Accounts registers up-to-date

Zeroing my webmail inbox is going to require me to either create a LinkedIn account or get comfortable with ignoring and deleting LinkedIn connection invites.

Another big source of email influx is political messaging. I do want to keep abreast of what's happening with ActBlue, OurRevolution, The Sanders Institute, #Resist and all, but they all need to figure out how to cooperate and organize among themselves to efficiently deliver meaningful content and known-effective action plans, not a daily numbing mishmash.

Sun: Wonder Woman, POTC 1, Lucy

I noticed at the opening credits of Lucy that it was written+directed by Luc Besson, and on double-check I confirmed yep, same screenwriter as The Fifth Element. Besson wrote The Fifth Element when he was in high school, so where do you go from there? I guess I just never got curious what he did after that, but it turns out his resume is pretty huge: writer and director for Leon: The Professional, The Transporter franchise, a bunch of movies and TV series I've heard of but never seen (e.g. La Femme Nikita), many more I never heard of, even one of the movies in yesterday's pre-Wonder-Woman previews: "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets". So it was neat to realize Besson used Gary Oldman as the abominable Stansfield in Leon: The Professional, and then right away again as Zorg in The Fifth Element.

I enjoyed the Wonder Woman movie a lot, but I feel like it should have lingered more over the fish-out-of-water confusion between her fundamental sense of equal voice as an Amazon royal, vs. the systemic deafness of WWI London to women's voices. Steve Trevor's feet should have been held to the fire a bit longer - ok, Mr. Spy, I see that I need to blend in and walk a step behind, like one of your London women, if I'm going to achieve my goal. But what about you, do you support your women's suffrage movement? How do you feel about your secretary's glass ceiling, would you support and advocate for her if she pursued a more responsible promotion? There's also a heady contrast to be observed between the leeway and respect given Dr. Isabel Maru, and the utter absence of women in any technical, advisory or managerial role in London.

I'm glad we watched Lucy. It wasn't really much of a character story; the title character Lucy quickly sheds her humanity to become a science-fiction force of nature. Contrast with Limitless where Bradley Cooper's character Eddie retains his humanity, his backstory remains relevant as the story unfolds, and he has to match wits and grit with like-powered antagonists.

Perhaps a better comparison is Stanley Kubrick's film, "2001: A Space Odyssey". Developed in parallel with Arthur C. Clarke's best-known novel, many people walk away dissatisfied with the movie's ending. As with Asimov's "Foundation" novels, Clarke's characterization takes a back seat to the explorations of how a technology might shape a society or nuance a strategy. The struggles of Heywood Floyd, HAL-9000 and David Bowman are ultimately just arcs in the Big Story of the alien monolith catalyzing crucial evolutionary leaps. Their journeys are the scenic overlooks from which we survey the logistics of space travel and AI, or a supposition of what an alien intervention in human progress might look like. Clarke's novel at least explicates some of the internal experience, whereas Kubrick's film seems satisfied to relay sensory experiences without bringing Clarke's explications along for the ride. We see and hear the character experience of zero-gee, airlock evacuation, or alien transcendence, but without Clarke's story we may easily arrive at the psychedelic transcendence sequence unengaged and hence unmoved if not downright confused. Lucy's character's motivations are

The primal hero story has us rooting for the protagonist's victory because the hero is tough, sly and right. Besson's Lucy is ... not quite right, as she wreaks mayhem on a lot of innocent bystanders, and her toughness is entirely a product of the super-mutant drug, not any inner foundational dedication to truth, justice, or even nation. We're moved by her phone call to tell Mom she loves her, but even with her brain magic leveled up to near the transcendence point, she still has to consult a scientist for moral direction. Are we rooting for her, despite all the senseless violence and absence fo moral compass? There's one scene that very subtly reconciles the whole movie, and if you get too lost in the action you might miss it. Del Rio asks "why bring me, you seem perfectly capable of doing it all on your own", and Lucy's response affirms that she's driven to retain some grip on her humanity despite the wanton havoc she leaves in her urgent wake.