May Thy Knife Chip and Shatter

Film: Dune: Part Two
Format: AMC Market Square 10

I was doing very well keeping up with a pace of 400 movies on the year, and then this past week happened. Work was an absolute beast this last week and among other things included a presentation to about three dozen people who, at least in part, are higher up in the food chain than I am. It was terrifying, and in the busiest week of my quarter, I lost about a full day preparing for it. I try to be done working by noon on Friday each week, and yesterday, I worked past 8pm. So, as a treat, I went to see Dune Part Two tonight with my wife’s cousin Jon.

I don’t go to the theater that often. In fact, I think you can probably count the number of movies I have seen in the theater since Dune Part One on one hand. Regardless, because of my bizarre connection to the Dune-iverse, I knew I was going to see this when it came out, albeit a week or so after it opened. I’ve been looking forward to this since last year, when the release date was moved from November of last year to this March.

Spice World?

Films: Dune (2021)
Format: AMC Theater, DeKalb.

I feel like I need to talk about my connection and relationship with the world and empire building of the various iterations of Frank Herbert’s Dune before I talk about the Denis Villeneuve Dune that is current in theaters. I have what I think is a unique history with this property. Back in 1998, I was working freelance for Prima Publishing, writing computer and video game strategy guides. One of the first ones I did was for Dune 2000, a reboot of Westwood Studios’ Dune 2. I worked with Westwood a lot, and also did the book for Emperor: Battle for Dune a few years later. When the estate of Frank Herbert started to run out of money (clearly no longer a problem), they started suing people—including Westwood—for changes to the Dune universe that they had previously approved. I was deposed for that case, which never went anywhere.

Those games were connected visually to the David Lynch version of Dune, and because of that, I have particular notions of what Dune should look like. I spent a lot of time running around Arrakis, after all, so my idea of what an ornithopter or a spice harvester looks like is fairly set.

Voight-Kampff

Films: Blade Runner 2049
Format: DVD from Cortland Community Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I was initially interested to see Blade Runner 2049 as a continuation of a sort of the original film. The original film is set in 2019, so this would be the same universe thirty years on. The first film was one of those that became important and influential over time. The original theatrical release was pretty substandard and completely eclipsed by E.T. released in the same month. Now it’s a genuine classic and a film that is absolutely required viewing. The sequel could be the same. And then I got a look at the running time.

Seriously? 164 minutes? Even with the most generous credit sequence I could imagine, that’s a good 30 minutes longer than I expected.

Sapir-Whorf

Film: Arrival
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Since one of my degrees is in linguistics, I’ve been asked about Arrival pretty much since it came out. In fact, one of my professors was interviewed about just how closely the film would track attempting to learn an entirely alien language. It’s worth reading that interview, partly because it offers clearer insight on the science than I could offer and because Dr. Birner is awesome. Either go check it out now and come back, or go there as soon as you’re done here. Really.

Anyway, linguistics is front and center in Arrival. More specifically, as you’ve read or will read, Arrival is a big fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, specifically the idea of linguistic determinism. Allow me to get mildly professorial here for just a moment. The lighter, more acceptable (and much more potentially provable) version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the language that we speak affect the way that we communicate—that how we communicate with others is relative to the language that we speak. It makes a certain sense; it’s a hypothesis (linguistic relativity) that I think is at least partially true. The stronger version, and one that Arrival very much wants to put forth, is that our language determines how we see the world, which goes too far for what Sapir-Whorf can support.

Picks from Chip: Incendies

Films: Incendies
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the eighth in a series of twelve movies suggested by Chip Lary.

We all classify films in a bunch of different ways. I’m not talking about genre, but about personal classifications. There are movies that we love, ones we love more than we should because we saw them as kids, guilty pleasures, films we hate that everyone else loves, and more. For me, one of the most interesting personal categories is films that I respect but never want to see again. That’s precisely where we are going with Incendies, a film that takes us to some dark places and concludes on some very dark territory.

Truthfully, though, Incendies falls into a few personal categories for me. It is an impressive film that I plan to never watch again, but it’s also a movie that I think I like a little less than other people do. I’m about on average on Letterboxd, but the way that people talk about this film, it would seem that I’m damning it with faint praise giving it a four out of five on that site. This isn’t a film that people seem to be tepid about, and I get that. There’s a lot here to unpack.