Category: Films and movies

Whether big-studio or independent, celluloid or digital, anything about movies

Marriages and alliances

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the character Lady Jessica is under orders from a powerful group to only bear her husband daughters. Eventually, it is revealed that the purpose of this was to ensure that her daughter could be wed to the son of an enemy clan, in order to seal the rift between them.

While such marriages have a medieval feel, it certainly seems to be the case that such unions can unite differing factions and promote the emergence of new political unions. It will be interesting to see how gay marriage changes that dynamic, especially if it spreads beyond liberal democracies. Such unions will not be able to produce biological children – for the foreseeable future – but perhaps they will still serve the role of binding groups together.

How different Dune would have been if Paul Atreides could have wed Feyd-Rautha or Glossu Rabban.

Obama’s speech in Cairo

President Obama’s speech on the United States and the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo, is worth watching:

It covers the history of Islam, the United States, and the Muslim world. It also covers Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, nuclear proliferation, democracy, religious freedom, the rights of women, and economic development. Many translations are available. Climate change was not directly mentioned, despite its considerable importance for both Muslims and Americans.

At the very least, the speech demonstrates the change in tone between this administration and the last one. Whether it is the start of something more meaningful, time will tell. Slate has some commentary: relatively positive and more negative.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Yellow Fiat rearview mirror

This film is worth seeing, if only to dispel the notion that all the electric vehicles that existed in the last few decades were awkward, short-range creations. The EV1 looks about as good as the forthcoming Chevy volt, got 260km per charge (with the second generation Ni-MH battery, apparently available from the outset), and was released in 1996. The film also helps to illustrate some of the relationships between lawmaking, regulation, and strategic industrial behaviour. Sadly, it also hints at the general willingness of political bodies and even bureaucracies to fold in the face of industry pressure, even when industries are acting against their own long-term best interest. Indeed, the film makes a reasonably compelling case that the American auto industry conspired to crush the electric vehicle as an alternative to the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine car.

The film also does a decent job of highlighting that the hydrogen car has always been a deeply unlikely proposition; hydrogen is just an energy carrier, and it is a deeply problematic one. Fuel cells are expensive and don’t last very long. Hydrogen takes energy to produce and compress of liquefy. It is tough to store, and there is no fuel distribution infrastructure for it. Compared to all that, electricity looks very appealing.

The film does seem to contribute to the common argument that our current approach to automobile regulation lacks vision, especially given the degree to which auto companies are now creatures of government largesse. Given climate change, given the possibility of peak oil, given the geopolitical consequences of oil dependence, it really seems as though they should be under much stronger pressure to produce very efficient vehicles, as well as vehicles that do not derive their energy from fossil fuels. Now that the government and unions own GM, perhaps they can insist on digging up any corporate records that haven’t been destroyed, with respect to internal deliberations on electric vehicle strategies, as well as responding to California’s mandate for zero emission vehicles.

Individual vehicles won’t ever really be an efficient option, compared with mass transit. That being said, it is unlikely that we will see their abandonment in the developed world, nor much diminished interest in them in the rising middle classes of developing states. If we are going to keep building cars, we need to do so far more intelligently. Electric vehicles will likely be a big part of that.

[Update: 2:11pm In retrospect, some of the film’s conspiratorial allegations may be less convincing than they appear at first blush. It is certainly plausible that oil companies would have a reason to resist the widespread deployment of vehicles that are not dependent on their key product, but it is another thing entirely to prove that they actually took action in that direction.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Log and reeds at sunset

Tom Roger’s Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics teaches basic science principles in one of the most entertaining ways possible: by illustrating the ways in which elements of popular Hollywood films are hopelessly out of line with the physical laws that exist in our universe. Topics covered include the laws of motion, gravitation, vehicles, the behaviour of weapons, relativity, extreme weather, space travel, and more.

While the book may seem whimsical, Rogers makes the important point that movies are a form of vicarious experience for people. For most of us, they have provided most of our ‘knowledge’ about firearms, knives, the extreme operation and destruction of vehicles, the destruction of buildings, etc. By consistently misrepresenting these things, films leave people ill-equipped to understand the phenomena in the real world.

In addition to this, Rogers’ book includes a detailed debunking of two conspiracy theories partially fuelled by a poor understanding of physics. In the first, he discusses the physics of the JFK assassination, in the context of the popular film. He argues that the official account is convincing for a number of reasons, and that the film has helped to entrench a serious misunderstanding in the minds of many Americans. The second conspiracy theory – that the World Trade Centre was destroyed using explosives planted inside – is similarly based in a bad understanding of physics, and similarly damaging in terms of the way in which it colours people’s thinking.

The kind of people who take delight in outsmarting the people who make movies will probably find this book very entertaining. Those trying to teach physics concepts may also find it useful as a mechanism for engaging people and having them explore ideas in an imaginative but realistic way.

Downloading from YouTube and Megavideo

There are lots of sites out there that present videos in a non-downloadable way, wrapped in flash video players. For instance, there are Megavideo and YouTube. For those running Safari, there is an easy way to download these videos:

  1. On the page with the video, click ‘Window’ and the ‘Activity.’
  2. Scroll through the list until you find something plausibly large (at least a few megabytes)
  3. Select that item and copy it, either with the hotkey or from ‘Edit > Copy.’
  4. Click ‘Window’ and ‘Downloads’
  5. Paste the item, with either the menu or the hotkey.
  6. The file will download to your desktop.
  7. Add the extension .flv to the file
  8. They can be played in video players like VideoLAN.

The same trick can be used to grab other forms of embedded media from all sorts of websites, and it’s much easier than digging around in search of temporary internet files.

Star Trek

Hallway leading to the library, in the Canadian Parliament

While the new Star Trek movie was entertaining, it won’t feel familiar to those whose first major contact with the series was The Next Generation. It’s a hyperactive, disorderly action film, populated mostly with teenagers who look straight out of The O.C. Star Fleet Command certainly seems surprisingly willing to give command of ships to reckless young people with no command experience. Those used to the deliberative, diplomatic approach of the Picard era are likely to find this jarring, or perhaps so alien as to be part of a different fictional universe altogether. At the same time, this film is definitely less absurd than some of the previous attempts to turn Patrick Stewart into a kind of big-screen action hero. If you insist on making Star Trek in an action genre, this may be the way to do it.

This film clearly attempts to start things afresh, and the re-launch of the series is handled in a somewhat clever way. By adopting a branching universe view of how time travel works, the writers gave themselves wide scope to produce a Star Trek variant in which significant elements of the original are vacant or absent.

Star Trek is basically a summertime puff film, strongest on visual effects and its ability to be compelling on a big screen. It is distinctly disjoined from the more intellectual traditions of the Star Trek universe, and would make an awkward platform from which to return to them. That being said, it may find a place as an entertaining and less mature split-off from the more serious mass. It’s not a film I regret seeing, but it’s not something I would care to see again.

P.S. On a technical side note, nitpickers will find plenty to quibble about, in terms of plot inconsistencies and appalling physics. For instance, why an elaborate skydive-from-space operation was necessary to disable a certain thing in one instance, when it proved quite vulnerable to conventional space-based weapons later. There are also some inconsistent transporter shenanigans. This is not a film for the type of people who care about the realities of jumping between metal platforms vertically separated by more than ten metres, without serious injury.

Watchmen

Birdfeeder

I saw Watchmen last night and didn’t feel particularly inclined to review it. That said, it was getting late and I couldn’t think of anything else. As with all my reviews, it it is likely to contain ‘spoilers.’

When it comes to comic book films, the mark of success or failure is often whether it is compelling enough to make you stop asking questions about the unreality of what is presented. Judging by the conversations I had with friends after the film, this one didn’t quite clear the hurdle. While it was very strong visually, it lacked the originality of something like The Matrix or Sin City – both of which it clearly drew from. While some of the characters were interesting, most were either flat or very clearly derivative (James Bond villains, vengeful detectives, etc). The plot was fine, but not especially inspired, particularly in terms of ‘surprises’ that failed to surprise.

The central enigma of the film is the character of Dr. Manhattan, and I think that is where it fails most comprehensively. He isn’t compelling. He’s a dull kind of guy who likes the arid emptiness of Mars and has no special problem with killing Vietnamese soldiers for the American government, Apocalypse Now-style helicopters beside him. He is boring, rather than deep. In the end, he comes across as a kind of powerful dimwit, and nobody is emotionally affected when he wanders off. All kinds of things are deeply implausible about Dr. Manhattan, in terms of the plot, also. For instance, why the military research facility where he was actually created never tried to make any more supermen. Also, why the government seems to think he is able to stop 99% of Russian nuclear weapons, without any special system to inform him they that are coming or where they are. If he could do so without any outside assistance, he should presumably have noticed that the arch-villain had destroyed Moscow, during the climactic period of the film. The other enigma, which isn’t addressed in any way, is why some people who decide to become vigilantes have superhuman powers; it’s like X-Men, but with no premise of explanation. Presumably, the graphic novel version is more fleshed out.

One amusing thing I realized about the film is that, for at least some teenagers, it will be their first introduction to the music of Simon & Garfunkel, as well as Jimi Hendrix. The opening credits, which consist of an interesting montage of film and semi-ironic music, were actually the best part of the film. Second to those were the comic touches included from time to time. Third best was looking at Malin Akerman, though she looks a bit like a digital amalgamation of Kirsten Dunst and a few other recent female love-interest figures.

Watchmen is certainly an enjoyable enough film to watch. There are some cringe-inducing moments of violence, though they don’t have the same awful character as the ones in Sin City. It is not, however, a comic film good enough to make you forget its flaws. It will please those who are primed to appreciate it, but I doubt it will have a lasting influence on anyone.

Air travel and appreciation

This video clip of Canadian comedian Louis C.K. on the Conan O’Brien show is quite amusing. He is talking about how people take air travel, and technology generally, for granted. He has an amusing way of turning around the common gripes people have about air travel:

‘And then, we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway, for 40 minutes. We had to sit there.’ Oh? Really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?

It’s true that people fail to appreciate the immense effort and skill reflected in things like computers, pharmaceuticals, global communications, as so forth. At one level, that is simply a lack of curiosity. On another, I think it’s a kind of defence mechanism: people are completely dependent on these technologies, and yet few understand them at all. Most people probably couldn’t even explain how an airplane wing produces lift. That general point is especially well made by James Burke. He chooses an even more banal technology example than air travel, elevators. In the first episode of his series, he demonstrates how our attitude towards them demonstrates our dependence, ignorance, and vulnerability.

Coen brothers ad on ‘clean coal’

The Coen Brothers – directors of favourite films of mine like The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? – have made a short advertisement debunking the notion of ‘clean coal.’ It doesn’t have enormously much substantive content, but it does a pretty good job of saying: “Those promising that coal can be clean are lying to you.”

The ad was commissioned by the Reality Coalition.