Chappie (2015)

Chappie is the third film from Neill Blomkamp, and his second set in South Africa. (The aliens as Apartheid allegory District 9 (2009) was the first.) This one started out reminding me of a SA "Robocop" (1987), with but with robot humanoids (instead of cyborgs) and a remote piloted "Moose" taking the place of the ED-209 robot, then the stories diverge.

There is a large corporation building machines for crime fighting, and the C-staff are very driven to boost sales to police forces. A software engineer is very interested in a project to make the robots self-aware and fully "intelligent" but he gets nixed for business reasons. So he steals a robot intended for recycling after getting damaged and installs his software on it anyway.

"Chappie" is the name that robot gets.

In a parallel story, some drug dealers whose business has been impacted by robot police, have a plan to kidnap an engineer from the robot manufacturer in order to get an advantage on the robot cops. They grab our AI focused engineer while he has the stolen droid in his car. (The core pair of drug dealers, at least core to story, are played by the duo from South African zef-rap-rave group Die Antwoord. They sort-of play themselves, using their stagenames as character names and Die Antwoord style art around their lair.)

As Chappie first starts to learn, the learning is shown as an accellerated human baby might pick up things. Imitation, discernment of items (eg a wrist "watch" pointed out) in a complex settings, learning that people lie from experiencing it, etc.

These are important innate skills of humans (and probably other mammals) that have no parallel in the present AI tech world. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chatgpt do not have innate immitation. They do not have feedback loops to learn deceit from observed contradictions. They do not have acces to empathy to feel bad for hurting people, or people just hurt.

The movie glosses over how the robot got these traits, and I think the AI advocates in the modern tech world have glossed over the importance themselves. Throwing a bunch of structured text at a matrix generating program fails to consider how a matrix would identify text visually, how human brains are wired for grammar natively, how humans adjust their learning based on day to day activities (and not just structured "training").

By failing to understand how computers store data, the movie script just has the robot learn like a huan. By failing to understand how humans actually learn, techbros imagine stored data is learning.

After that the movie just becomes fantasy, to me.

Side note: I remember before this came out how famous the band Die Antwoord had become, and watching it I started to wonder, "what became of them?" So I looked at the Die Antwoord Wikipedia page and, "oh my", "oh dear", and "yikes".

Chappie at imdb

Deathstalker

One of the more notorious Roger Corman productions is the 1983 film Deathstalker. This was marketed as a swords and sorcery movie but it's a primarily a tits and ass film around a swords and sorcery story with a smattering of weak comedy.

When we first meet "Stalker" he has just met a band of hideous looking men (monsters?) who are trying to steal the loot, and kidnapped woman, off a thief. Stalker kills all the monster-men, then thief, and then tries to force himself on the woman. Over the course of the film, he calls himself Stalker and others call him either Stalker or Death Stalker.

The title character is not morally ambiguous, he's morally odious. To call him an "antihero" would be a whitewashing of the term. The exploitation is thick, every woman under 30 in the cast is there to show skin. The named two women stars were best known at the time for modeling, one in Playboy. The other, Lana Clarkson, only really became famous with this role. (Later she would marry Phil Spector and be killed by him.)

The story is weak, the special effects so-so, the costumers emphasizing the beefcake of the male stars and sex appeal of the female. But the camerawork is good and the stars are good to look at.

In 2025, a remake has come out. This one is executive produced by Slash (of Guns'n'Roses fame). The cast is much smaller, and no one flashing tits or ass. This time it is clearly a swords and sorcery comedy.

Here we meet Deathstalker, an ex-military man who now is an independent thief looting battlefields, and finishing off some of the wounded for their bounty. Later in a bar, the patrons talk of him and share his name with the audience.

The story has some vague similarities, but most specifics differ. The cast is a lot smaller, and the sets are not as impressive. The new one has a lot of good practical effects, a rarity in this day and computer age. For all of the lack of actors, this wastes no opportunity for a good practical detail.

The story makes more sense now and Patton Oswald lends his voice to the main comic-relief sidekick. The names of every character except Deathstalker and the witch Toralva differ. In both stories Toralva explains the some magic artifacts and sends Deathstalker on his way.

There's still a plot significant amulet and sword, but in 1983 Deathstalker gets the sword and then looks for the amulet, which the wizard Munkar has. With the amulet, Munkar can't die. With the sword, Deathstalker can't be killed.

In 2025, Deathstalker gets the amulet during his battlefield thievery. He discovers he can't get rid of the amulet and Toralva tells him it goes with whoever killed the last owner. The wizard Necronemnon is out to get the amulet, and is willing to kill for it. Deathstalker needs to find the special sword which is the only thing that can kill the wizard.

The newer movie is a better story, with better creatures. It has a lot more gore than the original and none of the eighties sex excess. It also is a lot smaller.

Deathstalker (2025) at imdb
Deathstalker (1983) at imdb

The Timekeepers of Eternity

In 1995 a miniseries was made from a Stephen King short story, The Langoliers. The miniseries was essentially a three hour movie in two parts, and the DVD release just presented it as such. It's got the usual things that bother me about King, like a character based a bit on himself and a psychic kid. It also suffers from the "we need three hours of content" TV miniseries issue, so the story drags.

The gist of the story is on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston most of the passengers, and all of the active crew, disappear. The plane continues on autopilot until, a dead-heading captain takes over. A good chunk of the film is the people trying to figure what happened, then some time realizing there's danger, and finally how to undo what happened.

The author stand-in mystery writer provides much of exposition, but it's pretty much all speculation. A self-important and obnoxious businessman provides the name for threat, based on childhood tales his father told while psychologically abusing the kid. One character describes these "Langoliers" as "The timekeepers of eternity" during a bit of padding.

Eventually some of them get back to LAX, and take care to stand out of the way for a safe return to reality, thinking nothing of the huge plane they left right outside the terminal.

That businessman, Mr Toomey, provides a good deal of the conflict when not worrying about the Langoliers. During his attempts to control his emotions he spends the time tearing paper into small strips. This is even used by other characters to recognize Mr Toomey has been around when the torn paper is seen.

In 2021, Aristotelis Maragkos decided to remake the film by reediting the original Tom Holland directed version. Maragkos titled his work The Timekeepers of Eternity and it is more Mr Toomey focused and much tighter, a mere sixty-two minutes.

But the remarkable thing about Maragkos's edit is that it is paper based. He printed the frames, in black and white, on paper and tears and crumples them to fit the story. Split screen edits, for example are archieved with a torn sheet on top of another sheet. The Langolier monsters are no longer mid-budget 1995 CGI "beachballs with teeth", but are now balls of crumpled paper.

(The direction King provided to Holland for the look was "beachballs with teeth". That fits the size, but to me seeming more like walnuts with metal buzz saw teeth. The crumpled paper balls have no visible teeth but seem more intimidating.)

This paper version improves on the original in every way and is an excellent example of experimental film. As a mild spoiler, the ending is different in this one. The film stops before they reach LAX with the implication that they never make it. I believe this is minor since the process and the journey are the good parts. And it's not explicitly said that they don't make it.

The director sells this film, but not on DVD or Bluray, no, you can buy it on used VHS tapes, where the first hour has Timekeepers recorded on top of whatever was there before.

43 million in bond money out of 50 million.

• VHS store version
• Langoliers at Wikipedia
• Langoliers at IMDB
• The Timekeepers of Eternity at IMDB
• The Timekeepers of Eternity trailer at Youtube

Taking Apart a Locking Shopping Cart Wheel

These are old photos from something I did about ten years ago, but I thought I'd share them for people interested.

Some supermarkets around here, in order to combat people walking off with their shopping carts, have wheels that lock when they roll over a line with some sort of short range signal coming out of it. I don't really know the specifics of how the signal is sent.

I've been curious about the anti-theft shopping cart wheels for a while. It's clear that they are radio operated by a signal with a very short broadcast range. Less clear was how they actually stop the wheel from turning. My original hypothesis that the wheel contained a motor which would actively stop the wheel from moving. After finding a wheel that had broken off a cart (honest, I had been watching out for one for several years before finding one; this one was in a Target parking lot), I took it home and opened it up.

It turns out my hypothesis was far off. The center part of the wheel is fixed in place, well anchored to the axle which does not spin. Put another way: the outer part of the wheel moves, but the axle and the inner part do not. When the system receives a signal, it expands a plastic drum brake against the outer rim of the wheel, to prevent the wheel from spinng. When it receives an unlock signal, the plastic drum brake is retracted. During normal operation the only power draw is a small circuit listening for those radio(?) signals. At those times, it then switches on a motor to expand or retract the brake.

This post prompted by learing of begaydocrime.com which has more technical detail and audio files you can play to lock or unlock this sort of wheel.