Pig
Heads up: There are spoilers in this section.
I recently saw the movie Pig. On its surface, it’s loaded with the Nic Cage fanboy treatment. Cage plays a man who refuses to speak, lives in the woods with his (very) valuable truffle-finding pig, pig gets stolen, his idiosyncratic, mythical figure must exact revenge and get his pig back.
Except he doesn’t exact revenge. He takes beating after beating. When he is (constantly) presented with the opportunity to leverage violence as his means, he improbably relents and pursues peace. It’s not “Taken but with a pig.”
The movie was a critical darling, but by all accounts, it didn’t make money. The best estimates have it slightly above breaking even, others have it as a million-dollar loss. I found the movie lost momentum towards the end, undermined its climax, and that fantastical elements of the plot distanced it from the reality it was trying to create. I wasn’t enthralled by the result, but I very much enjoyed a number of its individual mechanisms, including its cinematography and the risks it took in its storytelling.
There should be more movies like this one, though, ones that don’t just take a left turn when we’re expecting a right — ones that are written from an entirely different place on the map. That’s why I believe it’s important that the movie got made. My feelings on its final assembly aside, it’s important that Pig was recognized so broadly and publicly in the hopes that more movies like this will get greenlit. It’s wild that an esoteric movie leveraged the real-world fandom of Cage’s acting choices to pursue an unexpected narrative. It’s emblematic of a creative approach that plays on the real-world expectations of fans, further blurring the fourth wall between our art and our lives. And when new creative approaches are pursued, we get further innovation and collaboration and remixing and rebuilding.
These results are rarely perfect out of the gate, either, but that’s rarely the point.
Stem Player
In today’s economy, video games are bigger in terms of the size of the business than movies and music and TV all put together. And what are they? They’re about going into the world and changing it and interacting with it. … My fundamental opinion is, the more we can see together, the more together we’ll be.
Alex Klein
Co-Founder of Kano Computing in GQ Magazine
Alex Klein is the co-founder of Kano Computers; Kano created the Stem Player device with Kanye West. GQ Magazine interviewed him about his work on the new product where he discusses, among other things, the inspiration for its design: Kano’s see-through computers, the machinery used in music studios, children interacting with it at Ye’s Yeezy Christian Academy, a destroyed Apple laptop, stress balls, (literal) rocks, arcade machines, products designed for people with autism. The two of them found inspiration for it everywhere. It was a communal process.
