Face Analysis Face-Off, Part the Second...

Chilean werewolves... Argentinian space aliens... and a Swedish Dracula.

In our last episode, I (in partnership with my pals Aaron and Amber) discovered how to meticulously drain the validity out of an online personality test by bombarding it for days with images of various movie monster faces. The results were mostly hilarious, but they really got me to thinking about exactly how this particular Nametests.com game – titled "Which Nationality Do You Resemble Most?" – was designed in order to determine its various outcomes.

Did the test, as hinted at in both its cover and results images, use three pinpointed target areas on a candidate's Facebook profile picture to capture the necessary information? Or was the whole thing really just a hit or miss affair, especially when none of the results made a lick of sense, except in what I would offer up as circumstances of pure coincidence. An example of this would be when Aaron's picture of Godzilla came out as Japanese, which made sense factually. But then my picture of the aliens from Invasion of the Saucer Men also came out as Japanese. The only similarity between the two photos? Both pictures seemed to have slanted eyes. So was the test also extremely racist as well?

[To read Face Analysis Face-Off, Part the First, go to https://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/05/face-analysis-face-off-part-first.html.]

Often in the full ten days or so that I goofed around with this silly test, I noticed one factor that kept getting repeated. Even though I was swapping out profile photos every single day (and sometimes even faster) while also deleting the previous photo so that it couldn't be picked up by the test again, after the fifth picture was posted and deleted, that picture kept returning from the dead. The fifth picture was of Lon Chaney, Jr. from Universal's The Wolf Man (1941). I kept swapping photos but that stubborn Wolf Man would get picked up by my next iteration of the same test even when I had moved on to other creatures, like Dracula and the Saucer Men. The Wolf Man, who was named as Italian in his original test, began to get new nationalities each time, like Chilean and Russian.

On the fourth time that the Wolf Man reappeared as the selection inside the nationality test (though still Russian that time), I began to wonder, "What if I skipped Facebook at first and went directly to the Nametests website and tried to take this test there?" And so I did a search for "face analysis nametests" to find a direct link. To a small bit of astonishment on my part (but just small), up came a list on Google of numerous tests on the Nametests site which were mostly built around facial photo analysis. The nationality test was sitting in the middle of those results, and I was moved to go in a different direction. "Hey! Let's see if I get either the Wolf Man or the Saucer Men if I click into one of those other links!"

Seriously, that was all I was thinking going forward, and I was really considering how much more of my time this little spur of the moment research was going to cost me. So, having cast aside all good judgment on my part, I clicked on the second test titled "Let's Analyze Your Face!" (which, on a different website might have a whole other meaning and pronunciation, disgusting or otherwise, depending on your particular needs).

And the result?

Sadly, it doesn't say "Wolf Man's Face Analysis" instead of my name, and I am going to dock them extra points for leaving "analysis" without a capital in the title and for dropping the apostrophe for the possessive at the beginning too. (Then again, a quick glance at the entire graphic shows that they are all over the place with capitalization.)

As to the five details in their results of "my" face analysis, it goes without saying that the Wolf Man (since it is actually his face being analyzed) often does think only of love, given his penchant for carrying off the occasional female. (You can make doggy style jokes on your own.) This might tie into his "passionate" eyes as well; even if his passion is not necessarily about love, he is certainly wound up about nearly everything in his movies. Next, it says his nose is "pretty small," but are they just counting his snout-like tip or the entire bridge as well? Taken as a whole, his nose doesn't really seem all that tiny, unless they were basing it on the itty-bitty version of his profile pic they dropped into their graphic. Fourth, if you count his ability to howl crazily like nobody's business, then you could say the Wolf Man "yells very loudly". Finally, he is the Wolf Man. He has stamina and power like few other monsters, and since he is chased by villagers quite often, he does need to be ahead of everyone else.

While I was at first disappointed that the Wolf Man was still coming up as my profile pic after having been deleted nearly a week earlier, I could not argue with the results that I got from this other random testing. The success of this test then made me wonder just how many different face analysis tests the Nametests site had on hand. And so I started to take all of the tests that had shown up on my Google search page.

Up third was a test called "What does your face analysis reveal about you?" If I worried about what would happen if my latest profile pic of the Saucer Men showed up instead on one of these tests, simply by accident but thereby negating this latest fun chain, I needn't have. When the swirly dial stopped spinning after I connected the test to Facebook, ol' Wolfie was back yet again, and here is what I saw...

Once more basing my reading of the results against the monster's known personality traits and not mine (though I am -- ahem -- all of the quite noble things listed above), we are told that Wolfie is "honest and sincere". I suppose that one could mostly say that at first about the Lawrence Talbot character before the first film's transformative bite by Bela Lugosi's gypsy character (who, by the way, looks like a normal wolf and not like a man with wolf makeup on his face and hands), but after that bite, Talbot is really not to be trusted ever again. Even in his final appearance in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where he is pretty heroic both as man and monster from the start, he still lies to the boys (or, rather, hides the fact) about his actual identity at first (though mainly to protect himself while he attempts to save everyone from Count Dracula).

To the second point of his being "a brother and a friend," Talbot certainly serves in the Abbott and Costello film as a friend, and he returns to his ancestral home in both the original 1941 film and the 2010 version due to the death of his brother (though in the second film, he arrives home just as his missing brother's body has been discovered). As far as sensitivity goes, certainly the Talbot character is overly prone to letting his mood – whether sad or angry – affect his behavior, and while he may not have a will strong enough to prevent his transformations, he is certainly adept at fighting in any situation. The fourth point, that he is "a born guardian," is the outlier here. You could use his appearance in the Abbott and Costello film to make the case, since he is mostly attempting to protect other people from Dracula and the Frankenstein monster that the vampire wishes to revive. But his actions in the other films are all over the place, and often in increasingly evil ways, and so he really doesn't have the sort of reputation where you could say he is a consistent guardian of anything except for himself.

The fourth test on the search list was titled "Have Your Face Analyzed! Click Here!" You might think that I am being a little too OCD when pulling the title off the list, but really, when you see the graphic, it still says "Click Here!" at the top of it, even though there is no longer anything on which to click. (This proves once more how fly-by-night these operations really are.) This one drew an immediate loud fit of laughter from me when I saw the results...

Boy, these guys sure can sweet talk a wolfman! My (his) eyes are deep and my (his) smile is beautiful. Somehow, via the application of a heavy Jack Pierce makeup design which clearly show numerous lines and pockmarks, my "age by appearance" has been mysteriously halved to a youthful 26. The overall impression line at the end says that "Rik is meant for great things," which announces boldly to me that these guys really haven't got the memo about me, have they?

The next test is one called "What does your face analysis reveal?"...

Hey, everybody! I've got a pretty face! Well, pretty is as pretty does, and this is pretty damn ridiculous. It says in the text section below the graphic box that "one glance is enough to take your wonderful personality in and that's why everyone loves to be your friend". I'm sorry... isn't that called "judging a book by its cover"? And isn't that something you are usually taught not to do?

It does strike me that absolutely anyone could take these tests and not be told they look like a bucket of shit. I guess they don't want to incur a possible lawsuit if people took a face analysis test on their website and were so depressed that they killed themselves over the result. I guess they've never considered those of us who still might do the same because we are ultra-sensitive and sick to death about being lied to like this.

Of course, these tests are meant and built to be nothing but positive in their results. It's a feel good test to take on a shitty day where you need a lovely pick-me-up. Even a white supremacist asshole like Richard Spencer could come home after a hard day of inciting violence against other races and spewing his Nazi-like hatred, and maybe he has had a rough time because he got punched in the face again for just being a dick, and he feels he needs a release from the day's pressure. So, he jumps on Facebook – because he knows he will spend the next few hours on Grindr edging along to femboys with Nazi-inspired haircuts, so he wants to get the light stuff out of the way first – and he runs across the test titled "What does your face analysis reveal?"

Just for the sake of argument, let's put aside the notion that Spencer probably has a flag or symbol representing whatever his stupid ass, neolithic organization is as his profile pic, and just assume that he put up a 320 pixel squared image of his own mug. (Because, while I am hardcore about doing research, I am not about to look up Richard Spencer on Facebook.) Now, any personality test worth its salt in credibility would take a look at his face and go, "Obviously, you are a racist shit-heel with reprehensible, outmoded, and severely dangerous thoughts, and you have a perfectly vile personality to match." Arguably, the line could go on with "But your eyes are so, so pretty"; just as long as it got the racist call-out in place first. Nope, even Richard Spencer gets to have his load lightened by having it tell him exactly what came up above for the Wolf Man. And while the Wolf Man may have been a vicious, out of control killer, he was no racist. He would have bitten anybody... anybody! That is, if Universal Studios in the 1940s would have given any of those parts to anybody that wasn't white.

The sixth test reverted back to a previous title – "Let's Analyze Your Face!" – but with a far different angle to it...

Man, my eyes (or rather, the Wolf Man's eyes) do a whole lot of things. They have been variously pretty, deep, and passionate; here, they are not just "108% flirty" (like that's possible), but they also "radiate power and virtue"! Hold on there! I have a hard enough time just maintaining the flirtiness... how the hell am I supposed to radiate at the same time? That's some Cyclops-level shit there. (Though he did win Jean Grey over even though his ruby quartz sunglasses are definitely not of the flirty variety... or his optic battle visor for that matter. I guess, hanging around mutants her whole life, Jean just got into some weird dudes.) My smile is also "105% funny," which is a good deal more than TBS (who are just rated as "very" in that regard). So, I guess that I need to start my own basic cable channel.

Next up is "What does your profile picture reveal about your personality?"...

So very wordy! No bullet points this time. The second sentence reads, "You are a very goal-oriented person." Since his goal in most of the films is primarily "Get this werewolf curse removed," Talbot never really accomplishes much. It also says that "others admire you because you know well how the wind blows," which is not saying much to someone with fur all over his arms. All he has to do is hold one up in the air and figure that out pretty quickly. Finally, as for rising "like a star in the heavens," this guy already has a complex regarding the full moon; don't get him started on constellations as well.

Lastly, we have "Analyze Your Face!" Yeah, damn it! Analyze your stupid face already! You've been wasting your time with all of these other dopey face analysis tests that you totally forgot to analyze your face!

I know it is only coincidence, but the combination of my usage of a monster picture and the words at the bottom of the resulting graphic tying into Lady Gaga (who calls her fans "little monsters") was just too much for me. Regarding the information above, anyone that knows me will automatically discount the mental age of 34 years (but then again, this is based on dear Wolfie Talbot), and once more, the photo of a monster who looks considerably aged in comparison but still shears my real age by more than half is suspect. The two best points close the action. While I know that one can cut an athletic figure, and also know a great many athletes who are charismatic, I have never known charisma itself to be identified as directly athletic. "He had a charisma that was, for complete lack of a far better term, athletic." Yeah, doesn't work. Finally, there is the complete assessment at the end: "Only angels look like this." Well, maybe in dog heaven.

This was by no means an exhaustive look at the variety of utterly stupid, time-wasting tests to be found on Facebook, along with the companies that are mainly looking to capture your personal information to most likely sell to marketing firms, advertisers, etc. There are likely so many more tests to be tried, but I just kind of wore myself out doing the ones that I did, though I was delighted by the results. I will probably need to scrub my computer history pretty well after this, and will need to dig into my Facebook settings to shut down further permissions for Nametests and whoever else has hooked up to my information in this span.

Looking back on all of this fluff, especially after riffing on Richard Spencer back there, it reminds me that I had at one point considered putting up a snap of Spencer's favorite president, Agent Orange, as my profile pic. But then I really didn't want to taint my Facebook page with his mug any more than I already had after tearing him apart in my posts, nor did I want that "haven't showered for a fortnight" feeling one might get in having to pretend that Trump's picture is relatable to your own. Certainly, the results would have been possibly even more ridiculous than using swamp creatures and sea monsters instead, but those are noble cryptids that deserve our love and understanding. 

I wouldn't never even apply the term "cryptid" to a demagogue anyway, so there is no comparison. Demagogues are a known lot who have been studied non-stop for decade after decade, and their worthless habits are completely known even if a massive proportion of the world still falls for their bullshit without pause every time. The only real word for their kind is simply... douchebag. And sadly, more than ever it seems they are a species that will never go extinct; they just disappear into the wild for a spell. You can't even test for it.

Face Analysis Face-Off: Part the First

If you are like me at all, you have tried to ignore the ceaseless array of online personality tests that infest Facebook like bedbugs in a Motel 6 mattress pad. You have also, if you are like me at all, absolutely failed in avoiding taking any more of those tests. My one saving grace is that I rarely encounter or even seek out one of these tests on my own. And so I take them very infrequently.

But just how do I take (or even find) such tests on those "infrequent" occasions? Obviously, because one of my friends or acquaintances on Facebook had already taken the test first. Of course, for me to even stop and click the "Find Out Now" tab (or other such shiny, candy-coated buttons that entice you to disrupt whatever flow you had going), the quiz's subject matter has to be just interesting enough where I wouldn't mind finding out what an entirely robotic system has to say about some aspect of my personality derived solely by the spare (and often intentionally) misleading information I have posted on Facebook. 

My profile picture is rarely of my own face, so that either negates or at least perverts or stunts the results of any tests based on photo usage, and I am too self-conscious or defensive to actually post the straight results I might obtain from personality quizzes based on multiple choice selections. There is also the scary proposition of exactly what the quiz sites are gathering from your Facebook page, and/or how they are going to use that information ultimately. Most such sites are now upfront with precisely which info they will be gathering once you approve the link between their site and your page, but it is still a daunting thought as to what the nefarious ends are as to why they would ever want it. However reticent I might be to take part in such entertainment after weighing the pros and cons, I will admit that it can be completely fun to take such tests, if only to kill a few minutes of the day in completely trivial and mind-numbing brain-rot. And so, should the mood strike me, I engage readily with them at a moment's notice without hesitation. 

A couple of weeks back, my friend Amber – who just so happens to be the wife of my writing partner and erstwhile pal who most closely shares my cinematic madness, Aaron – had taken an online game called "Which Nationality Do You Resemble Most?" The simple text for the test reads, "Let us analyze your face and discover which country suits you best! Click here!" The test takes a look at your profile picture and in just a handful of seconds, spits out the result, and if you thought such results might be fairly accurate, then you have never taken one of these stupid things before.

For Amber's go at determining her possible nationality, the testing site grabbed her current profile photo, which was a recent family portrait she and Aaron had taken to include the most recent addition to their little family of four, their newborn daughter roughly six months in age. (I am a baby-hater by instinct, but even I admit the little goof is pretty damn adorable.) Yes, Amber was in her own photo on her own page, but the test did not take into account the name or sex of the owner of the participating Facebook page, and instead latched on to the most prominent visage in the quartet: that of her husband Aaron (while still retaining her name in the reply)...

This result brought great joy to his wife, who posted the result with the only text being the word "Ha" followed by triple exclamation points. While Amber and Aaron have a good deal in common (as some married couples do), they most definitely do not look like each other at all. Nor are the pair even relatable in terms of height, Aaron being taller than even 6-foot me, and Amber being far shorter. As to the results, the test took a look at Aaron's face and declared, "Amber, according to our face analysis, your nationality is: Canadian." And to back up its findings, the Nametests site added a graphic that gave an accuracy rate of 85%.

Amber and Aaron are, like myself and my own wife, former lifelong residents of Anchorage, Alaska, which is as the crow flies, about 300 miles away from the Canadian border, and 500 miles if you are actually driving from our hometown to Dawson in the Yukon Territory, the first Canadian city after crossing said border. (I will not get into flight specifics here of traveling to other places to reach the Great White North in shorter distances; just trying to set a standard. And I use the word "city" to describe a place that shows up on the majority of maps without needing to use an electron microscope to find your idiotic town with a population of 46.) So, while we exist at roughly the same latitudes as Canadians, pretty much experiencing the same seasons, etc., in Alaska, we are still Americans. Still, I can see a measure of the stereotypical Canadian openness and politeness in Aaron's picture, and so the result is not as far off as it could have been.

So, let's move on now to those "could-have-beens," shall we?

Naturally, I just had to take this test, and for one very good reason: my current profile pic was none other than King Kong from his most recent film, Kong: Skull Island. I was dying to find out what the result would be, and honestly, I was ready for a wide variety of possible outcomes from this, including wondering just how racist the creators of the quiz might be. That I was itching to immediately publish the results is an understatement. And the answer?

Wow... Had the creators of this quiz recently seen the 1961 British horror film, Konga? That's the most prominent English ape flick of comparable sizing. (This is not taking into account international co-productions of recent vintage.) For real 'Mercans (aka the real snowflakes), the notion that Kong is not considered 100% American here might upset them greatly and get them reaching for their AKs. But, of course, a great cross-section of them also deny the American Civil War was primarily fought over slavery, so what the fuck do they know? They would also miss out on the fact that Kong in the original 1933 (and 1976... and 2005) version was straight up attacked and then kidnapped from his island home, transported in the hold of a massive ship to America, made to perform onstage in bound slave-like fashion for the delight of human beings, attempted to escape, and then was paid back for this mistreatment by being shot up by human weaponry, and finally, we are shown the image of his bloody, broken body strewn across the streets of New York. I am pretty certain Kong never would have considered himself an American, because being an ape (even a gigantic one with a serious jonesing for hot blonde women), he doesn't know from nationality. So, being called English instead of American is not going to upset him in the least.

This got me thinking, though, about how other monsters would come out nationality-wise via the same dopey test. To establish a base using a common image, I first jumped to Peter Jackson's version of King Kong from 2005. I thought the result might be roughly similar, but was told a very different origin story about this big guy:

Like any of these results, read into it what you will, but the 98% accuracy rating seems pretty definitive... doesn't it? It doesn't? Why a gorilla-like creature would be thought to have come from a continent entirely free from great apes is beyond me (though South America does possess a wide variety of what are termed New World monkeys), but then again, this test is not exactly giving us an actual biological analysis. In fact, I can't figure out what the hell it is using as a basis. The photo shows us three boxed points on each image as an example of how it determines the results, but the boxes are used in the images via a template, with said box trio configured in the same exact positions on each profile picture. If it is actually using those three points on each image, and if the selection is merely based on color points in the photo and not true physical characteristics, I do not know. (And, of course, this is all just very silly and never meant to be even mildly analyzed in reverse, like any test you might take on a social media platform...)

Aaron had seen his wife's post and taken the test himself, which he then posted on his own Facebook page. His profile pic, in contrast to mine, was of Godzilla. Aaron and I are both huge kaiju fans, so the fact that we were lined up with the two greatest figures of the genre at the same time in our profile pics is no real surprise. We often have header images of monster flicks and posters, or regularly post monster pictures for the heck of it on our Facebook pages. Myself, I was a bit jealous not having tried the Big G myself. While the 1933 Kong is my very favorite movie of all time, Godzilla is my absolute fave large-scale monster. (More on my fave human-sized "creature" is coming right up...) But Aaron had Godzilla in place already, and set down the comment point for the remainder of this exercise. Aaron's post had these words: "I am the only one this test has been accurate for."

So, why did Godzilla come out as Japanese? Is the coding for the test set to recognize certain pop cultures figures like Godzilla and know he is of Japanese origin? Or was there a more racial component to the result? One can't help but see one of the template red boxes in the image is directly over one of his eyes. And how is that portrayed? Is it reading his eyes as being slanted at a certain angle that certain citizens would not mistake for anything but of Asian origin? On which physical features does this test use to determine its results, if indeed it is doing so at all, and not just rolling the dice, so to speak? Whatever the algorithms are, the test seems more unsure of the Godzilla result than the last Kong one, giving it only 85% accuracy.

As I said, Aaron's post became ground zero for the rest of this discussion, especially since he had tagged me in the post itself so it appears on my own home page. I commented on his post with my first two Kong results back to back. Then, after a brief span, I switched out my profile pic once more. This required, it seemed, the deletion of the previous profile pic entirely, otherwise the Nametests site would continue to employ the old picture instead. After letting it stew for a while and cleaned out my cache as well, I finally got a result for my new profile pic, which just happened to be that more human-sized "creature" I mentioned a few paragraphs ago...

Once more, read into this what you will as far as how it determines the result. Or is it just swinging wildly, and letting the user read into the answer instead? It seems most likely. Here, I posted on my comment, "Boy, they are off across a whole ocean and a continent..." since the Creature from the Black Lagoon's lagoon is located deep down the Amazon river.

I next wanted to see what it would do with a completely non-humanoid face and figure, and so a few hours later (after clearing everything under the sun out of my browser again), I posted the result for another favorite monster of mine – this time of the prehistoric sea slug variety – a certain "Monster that Challenged the World". There was a small problem though...

The Nametests site could not make out the image I posted, even though I had been making all of my profile pics the same size. This time, it looks like they used a microscope to read the picture. For once and only once in this article, I have created a mockup of the result (though without wasting time in blending the images together in the middle). Here is the result for the "Monster"...

Since I am Swedish on my dad's side, this made me laugh uproariously, and especially because it is the most gratuitously creepy of the monster images I had used to that point. Later that evening, I ran into a bigger problem. The Nametests site was possibly getting tired of my shenanigans (though it is more likely to have been coincidence). Whatever happened, after I had switched my profile to an image of Lon Chaney, Jr.'s Wolfman character, the system kept recognizing the Creature from the Black Lagoon instead, even though I had deleted the image from Facebook and its history from my browser and cache. I even tried to get a Wolfman result on my phone, but wasn't able to until early the next day, after about 20 tries. And I was not displeased with the final version, though once the game let the Wolfman in, it was going to prove remarkably hard to keep him away...

Aaron, not to be outdone, went another route with his second picture. Being a dedicated fan of the Master, John Carpenter, he changed his profile pic to one of the aliens from They Live, after their hideous countenances have been revealed to Rowdy Roddy Piper with his special sunglasses. More possible tension is likewise revealed by the test result...

Aaron was worried what it said about the makers of the game and their possible contempt for Argentinians; I said it probably had something more to do with their contempt for aliens. I commented on Aaron's post that "I can see this is going to become a great, new way of life for us," but then the test kept doggedly hanging onto an old image after I deleted it. This time, it was the Wolfman, but instead of seeing the exact same picture, I started getting other nations as results. I had switched my profile to that of Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, but the Wolfman returned, this time as...

At this juncture, I knew the game was rigged. First off, there is no way that a Wolfman could get trapped in a mineshaft. It was becoming more clear gradually that this test was just hit or miss. There couldn't be any reason to it. After several hours of waiting, I was able to finally get a hit on the Dracula picture...

Now this was cool... I was very accepting of the result (speaking for my own partial peeps), even though Romania is a good distance away from Sweden. (Lugosi was Hungarian, but was actually born quite near Transylvania in an area that was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary but is now part of Romania) They at least got the continent correct. I switched to yet another image, going the alien route this time, by using the crazy big-eyed and big-headed costumes from Invasion of the Saucer Men. However, while Dracula is most renowned for coming back from the dead over and over again, it was the Wolfman who was still getting in my way. And wouldn't you know it, he has now been revealed to be totally in it with Trump's cohorts...

In fact, he may have rigged the election for Cheeto the Toddler. I kept trying to get the Saucer Men to show up, but it wasn't until three days later that I finally got the Wolfman to disappear when I took the test. To my delight, I was to discover that my pal Aaron (in his human guise) and the Saucer Men were probably one and the same...

I rather gave up on the Monster Nationality sport at that time, mostly due to being distracted by health appointments and family activities. I did try the test once more on my phone a couple of days later to see if the result was the same, but the Wolfman reappeared yet again. He had gone back to his Italian roots for some reason (or no reason at all). Finally, this morning, I decided to give the game one last try, still using the Saucer Men profile pic. This time, the little buggers shifted across the Pacific and were now apparently related to Aaron's Godzilla...

This time, the test's algorithms were far more sure about the Saucer Men being from Japan than it was about Godzilla (96% to 85%), but truly, it was just all silliness down the line. It's really what you want from one of these games, especially when you are just killing time. But I would still really love to learn what the creators of this particular quiz did to get these results.

Meanwhile, something else happened when the Wolfman mysteriously returned for the fourth time...

[To be continued soon...]

The Villeneuve List: A Tour of Cosmos

"Move and I shave her!"

Upon posting on Facebook that I was stunned to my senses by the film Incendies the other day, my friend Kenda recommended that I see director Denis Villeneuve's earlier work in a film called Cosmos (1996). After finding it Cosmos is not readily available on DVD or streaming (not even on Amazon.ca), I managed to locate a quality full copy that someone posted on YouTube. Even better, since the film is in Québécois French, the copy turned out to be subtitled in English.

Cosmos is not a full Villeneuve film. It is an anthology film of short films by six directors including Villeneuve, each taking place on and around the streets of Montreal. The short films are tied together by the presence of a partly Greek cab driver named Cosmos (played most appealingly by Igor Ovadis), who stays mostly at the edges as the six vignettes are played out before us, though he is fully involved in one of the stories (Cosmos et agriculture, probably the funniest section of the film).

The short films are edited together so that they weave in and out of each other's stories occasionally in a mostly organic way, aided by the fact that co-director André Turpin also serves as the cinematographer for the whole affair. His stellar camerawork aids immeasurably to keeping a consistent look to Cosmos, even if there are vast changes in tone and style between the six directors.

Villeneuve's extremely odd section (Le Technétium, about a film director who is highly nervous about appearing on an MTV-style channel where the only real concern is how incredible the guests' hair looks once in-house star stylist Tekno has his way with it) was my favorite (and most imaginative) of the individual sections.

Cosmos is somewhat reminiscent of the higher profile Night on Earth (1991), the difference being that the Jim Jarmusch film is in color, and tells the stories of five different cab drivers in five cities around the globe in one night, whereas Cosmos is in black and white, and has one cabdriver involved in six stories in one city in Canada. But it was hard for me not to think of Night on Earth constantly while watching Cosmos. Still, while at least one of the stories didn't really work at all for me (Marie-Julie Dallaire's L'Individu), I enjoyed the film overall.

Recommended for the adventurous of spirit and for those who don't cringe at the thought of either subtitles or French (or both).

For anyone interested, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AtYfdsyV4.

Out of Bounds is Always Out of Bounds...

I have been on pain meds lately to help me deal with a constant hip pain issue (it's the reason that I have not been writing very much the last two months), and as per the instructions given by my doctor, I am supposed to take my pill once a day... AT BEDTIME. Unofficial bedtime – as in "lights out" (though not "TV off" or "phones off") for Jen and I is usually around ten at night, but this does not quite jibe with my ability to withstand the pain in my hip. The meds I have been given help me sleep, though in a pretty light way (which is a nice bonus), but the chief benefit of their use for the past couple of weeks is to reduce my level of pain (and the resulting annoyance with that pain) from anywhere to 50-75%, depending on the night. My mornings are relatively comfortable, but by noon the meds have usually started to wear off incrementally. Each day varies, but most often by around two in the afternoon, the onslaught of discomfort and leg spasms begins.

For the remainder of the afternoon and into the early evening, the pain gradually increases. I started out taking my pain medication each evening – after determining a certain amount of time for the pill to start kicking in to at least allow me to settle into sleep – around nine p.m. But I found quickly that I was getting more and more impatient each day to get that pill inside my system, and thus, the time has moved up every couple of days to 8:45, 8:30, 8:20, and so on to the point where I am throwing it down the ol' gullet around 7:45 p.m. So, as I have shifted my pill-taking time, so to has that "AT BEDTIME" time. Last night, this allowed me to seek the downy softness of my pillow just after nine o'clock, where I crashed pretty deeply for nearly nine hours.

The point of this? Well, each evening, I generally stop checking Facebook and other social media sites somewhat early in prime time. I also cannot get onto any news sites at all. The main reason is so that I don't get riled up about something in the news or by something stupid someone says (more often than not lately, the same goddamned thing). If I decide to pick a fight with someone online around 8:30 in the evening, I will go ballistic for about four hours, Jen will never hear the end of it, and my brain will never shut off at all in order for me to get some sleep. Add in another reason being the one-hour time difference between where I am located (California) and where the vast majority of my longtime friends and family are (Alaska), and then mix in yet another reason that so many of my friends seem to get on social media (owing to various family and/or theatre-related concerns) much, much later in the evening – long after I go to bed (and add in that extra hour) and sometimes early in the morning – that it becomes completely futile for me to check Facebook before I go to bed. There just won't be very much there to see until later, so I tend to wait until the morning.

Every once in a while, however, I miss out on something. Last night, people on both sides of the political divide within my group of friends seem to come to agreement over something someone had tweeted about Barron Trump, the ten-year-old son of... eh, you know. The tweet was by Katie Rich, a writer with Saturday Night Live  (who has apparently been suspended since this blew up) and the joke was along the lines of "Barron will be this country's first homeschool shooter." Ms. Rich was not the only one to go after the youngest Trumpster, as it seems to have become a bit of a pile-on to come up with cruel things to say about the lad. Even my hero Patton Oswalt's younger brother Matt got into the swing of things.

Of course, the Facebook thread merely discussed that it was not alright to do something like pick on a kid, but they did not elaborate on who it was about (not by name anyway) or what was said. The thread began last evening, right around the time where the news becomes a "Forbidden Zone If You Want to Get Sleep" for me. They mentioned "Trump's son," and I never even thought about the youngest one. I immediately thought Eric or Donald, Jr., and my reaction was, "Fuck those douchebags. Hell, Junior posed with a severed elephant's tail on safari. Fuck him in the ass and mouth with it. The ass first." Nor was the content of the tweet revealed so I had no idea what was said. I know "vaguebooking" was not meant (for once) with this thread and that the people involved were discussing the issue fully engaged and aware of the story's details already. But for someone just dropping onto Facebook early in the a.m. and finding that thread was the first thing in their feed, and then finding no information within the thread that actually revealed who the hell the victim actually was and who the hell the perpetrator was, it was maddening to me.

Luckily, I am great at research, and had the answer in seconds. And yes, I agree with all of my friends on that thread, both on the left and the alt-right (sorry, had to get a dig of some sort in there), Barron Trump is out of bounds. He is a ten-year-old boy. He is not an adult, and he has not put himself in the public eye on purpose. Someone did mention in the thread that the president's wife, children, etc. [I am paraphrasing] should be untouchable, and I do not for a second agree with that, however. Trump's adult children – at least the three who have determined (or are allowed) to take this ride along with him – are legal adults who have placed themselves in both the celebrity and the political world of their own free will. The same goes for the First Lady, who was already in the public eye (in rather revealing ways) before she joined the Trump Circus Train.

I am not saying that people should go after them or have a right to go after them just because they are celebrities, but when your face is constantly in the public eye, it is going to happen more often than not. Every actor, actress, comedian, musician, director, etc. out there has fans and haters alike, and the only real way to make any of that go away is to simply not be in one of those professions. And politics? Half the people are going to hate you no matter who you are, and in Trump's case... well, let's leave that stew for a good while. People should not automatically go after celebrities or politicians just "because". But if that celebrity or politician does or says something stupid or terrible... well, by all means. Tweet away. Fire your barbs if you must.

But his ten-year-old son? Leave him alone. Off limits. He is out of bounds. Let him have his childhood, even if his dad seems to be modeling him in his own image, suit, red tie, and everything. What dad doesn't want their kid to be like them? My dad wanted me to love fishing as much as he did, and I wasn't having it at all. I love my dad, but I had a different agenda, even as a kid. Barron might even be a horrid little brat behind the scenes, but that is not for us to muse upon in public forums. Barron Trump is to be left alone, people. 

But there's more to this...

I am saying all of this as a person who has openly and actively despised Mr. Trump for well over thirty years to the point where even seeing his orange-crusted image has me reacting much like Kramer did to Mary Hart's voice on Seinfeld. I do not like the man. I do not want him in the highest office in this country, and I do not want him in charge of anything other than his own worthless businesses. I would rather we built a wall around him more than anything. (And in some ways, he kind of has done that...)

But there is another trend I have been noticing lately – in fact, have been noticing for quite some time – and that has been the calls for extreme violence in response to whoever is sitting in the White House. I don't mean by terrorist groups... I mean by ordinary people on social media or that one encounters in public.

Or by celebrities. The one getting attention right now is Madonna's thoughts about "blowing up the White House," which she says, in the usual half-apologetic, public relations-laden turnaround, was "taken out of context." No, Madge, I think it was pretty clear what you were saying. I don't like Trump any more than you do, but I didn't leave America for years to pretend I had a British accent, and I certainly don't want our political system to become a free-for-all target range for whatever yahoo wants to shoot or blow up the place. We have checks and balances in place for a reason, and Trump has many millions of miles of work to go to actually earn the trust of the American public for real. I'm an atheist, but no one steps on a church in my town. Likewise, no one gets away with saying they would like to blow up the friggin' White House. I don't care if you once had some decent songs...

The same goes for random people commenting on posts on Facebook. I have seen several threads in recent months, some as recently as yesterday, where someone has posted a comment about something political (generally something anti-Trump), and people have most often replied in kind. There is the occasional person from the other side who will provide a counterpoint, and that's fine (as long as it is not obvious trolling). But then, someone will agree with the original poster's point, but then throw in something along the lines of "I think someone needs to shoot him." Wait, what? NO!!! That's not how we do things here in America. OK, yes... that's how most of America operates day to day in the streets, but not in the political arena. Violent upheaval is not how you run a government.

Am I wrong, or isn't it rather illegal (or at least didn't it used to be) to say such things? Or are there just so many people doing it nowadays that our federal agencies have just given up trying to track each instance down? I am pretty certain most of the people who randomly throw such comments out (the most recent instance I noticed was someone who is a housewife day to day, and is probably a pretty nice lady otherwise) are just releasing hot air, and don't really mean such sentiments. Do you really want someone to get physically shot? I mean, shot with a gun, possibly killed by a bullet through their head or decimating their innards. I suppose they could have meant "with a camera," but then why didn't they just say "Hey, I think that person should have some 8x10s taken!" and not sound so violent with their ultimatum?

I think this instance upset me most because it was someone who seemed to have generally the same take as me on the discussion but then they decided to throw in that nasty little tag to their response. No wonder those on the right like to often point out how "violent" liberals are lately when such things are tossed off at random. I am not trying to create an equivalency here in conjunction with this statement, but I am reminded of one of my innumerable doctor appointments about six months ago. 

I was waiting to see my allergist in a room shared by a variety of doctors. There was a couple sitting almost directly across from me in the room, and they were watching the news on a television hanging down from the ceiling that was tuned to CNN. The couple – both caucasian – were in their forties, perhaps early fifties, seemingly in the same general age range as me, though they were two different patches of much rougher road. It was a Jack Sprat situation: the lady was obese enough to require a cane and was eating a sandwich from a Tupperware container in the waiting room; the man was pencil thin, wore a ratty T-shirt and trucker cap, and noticeably had what just had to be "meth mouth". They were eyeing the news with suspicion, as it aired an interview with Barack Obama. The TV sound was low enough, and I was far enough way, so that I could not make out most of what the then-president was saying, but I could hear what the couple was saying in reaction to the fact that he dared to be on the television in front of their faces.

The lady said, "Oh, I hate that man so much" and the man replied, "Yeah, that motherfuckin' n----- should be shot! If I don't do it, somebody should!"

Beside myself, there were about a half-dozen other people in the waiting room when this was said. (My mother-in-law was in the restroom.) It was said loud enough that no one could mistake the words, and in fact, the man's voice raised slightly – puffing himself up in about as macho a pose as he could – as he said it. I was the only other white person in the room, and his speech made me feel filthy just by proxy. Everyone else in the room clearly heard what he said, including the three receptionists at the counter about fifteen feet away, and there was noticeable agitation in the room. But no one said anything in response. I glared straight ahead at the couple, and I caught the man's eye, and when he saw I was staring hard at him (I easily had a hundred pounds and six inches on him), he actually kind of withered and lost his resolve. When my mother-in-law returned, I whispered to her what had been said, and she was shocked.

I thought hard about contacting the FBI or Secret Service about the situation, but then let it go. I knew it was just a couple of bona fide assholes letting off some steam, and knew there was nothing behind their stupid threats besides ignorance. And that's how I feel about most of the people, on either side, who throw out such words. There's nothing to it. So why do you have to say it? Do you really want to see someone shot? Or raped? Or blown up? Wouldn't you rather live in an America where no one gets shot, raped, or blown up?

People on both sides are equally capable of saying terrible things about anyone. I am not going to say one side is more guilty of it than the other, because such numbers are unquantifiable and not really worthy of discussion. And I don't care if you are "on my side" or not, talking seriously about killing someone for any reason is not OK. It doesn't matter who they are, what you perceive they have done, and most certainly what position they hold in government. Even if you hate that person beyond all reason, it is not OK. Not one bit.

And if you are an adult, don't pick on ten-year-olds. No matter whose kid they are.

Out of bounds is always out of bounds...

RTJ

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 1: I've Been Here, I've Been Working on Something, and There Is No Problem

The title above holds the answers to the questions most often asked of me over the past couple of months, during which time it seems I have taken some form of hiatus, purposeful or otherwise, from the Cinema 4 Pylon: "Where have you been?" "What the hell are you up to? You haven't been writing lately." "What's the problem now? Are you in another one of your funks?" Emails, phone calls, up close and personal... this is what I have heard, and not just from the usual suspects.

It's funny how you can write and write and write your ass off, and only a couple of committed, caring friends (and the odd stranger or two) will comment here and there, and you will begin to feel as if you were just another voice lost in the uncaring wilderness of the internet.

But, take an uncharacteristic amount of time away from something that people have locked you into their minds as being the sum of your being, and they begin to notice. Lately, I have received batches of concerned emails relating to this topic, along with a few comments on old posts to which I didn't bother to respond, and even Twitter messages from people with whom I am only lightly acquainted who have at least wondered where all the movie review tweets have gone.

This is all very nice, and I appreciate that some people have noticed my disappearance from the online world. But, here's what I thought was the truth: as of early September, I had grown sick of the internet.

After a few short months of testing, I came to believe that Twitter was essentially useless as a real communication tool, and rather just the latest and possibly worst form of networking pollution -- chiefly mindless blather trying to out-shriek the rest of the chiefly mindless blather, much of it scrubbed of context and therefore lacking any real impact. Facebook had become unmanageable to me once I reconnected with dozens of people from the past that I never really knew anyway. A precious few are grand old friends with whom I am glad to refresh our acquaintance, but then they throw their friends from the old days at you, and they don't realize (and often get hurt when they find out) that you really have no wish to know those other "old friends" anymore. Largely, this is because you never liked them in the first place (and most likely, they never liked you either). Worst of all, for weeks I dreaded opening my email accounts for fear of actually having to communicate with anyone. And when I did answer, I found, because I had not been paying very close attention to the run of things on the internet, that it would most likely would have been better had I not ever replied to anything at all. I had taken myself out of the loop, and even considering playing the slightest bit of catch-up had become both loathsome and monumentally difficult for me.

And so, for the most part, I disappeared online. A couple of email replies here and there kept the dread going; a mere handful of tweets throughout September and October showed that I was fighting whatever this creeping malaise happened to be. There were even brief moments where I tried to push back at it, and announced boldly m return to online life. (Well, if you can call saying anything in the cavernous depths of either Twitter or Facebook saying being truly bold -- which neither action is.) And while it is fun to think that perhaps this mood is merely just another syndrome amongst the thousands either identified or created to help us inch our way through the modern world -- let's throw a charming acronym or a smartly dressed abbreviation at it! -- the fact is that my attention has been diverted, and interacting online with the electronic world of faceless others has simply not been shown to be important enough to wash away the impression that I have disappeared.

But I have been around, and I have been busy, quite busy. Indeed, I have been quite deeply engaged for two to three months now. While I have been writing to some small degree, that activity has not been on anything to which this website directly relates, and it has not been the center of my attention. Writing is still the most important thing to me, and will prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of what I have been up to over the last two months. In fact, you could call my efforts "research" to the largest degree, or rather, a preparatory indulgence. What I have been doing will likely seem idiotic to some and markedly obsessive to all, but those who have similar addictions to the world of the cinema, those who feel lost within their own personal realms, and even anyone even the tiniest bit OCD will fully understand. (Yea, modern syndromes!)

To fully impart the madness into which I locked myself through the lateness of summer, though, I should divulge what led me to this point...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2...)