I'm currently on a work trip to Hong Kong and I watched two great movies on the plane. Let me jot them down:
1) The first movie was Jumanji - Welcome to the Jungle. At first I started watching AI (a bit more on that later) but it turned out too serious. I wanted something light-hearted and entertaining as a start to my overseas trip, even if I think AI does indeed pose some serious issues to humanity worth thinking about. But the movie was too... sad and retro-feeling and slow-going. So I switched halfway to Jumanji, after watching a ton of trailers to identify the most promising. The movie turned out to be super funny! It was absorbing from the get-go, and it had me laughing every 2 minutes. I did not realise Dwayne Johnson could be so funny while being macho and serious, and Karen Gillan also looks really good and hot in her get-up. I love it when Jack Black acts like the self-absorbed, handphone and Instagram-obsessed teenage girl that he was before he got sucked into the video game. There is also this funny scene when Dwayne Johnson who is so macho and powerful in the game, turns around and is saying to himself "Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry" cos he is actually a hypochondriac nerd. You totally don't expect him to do it in the character but then that is what he would do as the boy he was. And there were all these video game inserts like characters that appear at specific times to guide the heroes on to the next phase of their journey and keep repeating their lines. I also liked the pilot, John Seaplane, as he looked so young and dewy-eyed and fresh. Really like those British pilots who fought in WWII. It was also funny watching Jack Black teach Karen Gillan how to flirt, and her doing it so amateurishly, and how Dwayne Johnson and Karen Gillan have their first really inexperienced kiss. He looked so gross there flapping his tongue it was unbelievable. I love this show, love it to bits. I think I may love it as much as The Holiday. Those movies I can watch over and over cos they just give me this happy feeling almost every scene.
Talking about video game characters, I also like how every character has their strengths and weaknesses, and together as a team, they outwit the game's challenges and obstacles and go on to the next level. A major moral of the movie is how we all need one another, especially those with complementary strengths, to get to the 'next level' in life. So, those people whom you find most annoying, you may need them someday to do some difficult and challenging thing and they may be key! This is a lesson I learnt in my previous agency, but one which I need to relearn again and again.
The movie also shows nerds whose world is playing video games, and it sort of tells you, that given the right sort of experiences and exposure, these boys can grow up. And become someone mature. And of course, every character has a character arc. I love how Jack Black's character turns from someone so annoying and small-minded and superficial can become someone self-sacrificial and become good at something besides flaunting her body (e.g. map-reading skills that the others depend on). There are so many people who resemble Jack Black's character in real life (just look at the number of people taking pictures of their food and taking selfies and immediately posting it with really self-absorbed hashtags, they make me want to roll my eyes). But I guess social media is just allowing all these inner selves, immature and ungrown as they might be, to be really loud in your faces at that. How I yearn for them to encounter life-changing experiences and turn them into their fuller, more alive selves! Who they are really meant to become!
2) I also watched Artificial Intelligence halfway and it was quite an ugly show at the beginning (meaning it didn't have good visuals, the actress and actor were not the best-looking people on the planet) and the plot was a bit confusing and slow-moving. But eventually it got good and by good I mean, complicated and challenging and it got interesting. I like the moral questions it poses, and how it realistic the child robot is, especially how clingy and distressed he becomes at one point. And I was blown away by a commentator / movie reviewer (they really are the best) who wrote that this movie shows that ultimately, even a robot that is programmed to love, can only do and say what his code tells him, he is not experiencing love, and cannot love you back in the true sense of the word, and for me I guess it means the robot is not really being delighted by your personality and attributes, yearning and enjoying your company, being happy being with you, liking you more than others, and sacrificing for your happiness (which is what true love does). It is just acting out his code. It puts AI in its place. We will still need humans for human relationship - friendship, love and all the tones in between. Thank God for that. We are not obsolete. However AI can become more powerful than humans, and outsmart us. I think that idea is explored in other movies, and even Stephen Hawking predicted this would happen. So we need to put lots of safeguards in place and master technology rather than let it master us. May we do so!
