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Overview: Not often that a good cyberpunk movie comes down the wires. Lately, the better ones have been coming out of Japan’s anime studios. Technotise could be the latest-and-greatest to come from the land of the rising sun… only it came from Serbia, not Japan, although the anime influence can be seen. While not enough to make those famed anime studios nervous… yet… it already has a live-action remake under development.

A sequel based on the comic (readable here, if you understand Serbian), Technotise looks into a bit of the the life of a college girl as she faces a struggle in Belgrade 2074 that could kill her.

 

The Story: Edit Stefanović is a psychology major in a Belgrade college. Like most students, Edit has had her successes and failures but mostly failures. Now her professor has given her an ultimatum:

After burying her robotic pet, and a fight with her mother, Edit decides to get a memory chip implant to help her pass the exam. She is also an intern at TDR, a research company that’s been working on a formula that connects all the energies in the world, aka “A direct line to God.” This “formula” can be used to predict the future, but any computer that calculates it becomes sentient before it shuts down. Abel Mustafov discovered the formula before becoming autistic, and when Edit sees a “graph” of the formula, her chip becomes alive and starts wiring itself into her body, making her act weird (like eating large amounts of iron). Now TDR wants Edit and the chip for their future-telling computers, while Edit wants what the chip did to her undone.

 

Algorithm Absurd. This phrase is used a couple of times to describe what happens to the computers that calculates the formula. Algorithm - like a computer program; A series of finite steps to generate an output from input. Absurd, the ludicrous, insane, irrational. The phrase is simply another way of saying: “That does not compute.” Apparently the computers see the formula like a digital existential crisis, one that says machines are not alive. But Edit’s chip doesn’t suffer the same fate, probably because of their connection to each other, or maybe because of Edit’s study of psychology she was able to “understand” the graph in a way that computers couldn’t so she acted as a “buffer” and the chip was able to process her output.

 

The next GITS? Like GITS, Technotise uses a variety of animation styles to produce some high quality movie fare. 2D, 3D, vector, and realistic static drawings come together for some of the best eye-candy. But without a good storyline, all you can get from eye-candy is diabetes. Fortunately, Technotise has the storyline to back up the visuals. About the only problem is the language is entirely Serbian with English subtitles so you might miss out on some of the vids.

Conclusion: With the themes of the search for “God” via science and our continued interconnection of human and machine, we have some excellent cyberpunk fare to even anime fans happy for the next decade or so. This is one animated movie that can go byte-by-byte with GITS. Just get the DVD and see what I mean…

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Introducing the soundtrack to a movie you’ll NEVER see! OK, you may have seen the movie already, or at least heard of it. This CD is a parody of that movie. No, not a “Weird Al” Yankovic-style parody, but a cyberpunk take on the movie’s soundtrack. The music is given a cyberpunk/industrial/electronic twist while the spoken tracks (in italics) gets technical enough to make nerds’ ears happy. The CD can also be considered as something of a “showcase” featuring Re-Constriction artists, though Society Burning has six of the music tracks and all of the spoken parts. But putting that aside, let’s see if this disk is one for your soundtrack, or if it’s just a bad joke…

 

Track one opens with a quick spoken part with a couple of lovers expressing their affection for each other, before they threaten to terminate every last motherfucking job on the mainframe. Then the music kicks in; light, simple, but good.

Track two (Electro Body Music) is the first of four totally spoken tracks. Just two guys talking about buffer overflow on Telnet before moving on to how industrial music in Germany is called “Electro Body Music” and how they use flange instead of reverb on the drums in Belgium.

Killing Floor keeps Jungle Boogie funky, while Christ Analogue gives Al Green’s Let’s stay together an electro-shock to his soul. Bustin’ Surfboards trades surfing ocean waves for electronic waves… or just surfing the nets. While Son of a Preacher Man goes from southern blues to industrial rock.

Some more dialog as a girl finds a sampler, then Bullwinkle Part II takes the same surf-to-industrial path as Bustin’ Surfboards. Mostly drums, mostly groves.

The Mos Eisley Download Contest features a robotic voice speaking Japanese (could be Klingoneese?). Meanwhile, Hotbox gives Chuck Berry’s You Can Never Tell a shot of rock and… reggae? That’s what it sounds like to me. Interesting.

Lonesome Town now sounds like it could be any cyberpunk village you care to mention. Purr Machine gives Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon new meaning, mostly due to the female vocals. Another version of the truth: I prefer the 16 Volt version. If Love Is A Red Dress sounds a bit more vicious than the original.

Quick dialog before Comanche. Non-Aggression Pact gives us the our WTFF? moment with the bizzare vocals of Flowers on the Wall. I could try to explain but… the FUCK???

User Friendliness features a guy who doesn’t use Windows because it’s too complicated (ಠ_ಠ). And Surf Rider thrashes its way into our eardrums, literally.

FAQ 25.17 gives us our last bit of dialog, and the funniest moment of the CD. It just one guy talking about how high-resolution modes can strain an 8MB system (remember, this CD came out when graphic accelerators like 3Dfx were considered high-end), and how you need to use eight-bit color lest ye overload your piece-o-shit video card!

The “Bonus Tracks” (tracks 18-20) are rather odd additions since they are actually better than the main versions, especially 16 Volt’s version of Girl…

Hexene gives You Never Can Tell some electro-soul-and-funk to make it good, while Society Burning’s offering of Flowers on the Wall has a rocking edge with understandable vocals.

 

Cover Charges. How you feel about this CD may depend on how you feel about cover tunes and/or parodies. I have a few favorites on this CD. You should find this CD worth a listen, especially if you like cyberpunk/industrial.

Source: IMDB, with links to individual movies.

 

Welcome to 2011! With the new year upon us, let’s take a look at some movies expected to come out in the next 12 months… At least, according to the IMDB they’re expected to come out. As always, some will get pushed back to 2012… or later, some may end up direct-to-video, and some may never see a theater or home screen. If you feel up to it, you can check out IMDB’s Feature Films (to be) Released in 2011 and see how many of the 5744 you might want to watch and/or have reviewed here. I should warn you, most of the films listed are categorized as in development, that is, they’re still working on stuff like cast and script and haven’t started shooting yet, and may be canceled outright if such details cannot be ironed out. Better bookmark those links if you want to follow them.

 

Haven’t I seen this movie before? Chances are you have. 5700+ films may sound like a lot, but there’s a lot of movies based on other materials, including numerous remakes of movies like Short Circuit, Scanners, Videodrome, and Brave New World (to be directed by Riddley Scott). Even anime gems are getting live-action makeovers: Be ready for Cowboy Bebop, Technotise, Ghost in the Shell, and Bubblegum Crisis to go from pen-and-ink to flesh-and-blood (and CGI).

 

Comics are serious. The wave of comic-book based movies continues, and for cyberpunks some good choices are waiting in the wings. The coming year will see the likes of Y: The Last Man, Aphrodite IX, Ex Machina, and Deathlok make the jump from the comic pages to the big screen.

 

It’s in the books. Several novels are slated for 2011 movies, including two from cyberpunk godfather William Gibson. The seminal Neuromancer is on the in development list. That means another change of director, another change of script, another delay… Maybe we should forget Neuromancer for now and concentrate on Pattern Recognition. It’s in active development, and looks like it will be in theaters long before Neuromancer.

Also in development is How To Survive A Robot Uprising, which is about… something. Currently in post-production is Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s epic about a railroad tycoon facing a culture of self-destruction all around her. People say that the novel closely resembles the current economic situation. Not cyberpunk stuff, but I might see it just to give myself a laugh… or cry.

 

Movies to watch for? With all the apparent rehashes, prequels and sequels, TV spin-offs, and what could be best described as Hollywood’s continued loss of originality, I have found some movies that I would like to see and review this coming year. Your mileage will vary:

Real Steel: Hugh Jackman plays Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots - with real robots! Could be this years KO… literally.

Fard Ayn: “A passionate look at humankind’s commitment to a dark future. One man is bound by loyalty. One woman is trapped in a technocratic state. The two stories are a dramatic parallel saga of what could be humankind’s dangerous future society.” It’s already been tagged as a cyberpunk movie, but we’ll see if it lives up to it.

Future Fighters: Mechs in space, boldly going where no one has gone before… except the Macross/Robotech and Gundam franchises.

Offline: People look to mass-media to escape the reality of a dying Earth, but someone is unwilling to be a good little sheeple.

Bad Pixels: For women in the future, life is a bitch. But one girl and her homemade synthesizer is going to rock the system.

Flashback: Once the gleaming jewel of 32nd century Hollywood, Flashback Films now suffers decay due to corporate corruption.

Deus Ex Machina: Heaven and Hell DO EXIST! The government has made them from VR technology.

Branded: A “personality model” receives pirated upgrades and is drawn into a world of illegal corporate greed.

Cold Sea Rising: Another pre-branded “cyberpunk” thriller about a bounty hunter hired to steal emergent technology from an unknown company.

That’s just my shortlist. Plus some videos of past years yet to be viewed and reviewed, along with the other media to check, and 2011 looks like it’s going to be pretty busy.

As always, stay tuned…