Sunday, March 10, 2024

Perception: A TV series

 


Friday, August 25, 2023

'PERCEPTION' : There is a neuroscientist in your soup.....




This engrossing 3 season 2014 serial is available with freevee app.

A neuroscientist college professor, Daniel Pierce (DP) , and his partner FBI agent Ms. Morretti collaborate to solve many crimes. The series would have been another CSI except for the fact that DP digs deeper into the reason/s the victim committed the crime. As an example, in the very first episode a lady victim is accused of killing her husband and the FBI is quick to assume that she committed the murder to get his insurance money! When DP interviews her, he discovers that the victim is a mental patient and is innocent. He explains to the FBI, that she belongs in a psychiatric hospital and not in jail because she suffers from a syndrome that makes her mind strongly susceptible to external suggestions. This episode, which is a Pilot, becomes more and more complicated before DP solves the crime; the suspicion shifts to a new person every few minutes - there is a drug company cover-up, cheating spouses and even sexual harassment by a student all within this one episode!

 Almost every episode begins with DP explaining neurological parts of the brain and how they function in somewhat flamboyant and interesting manner to his class! The viewers might learn something from these one -minute lessons. DP is usually interrupted by FBI agent Morretti  or one of his other acquaintances in the middle of his lecture!

 We soon learn that DP is himself suffers from paranoid schizophrenia!! Therefore, as the series progresses, he is visited by many ‘people’ from the past including his dead mother, Sigmond Freud, JFK like politician, Joan of arc, a baseball player and even his own younger self! These hallucinations help him solve many crimes by dropping clues at the appropriate moments when DP displays abnormal amount of nervousness. This changes the series into a science fiction bonanza. But right at the beginning, DP explains to his students, the same set of neurons fire whether you are having an experience while you are awake or asleep and dreaming about it!!

As DP frequently loses touch with his surroundings and starts having conversations with his hallucinatory friends, he needs the help of his very loyal live-in aide young Lewicki to tell him whether the person he is having conversation with is really there!! We sometimes see DP sitting on the sofa having conversation with his psychiatrist and a look alike friend simultaneously and only one is real! 

One might feel that the neuroscientist DP takes a lot of professional liberty in some episodes when he creates psychiatric terms to explain behavior of the ‘accused’ who might just be lying! Then there is leftover romance between agent Morretti and her ex-husband which gives us soap opera like moments…..

  

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OLD : A MOVIE REVIEW

  Video Source: FreeVee App




Foreword:

First - M. Night, the director of this movie, is himself part of the villainy in this movie as a very scientific and objective observer on the hill hired by the Research group of a pharmaceutical!!

 Second - the aging effect that happens in this movie is assumed to occur in outer space in the context of worm holes (INTERSTELLAR). A returning traveler will find that earth population has aged by years while he has been gone for a few days!

Third - the author of this review has himself experienced this aging effect since his involuntary 'retirement' several years ago as he sees the world changing around him quite rapidly - kids becoming youth and relatives and popular actors of yesteryear aging and dying!!

That should give you enough hints about the story behind this movie .....one has to listen to almost every word uttered by the actors to understand 'OLD". This is not a typical horror movie...but rather a conspiracy by nature and opportunistic Research Scientists!!

 Synopsis:

A group of jolly tourists land on a pretty beach resort and are politely offered an alternate private beach by a 'gentleman' at the resort which they accept without reservation. Two kids of the group, a boy and girl, become friends with a sad looking young boy named Idlib! Idlib gives them a puzzle on a piece of paper in an envelope.

I am skipping over the personal stories of the tourists that the director gradually introduces us to! The following will expose most of the suspense that builds up as the movie progresses!!

At this beach weird things seem to happen. A young lady dies while swimming, cuts and wounds begin to heal in a second, kids begin to grow up at an accelerated pace so their own parents can't recognize them, a tumor inside a lady increases to the size of a human head, the dead woman's body withers away within couple of hours leaving behind just the skeleton! One member of the group calculates that for every half hour they spend on the beach they seem to age by a year! And there is no easy way to escape from the beach!

The two kids are now grown adults, within matter of hours on the beach!! They find a diary and by going thru it they discover that there is a special magnetic effect caused by minerals at the beach location which is why humans age rapidly there. The diary was left by tourists, possibly dead, who were on the beach before the current bunch!! After deciphering the puzzle that Idlib gave them, the two conclude that swimming thru the corals might be their only escape to the normal world. The two survivors therefore decide to take the risk and swim thru the corals. 

The observer (M Night) at the top of the hill concludes that the two also have drowned and so packs his equipment and declares the trial complete. You see they do not want any tourist to escape from the beach. At the research lab, the project lead who is the same gentleman who had earlier guided the now dead tourists to the private beach, declares the project successful because they have found a cure for epilepsy - you see, one of the dead is a black lady with epileptic seizures. She did not suffer an epileptic seizure for 8.5 hours on the beach after consuming their new medication served via a drink at the resort; 8.5 hours is 17 years in the normal world! The lab gets the results about the effect of their new epilepsy drug within a day instead of waiting for 17 years.

The beach is the laboratory where the pharmaceutical company tests the lifetime effect of their new drugs on humans within matter of a day!! The dead tourists, following protocol, are declared missing until the two survivors manage to escape thru the corals. They hand the diary they discovered on the beach to a cop. The diary includes a list of 'missing' tourists from an earlier group who are all dead. [We can assume that they also share the horror stories of the recent deaths on the beach with the authorities] . Just as an old couple is being very politely guided to that same private beach for the next trial, the two survivors abort the sinister plan of the research lab thus saving the lives of those two and any future guinea pig tourists!

To establish context, the director shows the two middle aged survivors meet the sad young boy Idlib again; the two were that boy's age just a day earlier!! According to a brochure, the resort discouraged young children's access to the private beach and now we know the reason why! They might not age enough to die and might escape from there!!

The research lab of the corporation has no compunction with the fact that their test subjects -the tourists- will die like mice in a test lab!! This is one of the more intelligent movies from M. Night!

The tourists were lured to the resort by a free nights coupon given to them at the pharmacy. The resort is owned by the company that makes drugs !

INTERSTELLAR: A Movie Review

 Video Source: Prime Video



The movie 'INTERSTELLAR' is set in the future, when humans are nearing extinction on earth because most food crops like wheat and okra have become extinct due to ‘blight’, though corn is still farmable. According to Dr. Brand, a NASA scientist in the movie, the ‘next’ generation of humans might be the last one on earth. To make things worse, there are frequent ‘dirt’ storms that prevent people from leaving home. Layers of dust enter people’s homes and settles on furniture and kitchen utensils.Cooper is a farmer and a former pilot. Implied within the story is the notion that humans have made great advances in technology and are ready to venture into other parts of the universe to save themselves.

Cooper’s ten year daughter ‘Murph’ has been noticing strange occurrences in her room – books falling from shelves and a slow falling dust leaving a pattern on the floor of their library. Murph thinks it is a ghost. However, Cooper quickly deciphers this as a ‘binary’ string that is code for coordinates of a place. The coordinates lead him to the hideout of NASA. There he meets his mentor Dr. Brand and his daughter.

According to Dr. Brand, there are two plans to save humans. Plan A is to look for a new habitable world outside the galaxy and Plan B is to freeze fertilized human eggs and hope for the best. To investigate the viability of Plan A, NASA had sent a dozen astronauts earlier thru the wormhole. Cooper is asked to follow in their footsteps. Cooper reluctantly agrees to pilot the spacecraft with Brand’s daughter to the distant galaxy. At home, Murph is very upset with him because he is leaving her.  Cooper explains to her that when he returns, she might be his age because people age slowly in outer space!

 Cooper pilots his spacecraft to a Wormhole near Saturn. That Wormhole leads to planets of another galaxy light years away. Upon entering the Wormhole, the spacecraft is uncontrollably driven to the other end of the universe and is ejected into a new world made up of a black hole called Gargantua and three planets named Dr. Man's Planet, Millers and Edmonds. This part of the universe will cost him in terms of time – one hour here equals seven years on earth!! After some misadventures, the team realizes that they do not have enough fuel left to return to earth. So Cooper wisely decides to send Dr. Brand’s daughter to Edmonds planet and risks himself being sucked into the Blackhole Gargantua due to its immense gravitational pull. As Cooper ejects from his vehicle and tumbles down in the dark inside Gargantua, a ‘Tesseract’ opens for him – he is able to see 3-d video snippets of himself and his daughter from the day he left her until the present. He is only allowed to have minimal communication with her– he shoves the books on the shelf forward in a pattern and teenage ‘Murph’ thinks a ghost is trying to communicate with her. You see, desperately in tears, Cooper is trying to alter the past. He screams ‘don’t let me go’ but Murph cannot hear him. This is the part we saw in para 2 above!

 Then Cooper looks for that part of the Tesseract where Murph is a grown-up lady and tries to communicate with her by moving the second hand of the watch he gave her before leaving. Murph recognizes the Morse pattern and is overjoyed that her dad is back! Her dad, inside the tesseract is overjoyed that his daughter Murph has been chosen to save the last of humans and he helps her do just that by passing gravitational data from the black hole via Morse code. This will help Murph solve the gravity problem that senior Brand was working on before he died!! The result is that humans will overcome gravity and will be able to fly to other planets like Edmonds in larger numbers on space stations. Cooper station is one example of that!

 Rangers find Cooper orbiting Saturn alone after the Tesseract closes and move him to ‘Cooper Station’, also orbiting Saturn. There he is reunited with his old, sick daughter Murph on her death bed surrounded by relatives Cooper has never met!! You see, the hours spent rescuing parts of an old vehicle from its watery grave on Miller's planet and the encounter he had on the frozen Mann's planet with Dr. Mann himself had cost him dearly in terms of earth years. The hours spent inside the Black hole and the Tesseract additionally cost 50 human years! As a result, he could not see his daughter grow up or spend any time with his family and friends! Now Murph is 91 years old while Cooper does not look much older than when he left earth. Murph and his son Tom, who had already passed away, have their own family branches.  Cooper seems satisfied that the human race will survive due to their efforts. The movie ends as Cooper gets ready to fly to Edmond’s planet to meet female Dr. Brand and perhaps start a human colony there. Gravity plays multiple roles here you see!

Notes: This movie is based upon scientific facts of Cosmology. I have deliberately avoided going into the technical details of Wormhole, Black Hole, Tesseract, Spacetime, Five dimensional beings etc. This is so that we can follow the story smoothly. The story is of love between a father and daughter and their separation for a higher purpose, which was to save humans from extinction.

The heartfelt tears that the father feels, lost in the womb of Spacetime, and his love for his child overcome the limitations of human existence. Hans Zimmer’s musical contribution enhances the emotional parts of the movie. Modern sound engineering has raised the quality of piano keys! You see, the piano tune that plays in the background again and again at appropriate places in the movie rhymes with some lines of the song, as well as some portions of the piano tune, of an old Bollywood song ‘Dil Ke Jharoke ..’ from the 1968 movie ‘Brahmachari’. This is a song of separation and anguish!! Cooper even likes the Indian drone he captures because of the better solar cells.

Contact: A Movie Review

 By Ravindra Loomba



Contact is based on the book by Carl Sagan. From a ham radio enthusiast the young heroine  turns into a professional astronomer after she grows up. She is part of SETI, you see.She lives among rows of large dish antennas and room full of scopes. She and her friends are looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. Her doting father dies of a heart attack while she was a young girl.

One lucky day she receives unusual signals from outer space. These are accompanied by detailed design for a machine which will create a doorway to the unknown alien intelligence. A rich man named Hayden helps her understand the documents. When the plan to build that machine becomes public, there are protests from religious groups. One religious fanatic is on a suicide mission. He infiltrates SETI  and blows up the machine as it is nearing completion! Fortunately, the government has an identical copy of that machine elsewhere. 


The machine takes our heroine through a series of wormholes after which she descends on a beach with a posture that seems like she is in bed. On the beach she has unusual experience of seeing a small galaxy just above her head which is surrounded by a transparent medium like a pool of placid water! A ripple goes towards the center of the galaxy when she gently touches that medium.




Then a flickering shadow approaches her from a distance. As it gets near she realizes that it is her dad. She is overwhelmed to see him. She asks him if this is where people go after they die and he answers that some do. She has many more questions but the father says 'small steps' and the visit ends. She is instantaneously transported backto her machine module that has remained where it was built…

At the special hearing held to brief her seniors, she has difficult time convincing people that she had that experience because all that the observers saw was her module descending into the sea a few minutes after it was started. Doubts are raised about rich Hayden's involvement and whether whole thing was fake. But the young lady is adamant that she did have that experience and it is not a drug induced hallucination. 

They also notice 16 hours of static on the recording device..

I wish Carl Sagan would send us a signal from the other dimension to confirm his story..

Note: The information received from alien intelligence also has news from the time of Hitler. I have forgotten the details...