Correspondence on dancing and music in movies
Last time I spoke about temp tracks, and the use of an end-of-film dance sequence as a nuanced way to wrap up a narrative.
Tarim points out that Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017) is an excellent contrast to a temp track, in that it has many sequences precisely written, choreographed and edited with a very particular song in mind. I had hoped to see this catch on as a trend but have so far been disappointed, so do let me know of anything similar I missed.
Miranda pointed out that in video games, Frog Detective also features the Dance Party Ending trope, which makes me want to play it even more.
Finally Ben notes that Der Hauptmann / The Captain (2017) does something at the end that is not dancing but is nonetheless unexpected and produces an interesting overall effect. I’ve not seen it yet but that does sound pretty intriguing.
Real-world puzzle: Frit
In Things June 2022 I invited you to consider “How do rice cookers work?” as a sort of real-world puzzle one could solve just by thinking about it.
Similarly, frit is the name for the black spotted band you see around the edges of car windscreens or train windows. But why is it there and why does it look like that?
As a clue on how deep to go, from what I have now read there are three parts to the answer, all of which I think you could work out just by thinking about it – if you have enough background knowledge of how the science of this sort of thing works.
Chasing ‘Oumuamua
In 2017, an unusual celestial object (NASA description), uniquely cigar-shaped, was observed rapidly entering the solar system before being slungshot (at 87.3 km/s) by the Sun in a different direction, in what looked like an Oberth maneuver – and even sped up slightly as it left! Tantalisingly, and if you are prepared to get tremendously speculative, this is just the sort of thing you might expect an object created by a Non-Human-Intelligence to look like and do. But it was travelling far too fast for us to stand a chance of sending anything out to take a closer look at it.
Or was it? Project Lyra explores the possibility of finding some kind of trajectory through the solar system that could catch up to it, and impressively actually found a way. Launching a craft in 2030 and pivoting it around Jupiter to launch into its own Oberth maneuver around the sun and catch up with ‘Oumuamua by 2053 – albeit passing it at a relative speed of around 26km/s. It’s not clear if we can build a craft that can actually achieve such a feat, let alone muster the ability to fund it, but it’s a pretty fascinating possibility.
A nice animation of this path can be found with this twitter/X post. If you don’t have an account you can try this YouTube video which edits it to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird to greater/lesser effect.
This great astronomy.com article goes into detail about possible explanations for the object (even that acceleration), and multiple methods being investigated to get a closer look at it.
One of my favourite parts was a note on the scale of distances involved. One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Travelling at such an incredible speed, in one hundred years ‘Oumuamua will be about 150 AU away from us. In comparison, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, is more than 268,000 AU away. While I already understood that interstellar distances are very very large, this helped me put it in better context.
Video round-up
If you’ve not seen her before, Diane Morgan’s fictional character Philomena Cunk is an “ill-informed investigative reporter”, interviewing subject-matter experts and opining on various matters with a playfully unhinged level of naivety, weaving a kind of verbal slapstick with sudden darts of dark satire (sample quote interviewing a professor of imperial history: “Was the British Empire evil like it was in Star Wars?”)
The approach is very silly and sometimes effective, but the stand-out moment for me is her interview on the topic of nuclear weapons, which possibly only lands if you’ve seen her other stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGrLUNpF7H4
Last time, I wrote about LCD Soundsytem’s “New Body Rhumba”, after which YouTube convinced me to watch some of their other music videos. An excellent highlight of this back-catalogue is the video for Oh Baby, directed by Rian Johnson and telling a short story that I think would be of interest to Things Readers. (Do note that the music and video both take 35 seconds to really kick off):
When I was a kid I said my favourite TV show was the adverts. Perhaps this was a golden age of the form, or perhaps kids just love short-form video wherever they can get it, but in any case one of my favourites was Cog – I literally have it on DVD! So I was very happy to find this behind-the-scenes video about how it was made:
Recommended Media
Spy x Family
As an anime on Netflix, this is notable for being both interesting and comparatively available even to people who don’t usually watch anime. It’s best thought of as a sit-com with a very silly ‘sit’: in an incongruously average Western setting (German style place names, European architecture, English character names, American school buses, vaguely cold war era), a fake family is formed where none of the participants know about the secret lives of the others. Watch the first two episodes to see how this pleasingly mad premise comes about and judge if this kind of silliness is for you!
Delicious in Dungeon
Another anime on Netflix that might appeal to people who don’t usually watch anime! This one is a bit of a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing. It initially appears to be about a D&D-style dungeon crawl with a surprising fixation on recipes you could make with the monsters killed along the way – like a fantasy-themed cooking show.
After a while though it reveals writer Ryoko Kui’s passion for thoughtfiul world-building with an emphasis on systems-thinking, with the party’s success coming from knowledge and curiosity. It also does get quite dark and violent. You probably need to watch at least 5 episodes to see if you’ll enjoy what it has to offer, but for me the journey was definitely worth it. Also do note that the primary female character becomes much less two-dimensional and sidelined over time, as I found this aspect was quite off-putting in the early episodes.
Riddle of Fire
Just reading the premise on the cinema listing got me interested:
“In the rolling hills of Wyoming, three mischievous children are tasked with collecting a blueberry pie from their local store. However, what begins as a simple errand soon evolves into an odyssey across the American West, as the intrepid trio faces poachers, witches, huntsmen, and fairies, who all seek to challenge them on their quest. Will the bonds of friendship prove strong enough to guide them home?”
This very consciously evokes 70’s live-action Disney, with the film aesthetic, the haircuts and even the casting. I was a bit surprised to realise early on that these kids really can’t act (or possibly are being directed that way), but I took it as part of the Lo-fi approach, and ended up spending most of the film with a big smile on my face.
The trailer does a good job of representing it from the very first seconds, this is pretty much what you get:
Blade Runner 2049: subtext and metatext of the baseline scene (no spoilers)
I found Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel cinematically striking, but was quite put off by the script’s underlying preoccupation with the elimination of every commonly recognised contribution of women to society (made no less problematic by the suspicion that this wasn’t even intentional). As such I can’t recommend it, even though I do like what the overarching narrative is going for.
Still, I have to respect the ‘baseline scene’, an update and reframing of the original Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampf test, as something strange and mysteriously compelling. This long essay by andi goes into that in a lot of detail, and is worth reading because it justifiably concludes with this excellent remark:
“At this point the text, subtext, and metatext all converge.”
If you know of anything else in any other media that can be described similarly please let me know!
https://cohost.org/mcc/post/178201-the-baseline-scene
Oral History of Lilo & Stitch
If you don’t want to read a long article about depressing sci-fi, how about one about uplifting animation?
A recent rewatch confirmed that Lilo & Stitch is my favourite movie of all time (closely followed by Kiki’s Delivery Service and Speed Racer). It also has one of the best behind-the-scenes content I’ve ever seen on a DVD in the form of a 2-hour making-of documentary that covers all the aspects of film-making I’m most interested in – especially the iterative writing process and the way in which a singular creative vision is realised with a large team.
This makes it all the more impressive that Vulture’s ‘oral history’ finds even more fascinating information about the making of this film. With some very candid interviews with key players, it puts the film in the proper context of this somewhat wobbly era of Disney animation. It’s also a great case study for giving creative works a certain amount of independence from outside interference, and the benefits of avoiding crunch:
https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/an-oral-history-of-lilo-and-stitch-a-hand-drawn-miracle.html
If you like that, even if you haven’t seen the film you might also appreciate their oral history of the Emperor’s New Groove, which is much more of a roller-coaster when it comes to the evolution of the story.
Quote
“Change? Why do we need change? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?”
Attributed to Lord Salisbury
Why I love the ‘Singularity’ music video
As part of an attempt to add some positivity to the internet, I previously wrote about why I love the ‘Up All Night’ music video.
While there is less to unpack, allow me to present the Jon Hopkins Singularity music video, directed by Seb Edwards. First watch it here, and note that while pondering a metaphorical reading of the action is quite interesting, I am – unusually – much more drawn to trying to interpret it literally:
As with Up All Night, I’ll use the performers’ names for the unnamed leads: Jarkko and Aliashka (source). By the way, if this doesn’t really interest you then feel free to move on as this is the final Thing of the issue!
Your mileage may vary, but the opening worked perfectly for me: all I could see was something incomprehensible and spooky in a forest, and was only able to interpret the imagery when it then recurs towards the end of the video.
We begin in an ambiguous and dystopian-looking setting (actually Belgrade according to this, looks like Block 61 on Google maps) as Jarkko comes home to discover Aliashka mysteriously floating and spinning down from the sky. Immediately we are challenged to interpret what could be going on.
My read is that they do not know one another, but they are curious about each others’ circumstances, and there’s a spark of attraction. The presence of flashing lights and drifting down from the sky immediately suggests something extra-terrestrial, but the amorous developments and eventual arboreal destination suggest to me Aliashka is some kind of fae spirit entering the human realm for the first time.
The next challenge to a literal interpretation is the movement: actions and reactions are almost normal but have a supernatural grace. Jarkko looks confused about this, not sure if he needs to help or evade, and Aliashka seems mostly interested in how he is reacting. My read here is that in a magical exaggeration of the human instinct to read social cues and mirror behaviour, Aliashka’s fae nature ensnares Jarkko, who can’t help but fall into her patterns of movement a little – and later on, a lot.
Ambiguous behaviour reads as threatening, and for a few shots it seems like Jarkko is cautiously backing away but not entering full flight. Aliashka closes the gap, becoming more interested in him – especially as his movements become more dance-like and fluid. I read this as Jarkko beginning to pass some sort of compatibility test.
A sequence of throws might be Jarkko trying to push Aliashka away, but each one turns into more of a dance, and he becomes more enamoured – now no longer backing away, he chooses to follow her up some stairs with her smiling encouragement.
Moving into an embrace that might usually escalate to a kiss, it seems they have both concluded that they have found a romantic partner. But as the music shifts, so does Aliashka’s demeanour. She starts to look frustrated and even sad. This is because despite confirming a baseline compatibility and attraction, she must now submit Jarkko to a more severe process to progress their courtship.
To Jarkko’s bafflement, her movements now shift decisively from ambiguous to physical attacks and throws. He can’t match her supernatural strength, although he can perhaps endure it.
When thrown through the floor, he tries to stand but can’t – not because he is weakened, but because his body is now fully caught up in the rhythm and spin.
In an almost miss-able moment, standing apart, Aliashka hunches and moves her arms – and Jarkko mirrors the movement, or tries to.
He’s not actually being attacked: this is part of the process by which he is brought into sync with the fae. Her attacks change to patterns for him to copy, or encouragement for him to keep going. Her movements become wilder and more desperate as she puts energy into the process, willing him to survive and complete the process of assimilation.
They finally rise and hold one another, locking eye contact, touching heads. Jarkko understands that this was never an attack, but something more like a bonding ritual and a lesson. They bounce in sync and he finally reaches her level – the ability to spin and float! It’s ridiculous and beautiful and represents a sublime level of compatibility.
They drift out of the urban environment and into the woods – her realm, I think. There they finally stop and share a moment, both relieved and cautiously optimistic about where this might go next.
Or, you know, perhaps it’s just a metaphor for a relationship that breaks down and then heals again. But that’s not as interesting.
- Transmission ends
