Hotel hallways: the loneliest places in the universe.

We’re not supposed to like Michael Stone in Anomalisa. This beautiful stop-motion film, from the byzantine mind of Charlie Kaufman, might impress us with its craft, might make us laugh at its absurdity, but it doesn’t want us to root for its main character Michael. Michael may be at the center of the film, but he is also its villain. It’s a cautionary tale.

The film deals with loneliness, that feeling that sometimes creeps in that we’re somehow apart from and different than everyone else, that we’re tortured and misunderstood and experiencing some special sort of malaise that’s specific to us while everyone else goes on happily living.

Anomalisa confronts us with this phenomenon of both self-absorbtion and self-doubt at once, captures the emptiness it leaves in our hearts by creating a beautiful visual metaphor of Michael’s worldview in which everyone looks and sounds like the same bland person. His perspective shows us at our worst. And yet he gives a lovely speech (as a renowned expert in customer service) about striving to see each person’s individuality, their complexity, their personal pains and failings, that maybe Michael can’t quite live up to himself but must in his heart believe to be true. His speech, even if he can’t practice what he preaches, represents us at our best. Kaufman knows this, and shows us his anxiety of falling on the wrong side of the divide.

When do you feel loneliest or most disconnected from the world and the people around you, not so much physically, but emotionally?

Has anything ever made you feel at a distance from the rest of the world, as if removed from or different than everyone else?

How do you combat that feeling and try to see others as people, not a sea of “everyone else”? Does it work? Does it make life better?

Featuring Steve Carrell as Angry Guy and Ryan Gosling as Slick Dude.

The Big Short probably shouldn’t exist as a movie. As an explanation of exactly how and why the financial meltdown of 2008 happened, it’s fascinating, and does a reasonable job laying out the series of events. But if you’ve read enough news articles, or listened to some of the great podcasts from This American Life or Planet Money since these events unfolded, it’s not really offering a lot of new info. As a story about a few specific finance guys who saw it coming and took action, it’s compelling, but also packed to the gills with journalism and outright explaining disguised as drama, just to allow the audience to follow along.

What results feels like a mix between a Michael Moore movie (specific agenda and point of view, humorous fourth-wall-breaking style) and the most star-studded, entertaining dramatization to escape the confines of what could have otherwise been a talking-head documentary. Its script makes it fun while its facts make it depressing; it has a stylish tone and voice I enjoyed, but comes off as schizophrenic in what type of movie it wants to be.

But that’s the film as an experience. Strangely, the movie seems only glancingly concerned with the moral questions involved. It clearly takes the stance of “The Big Banks are Evil,” which pretty much every non-rich person agrees with going in. The handful of traders and fund managers who saw the signs early enough to profit from it serve as our gateway into the story, a useful device for all the explaining the film has to do as they figure it all out. But while the movie also paints these people as our “heroes” — we follow their actions, we root for them to succeed — it pays only lip service to the fact that their success comes on the backs of millions of people losing their homes or jobs, and the entire globe suffering a huge financial disaster. There’s a lot of glee at them pulling it all off, only a couple quiet moments of realization at the implications. It’s so interested in using these characters to make a bigger point about “the system”, it brushes the possibly-more-nuanced character question under the rug in the process.

So.

If you know something terrible is going to happen, affecting millions of people, but stopping it is out of your control, is it wrong to take action to personally profit from that tragedy?

How would you feel about doing it?
Should it be legal or should the system be changed to prevent it?
Is it better that someone benefit than no one?
Would you feel obligated to use that profit for good?

Some messages are subtler than others.

You can play The Beginner’s Guide in a couple hours, tops. Playing it feels unlike playing any game you’ve played, because there aren’t really objectives to complete or decisions to make and there’s definitely no way to win or lose. The most accurate description of TBG I could come up with is calling it the world’s first interactive critical essay on video games; a game built to explore what games mean to their creators and the people who play them.

The conceit is that the narrator (the maker of the “actual” game you’re playing) is taking you on a guided tour of a bunch of half-finished game ideas created by a fellow game designer he admires. The thrust of the conversation focuses on how games reflect the ideas and personalities of their creators. The biggest point of contention is this: creating for the sake of creating is a pure act — personal, private expression — and then once anything is shared with an audience, the work inherently changes. There are expectations the audience brings to the work, there are interpretations and assumptions made about the work, and ultimately a whole new set of demands made on the creator of the work.

The interactive mode of exploring this idea makes for a very novel, very engaging exploration of the creative process. I loved going on this journey. But I liked it most for being one big exercise in examining my relationship with any of the creative works I enjoy.

Does creativity inherently lose something when it’s shared? Does it require an audience, or change as soon as an audience gets involved?

For things you’ve made, how do you factor in the audience while making those things?

For things you’ve enjoyed as an audience member, what, if anything, do you feel the creator owes you as a creator? Is that a fair exchange?

If they key art for the game can spoil a plot twist, I certainly can.

SOMA is a game that’s hard to talk about without getting into specifics, and there’s nothing more insufferable than talking around something in an attempt to “avoid spoilers”, and thereby talking a lot without really saying anything at all. So there’s that.

On its surface, SOMA is a scary haunted house game set in an undersea research facility where you have to find a way out of the nightmare you’re trapped in, both literally and metaphorically. But really, SOMA is a game about consciousness. And if it weren’t more about that than running from monsters in a dark dank creepy maze at the bottom of the ocean, it would not be a very interesting game at all. In fact I would be just as happy to think and talk about the version of this game with no monsters at all. The monsters are not the point.

Some things a thoughtful person will ask themselves as they play this game include: Is putting a broken-but-still-living thing out of its misery an act of mercy or cruelty? Does this machine feel pain, and is that pain different than “real” pain I would feel guilt for inflicting on a person? Does a form of intelligence not based in traditional human biology have the same right to exist and propagate that we do?

But the biggest questions are about what it means to be human. In a future where consciousness can be transplanted — where our minds have the chance to continue after our frail human bodies, and the earth they occupy, are no longer sustainable — it’s up to us to decide if that’s an action worth taking.

The designers employ a clever trick to force us to confront this directly. At several points in the game, the player comes across kiosks with seemingly benign survey questions about what it feels like to be taken from your original body; about what it means to be untethered from the physical anchor we’re used to.

The questions don’t change over time, but based on the actions you’ve taken and what you’ve been through between these points in the game, you may find yourself reevaluating your responses. It’s tough to say you don’t want to go on when you’ve fought so hard not to give up. What may seem like sweet release viewed from the outside might be a torturous end when it’s your turn. Deciding between a false reality and none at all isn’t much of a choice.

If you could live on beyond your body by putting your mind into a mechanical host, would you?

Would it be better or worse to upload your consciousness to a simulation (like in The Matrix) and leave bodies behind altogether?

How do you think you would feel different in either of these situations, given that you are 100% aware of what’s changed?

May the odds… oh wait, wrong movie.

Recently I revisited the classic (and influential; looking at you, Hunger Games) film Battle Royale, about a near-future Japan where every year a class of students is shipped off to an island to battle to the death. Though it doesn’t delve into some of the class issues that makes the later Hunger Games so provocative and interesting, it’s still a must-see film. In fact, I love how Royale deals with dissatisfaction on both sides in a very Japanese way. The adults see ungrateful, unruly teens and feel like they need to be taught a lesson (which one could say about today’s entitled youth), but how can you not also sympathize with teens growing up into a world lacking in opportunity? It’s a fascinating exaggeration of reality where kids are forced into a cutthroat system against their will, and how they deal with that by trying to find rebellious ways out, whether suicide, bucking the system, or just finding their own way together despite the ‘rules’ that they’re supposed to play by.

But at the end of the day how can we not focus on the amazing hypothetical scenario the film (and its successor) proposes:

If you were in a Battle Royale/Hunger Games scenario, what do you do when you’re forced to kill or be killed? Make allies? Go fully aggressive homicidal? Play nice to get close, then betray those who trust you? Or opt out and kill yourself before they can do it to you, in some final act of defiance?