrated that it was positively riddled with such holes, but West of Memphis goes farther than just presenting alternative scenarios. It goes to the next step, showing the hunt for experts -- and many of them -- to verify these alternatives.

And then the film presents a damning case against another suspect: Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of one of the murdered boys. It's an accusation that isn't made lightly. Indeed, West of Memphis begins its search for an alternative suspect by pointing out that the second Paradise Lost documentary, when it presented an alternate suspect, did so with no more evidence or rationality than the original case against the West Memphis Three themselves. Here, the case is laid out rationally and compellingly. By the end of the film, there can be little doubt as to the true perpetrator of these murders.

Which makes the end of the film even more maddening. Last year, resulting from the efforts of the group behind this documentary, the West Memphis Three were granted a new trial. But understandably nervous about again confronting a justice system that had imprisoned them for two decades, the Three were persuaded by their lawyers to forego the trial and instead enter a very rare "Alford plea." In essence, this irrational legal construct allowed them to go free and publicly maintain their innocence... provided they still pleaded guilty in court, essentially forfeiting their right to sue the justice system for redress of their wrongful incarceration.

The film documents this ambiguous conclusion to the case, and yet conspicuously avoids its most unsettling implication. The Arkansas state justice system has their guilty plea. This case is closed for them. But the film has set forth nearly incontrovertible proof of the real culprit's identity -- who will clearly not be prosecuted. The murderer of three young boys, who has escaped justice for two decades, will continue to go free.

I can only hope that someday, there is a fifth documentary covering this case... specifically, depicting the capture and trial of Terry Hobbs. But until that day, West of Memphis stands as the best film of the four on the subject. It will outrage and shock you. It will make you think. I give it an A-. It becomes a late entry on my "Best of 2012" list, sliding into the #10 slot.

View With a Room

I recently spent an evening watching an extremely low budget documentary called Room 237. There must be something about movies with "Room" in the title. Because not since Tommy Wiseau's impossibly bad The Room have I seen watched a movie that I would call predominately "bad," and yet simultaneously find so watchable -- even recommendable.

Room 237 is an examination of Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining. In an interlaced series of interviews, five different enthusiasts of the film share their theories on subliminal imagery and hidden meanings they believe the notoriously controlling and meticulous director placed within the movie... and each conspiracy is more outlandish than the last.

I should say that I myself am no fan of The Shining. I find the movie over-the-top to a point where it's often more silly than scary, and filled with ridiculous performances. So I was coming to this documentary not as a Shining fan, but for this movie in and of itself, having read a glowing review in Entertainment Weekly magazine, which provocatively proclaimed: "even more than The Shining itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks."

From that perspective, Room 237 is pretty amazing. In the course of the documentary, Kubrick fans argue forcefully (though unconvincingly), that the movie is a metaphor for the genocide of Native Americans, or a way to personalize the horrors of the Holocaust. They "unmask" how the movie is steeped top to bottom in subliminal imagery, either of a predominately sexual nature or referencing the myth of the minotaur, depending on who you ask. There's a guy who geeks out over what happens when you simultaneously run the movie forward and backward at the same time, superimposing the two images over one another on the same screen. And there's my personal favorite, the man who swears The Shining is Kubrick's secret confession to having directed all the fake Apollo moon landing footage.

In essence, Room 237 is a case study of film criticism and deconstruction taken to the nth degree, past the point where it can spark any meaningful conversation. But entertaining as that is for a while, it does feel like there comes a point where you realize there is no point. I'm unsure if the documentary is trying to say anything, or if it's just inviting us to point at the weirdos and laugh. Which, I confess, I certainly did. Or maybe that's the point? Maybe the documentary is probing for the line between healthy geek passion and crazed whack-a-doodle obsession?

But I'm inclined to think that, like the enthusiasts interviewed in the film itself, I'm probably reading too much into a movie. For one thing, Room 237 is made so on the cheap, I think I could have done it myself... on my dying laptop that doesn't even function right or take a battery charge anymore. Not a single one of the interview subjects is shown on camera in the film. Instead, each is recorded (sometimes quite poorly) by telephone, their comments edited in rather amateur fashion over spliced together footage from a raft of movies -- mostly The Shining, largely other Kubrick films, but ultimately I gather any random movie they could get the rights to show a clip of. The result is a movie so shoddily made that it's hard to take it seriously... though I suppose once you start hearing some of the ravings of the theorists within, there would have been little chance of that anyway.

In the end, the movie is so poorly assembled that I can only give it a C-. That said, there are plenty of people I'd probably still have to recommend it to: if you love film criticism, or enjoy a good laugh at an outrageous conspiracy theory... or, of course, if you're a fan of The Shining. To all of you, I'd say that -- warts and all -- this might just be a "must see."

The Final Throes

This spot was originally going to be my review of the new movie Gravity. But then my computer continued -- accelerated -- its downward spiral into obsolescence.

The power cable and adapter have ceased to function reliably. Plug the thing in, and the power winks on and off, charging up the laptop's battery about 1 to 5 seconds at a burst, every two or three minutes. It's probably not a good thing for me to leave the laptop plugged in under those conditions, but I would like to get enough of a charge for a current backup (I'd fallen behind in the move), and I kind of don't care if the thing blows up at this point anyway. That would be only a marginal decline from its normal performance.

Thoughts on any good laptops these days, anyone? Desktop computers and tablets need not apply.

Sour Apple

The internet is filled with stories praising how wonderful Apple's customer service is, how the folks at the Genius Bar in an Apple Store will do just about anything for you and hand out new replacement phones at the drop of a hat. Whenever somebody starts listing the things they don't like about Apple products, an Apple disciple's two most likely retorts are about how easy they are to use, and how awesome the Apple customer service is.

I'm here to puncture that lie.

Starting a few weeks ago, I began to have an intermittent glitch with my iPhone. (Last year's generation, the 5.) About two or three times a week, I'd go to check something on my phone in the middle of the afternoon, and find a message on the screen: "No SIM Card Installed." Each time, I'd restart the phone and the issue would seem to correct itself, but it was a bit inconvenient -- not to mention the fact that for however long passed between the time this error would occur and the time I'd notice it and restart the phone, I wouldn't be receiving any texts or emails (or calls, I imagine) from anyone trying to contact me.

Sunday afternoon, I logged onto the Apple web site to make an appointment at the Genius Bar of the closest Apple Store. That wasn't until 6:40 Monday night. (Hmmm... that seems rather a long wait for repairs on your supposedly reliable products, but okay.)

Last night, I drove to the Apple Store straight from work. A few hours earlier in the afternoon, my phone (in?)conveniently had the same error, presenting me the "No SIM Card Installed" message. Rather than reset it, I decide to leave the message there on screen so that I could show the exact problem to the person at the Genius Bar -- even though this meant going a few hours without being able to contact anyone.

I arrived at the store at 6:30. I walked straight to the Genius Bar at the back of the store... where I was completely ignored by three different employees who all looked right at me at different times without engaging with me, even though I'm clearly standing there with my phone in my hand, looking like I'm trying to get someone's attention.

As 6:40 comes, and still no one has bothered to help me, I decide to go back to the front of the store to talk to the employee greeting people at the door. I explain how everyone at the Genius Bar has been ignoring me, she apologizes, and then "checks me in" for my appointment. She then asks me to stand over in an area that's nowhere near the Genius Bar, and someone will be with me shortly.

Ten minutes pass. There's yet another employee sort of milling about this area of the store, who finally seems to notice that I'm standing there for no apparent reason. He comes up to me, asks if he can help, and I explain that I'm waiting for my Genius Bar appointment. He says "Christian will be with me shortly." He gives me absolutely no indication of who this Christian is or where he is.

Ten more minutes pass. I grab this second guy whose section I'm apparently standing in, and ask him what the delay is. He punches a few things on his iPad, and tells me, "oh, it looks like we're running about 20 minutes behind." Nice. Somebody could have told me that before I got all worked up from just standing around doing nothing.

I stand around staring daggers in the direction of the Genius Bar for another five minutes, and finally one of the employees calls my name. This is the fabled Christian. And apparently, although I've waited for nearly half an hour past my appointment time watching people get one-on-one sessions with the "geniuses," they've decided that now that my turn has finally come, they're now going to line up three customers with one employee and have him round robin us all at once.

I typed in a description of my problem on the web site when I set up my appointment, so Christian is already on the case. He pops out my SIM Card and takes a look, and says, "You're on Verizon? This is weird, because Verizon doesn't even use the SIM card." I'm not sure exactly what that is supposed to mean to me, but he pops the thing back in and asks me to restart the phone. I do so, and he goes off to help the other two people while I wait.

The phone is restarted a minute later, and he's back to me. "Is it working?" he asks. Yes, I say, though I quickly point out: I've always been able to restart my phone to reset the problem this entire time, so that hardly means anything has been "fixed." Well, says Christian, "the first thing I'd do is go to a Verizon store. There may be problem with one of the contacts on the SIM Card, and they need to fix it for you."

And that's it. What the hell? I waited almost half an hour for an appointment I made a day in advance, got to spend all of two minutes at the Genius Bar, time shared with two other customers, after which I was told Apple could do nothing for me -- it's Verizon's problem.

This is the customer service Apple is so famous for? "Did you cycle the power? Then that's all I can do for you" is literally the kind of crap service I can get on the phone from any number of other companies. And at least I can get that from them on the phone from the comfort of my own home, rather than carving out an hour of my day to go stand around and be ignored.

Apple, your customer service sucks. (And while I'm at it, your new iOS sucks too.)

The Purple Gorilla Joke

In case scuba diving (or reading about other people scuba diving) isn't your thing, I'm going to break up my tales from the ocean with a story from our second night in Playa del Carmen. After our first day of diving, we decided to have dinner at one of the two fancier restaurants at the resort. If dining at the buffet wasn't your thing, you could go upstairs to either the Italian or Mexican restaurants for a nicer meal.

You still didn't have to pay anything; it was part of the all-inclusive package. But service-wise, you got what you paid for at these restaurants. We went to the Italian restaurant that night, where it took at least 15 minutes before they came for our orders and another 30 to bring the food. When the food finally did arrive, only half of us got anything, while the rest had to wait another 15 minutes. It was a rough dinner. (And yet, apparently not rough enough for us to choose not to go back later in the trip.)

My six-year-old niece was fortunately in a good mood that night, so she was able to bear the wait. In fact, she was passing the time by telling us jokes. She had a seemingly endless supply, many remembered from her last trip to Disney World. She kept pushing me and my boyfriend for more jokes, but I quickly exhausted every lame gag I could remember from a popsicle stick and simply had nothing child-appropriate left to tell.

Except for one joke. I warned my niece: "This is a really long joke, and you probably won't even think it's very funny." But she wanted to hear it anyway, and I figured that, not knowing how long it would take the food to come, I might as well fill the time. So I told The Purple Gorilla Joke:

A man is dying of thirst in the desert, crawling along from dune to dune, hoping that he'll come across some water to quench his thirst. On the horizon, he sees what appears to be an enormous castle. He gathers his remaining energy, reaches the castle, and knocks weakly on the door.

A guy in a purple suit answers the door, but the man is barely able to speak for his thirst. "Oh my!" says the purple man. "Here, have some water! You look horrible!" He produces a pitcher of water, and the man is able to drink his fill.

The purple man continues. "You must stay here in my castle and rest up until you're well enough to travel again. You may stay as long as you like -- I only ask that you obey one rule during your stay.

"If you were to go down to the end of this hall, you would find a purple door. On the other side of that purple door is a purple hallway. At the end of the purple hallway is a purple room, and on the far end of the purple room, under a purple sheet, is a purple cage holding a purple gorilla. DON'T touch my purple gorilla."

The man is doubtful that anyone could actually own a purple gorilla, but this seems an easy enough request to agree to in exchange for shelter at the castle. So he makes his promise, and then spends days at the castle, drinking all the water he needs and gradually regaining his strength.

But as the man is starting to feel normal again, his curiosity begins to kick in. This eccentric castle owner can't actually have an actual purple gorilla in a cage, can he? So despite his promise, he decides to investigate.

He goes to the end of the long hallway, and finds that indeed there is a purple door. It isn't locked, and when the man opens it, he finds that indeed on the other side, there is a purple hall. So he walks down the purple hall and comes to a purple room. There on the far end of the purple room, he sees a big object concealed under a large purple sheet!

Having come this far, the man can't leave without satisfying his curiosity. So he nervously makes his way across the purple room, then pulls away the purple sheet. Underneath, to his disbelief, he finds a purple cage, and there inside is a purple gorilla! The man with the castle actually owns a purple gorilla!

Of course, the man had never dreamed that he would actually find the purple gorilla. But now that he's there, he has to know -- why am I not allowed to touch the purple gorilla? What would happen if I did? So he nervously reaches his hand between the bars and touches the purple gorilla.

The purple gorilla immediately lets out a mighty roar of anger and starts beating its chest. The man backs away, but the purple gorilla grabs hold of the bars of the purple cage and begins to bend them. The man turns and starts to run as the purple gorilla breaks out of his purple cage!

The man runs across the purple room, back up the purple hall, and out the purple door. The purple gorilla is chasing him every step of the way. The man flees the castle, running out into the desert, and the purple gorilla is right behind. The man runs back across the desert, slowly losing energy again, eventually dropping to his knees and crawling, struggling to escape, but the purple gorilla is relentless! The purple gorilla catches up with him, raises a purple paw...

...and says "Tag! You're it!"

I heard this joke in college, from another theater student. Of course, it's all about how you tell it... and it honestly isn't all that funny even when told well. But like I said, I had no other jokes, and loads of time to kill. So I dragged it out as long as I could, and my niece absolutely loved it. Dinner arrived, but she was more interested in hearing the Purple Gorilla Joke again than eating.

As we waited for dessert to arrive, I obliged and told the joke again. And then, the next night, again. I don't recall if I actually told it a fourth time later in the trip, but she certainly kept asking for it.

Of course, the joke probably doesn't read well either. My boyfriend questioned why I bothered blogging about it. But this was, in a strange way, a highlight of the trip, so it seemed like it deserved a mention.

When I went to Google a picture of a purple gorilla to illustrate this post, I discovered that "Purple Gorilla" is actually the name of a kind of marijuana. This reveals a likely subtext to the joke that probably explains why it was told to me in college. Suffice it to say, my niece won't find out about that part until she's older.

And in the meantime, I'm going to try to stock up on lame popsicle stick humor for the next time she wants a joke.

Custom Car

It's possible this qualifies as "overshare," but I had the strangest dream the other night and I have nothing better to post today. I so rarely remember my dreams anyway, so it seems fitting to mark the occasion by writing about it.

I'm at the mall with my bike, coming back to my car. (I don't actually own a bicycle, but it appears the unfeatured back story of this dream is that I do, and I was riding it around the mall for some reason.) I reach my car, and I'm trying to use my key to open the trunk and put my bike in. For some reason, the key is not fitting. So I take a moment to realize what I'm really looking at, and then I see it:

Someone has come along and cut off the entire back half of my car, and they've welded a pickup truck bed in its place. The color has been matched and everything, but there's a clear seam between the front and back of my vehicle. They didn't even bother to change/remove/whatever the license plate; the license plate on this pickup truck back half of some other car is right there.

I have to contact the police and explain what has happened! So I get out my phone. Now, for reasons that make sense only in dream logic, I'm not permitted to actually call the police. I have to send them a text message. Now in the dream, my phone is not my spiffy iPhone. I have this half-sized little device with a full keyboard, each of the buttons mere millimeters across. (It's a shrunken Blackberry or something.) So I'm trying to type out a text message on this thing, but my fingers are way too big to type out the letters correctly.

I'm getting increasingly frustrated with this process, when a bunch of thugs pull up in a tow truck and start snooping around my car. I realize they have the real back half of my car up on the bed of their truck. So I confront them. "What the hell are you doing? What the hell did you do to my car?"

"You weren't supposed to come back so soon!" says the leader of the group. "We were going to have this all put back before you got back, and you'd never have known."

I'm kind of flabbergasted at this. I want to yell, "how would I have not noticed a giant welding seam all the way down the middle of my car?!" And yet, I realize the truth is that in fact I did not notice when I first walked up to my car. I didn't even notice at first that my car had been transformed into an El Camino or something; I only figured it out when my key wouldn't fit in the hey-wait-a-minute-where-did-the-trunk-on-my-car-go? (And by the way, there's absolutely no way I could have gotten to the mall in the first place with a bike somehow closed inside the back of my car's not-that-large trunk. But that's more dream logic and back story I can't explain.)

Unable to come up with a retort to this thug, I say nothing and step back. I have to finish typing this text message to the police and get them here! But these guys are already going to work on my car, removing the back section. I'm now worried if I don't get the police here before they finish reassembling my car, then in fact they will get away with this!

Suddenly, my boyfriend arrives. I'm shocked and amazed he's there, because our plan was to meet at the movie theater. (Suddenly, I have more back story! I was extra upset at this whole thing because it was making me late to meet him at the movie theater.) I explain everything to him as I'm frustratedly trying to type a damn text message into this ridiculous munchkin-sized phone. I'm also pissed off about missing the movie because, in the dream, I was going to blog my review of the movie and now I have nothing to post! And everyone is going to have seen the movie now before us and spoil the ending!

My boyfriend is just totally calm about the whole thing, and trying to calm me down, telling me I'm never going to get the message right if I'm so crazed. Besides, I can blog about this weird story instead of the movie, he assures me. And then...

The alarm clock went off.

As I said, I rarely remember my dreams, but the ones I do remember never have an ending, because it seems the only way I have even a chance of remembering a dream is if I am awakened in the middle of it.

But I figured I'd follow the advice of the dream version of my boyfriend and get a blog post out of it.

Pliable

The #10 slot on my Top 10 Films of 2012 list has certainly been in flux. A movie from very early in the year just bubbled up to the top of my Netflix queue, and from there just sneaked on to the list.

Compliance is the story of a fast food restaurant manager who receives a phone call from a police detective. The detective has fielded a complaint from a customer regarding stolen money, and he's asking the manager to detain one of her employees for a search. But in truth, the "detective" is really a prank phone caller with incredible powers of persuasion and a twisted desire to see just how far he can make people go. The manager's initial (perhaps-sensible) steps down a strange path are just the beginning of an incredibly dark journey.

Compliance is not a movie for everyone. It's made on the cheap, so people looking for high production values aren't going to get them. It has few recognizable actors; the two biggest stars are Ann Dowd, a working actress who has appeared in dozens over minor roles over the years, and Dreama Walker, one of the stars of the likely-just-cancelled TV series "Don't Trust the B---- in Apt. 23."

But the real reason this movie won't be for everyone: Compliance is damned uncomfortable to watch. The movie is meant to make you squirm. As the prank caller pushes his victims into increasingly outrageous demands, the audience is constantly forced to ask themselves, "would I have fallen for any of this? At what point would I have woken up and challenged this insanity?" And ultimately, "wait, would anyone fall for this?" The movie ends up in such a dark place that it's literally unbelievable. The careful dance of tension that works for the first hour falls apart in the last half hour because it all becomes simply too outrageous.

And yet here's the catch: Compliance is based on a true story. A serial prank phone caller actually operated for nearly a decade, and the incident depicted here in this film actually happened. A few details are twisted around just a bit for the movie, but from what I've been able to find with a little research, what happens here is actually 90% accurate or more to the real events. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

It's a credit to writer-director Craig Zobel that this story comes off believable at all. There's going to come a point for every viewer where the chain of events feels too implausible (maybe a different point for different viewers). But it does start out believable. Maybe you wouldn't be dumb enough to fall for a stranger on the phone identifying himself as a cop, but you can see how it happened for these characters. That things do eventually come off the rails is perhaps not the movie's fault. I wonder if any writer and director could have made it believable where the story ends up -- even if it is the real world truth.

In any case, Compliance is certainly a provocative movie. It will get you thinking, and would certainly spark a conversation between two people who had seen it. I grade it a B+ and, as I noted earlier, award it the #10 slot on my list of best films of 2012. (For now, anyway.)