Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby Rory » Sun Jan 07, 2018 11:37 am

Rory » Wed Jan 03, 2018 8:39 am wrote:Horses for courses and all that. I've only seen the first 3 but they're the weakest 3 Black Mirror episodes I've seen. The first was awful, like I'm wasting my time bad, the second was worse (literally nothing happens, just white middle class anxiety). Vapid as fuck. The third was a visual feast - cinematography was phenomenal, but the story and writing are inane - the characters motivations are inexplicable and the whole things a disjointed mess.

Seriously bad in the context of what's gone on before. I wasn't dying about the last 6 Netflix ones, they were ok taken as a whole, with some interesting enough conciets and some charming nostalgia maybe, but I'm thinking S4 E04-06 are going to be shite too. Very disappointing


So I was completely off the mark in predicting E04-06 would be bad. They're assertively good. 4 and 5 feel like original/pre Netflix Black Mirror again. The leads in 4 are very likable, their chemistry is undeniable and although the central idea of the show is kind of trite, it felt very good to watch. Strong episode.

5 is great - survival horror, very tense. Bleak as fuck. Very well executed. Don't want to spoil it. Classic, up there with the best.

6 is very good also. Its not my favorite but its still head and shoulders above the first 3, and has some intersting ideas and ethical quandaries on display. It's also kind of a bridge between much of the content shown in prior BM stories.

Very strong second half to the season and it's certainly redeemed itself imo. That Jodie Foster episode aside, I could take the other 5 and say it's a good season overall. That Archangel shite is risible pish - nothing to every go back to there. Avoid.
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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby Jerky » Sun Jan 07, 2018 7:06 pm

LOL ArkAngel was my favorite episode (the Jodie Foster one), but Metalhead was my second favorite (a master class in suspense... and did you notice all the Penderecki on the soundtrack? taken directly from The Shining!)

Hang the DJ was, for my money, their best "feel good" episode... better than San Junipero even.

Black Museum, an anthology episode within an anthology series, was devilish fun. The best story of the three was the first one. I was shocked to learn it was adapted from a Penn Gillette story!

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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Jan 13, 2018 6:03 pm

.

About 2/3 of the teleplays in the first 3 seasons of BM showed greatness, usually with at least a spark of originality that was at times more like a giant flaming sword's worth. The last in the third season ("Hated in the Nation," the one with the bees) was arguably the best of all. The same can be said of either of the original two ("The National Anthem" and "15 Million Credits,") or of "White Christmas," and those are just the ones that come most directly to mind without looking up the full list.

After his performance over the last few years, which I consider unprecedented in my own viewing experience, I won't be blaming Charlie Brooker for anything as pedestrian as running out of ideas, as seems to be the case, or for getting repetitive because he has to meet a forced production quota now that he's a Netflix property. And maybe the six units presented as "Season 4" would almost all make for pretty good TV, if they could be viewed apart from the achievements of the earlier sets. And maybe more greatness will arrive in future blocks, given some time for a recharge. (Was it always the case that Brooker wrote all of the scripts, by the way? Not going to check that either just yet.)

One semi-legit complaint, I suppose, would be that most of the pieces in this set do not stand alone in that they proceed from a new idea, but rather settle in as variations within one alternate future in which human consciousnesses can be copied digitally, complete with all memories and feelings of physical sensations, and released into the Code Realm as autonomous beings. This is the same scenario already tried on, with much better results, in both "White Christmas" and "San Junipero" (an excellent episode which nevertheless won awards over even better ones because of the "feel good" hook). The fourth season subjects this same premise to increasingly diminishing returns in "USS Callister," "Hang the DJ," and "Black Museum."

"Callister" I enjoyed the most out of those three, for the simple reason that it was unapologetically comedic (if black) and made few bones about it, a parody both on Star Trek and even more so Star Trek fandom. Here predictability more or less contributes to the entertainment. Also evident was the PG-13 approach: By having its geek super-genius antagonist suffer from a heavy psychosis coupled with an impossibly immature sexuality, the show avoided a far darker territory in which functioning genitals would have been just about the last thing you would have expected the imprisoned simulacra to lack. I know that would have overburdened this piece and ruined any comedy; but I am not sure why that is the case, since what is depicted successfully for laughs here is itself a form of perpetual torture.

"Hang the DJ" took a similarly innocent approach, this time that of a formula romcom, and stuck to it. This would have worked best as an indie film outside of the Black Mirror context (or BM-verse, as it has now largely become). If you imagine the place where these two souls find themselves trapped to be a kind of magical purgatory, the solving of the puzzle and the feel-good ending might satisfy in an innocent way. If you imagine it as taking place within the same machine where the two long-dead lovers of "San Junipero" will also still be dancing until the sun stops powering the earth, the whole thing becomes rather more sinister. Was this episode intended as an advertisement for a future species of dating service that we should all look forward to? Because that is where it ends up.

"Black Museum" I thought was very much a throwback to the 1980s versions of "Twilight Zone," "Outer Limits," "Tales from the Crypt," etc. My early 1980s self would have enjoyed it, I guess. The title and the use of an over-the-top carnival barker who calls himself a carnival barker suggests that this is intended as a parody of none other than "Black Mirror" itself. The #BLM-ish twist in the final part (not the most unpredictable of the options) seemed far too serious and contemporary a matter for this trashy format. To then have the deceased mama also appear as the heroine's accompanying angel, and to be given the suggestion we have now seen some measure of justice done (as if she's ever, ever going to get away with this) veers it into political malpractice. But taken as pure late-night entertainment for stoners it came pretty close to matching the movie "Creepshow," if you remember that.

Now turning to the three episodes that did not fit directly into the emerging pattern of a standardized "Brookerverse" with a Matrix full of autonomous simulacra: "Arkangel" was the season's highlight, by far. (The first two were also the best two, which made for quite a letdown along the next four.) Not coincidentally, this episode had the best performances and best sense of timing and film-making, so that I actually asked myself who the director was before the end credits. Never mind that this is an old, old story, as acknowledged in its friendly wave to Oedipus Rex. That story is as fundamental and strong as ever, and here given perfect execution and a real sense of pain. Maybe it helps that for once the tech is a device for launching a story about humans I could actually empathize with? (All three of the main characters, though obviously the daughter and her friend more so than the mother, by light years.) One friend complained to me that the mother's actions at some point were completely irrational; like, why didn't she just talk with her daughter? I thought, irrational, yes, but also pretty much inevitable. Once she failed to throw out the device as directed by the psych counselor, there would be no going back.

I don't recall the name of the one with the woman chased by the powerful "dog" robot, but it was excellent for the extremely over-done thing that it was, from a mix of genres I would not normally be choosing to watch. Nice b&w shooting and pacing, seriously. If any of these should stand as a kind of real-world advocacy, then this one, although it will make no bloody difference. This exact form of war machine is actually being developed by Pentagon-connected contractors, as those of us on R.I. are well aware.

"Crocodile" was the first BM episode I would dismiss as embarrassingly bad. Look past every aspect of the plot, and do not bother to try understanding anything the protagonist does in either rational, or neurotic, or sociocultural terms, and you are left with some really damn good acting and some great visual atmospherics, not entirely gone to waste.

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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby NaturalMystik » Sun Jan 14, 2018 1:34 pm

JackRiddler » Sat Jan 13, 2018 5:03 pm wrote:.
The same can be said of either of the original two ("The National Anthem" and "15 Million Credits,")


FWIW of all the episodes, "15 Million Credits" is the one sticks with me the most. For whatever reason it fills me with dread and makes me feel a little sick.
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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Jan 14, 2018 6:49 pm

NaturalMystik » Sun Jan 14, 2018 12:34 pm wrote:
JackRiddler » Sat Jan 13, 2018 5:03 pm wrote:.
The same can be said of either of the original two ("The National Anthem" and "15 Million Credits,")


FWIW of all the episodes, "15 Million Credits" is the one sticks with me the most. For whatever reason it fills me with dread and makes me feel a little sick.


In emotional impact it's the strongest, I agree.
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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby 82_28 » Mon Jan 15, 2018 6:34 am

I also agree. 15 Million Credits is the one I have watched more than once and told people who dig reality shows and shit they too should see.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:19 pm

Now here are some words I could not have conceived of writing, or even understanding had I read them just a couple of hours ago:

Stated without irony, the Black Mirror episode ideally cast with Miley Cyrus as more or less herself (S5E3) is the greatest feel-good summer fantasy-adventure teenage date movie for suburban white kids of all time, and one of the most fun things I've seen in ages. Not kidding. It could have grossed 100s of mils at the 1980s box office, and deservedly so. Brooker's range and ability to rule any genre is awesome, more evidence of his gift than the supposed keenness of his sociocultural observation and prophetic abilities, which are wearing really thin since it's repeating what we all know and see and yet almost all still partake in, no escape visible. Diagnosis gets tiresome, but it is good he has resisted pretending he can offer a cure. Discipline is his forte.

S5E1 (the Mortal Kombat sex machine) was another excellent, perfectly paced piece of storytelling and acting, with genuine emotion. E2 was also good stuff, if more formulaic and too much designed for the social media stunt at the end.

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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby identity » Tue Aug 20, 2019 3:16 am

^
Thanks; I wasn't aware that Season 5 was out, looking forward to E3 tonight!

BTW, there doesn't seem to be any mention on RI of Fassbinder's 1973 TV movie (in two parts), Welt am Dracht (World on a Wire), which I think would be of interest to most people here, especially those into Black Mirror.

Here are a couple of reviews from imdb (there are SPOILERS, so if you don't want your fun upset by them, skip the following and just get and watch the movie):

Part 1 of Fassbinder's sci-fi foray, World on a Wire is quite good. I always like his direct, theatrical style. He opens with some references to 2001 -- white plastic futuristic decor, space opera music -- to set the tone. Then there's a whole lot of Alphaville -- hosts of blank expressions held artificially long -- and early Godard. And sure enough Eddie Constantine even has a small role near the end of Part 2.

It's a very Matrixy premise, from way back in 1973, of a world of people, termed identity units, created artificially in a supercomputer as an experimental control group, with the goal of predicting future human behavior and learning what to avoid/promote. There is an element of Big Gov't social engineering, and then companies move in to try to learn future demand (Big Steel is the baddie here, which is a little dated). In other words, it's just like today's world, with all of us trying to become identity units for Google to track ... or somesuch. The Thirteenth Floor (1999) is also based on the same novel "Simulacron 3" by Daniel F. Galouye.

Fassbinder uses lots of mirror shots to disorient and question the reality of identity and the nature of reality. With the camera often tracking over to mirrors, or starting with mirror images which only become apparent when the camera tracks a person's movement away from and out of a mirror. The room housing the supercomputer has a couple of fully mirrored walls, which gives it a sleek futuristic look, and acts as a visual metaphor for the layers of reality/unreality.

I especially liked seeing Fassbinder regulars pop up. El Hedi ben Salem plays a bodyguard/security agent; Barbara Valentin a sexy secretary/ corporate spy. This was originally done for German television, and Fassbinder uses some of these actors for his later TV opus Berlin Alexanderplatz. There is a weird sequence in World on a Wire, where Gottfried John's character takes over Gunter Lamprecht's body (which in BA terms is Reinhold taking over Franz Biberkopf, which has eerie resonance).

I was a bit underwhelmed with the extra: Fassbinder's World On A Wire: Looking Ahead To Today, but it did shed light on the casting. The fearless 27 year old Fassbinder used many older ex-stars for the project, an interesting decision to go retro to obtain a slightly futuristic feel -- similar to Godard's choice of Eddie Constantine in Alphaville. Fassbinder wants something to be a little off and odd about the characters, and so he uses past-their-prime actors, has them stare blankly unnaturally long, and dresses them up in costumes, distinctly retro, which they wear like costumes. This style creates a unique look and feel to the whole proceedings, distinctly off and slightly phony, accordant with the artificial reality theme.

The second half of World on a Wire is a little weaker. Part 2 becomes a paranoid thriller, as Fassbinder mostly focuses on the psychological aspects and the chase/hunt for the man who knows too much about the different levels of reality. And actually that's a joke Fassbinder tosses in. The focus is on a lone man wrongfully accused and caught up in a vast conspiracy. Less than one minute after I said to myself, Gee, this is becoming rather Hitchcockian, Fassbinder has a character refer to another's death by saying, "poor Franz Holm, a man who knew too much." Wink.

Part 2 is similar to such political/corporate conspiracy films as Parallax View, but now I see that Wire came out the year before Parallax. And Soylent Green came out just a few months earlier. Interesting. Altogether World on a Wire is nearly 3' 20", and it probably could have used a bit of trimming and tightening in the second half. But this is really an interesting addition to the Fassbinder legacy. Quite a treat for Fassbinder fans.

******


"The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane." ― Guy Debord

Werner Fassbinder's "World on a Wire" was first released on German television in 1973. Forgotten for decades, it reappeared in 2010 with new prints and a theatrical release, at which point it was quickly embraced as one of cinema's hidden milestones.

Pre-dating "The Matrix", "Blade Runner", "Inception", "Existenz", "Dark City", "Ghost in the Shell", "Paprika", "Strange Days", "Star Trek" ("Ship in a Bottle", "Projections") and many other similar works, "Wire" stars Klaus Lowitsch as Fred Stiller. Stiller's working with the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Science, who are busy creating an artificial world populated by thousands of sophisticated A.I. "identity units". The film was based on "Simulacron 3", a 1964 novel by Daniel Galouye. Philip K. Dick's "The Simulacra" was published the same year.

"Wire's" first half plays with now familiar questions of phenomenology (what constitutes experience, perception and consciousness?), epistemology (what is knowledge and how is it acquired?) and ontology (what constitutes the self, existence and reality?). Here Stiller realises that he is in fact a computer simulation of the Real Fred Stiller. This baffles poor Fred, as he has also recently created a computer simulation of "himself". The film thus offers a series of nested realities, simulations boxed within simulations boxed within simulations. When the "identity units" recognise that they are "not authentic", they begin to view others as phony automatons, have little existential crises and slip into depression. Some exhibit the existence denial of Cotard's Syndrome ("I think that I don't exist!"). Others resort to suicide.

Like Fassbinder's "identity units", humans are themselves "machines who are not aware that they are machines". Each of us is mechanistically programmed by an unbroken causal chain, and what we "see" is itself a mental simulation or representational content. The claims of "naive realists" (the belief that senses provide direct awareness) are similarly false. Our phenomenal life unfolds in a world-model and we are always blind to the mediums through which "things" are transmuted en-route to us. Thinkers like Hume, Schopenhauer, Locke, Sartre, Daniel Dennet and many other modern neuroscientists have also dethroned the notion of the Sovereign Self. For them, selfhood only exists at the level of false appearances. It is an accidental byproduct of processes which misrepresent "themselves" for "itself", and even consciousness only arises "after the fact", always dependent on objects which the subject is inadvertently constructed in relation to. Other philosophers are equally, or overly, droll. "The brute fact is that there is nothing behind the face," Thomas Metzinger would say. "There's no one there." And Erwin Schrodinger: "To learn that the personality of a human being cannot really be found in the interior of a human body is so amazing that it meets with doubts and hesitation, we are very loath to admit it."

But Fassbinder, a neo-Marxist, has always been more interested in the political. Like many of his pictures, "Wire" thus paints late capitalism as a superstructure which co-opts everything it touches. This is a giant control society, a kind of giddily embraced techno-totalitarianism in which everything is under surveillance, personalities are managed and created, everyone is an automaton lost in their own private cyberspational urgencies, capitalism has fully colonised human consciousness and machines simulate reality whilst people simulate "individuality" and "authenticity". "You're nothing more than the image others have made of you!" characters say.

More than this, "Wire" portrays "reality" as a collective psychosis in which all social energy is sucked into a vortex of labour and simulated productivity. The simulations made by The Institute, we later learn, are themselves intended for the prediction of future market trends, the "identity units" (and the whole world itself) literally created for the purpose of monitoring buying, selling and consumption. More eerily, the simulations within the simulations seem designed to investigate how people react to certain forms of control; a dry run for a total conversion which will soon occur, or may already have. Regardless, with the help of the "identity units", Germany's economy can be meticulously pre-planned and engineered. This kind of Big Data Mining is already occurring – the superstore Target famously mailed pregnancy kits to a teenage girl, successfully predicting her pregnancy before the girl, her family, lover or father knew she was pregnant – computerised pattern detectors already surmising from and shaping behaviour. Elsewhere Fassbinder shows, not just the political cost of distraction, but how distraction and solipsism are desired by those on every level of society. The Real Fred Stiller programs himself as a suave ladies man, humans love the idealisations sold to them by their digital echo chambers and the Masters rake in the cash whilst everyone remains oblivious. Meanwhile, those pesky "identity units" who wreak the party are "deleted" or "suicided" with the flip of a switch. The film's overriding metaphor (Zeno's Paradox), points to a world in which everything moves but no distance is travelled and no progress is made.

Aesthetically, "Wire" gives us mirrored surfaces, alienating spaces and a style which mixes noir, SF and retro-futurism. Its signature song is Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde", used as an ironic commentary on the idealisations of Fassbinder's characters, but perhaps chosen because it was itself inspired by Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation". The film ends with a playboy and playgirl in a box, spinning in false assumptions.
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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Aug 20, 2019 7:49 am

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Anyone watch Series Four of BLACK MIRROR yet?

Postby identity » Tue Aug 20, 2019 5:25 pm

^ That's not from the actual movie. Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kob-oywkvBk


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