I saw Moonlight yesterday, and it is really beautiful. Just so different from most stories that get told about young black men in the ghetto. Definitely go see it, although it's not a total upper.

People should go see Arrival because I need to talk about it!

It liked it a lot, but I would have enjoyed it even more if it were less hand-wavey. It was really hand-wavey.

I liked it a lot. I guess I didn't mind the handwavey-ness so much because the over all messages was so optimistic.

But yeah, there was a lot of "don't sweat the details" going on in that movie. Starting from, did they honestly fly all the way from Seattle to Montana in the one helicopter? Because IME, helicopters don't have that kind of range...

I didn't mind the handwavey science because the actual question of the movie isn't how do we teach aliens English but what does it mean to make choices when we already know the outcome. Which is putting it tritely, but you know what I mean. The aliens are just the conduit.

I saw Dr. Strange last night. It was way better than I expected. I didn't have any negative expectations; I knew nothing about it. But it was gorgeous and funny and I want to see it again.

But yeah, there was a lot of "don't sweat the details" going on in that movie.

I feel like that describes every Villeneuve movie I've seen, but I love the questions he explores and how his movies just seem to seep into you.

In short, Arrival was exactly the movie I needed to see this week.

Though I highly encourage people to catch The Love Witch if they can. It is basically a Technicolor version of Charmed that channels both Jacques Demy and late Hitchcock.

More Arrival. I love that Amy Adams is a female scientist protagonist, and that her being a scientist matters. I love Jeremy Renner as the eye candy Smartest Scientist In Some Other Field Which Will Never Again Be Needed To Move The Plot Forward.

I love all of that in spite of yet again, a movie about a female scientist which turns out really to be mostly about the fact that she is/was a mother.

I did not love whatever accent Forest Whitaker was doing. The fact that he was only doing it half the time only made it more irritating.

I would love to know how the Heptopod society works, if everyone is experiencing time nonlinearly. How does anyone keep track of causality in a world like that? Are there no arguments because everyone already knows the outcome, or are there constant arguments over misunderstandings stemming from temporal misalignment?

I loved that the climax of the film was the scientist getting published.

I saw Arrival during Toronto Film Festival and went to watch it again over the weekend. "Story of Your Life" is one of my all-time favourite short stories -- really, that entire Ted Chiang collection, "Stories of Your Life and Others", is wall-to-wall brilliance and I cannot recommend the book highly enough -- and remain impressed at how effectively they tackled something I thought was nigh unfilmable. There were significant departures from the short story, but I thought they managed to stay true to the core conceit nonetheless, which is no mean feat.

I still wish they'd found a way to include the digression into Fermat's Principle from the book, which would have given Renner's character a bit more to do other than look pretty and act supportive (not that there is anything wrong with that!) Plus, it dovetails nicely with the linguistic elements in explaining some of the reasons why Heptapods perceive the world as they do. I also feel like they didn't spend near enough time shedding light on the analysis of Heptapod B (the written language) and how not only deciphering it but the ACT of writing it and immersing oneself in it, is essential in understanding their worldview. Tl;dr I wanted the movie to be nerdier but understand why they short-charged that element from the story, etc.

The external conflicts i.e. the international incidences and the whole thing with the Chinese General, are not present in the short story. I mean, it's realistic that it'd trigger an international incidence like that, but I dunno. It felt more like a distraction and borrowed from a way more conventional SF/action movie.

One thing that got me thinking a bit deeper -- in the story, there is quite a bit of discussion about free will vs. predestination, which really is the meat of the thing. The original story takes a more... fatalistic seems like the wrong word. More philosophical approach to it? You can perceive the future and the present at the same time, and you enact, or "perform" the action that will lead to the future you see with grace and clear eyes, but I never got the sense that there was a *choice* not to do it, to break free and change the course. In the movie, it feels like Louise has a choice, but chooses to embrace the joy and the pain her time with her daughter brings (hence Ian leaving her for "making the wrong choice"). It's just as moving, but the nuance is a little different. I'd love to hear what other folks who'd also read the story thought about that.

Anyway, mad props to Amy Adams, who has rarely been better. I also thought the score was dynamite. I've been playing Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight (featured prominently in the film) in a loop since I watched it.

Also, don't go see the movie with an actual linguistics professor as I did. After the movie, there was a lot of ranting about how this was a super unrealistic stretch of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and grumblings about how she'd now have to prepare to discuss this with her students because of the stupid movie. I told her she has no poetry in her soul and super-unrealistic stretches of known scientific priniciples are what SF is all about. :p