Category: Films and movies

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

Thoroughly impressed by TED

Steel girders and sky

Initially drawn in by the Al Gore video, I have been watching lots of the films from the TED conference, and being impressed by many of them. I am more impressed than ever by cephalopods, and some of my idle curiosity about how ants decide what to do has been satisfied. I also learned about some new reasons for which we should be wary about the long-term use of antidepressant drugs.

Putting these short lectures online is an excellent way of demonstrating the power of the internet to distribute ideas. Even for those of us who would balk at flying to California to attend some very neat talks, fiber optic links provide a low-carbon alternative.

Al Gore at TED

Safety sign

The Technology Entertainment Design Conference takes place annually in Monterey, California. At the most recent one, Al Gore presented an updated version of his climate change slideshow, made famous by his film An Inconvenient Truth.

It seems a bit remarkable for me that when I first saw that film in Oxford, I wasn’t yet convinced about the full extent of the threat of climate change. Since then, I have devoted the majority of my time and attention to this issue. If you have not done so yet, I encourage you to watch the video linked above, and perhaps read some of the posts in my climate change index.

It is not unrealistic to say that climate change will be the defining issue of the next century, and possibly far beyond. Gaining a strong understanding of it is the least we can do as educated people today.

Airsick

This short video on climate change, produced by Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk, is very elegant. It doesn’t have a great deal of substantive content, but it includes a lot of striking visual images. Rather than being shot continuously, it consists of 20,000 black and white still images.

The video, and some of the claims made in it, are being discussed on Metafilter.

Dark comedies

I first experienced Jhonen Vasquez‘s work in the form of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: a darkly comic feature of my high-school days. Johnny is insane and believes he needs to keep a wall in his house painted with fresh blood so that demons do not push through from the other side. On the basis of that, you might wonder why Nickelodeon decided to produce a children’s television show created by the same man. Invader Zim is not nearly as dark as Johnny – though it definitely has its moments – and I think it is funnier overall. In one episode, the megalomaniacal alien Zim is concerned that a human nurse will uncover his secret identity as an alien because he lacks human organs. His solution is to start stealing them from his classmates in a macabre and hilarious episode called “Dark Harvest.”

The series is worth watching just so that you can exchange the most hillarious lines with other devotees.

For those already enamoured with Zim it is worth noting that you can buy every episode on DVD for $29.59. At that price, it may soften the rueful chastisement embodied in the angry fist you wave at those $70 seasons of The Sopranos. They even had the gall to split series six in two parts, so they could rob people twice…

Evolution and Ben Stein

Rusty bike parts

It is always surprising when a seemingly intelligent person adopts a hopelessly indefensible position. This seems to be the case with Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie. It is still possible to argue that some kind of deity must have created the universe. What is not possible is to argue convincingly against the central elements of the theory of evolution: namely how mutation and selection drive change and how all life on earth is descended from a common ancestor. There is simply too much evidence for both claims, and it is too good:

  1. The fossil record shows overwhelming evidence for a branched tree of life, connecting existing organisms to ancient ones that preceded them.
  2. Comparative embryology provides good anatomical evidence of both evolution and common descent.
  3. Concrete examples of evolution on human timescales can be easily found. These include plant domestication, moths that darkened in response to coal soot, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.
  4. The geographic distribution of species provides evidence for speciation and adaptation to new biological niches.
  5. Both nucleic and mitochondrial DNA provide excellent evidence for both common descent and evolution through selection.
  6. Common aspects of biochemistry are demonstrative of both claims: especially those features which are arbitrary yet consistent among living things

I haven’t seen the film, and it probably argues something more sophisticated than “the world is 6,000 years old and every creature that has ever lived is alive now, in the exact form in which it was created.” Even so, it is depressing to see someone commonly associated with intelligence fuelling a false debate centred around ignorance.

There are certainly many incredible mysteries that remain in biology – including many of the details on how evolution functions and has proceeded. Similarly, a questioning attitude is essential to scientific advancement. Those things freely admitted, purporting to challenge things with so many strong and independent collections of evidence supporting them is much more likely to retard the advancement of human knowledge than it is to advance it. This is especially true when a contrived debate runs the risk of forcing sub-standard education on children.

No Country for Old Men

Right up until the abrupt conclusion, the new Coen Brothers film is a melange of suspense genres, built around some of the cinematic elements that link the diverse offerings of the talented pair. On the basis of the first viewing, it shares some of the nihilism of Fargo – with chance and greed driving the bloodshed. Like, The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, much of the drama derives from over-the-top characters, though the theme seems to reside with the more demure ones who serve as their foils. Saying little of consequence throughout the film, Kelly Macdonald is nonetheless subtly captivating.

The film is imbued with a wonderful sense of place: showing the combined spirit underlying empty prairie and sleek Houston oil high-rises: the swagger and determination of the cowboy genre. It certainly gives a person an appreciation for the vastness of the American Southwest, and the way in which it is an inescapably rifles and pickups kind of place.

While additional viewings would probably improve one’s appreciation for the clever touches, it seems unlikely that anything but one’s first exposure will carry the full force of this film. That’s not because anything terribly surprising happens – this is not 24 – but rather because it is stark enough to stand for itself, appearing as a plain to be appreciated at a glance, rather than a dense wood with many paths to follow.

Nicholas Stern video

Emily kindly sent me a link to the video of Sir Nicholas Stern’s presentation in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February of 2007. I was lucky enough to attend in person; I even got to speak with him at the exclusive reception afterwards. My notes are on the wiki. This is your chance to compare a verbatim record of the talk with my notes and thus determine my particular strengths and failings as a note taker.

The talk is well worth watching, not least because Stern is obviously very well informed and quite a capable speaker. His report is fully deserving of its status as the seminal discussion of the economics of climate change.

Immersed in medical drama

Recent obsessive watching of House has taught me something: while whiteboards are the new standard, in relation to blackboards, the smoked plastic board is the cool option.

Also, pharmaceutical drugs are powerful, the human body is complex, and keyhole surgery changes everything. Also, people underestimate Rabies.

[Update: 4 February 2008] One medical inaccuracy I noted in this series concerns MRI machines. At several points, there are interactions between metal and the machine. In one case, bullet fragments that House shot into a corpse; in another, metal-laden prison tattoos. In both cases, there is no effect on the metal before the scan begins. This ignores how the magnet in an MRI machine is always on. The magnetic field is always there, aligning the magnetization of hydrogen atoms. The actual scan consists of radio waves used to alter the alignment of the magnetization. As such, the metal would have been drawn into the bore of the machine as soon as it got near it, not after the scans started.