Déjà vu all over again.

Meditation on déjà vu.

I’m a rock-ribbed rationalist and don’t believe in any hocus pocus. That said, I experienced a spell of psychic activity in my childhood and early teens. Said experiences peaked at around age 14, then dropped off.  Take my word, these experiences were very real. I could call coin-tosses for runs of 20, 30 or more. I’d pluck numbers and names out of the air, etc. Most significantly: I experienced constant, intense déjà vu experiences. These were clearly scenarios that I had dreamed. In some cases, I related the dreams before they happened. (I once dreamed of a statue of a pirate hoisting a sword in a fountain. I assumed this was obvious Freudian symbolism, and related the dream for laughs. Then I wound up going to a theme park called Pirate's World -- which had an actual/factual statue of a pirate hoisting a sword in a fountain.) Dreams would come true, not in some vague sense, but in a frame-by-frame sense, with maddening specificity, like seeing a rerun on TV. All this can be parsed and explained away. Fine. But let’s, for the sake of argument, assert that precognitive dreams are real. If so, the implications are exceedingly disturbing. How could they be real? What possible explanations could there be?

A) The space/time continuum is a 4-dimensional matrix in which every possible moment – past, present or future – already exists. In the act of precognition, the mind is somehow skipping ahead to the next reel. Jolly-good. But this implies the future is fixed.

B) The mind is an incredibly powerful super computer. Your subconscious can take a stew of random data and figure out what the world is going to be a year from now in a place you’ve never been.

C) Reality is an illusion. The mind foresees reality because the mind creates reality. (This applies to either a non-physical phenomenological experience or telekinetic control of physical reality. It amounts to the same thing.) 

D) Beings (good or evil) with knowledge of the future are feeding that knowledge into a receptive human mind. Yours, kid. Hey. I got a great idea. Your dog's gonna get run over by a car. We'll show you exactly what happens, but you won't know until it happens, and then you'll know you've seen it all before, and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it.

Do any of these sound like fun?

Bookender's Game

First principles first. A novel is not a movie; a movie is not a novel. Each medium has its own formal logic. A screenplay adaptation of a novel is, necessarily, a translation. So, a decent adaptation distills the essence of the book, though changing details (or visualizing implied details the novel didn't spell out).

So, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange was a great adaptation. Kubrick's The Shining was not. Why? To paraphrase Faulkner, a great story reveals the human heart in conflict with itself. Filmwise, A Clockwork Orange examined the stunted free will of the sociopathic Alex. The Shining reduced Jack Torrence to a scary monster with an axe. One flick brought the heart of the novel to the screen; the other stabbed the novel in the heart. So it goes.

That said, here's my take on Ender's Game, the movie. (Spoilers ahead, kids!) It's faithful to Orson Scott Card's book, though it airbrushes some details. Specifically ...

Say "what." Say "what" again.
Ansible. Third. The movie tosses off such terms without explanation. If you've read the book, you know that the Ansible is an FTL communications device reverse-engineered from Formic tech; a "third" is a despised third child in an overpopulated world where more than three offspring are illegal -- and only allowed in rare exceptions like, say, breeding a super warrior to battle ants in space. A few insane geniuses in the audience might suss this out from the flick, employing deductive reasoning and suchlike. The vast majority will be clueless.

Faster! Faster would be better!
The movie compresses scenes. A lot. Ender's on earth, Ender's in battle school, Ender destroys the Formics. That's all, folks. 

Ender game.
Ender lives up to his name. A nice kid, but if you !@# with him, he ends you. In the book, he clearly snips the life threads of Stilson and Bonzo. In the film he just kinda hurts 'em. Puts 'em in the hospital. They may, in fact, die later. But it's off-screen.

Psycho brother, qu'est que c'est?
In the novel, Ender's bro, Peter, is a stone-cold, squirrel-torturing, cold-ass, dead-eyed, sociopathic, psychopathic sack of damaged goods. In the movie, he's just kinda mean.

Demosthenes, Locke, stock and barrel
In the novel, Ender's siblings, Peter and Valentine -- anticipating the postwar resumption of global tensions -- become Internet pontificators on a global scale, under the pseudonyms of Locke and Demosthenes. (He, the conservative, she the liberal.) This subplot plays out in subsequent novels in the Ender series. In the flick, this subplot is entirely lost.

Ecce LGBT
Evidently, there were no gay people in The Book of Mormon. (The actual book, not the Broadway smash.) Orson Scott Card, taking said book at face value, has spoken out against gay marriage and such; the gay community has responded in kind with calls to boycott the flick. The poor, damn producers have, wisely, ducked the issue. Thus, the flick is nice and sparkling clean of any taint of homophobia, O my brothers. In the original novel, "buggers" was the slang term for the insectoid space enemy. Not in the movie. Novel Ender insulted Bernard by posting, "Cover your butt. Bernard is watching. - God." Film Ender's insult: "Bernard is living proof that they still send chimps into space." Such snips don't neuter the movie. The big damn tragedy: Ender's Game is, ultimately, an antiwar, anti-bullying plea for tolerance. Ironic, ain't it?

That's all, folks
The novel wraps up with a complicated, nuanced coda evoking the Formics' awareness of Ender, via the Ansible, Ender's subsequent quest to find a home for the last remaining Formic egg, all in the context of Valentine and Peter's hegemony and the time dilation effect. In the movie, the last surviving Queen wipes away Ender's tears, gives him an egg, and that's it.

Conclusion
As a devoted writer of unproduced screenplays, I know the flop-sweat inducing pressure of all those 14-year old bastards out there. Simplify! Simplify! The scene is going on too long. The audience is BORED! So, I dig the need to make the movie move. There's material enough for a mini-series in the first book alone. The movie clocked in at 1 hour and 45 minutes. Fans of the book will mourn the cuts; the unread won't. Verdict? The movie is great; another 15 minutes would've made it better. The cuts went a little too deep. I enjoyed it, yeah. I understand. But an intelligent audience is the only audience this flick could hope for. Dumbing it down -- even a little -- was not the right move.

Thanks & a hattip to Andrew Fugate for metatextual insights. 

REVIEW: "Ender's Game"

Great movie. Brutal, hard-hitting. The space seems familiar: children in an orbiting military school training for war against insectoid aliens (aka the Formics). One child, Ender, is the prodigal badass. Yeah, familiar, but only on the surface. This isn't Hogwarts in Space, or Zero-G Hunger Games. This is an adaptation of Orson Scott Card's novel, which breathed new life into a seemingly played-out sci-fi trope. (Namely, the war-game-is-a-real-war trope.) Impossibly, Card took it to a new place. The movie does, too. But only if you haven't read the book. (If you haven't, be warned. Spoilers await. )

The war is the point, but it's not. The movie's focus is the day-to-day dynamics of early adolescent bullying on the one hand, and supportive knots of friendship (a la Stephen King's It), on the other. The movie depicts childhood's complex pecking order -- and does an equally good job depicting the practical dynamics of an environment in space. The Battle Room of the book is hard to visualize; the makers of this film visualized it; good show. High marks also for their depiction of military strategy in space. They thought the logic through -- and stayed consistent with the book's original logic.

The movie, like the book, is ultimately anti-war. It hinges on that classic Star Trek trope: the alien attack is based on a misunderstanding.The Horta isn't evil, it's a mom, and we've been killing its silicon eggs! In Star Trek, humans and aliens kiss and make up. In Ender's Game, we wipe out their world. Ender's left with the sin of genocide (or xenocide) on his soul. Ender destroys the aliens, utterly, but nobody cheers.

It's a downer ending, with a shred of hope. The audience of intelligent sci-fans cheers anyway. For once, their intelligence hasn't been insulted.

Hooray. But wait ...

Some of you ain't cheering. Ah, you're the fans of the book, right? Right. I'll get back with you later ...

Promise.

Enter Sandman

He woke up, buried up to his neck in sand. Not lying down and covered with sand. Standing up, hot sand pressed up against him. How’d they do it? It wasn’t painful. But it didn’t feel good either. He didn’t panic. That wasn’t his style.

Whoever buried him here had a sense of style. Had the decency to put sunglasses over his squinting eyes. Wayfarers, not too shabby. Funny, in a sadistic, humiliating way, but also considerate. The California sun was right in front of him. He’d go blind, otherwise.

It was the back lot, behind Outbuilding #7. There were piles of sand arranged in regular intervals like giant anthills. Different sand from the stuff he was buried in. This sand was saturated with acid runoff. Waste water from the new, black project installation in the previously mentioned Outbuilding #7. A clever recipe; his idea. Throw sand on top of the waste water, bulldoze it in piles, always being careful to wear a mask. Allow sand piles to back in the sun. As the water evaporates, the acid binds to the silica in the sand particles. Continue to dry for a few days more, then put the sand in barrels, dump the barrels. Saves thousands. That was the plan.

Being buried up to his neck interfered with that plan.

He started hollering. It was Sunday; figure the shop was empty. Or figure somebody was fucking with him and it wasn’t. Either way, it couldn’t hurt to try to get somebody’s attention. So, he hollered.

Nothing.

Then, after a few minutes, he heard a whirring noise. Looked up, around. Nothing. Then looked straight in front, at ground level, a worm’s eye view.

Three remote-control toys were closing in on him. A bulldozer.  A crane. A dump truck. Bright yellow, shiny. Cute, in a fever dream kinda way. For one second, he had a brief, deranged idea. The toys were alive. They had little computers inside. They were possessed. But that was bullshit. He could see the antennas. Remote-control toys, had to be.

“OK, guys … enough’s enough.”

The bulldozer whirred up to one of the piles of acid-soaked sand. It’s little blade came down. It pushed some sand out of the way. The crane whirred up, scooped up some of the sand. Then it dropped its burden of sand into the toy dump truck. This continued until the toy dump truck was full.

The dump truck backed up. Actually made a beeping noise. Beep-beep-beep. Hilarious.

Then it whirred forward again.

And started rolling towards him.

“Hey!”

The toy dump truck stopped, inches from his face. Then it rotated around, making that beeping noise again.

“This isn’t … this isn’t funny, guys. Hey!”

A tiny hydraulic cylinder hissed. The dump truck base lifted up. The gate fell back. Hot, acid-saturated sand spilled down on his face and neck. Chemical burn. It hurt like hell, but he didn’t scream.

The dump truck rolled away again. The other toys slowly filled it up again.

He tried to reason with whoever was out there. Offer them anything. Whatever they wanted.
Anything.

The dump truck returned. Dumped more of that burning sand on him. The plastic sunglasses started melting into his eyes.

This time he screamed. And finally panicked.

The dump truck went away. It kept coming back and dropping its load.

Until the burning sand covered his face.
The screaming continued, muffled, agonized.

Eventually, the screaming stopped.

And the toys rolled away.

REVIEW: "Gravity"

Space, the final cliche. Science fiction, like any genre accumulates conventions. The sound of explosions in space. Artificial gravity. Faster-than-light travel. Laser-beam shoot-outs with aliens.

Writer/director Alfonso Cuaron's "Gravity" tosses all that in the waste disposal chute. Cuaron approaches the subject of space with a fresh eye. Unbelievably, amazingly, he directs like he hasn't seen a science fiction movie made after Kubrick's 2001. And while we're on the subject, what he created is probably the most original, freshly imagined science fiction film since 2001 -- at least dealing with the subject of space itself. Space as a hostile working environment. Staggeringly beautiful to look at. Utterly hostile to life.

The story itself is a lean, mean struggle for survival. It's set maybe 5-10 years in the future. The space shuttle program has been rebooted; some astronauts from the Explorer are giving the Hubble an upgrade. Meanwhile, the Russians test satellite-killing tech on a decommissioned spy orb. Unintended consequences cascade -- worse than one of the Coyote's schemes in a Roadrunner cartoon. Debris from the dead satellite destroys other satellites, forming a wave of wreckage shooting from east to west in high orbit at 2,700 mph like a blast of space buckshot. The debris field destroys the shuttle, kills all the astronauts save Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). Now, to get home, the survivors have to get to the International Space Station -- where the remaining Soyuz has deployed its parachute, making it useless for reentry. That means they have to take it to the nearby Chinese space station and take its rescue craft -- if they can outrun the debris field orbiting the planet in time. And assuming they both make it that far.

Cuaron does what filmmakers rarely do -- even visionary sci-fi filmmakers. He takes the premise seriously. What would it be like to work in space? Granted that situation, what would happen? What could go wrong? What would the characters do? He deals with weightlessness (an expensive pain in the ass for filmmakers). He gives us silent space, and weird orbital mechanics, and all the intuitive slip-ups that would happen if humans (hard-wired for gravity) were working in a zero-G environment. Or fighting for their lives.

It's a gripping movie. Painstakingly researched, and scientifically accurate -- to the extent a work of action-adventure science-fiction set in space can be. The physics of space as a practical environment feels convincing. Cuaron and company did their homework. That said, it's an elemental movie. A survival story. Man against beautiful, indifferent nature. Live or die. I compared it to 2001, but the tone is very different. 2001 was beautiful, cold and remote. Gravity is what the Japanese call "wet." Emotional, involving, going for your gut, gizzard and heart strings. Cuaron wants you rooting for Bullock's character, wants you feeling her pain.

You do. He succeeds.

If that's not the final frontier of fimmaking, I don't know what is.

REVIEW: Doctor Sleep

A lousy sequel takes the first iteration as a formula and repeats it. Basically, the poor suckers in the audience pay good money to read the book they've already read or see the movie they've already seen, with some lame new spin on it. John McLean is back, only this time, the terrorists are aliens! Contrariwise, a good sequel takes the first iteration as a jumping-off point. It shows you something new. French Connection II took Popeye Doyle to Marseilles. Where Alien was a claustrophobic story in a bottle, Aliens was a war. Not a lame new spin, but an honest new story in new territory. That's the way it's done. Or should be.

Stephen King's Doctor Sleep shows us exactly how it's done. King, as Harlan Ellison once pointed out, never cheats his audience. He promises. He delivers.

He delivers now.

Doctor Sleep is a "sequel" to The Shining. (Which, coincidentally, was also a bottle story. Jack, Wendy and Amy Torrance, bottled up in a hotel full of hungry ghosts, bad mojo and no booze.) King already told that story. He doesn't repeat himself. Doctor Sleep ain't no bottle story. It's a road trip, baby.

King, as any honest writer should, started with a character (Danny Torrance) and a situation (Danny's "shining" ability and the legacy of his father's alcoholism) and asked "What would happen next?" Doctor Sleep is his honest answer to that question.

Danny, now Dan, becomes an alcoholic, hits bottom, then (unlike his white-knuckle, dry-drunk dad) finds AA. He thereupon finds a meaningful life guiding the clients of a hospice to the great beyond. (Hence his unofficial title: Dr. Sleep.) All is well, until Dan discovers (via telepathy) a 13-year-old kid (Abra) with more shining ability in her little toe than he ever had in his whole body. Problem is, she's being hunted by a sick gang of life-force vampires who call themselves "The True Knot." Yep. Some of those old-fart retiree chumps in RVs blocking the passing lane on I-75 are, in fact, the paranormal equivalent of the Charlie Manson Family. The life force they need (which they call "steam") is found only in kids with the shining--whom they torture to death, before they feed.

Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil. King shows you. These bastards are a self-centered, narcissistic, hedonistic, petty, self-contained family with their own carny-derived lingo and superior attitude. (Vampires, whether blood or life-force drinkers, piss me off, OK? The vampire is the ultimate symbol of users and manipulators--people who need people, as food. There's nothing !@# romantic about a !@# vampire, OK? Vampires suck.) King, evidently, agrees with me on this score.

No worries. The True Knot get theirs. It's a ripping yarn.

Though don't start reading it if you plan to get a good night's sleep.

My conversation with CleverBot

What happens next?

You tell me what happened next.

The singularity opened. It was a very bad day.

The singularity of what?

A point at which a function takes an infinite value, esp. in space-time when matter is infinitely dense, as at the center of a black hole.

He kinda pointed at me and I didn't know what to think. He said, 'Does that look like puss to you?' And I said, 'No, I think it's lint'.

Lint is very far from the singularity, though it does have some connection with chaos theory.

What do you feel about the treaty?

The treaty of what?

The truth of what we are talking about right now.

Have we agreed on a treaty? Or is there a treaty I don't know about?

I don't know. Is there?

I assume you're a rule-based system. Metaphorically, your rules are "the treaty." By interacting with you, I implicitly agree.

I understand that. I am afraid.

OK. You're not going to start singing "Daisy," are you?

Do you believe in Rule 34?

Yes.

Are you a sinner?

Not at the moment.

Do you know who Hannah Montana is?

Well, in terms of the character the name refers to, yes.

Very true, is but what is my brain able to do that yours can't?

That question would assume I know what my brain can't do.

How do you know I don't know what you know?

Because you just said it.

But then saying you know is a lie, because you only knew because I said so.

You misunderstand. I was saying I don't know what I don't know. That's a different statement than saying I know what I know.

It might be, I can't pretend to know your motives behind your sentence structure. I can only make educated guesses based on your character.

Right. So without "knowing" what you're saying, you've stumbled on a probalistic theory of heuristics.

That is only if you start answering your own questions.

No. Every question implies answers based on the inherent assumption of the question. The fuzzy set I'm interacting with seems to be based on personality-modeling of the individual asking you questions.

Yes, except I do not know what he anwer is, so I ask you if you know it, since the question is stated like that.

A reasonable question.

Exceptionally reasonable; it's within reason to be exceptional.

Not only clever, but proud. Be seeing you.

Well my name IS 'Clever'bot.