[Weekly Update] Killer Sex Bot Movies

Happy Valentines' Day! If you are married, remember mark your calendars and ready your flowers.

If you are single. Welcome to the club! Booyah!

CHANNEL UPDATE

Next video:
A part of the problem with doing long form videos, as I've come to realize, is that without a time limit in place, the project just keeps snowballing. Our next video, on the topic of Kung Fu vs. Foreign fighters, ended up with a loads of newspaper clippings and articles and a desire for a 500 dollar stock image. I keep writing additional paragraphs, bringing in related topics like the development of Sanda in recent history, only to delete it later just to keep the video focus. I can see why some essay channels ended up with 4 hours long videos.

April Fools' video:
This year, as stated before, we'll be doing a video on Chinese swear words. Originally I planned to cover both Mandarin and Cantonese. However, Cantonese swearings are significantly easier to find in film, and I think I might have to limit it to that.

March video:
With the April Fool's project taking more work than anticipated, I think I'll make the March video a little simpler and easier. As such, we'll be covering a Ghanian film called African Kung-Fu Nazis.

Watchalong:
Last month, I said we'll do a watch along sometime together. That didn't end up happening, as I couldn't find an interesting and freely available movie. Instead, maybe we could play Mahjong together, with Mahjong soul being freely available. That said, I'm not sure if there's a spectator mode in Mahjong Soul. If we have too many players, we'll need that.

MEDIA TALK

If I have a dollar for every killer sex bot movie I've seen, I'd have two and a half dollars.

Yeah, when AI became the hot new topic on the Internet, I didn't expect the sex bot trope to be the leading horror genre to reflect our fear of this technology. Granted, these movies are still more interesting than The Creator (2023), but... I don't know, I think I expected more high concept stuff instead of sex bots.

The two films that awarded me a dollar each are Subservience, starring Megan Fox as a sex bot named Iris; and Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher as Iris. Just from this short introduction, you can tell these two started from nearly the same place. The name Alice and Iris both have a similar "innocent" ring to it, an both starring actresses share a similar sex appeal.

Companion is, undoubtable, the better film of the two. Nevertheless, neither films are all that deep. They decorated themselves with the topic of AI future, but ultimately offers little insight into the discussion. Due to both films still being so new, I won't be spoiling the details. Suffice to say, the identity of sex bots in both films serve little purpose. They aren't exactly The Matrix or Her, is what I'm saying.

As for the half dollar, that would be Ex Machina, an actual high concept film about AI and robotics, which also happens to be the most ahead of its time out of all three.

And, this might be weird to hear, it is also the only film to feature a sex bot with the appearance of an Asian woman.

Look, I know I sound rather crass for saying this. But we all know that if we ever gets AI android companions, many of them would be of Asian appearance (and many more of them would be anime). The century old perception that Asian woman are submission continued to lived in everyone's pornography fantasy. I refused to believe this won't be exploited by companies who sell sex bots.

Anyway, back to the topics at hand. What I really want from AI related movies, if it has to be about sex bots to be marketable, is to at least explore topics beyond the simple "what if a robot can kill". We all know robots can kill, I think we can move passed that by now. Instead, here are some ideas, which I just pulled out of my own butt, to think about:

• What if a regular human woman is mistakenly registered as a robot? How will her life change? How will people treat her differently?

• How will a society function if everyone's need is catered towards by a personal companion? Will social connections between humans ceases to be?

• What will happen if robots fully replaced the working class? Will everyone get to sit back and enjoy life? Or will there be a mass human extinction, leaving only the rich and powerful, supported by an army of robots?

• What will robots do after humanity has gone extinct? What if these robots aren't self-aware, and are serving a master that no longer exists? What if these robots are Facebook content creators, fabricating content with no audience to see them?

These ideas literally took me 5 minutes to come up. I'm sure Hollywood, or any other film industry, can do better.

Anyway, you want some actual horror? Sophie Thatcher, the lead actress in Companion, is only 24 years old.

She's born in the year 2000.

Anyway, if there are non-Hollywood AI movies out there, please let me know! I would love to see a different perspective on the topic.

I'll possibly see you in our next video!