Seven mistakes the movie Minority Report made about the future

When making the 2002 film Minority Report, about a policing system in the future Washington, DC, that use psychics to stop murders before they happen, Stephen Spielberg famously invited a group of experts to speculate on what the United States would look like in 2054, technologically speaking.

Certainly, the gesture-controlled screens used by Chief of PreCrime John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) were right on the money, even though the witnesses to Anderton’s swiping skills seem a little too impressed, considering the technology would have been around for more than 40 years by then. It’s like today being agog by someone’s effective microwave use.

I love the movie and rank it up there with Spielberg’s best and most philosophical. But with the hindsight (or foresight?) we have in 2015, it’s clear that many of the movie’s guesses are a little off.

• Where is the geopositioning technology? PreCrime gets the names of victims and potential killers, and the time of the crime, which is very convenient. So most of its work is finding and getting to the location of the future crime. The widespread use of geopositioning in smart phones, coupled with the increasing use of drones, means that, by 2054, finding someone might be the easiest part of any criminal investigation. In Minority Report’s opening scene, the investigators work their asses off to figure out which Howard Marks is about to kill his wife and her lover. Even in 2015, they could have used Facebook to quickly find which Howard Marks was married, where he lived, whether he hung out and which had signs of unhappiness in his life. Getting to the crime? Gotta love jet packs. Waiting for them to be sold at Canadian Tire.

• Much has been made of Minority Report’s depiction of personalized advertising, where ads call out the names of consumers from digital billboards. Again, smartphones have changed the course of marketing. Marketers don’t shout at us in public now and they likely won’t in the future. Instead, they whisper to us with flashes and beeps and vibrations from our phones, fitbits and maybe our watches or glasses. And the messaging will likely be much less hamfisted than a GAP hologram calling out, “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the GAP! How did those assorted tanktops work out for you?” Through social media and other relationship-building interaction, retailers will likely know exactly how things worked out before a consumer returns to the store again.

• The GAP in 2054? Try H&M.

• Cars won’t have steering wheels. When pods are travelling along tracks, the most unsafe thing is to give somebody the sense they can control it, as we’ve already learned from Google’s Self-Driving Car project. Spielberg obviously thought things out and figured that cars would drive themselves on special roadways in high-traffic areas, but would be handled in an old-fashioned way in more rural areas. Again, geopositioning technology made such a two-pronged approach unnecessary.

• Moving pieces of plastic around to put images on screens. The transparent-hologramy plastic discs that John Anderton inserts into his home video projector are certainly cool, and the way he scrambles for them evokes pathos around his obsession with his dead son. When detectives pull larger plastic plates out of one screen-machine and stick them into another one, it conveys urgency and seriousness. But even today, we mostly move data through wifi, cellular data connections and, in a pinch, cables. In 2054, getting data from one place to another will be faster, less labour-intensive and require even less material—our concern about reducing waste should be manic by then. All John Anderton’s memories will clog up landfill.

• Newspapers and paper photos. The paper photo is already a dying species, yet they abound in Minority Report.  Spielberg does make newspapers and magazines interactive and updatable, but doesn’t really account for the fact that each periodical will eventually consumed on a single object like a tablet. It’s true that future tablets may look and feel like paper. But the art of newspaper design will have changed by then. Periodicals of the future, whatever form they take, will not emulate the typography and layout of today’s newspapers because they will be an adaptation of tablet content and use Internet-style layouts. Traditional newspaper design will be long dead.

• The need for psychic mutants to predict human behaviour. Big data, drawing from all the information we share about ourselves online, will make the world of Minority Report possible without a supernatural element (or the slavery element—those poor precogs!). Algorithms will interpret our posts and our pictures, using predictive patterns to figure out who’s going to go off the rails and, perhaps before the police are called in, subtly nudging possible perpetrators back from the edge of criminality. The law won’t have to storm in to stop crime; it will manipulate our online reality—increasingly becoming our primary reality—to change our mindset, reschedule encounters and warn potential victims of what may happen.

You can wash and wash Gap’s black denim, but the Film Noir blood just won’t come out

It’s funny that Gap, with its new David Fincher ads, has had to go back to the 1940s and ’50s to find some semblance of “normal” for our stylistically fractured age.

In fact, Film Noir, from which Fincher lifts the Drive ad’s aesthetic, could be defined as a classic movie genre about people who are pushed far outside their normal—crime, sex and mayhem. But then nobody ever said fashion advertising makes sense. Wholesomeness and sleaze are hinted at in equal measure, as if the concoction averages out to achieve some predetermined sales metric.

“The uniform of rebellion and conformity,” declares the text on the screen, after the lithe young women in the Drive ad takes off her jeans and throws them into the front seat where two other handsome young people are sitting, looking quite serious. Not only do the words contradict each other, they don’t connect with the images, either. Disposing of the evidence after disposing of the body of a murdered lover in a river, as a noir heroine might do, hardly counts as “rebellion” (or conformity, for that matter). The image here is all desperate depravity, playing against the words of modern marketing.

Then the lightness of Fincher’s Stairs conjures all the sexual charge of a 1980s Sprite commercial done in ’50s jazz style.

The Fincher commercials create a mystery which is then answered (but not solved) by the celebrity endorsements of the print ads. The familiar faces of Anjelica Huston, Elisabeth Moss and Zosia Mamet provide recognition in lieu of meaning; they are talented actors filling in the holes of a dodgy script with their performances. You can sell tickets to any unholy mess if you have the right cast.

All the murk disassociates Gap’s “normal” from the normcore trend of hipsters dressing in unedgy clothing, even as the campaign capitalizes on it. “Normal” has insider meaning to those who follow style trends, but, at the same time, can be interpreted as an opportunity to be stylistically lazy, old-school "normal," for those who don't.

No wonder Fincher’s Gap ads retreat into history. Like a sci-fi time traveller who goes to the past to change the present, Gap must scour other eras to dislodge “normal” for the purposes of selling black denim. They have to make “normal” mean exactly nothing…. And, therefore, everything.

'Moon' child

Kristen Stewart? How has an actress so sullen, so dour and unemotive managed to steer the Twilight franchise into the hearts and pocketbooks of movie audiences worldwide?

So visibly awkward, it's like she's been coached not to hunch but keeps forgetting. Her chin juts like she's on edge even as her eyes zone out. Wear-wolfs? Vampires? Stewart's Bella seems ready to doze off any second or go stand in the corner and sulk.

Her very particular talent made sense in, say, Adventureland, where her character was the same sort of sullen beauty. But, setting her performance aside, we constantly hear the other Twilight Saga characters--from the vamps to the wear-wolfs to the cafeteria kids--obsess over her. They keep telling us she's special as they orbit around her like she has some special power. There's a tremendous disconnect but Stewart must be doing something wright. New Moon made more than $150 million domestically in its first weekend, quite an achievement for a film that, judging by the look of it, cost a fraction of the cost of other members of the $100-million-plus club.

I think it's because she's so utterly replaceable in the viewer's imagination. Any viewer who wants to imagine themselves as the focus of New Moon's very sexy love triangle--and that would be pretty much anyone who went to the film on their own steam--can banish her from registering on their cerebral cortex, leaving a blank spot onto which they can project themselves. She's not a star--someone who's inherently watchable--and she's no character actor either. We can essentially place our thumb between us and her face and let ourselves take part in the fantasy that her Bella doesn't really deserve.

Picnic & Splendor

The selection of DVDs on an given day at a branch of the Toronto Public Library is quirky to say the least--it's how I came to discover Sister Wendy. It was because of this random availability I came to watch Picnic (1955 with William Holden and Kim Novak, directed by Joshua Logan, who critic Roger Ebert describes as "among the worst filmmakers of his time") and Splendor in the Grass (1961 with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, directed by Elia Kazan) in quick succession.

They're both about the traps that sex set for women. Picnic is simplistic and overwrought: a hunky Holden shows up in town one Labour Day weekend, awakening sleeping desires among the women of a small Kansas town. Sparks fly between Holden's Hal Carter and Novak's Madge. She's a 19-year-old beauty queen courting the town's rich boy; he's an older drifter (Holden was 37 when the film was made and I imagine his character was meant to be mid to late 20s). Madge's younger sister is a brain. Her family's lodger is a prim but loopy old-maid school teacher, played with over-the-top vim by Rosalind Russell. Each of them falls for Holden, whose shirt is off or ripped for much of the movie. He's all sex, all the time, which seems so much more appealing than the chore of finding a husband and looking good in the eyes of the community, but the likes of Hal Carter can offer no permanent solution, just an exciting weekend that, hopefully, won't ruin the rest of your life.

Splendor is overwrought too, but stranger and more willing to try to break open the rules of the game. The good rich boy and the sexualized hunk are the same person--Warren Beatty playing Bud Stamper in his first starring role. He's dating Deanie, played by Wood, who is a good girl but who recognizes her beau's urges--the opening scene is a front-seat sex negotiation. No, you don't have to import an older out-of-towner to introduce sexual danger to a small town. Her choice is not between sex and security but whether to risk using sex to obtain security. It doesn't go well for her. She cracks up and ends up in a mental institution. She didn't have the skills to negotiation between good girl and whore. Though both films are melodramas, Splendor internalizes its perversity, making the heroine partly responsible for the trap that she lets society put her in.

Besides their lessons in sexual deportment, the other contrast that's interesting between the two films is the female leads. Novak is a cold beauty with all the charisma of a dish rag. There are moments in Picnic where she looks like a feather-haired 80s singer trapped in a rock video by a director who's bullied her into submission. But Wood! I hadn't paid attention to her before. In Splendor she's raw and alive and so contemporary, you want to reach out and comfort her when she's suffering. You can imagine if she had been teleported to Hollywood in 2009, she'd be taking up so much space, the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman would be relegated to the B-List.

A figgy pudding

How strange is it to be delighted by a documentary about AIDS activism?

Inspired, sure. Provoked, of course. Overwhelmed, probably. But it was delight that most infused my feelings about John Greyson's Fig Trees, which played at Inside Out this week. I was skeptical going in: I heard it was an opera. But the moment I saw the narrator was an albino squirrel--sometimes a real squirrel, sometimes a puppety one and sometimes a boy dressed as one--I knew that opera wasn't going to be taking itself serious.

Fig Trees juxtaposes the lives and works of two AIDS activists, Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Cape Town, South Africa, through interviews, opera arias and experimental film techniques. Having admired McCaskell for a long time, I loved that the film found in him and Achmat two subjects who could embody some of the heroism of the personal side of social change but also two subjects who are critical of an individual's role, knowing that there there is so much more to be achieved by collective action. And they're both so forward-looking, neither have ever seemed tempted to say, "That's it, honour us now for all the work we've done." The film shares this resistance to self-congratulations.

So I loved the two people profiled. But I also loved Fig Trees' ingeniously eclectic style. There was AIDS and opera and an albino squirrel, yes. But there was also Gertrude Stein, palindromes, train sets and satirical music videos. Some of it was out of left field but none of it was random. I've seen a few things lately where their makers' tendencies to throw a lot of "stuff" at audiences seemed aimed at covering a lack of rigour in the writing process, as if a first draft was rushed into production. While I would not claim to understand all of the connections Greyson makes in the film, they are asserted with such inventiveness and purpose, I feel I have put my emotions and thoughts in the hands of someone who has thought things through. Fig Trees is frequently silly, but never shallow.

Even if audience members left with new (or renewed) disgust with corporate and government complacency in the face of HIV/AIDS, a deeper sense of the daunting task of the fight against HIV/AIDS, I don't think Fig Trees left any room for despair.

Adventureland for boys

Though I thoroughly enjoyed Adventureland--set a grease fire in 1987 and I'd watch if only to hear "Dancehall Days" in the soundtrack--I came out feeling that it drew its female characters so thinly you could see misogyny through the ensuing rips and tears.

The film--its script, its direction and sensibility--certainly liked its male characters and the lead James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, the library-card-owner's Michael Cera) deserved it, wearing his heart so loosely on his sleeve it fell off a couple of times. In some ways, it's a fantasy piece for the underdog in all of us. The film liked underdog Joel and even liked womanizer Mike Connelly (a blank faced Ryan Reynolds--who writes a summer teen comedy without writing a scene for the stud to take off his shirt?). Connelly might be a player and the villain (the first always leading to the other in Hollywood), but never raised his voice or made threats or did anything particularly degrading to his conquests. His worst crimes were wanting it all and lying about music (which sadly remains only a summary offence conviction, despite all my lobbying efforts).

But the ladies! The two moms were unforgiving shrews who, though one had her hair and one didn't, might have been interchangeable. There was the racist Catholic girl. There was the dumb, slut Catholic girl (who seemed to be in a more satirical movie than the twee gang around her) and then there was the love interest, Em, which had Kristen Stewart playing an even blanker slate than she played as Twilight's heroine. I don't think the film hated her. She was the love interest after all. But she was such a lobotomized object-of-desire, she was well beyond the realms of likeability. We have no idea why she's attracted to James, but she is, maybe. She seems smart, but not smart enough to see that she's one in a long series of girls sleeping with the stud. She's a bad girl, but one who confronts racism like a 90s activist. Her strange behaviour comes off as something of a midway game--those pop-up gophers, perhaps--that the hero must deal with in order to keep the plot churning along. But it does seem like the behaviour of a real teenager.

Slumdog Millionaire

About the Oscars--there are more invested people out there. All I can say is that Benjamin Button was much ado--and by ado I mean, star-power, running time, special effects and directorial willfulness--about nothing, a film that failed to even bother to examine its own main conceit (if you skip over the young-old person, you've passed up all our opportunities to say anything about aging; who knows what went through the old-young Brad's head?). But it's more bougeois, more liberal than its parent (older sibling--gentically, nothing's been added), Forrest Gump so why not? Slumdog is certainly an underdog, making up in chutzpa what it might lack in innovation. Dickens forever!

Musical high

What's astonishing about High School Musical 3 (I must plead ignorance on numbers 1 and 2 which didn't get theatrical releases) beside the joyous sweat and cuddly vim of the performances (was there a story there?) is how much cultural clutter the filmmakers must sweep away nowadays before we partake of goodhearted wholesome song and dance numbers.

And I don't just mean the de-sexed gay character, sashaying his choreography moves with his rhinestone jeans, asymmetrical argyle sweaters and pink-buuffanted backup dancers, though I can totally see Ryan Evans and his artsy prom date Kelsi boogying at a gay club in the East Village two or three years after graduation, if they're not already doing it on the weekends. Nor do I mean how the black kids get to be almost-main characters but not quite and how they can only date each other, each colour of this rainbow-coloured universe staying safely in its place. Or how Troy, because he's good at dancing, has to compensate by being hyper masculine in other ways: A glossy teen with perfect hair wouldn't have rummaged through a salvage yard for jalopy parts in any era, not even Archie Andrews. Or the victory party without drinks of any kind and the absence of drugs. I mean how everybody has to get out of the way of the heroine, Gabrielle, because she has to have zero personality characteristics except being sweet.

All the other female characters--and I should point out that the female friendships in HSM3 are closer to particle physics than intimacy--have singular defining characteristics: Sharpay's star-struck consumerism, Taylor's political ambitions, Martha's big-girl brains (she'll be at the clubs with Ryan and Kelsi soon), Kelsi's offbeat funkiness, Ms Darbus's striking similarity to Mrs. Doubtfire. Appropriately uniformed, they all do one thing extremely well. In the male world, you make your lead stand out among his peers by having him do everything well: Troy can sing, dance, play basketball, fix his car, bond with his friends, haze the juniors. His is alpha dog in all arenas. But Gabrielle? We're told repeatedly how great she is, but we never see her do anything particularly great except her swooning numbers with Troy. She's sweet, period. Even at Stanford, all she does is wander by herself, a damsel in distress as yet unaware that she needs to be rescued. It's true that near the end of the film they do say she's going into pre-law, but it might have been medicine or film studies or engineering--I'm sure the writers just made her major up on the day. In order for her to be the romantic female lead, she has to be about absolutely nothing. It's the zen approach to femininity. Girls might be good at one thing or the other, but all that's going to get them is a beta. To rise to the top, to be the one everybody aspires to be, they must effortlessly be little more than a vessel for the leading man's dreams.

Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." This 2006 Entertainment Weekly article on the history of "Merry Little Christmas" has stuck with me. I have to say the Judy Garland lyrics are my favourites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC9o4oYMIqI

As far as bio pics go, Milk was moving. But bio pic it was. Gus Van Sant has been playing with form for his last few films, so it was entirely possible he might have evaded the traps. He did so in the minor notes, mostly in how Harvey Milk picked up the men around him--the harmony of the movie was flirtation and seduction. But its melody was as plodding as Walk the Line. He promises his partner he'll quit after the next election, but he runs again and leaves. A fellow politician tells him he's got to offer the people hope and, in his next public speech, he's talking hope all hopefully. It's like the writers made a list of defining moments, then sat down and thought, "How are we going to foreshadow that?" Everything becomes cause and effect, warning and punishment. So many of the movie's small moments are signals for the big ones that it comes as no surprise that, just as he's about to be killed, things go into slow motion as if there's no way to over-foreshadow his death.