Category: Films and movies

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

The Wicker Man

Last night, I watched the 1973 film The Wicker Man. Basically, it is about a Christian policeman who (a) tries to prevent murder in and (b) tries to suppress paganism in a Scottish island community. It was a bit perplexing from a contemporary standpoint. Most of my friends would agree that the state has a critical role to play in deciding what children should be taught and the legitimate terms under which lives can be ended. At the same time, most of them would likely consider paganism less objectionable than Christianity, if one was forced to choose a religion.

As such, the film felt oddly disconnected from time, like a satire from a place and era you do not understand. From my current perspective, it was almost at the precise balance point between mocking the pagans and mocking the Christians. Neither had any claim to empirical validation of their belief structure.

It is enough to make one wonder about how today’s satire will be viewed in 25 years. Will people find themselves uncertain about whether The Daily Show was mocking or praising the Bush administration?

Loggers and tree-huggers

HSBC has released the strangest environmentally related ad I have ever seen. Usually, environmental advertising is absurd because filthy companies like Exxon pretend to be clean, or because they horribly distort environmental science. This one is strange both because it doesn’t make much sense internally and because there is no sense in which it constitutes a genuine endorsement of HSBC. The ad is bewildering if you take the logger to be the protester’s father; it becomes a bit more disturbing if you take them to be romantically involved. Either way, the best shot in the piece is the older male protester putting away his glasses while the police approach.

John Swansburg has produced some fairly extensive analysis.

1958 climate change video

Boing Boing came up with quite a find today: a video from 1958 that is both amusing and full of relatively accurate information about climate change. Entitled “The Unchained Goddess,” it was produced as an episode of the Bell Telephone Hour.

As I have described before, the idea that climate change only entered the realm of scientific knowledge within the last few years is quite mistaken. Notice also how the announcer in the video is concerned about emissions of “six billion tonnes per year of carbon dioxide.” The figure today is closer to forty billion.

Video explaining runaway climate change

I have often spent time thinking about the danger of a tipping point into runaway climate change – particularly about the ways in which the concept can be conveyed to non-experts in a comprehensible manner. This eleven minute video does a good job. The script, with peer-reviewed references and additional information is at wakeupfreakout.org.

Here are some related prior posts:

I discovered the video linked above through this Gristmill post.

[Update: 4 February 2009] Here is a post on the danger of self-amplifying, runaway climate change: Is runaway climate change possible? Hansen’s take.

Passchendaele and glory in warfare

Before several recent films, I have seen the trailer for Passchendaele – a film that seems to provide a heroic and pro-Canada take on this WWI battle. If anything, this actual history of Passchendaele demonstrates that war is rarely heroic, and that many narratives of heroism are self-serving for those that generate them. Both sides were fighting in defence of imperialism. Furthermore, the battle served little strategic purpose. After being taken at huge cost of lives – nearly one million killed, wounded, or captured on both sides – the terrain was abandoned so the Allies could respond more effectively to the German Lys Offensive.

Of course, Passchendaele joins a large collection of films of dubious historical quality. While I have yet to see it, the trailer is guilty of mindless patriotism, historical revisionism, and perhaps the Aragorn Fallacy. It would behoove us to remember a few key things about WWI: that the war was hugely costly in lives and suffering, that none of the major powers participating got the outcome they wanted at the outset, and that it ultimately did nothing to address the imbalances in Europe caused by the unification of Germany. Of course, films that highlight such things are unlikely to be blockbuster smash hits.

Generation Kill

Written by a journalist embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Corps, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill describes the experience of invading Iraq alongside them in 2003. The book provides a graphic account of what transpired among the men of the Battalion and its subsidiary units, as well as on battlefields between Kuwait City and Baghdad.

Some of the more notable elements of the first person account include the lack of coordination between different units, poor logistics and intelligence, near-total lack of translators, wide variations in competence and attitude between officers, and the force with which the sheer terror and agony of the experience is recounted. While large portions of the invading army may have had tents, cots, and warm meals, the recon Marines operate for the entire war on pre-packaged food and holes laboriously pick-axed into the ground. They spent much of the war in bulky chemical protection suits, fearing gas attacks that never came. The Marines are intentionally sent into ambush after ambush, receiving massive amounts of fire from within open-topped Humvies, as a feint to confuse Iraqi forces about the overall American strategy. The book certainly does a good job of conveying the brutality of it all: for the Marines, their Iraqi opponents, and for the civilians all around. The most interesting aspects of the narrative are definitely the characters of the individual Marines, as effectively illustrated through quoted statements.

The book does reinforce some broader conclusions that can be drawn about the war: particularly in terms of how the treatment of the civilian population has been mismanaged. What is less clear is whether the lesson to be drawn is that much more attention needs to be paid to post-occupation planning in future conflicts, or whether expectations of anything other than absolute carnage following a ‘regime change’ are misguided. Probably, the answer lies somewhere between.

The book has also formed the basis for an HBO mini-series of the same name. The series and the book parallel one another very closely. Indeed, given the arguably greater capacity of film to depict the majority of the events described, just watching the series may be a superior option to just reading the book.

Frontline episodes

The entire archive of the PBS investigative journalism program Frontline seems to be available online for free. Some of the more interesting topics covered include:

There is certainly a consistent – and fairly critical – focus on the controversial actions of the second Bush administration. That being said, the quality of the programs seems to be quite high.

Sleep and slime moulds

Since I spent the last fourteen hours sleeping, I don’t have much of interest to convey right now.

As a consolation, here is a time lapse video of slime moulds and fungus growing. I have always found slime moulds rather fascinating. They start of as single-celled, bacteria-eating organisms resembling amoebas. If two with matching mating types encounter one another, they can form a zygote. That, in turn, becomes a macroscopic organism with many nuclei, but no membranes between cells – an “interconnected network of protoplasmic strands.” Once this has eaten everything nearby, fruiting bodies form that disperse spores. These hatch into single-celled bacteria-eating eukaryotes once again.

One of the more odd and charming sections from the Wikipedia entry on slime moulds is this:

In 2006, researchers at the University of Southampton and the University of Kobe reported that they had built a six-legged robot whose movement was remotely controlled by a Physarum slime mold. The mold directed the robot into a dark corner most similar to its natural habitat.

It is disconcerting to consider that an entity consisting of an amalgamation of amoebas can apparently display something akin to preferences when put in control of a robot (though I think the ‘control’ just consisted of watching how the slime mould moved and copying it). This article has a picture of the robot.

In any case, I am hoping that my period of hibernation will reset my brain. During the last few days, it has sunken into something akin to – but nonetheless more profound than – the normal August lull which permeates Ottawa.

Editing video using still photos

Recently, there was controversy about a doctored photograph showing four Iranian missiles launching, whereas the original apparently showed three and one on the ground. Errol Morris discussed the images on the website of the New York Times.

Photo and video editing are nothing new, but some new software seeks to make the former much easier. It combines video data with that from still photographs in order to accomplish many possible aims. For instance, it could be used to improve the resolution of a whole scene or elements within it. It could also correct for over- and under-exposed regions. Of course, it could also facilitate video manipulation. The skills and software required to edit still images are increasingly available. Combine that with this software and you could empower a slew of new video fraudsters.

It will be interesting to see what kind of countermeasures emerge from organizations concerned about data integrity. One route is forensic – identifying markers of manipulation and tools for uncovering them. Another relies on requiring technologies and techniques for those capturing and submitting video. That could involve the expectation of multiple independent photos and videos produced from different angles using different equipment, or perhaps the widespread deployment of timestamps and cryptographic hashing to strengthen data integrity.