Films and movies – Page 19 – a sibilant intake of breath

Public broadcasters and the web

The existence of the internet changes the economic logic of public broadcasting. Where, at one point, the BBC was a collection of channels, each showing one bit of their vast archive at a time, now much of it is online. That creates a huge database of materials, paid for by taxpayers, and ideally free to be accessed without copyright concerns. Being able to view documentaries like Dangerous Knowledge upon demand is a notable benefit, and one not adequately captured by private sector content generators who are not concerned about societal benefits not captured in their profits.

If all the world’s national broadcasters and other public generators of knowledge would open up their libraries comprehensively, it could make the internet an even more valuable thing than it already is. Unfortunately, that process seems likely to be piecemeal and marked by set-backs. Witness the BBC iPlayer dispute.

Paprika

While the plot is definitely nothing special, the visuals of this film make it entirely worthwhile. Paprika is whimsical, quite beautiful at times, and capable of provoking widespread and audible amusement in the audience. This is a film that should only really be seen in theatres, given how much of the appeal and personality resides in the artwork.

One factor distinguishing Paprika from the wonderful Studio Ghibli films that seem to dominate the mass market for anime in the west is the way in which it has a bit of a dark edge to it at times. Nothing like Perfect Blue, but there were some scenes that would not have been in a PG-rated film, if they had not been animated.

Paprika is playing at the Bytown Theatre for the next week or so.

Lucrative video contest

Readers of this blog have been appreciating my brother Mica’s videos for a long time, and have helped him win a number of video competitions in the past. Now, he is in a contest where the objective is to produce a promotional video for Molson Canadian. While I hope readers of this blog have less mediocre hops and barley beverages in their own fridges, voting for his video might help him win $5000, which he will spend on school.

In order to vote, you must be on Facebook (though that seems to include almost everyone under 30 now). You need to join a group called ‘Molson Canadian Nation.’ If you want an invitation, send me or Mica a message and we will send you one. Voting begins on September 1st, and members of the group can vote once per day.

More details will follow. This will be an excellent way to show your appreciation for Mica’s videos, as well as help reduce the size of his student loans for next year.

[Update: 5:40pm] It seems that only those in Canada can join this group. To those elsewhere: “Thank you for your help in previous campaigns. The advertising imperative in this case does not favour you.”

Parliament light show

On Parliament Hill, they put on a giant multimedia show twice a night. It is called Canada: the Spirit of a Country and it is both preachy and prescriptive. To anyone even slightly wary of government dictating values from on high, it seems a bit disturbing. It definitely seems absurd and over-done.

I hadn’t properly seen it before yesterday, when Emily and I happened across it. While the virtues it expresses are generally admirable, the delivery is incredibly Orwellian. Between psychedelic bursts of light projected across the front of Parliament, it plays videos and expounds in both official languages on the virtues of diversity and cultural exchange, peacekeeping, and the like. It’s like an over-the-top ‘Part of our Heritage’ commercial, though it seems a lot more disturbing. While the message may be an innocuous one, the propaganda approach is off-putting and the overenthusiastic promotion of Canada seems very much like a case of too much effort.

If you ignore the words, the light show itself is quite dramatic, though also profoundly discordant. It is very odd to see huge spinning abstract purple shapes projected all across Parliament, suddenly replaced with a pattern that looks like the razzle dazzle ships of World War I.

Standing within 50m of the war memorial, one might hope that we have moved beyond nationalism. At an aesthetic level, one might at least hope that we have moved beyond the kind of crude, half-deluded, and self-serving nationalism that the light show seems to represent.

Al Gore in a nearby park

In a public park up the road from here, a public screening of An Inconvenient Truth is ongoing. It’s a bit amusing that this should occur tonight, which is far and away the coldest night I have experienced since arriving in Ottawa. Leaving the office at about 6:40pm tonight, it was the first time I have gone through that double set of doors to find the air outside cooler than the air inside our twenty-eight story tower.

You have to wonder what the wider significance of growing public awareness about the climate change issue is. If it will require massive sacrifice to deal with, there is a reasonable change that Monbiot’s assertion is correct:

We wish our governments to pretend to act. We get the moral satisfaction of saying what we know to be right, without the discomfort of doing it. My fear is that the political parties in most rich nations have already recognized this. They know that we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about their failure to curb climate change, but that we will not take to the streets. They know that nobody ever rioted for austerity.

Thankfully, it does seem likely that the early stages of mitigation will be relatively painless and will carry corresponding benefits in terms of reduced dependence on foreign oil and reduced air pollution. It is when things really start to bite that the resolution of voters and law-makers will really be tested.

Hollywood physics

Deficiencies in movie physics can be good fun to dissect and mock, but a recent paper suggests that they are less benign. “Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy” suggests that the absurdities that abound in popular films actually weaken the people’s ability to understand how the world works. The paper concludes that:

Hollywood is reinforcing (or even creating) incorrect scientific attitudes that can have negative results for the society. This is a good reason to recommend that all citizens be taught critical thinking and be required to develop basic science and quantitative literacy.

Specific issues discussed in the paper include projectile motion, Newton’s laws, impulse, buoyancy, and angular momentum. Certainly, some films underplay the dangers of high falls and similar phenomena – as well as playing up the dangers of things like automobiles spontaneously exploding.

Personally, I would prefer a world in which movies portrayed all the sciences in realistic and accessible ways. Unfortunately, such films are in perpetual danger of being ignored in favour of flashy absurdities like the The Core or the egregious recent Star Wars films.

Reading these entertaining reviews is a good after-the-fact vaccine.

Data storage

This evening, I was at an art gallery watching 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm films shot 25-40 years ago. Most of them were not in pristine quality, but still quite viewable. Afterwards, I got into a conversation with someone who works in archival film storage for the federal government. Contemporary society is generating far more data than ever before. At the same time, virtually nothing is stored at archival quality. An 8mm video or a 35mm negative will be fine in forty years if stored at controlled temperature and humidity. Even dumped in a box in someone’s attic, it is still likely to be comprehensible. The same is not true for how we store data today.

Basically, you have optical and magnetic storage. Optical includes CDs and DVDs, and is further divided between mass releases CDs (which are pressed into metal) and personally made CDs (which rely on dyes exposed to lasers). Neither is really archival. It is quite possible that your store-bought DVD will not work in twenty years. It is quite likely that your home-burned DVD will not work in five.

In terms of magnetic storage, you have tapes and hard drives. Many companies have learned to their detriment that poorly stored magnetic backup tapes can be useless. As for hard drives, they are vulnerable to physical breakdown, viruses, exposure to magnetic fields, corrosion, and other factors.

While is is likely that the products of my early fumblings with Ilford Delta 400 in high school will be intelligible in forty years, it is a lot less likely that my digital photos from Paris will be. That’s ironic, of course, given that the first ones can only be copied imperfectly and at a notable expense, while the latter can be copied perfectly for a few cents a gigabyte.

While some information exists in the form of so many copies that is will likely never be lost (ten thousand unsold copies of Waterworld on laserdisc), there is reason to fear that personal data being stored in the present era will likely be lost before people born today have grandchildren. While that has certainly been the norm for generations past – who would be lucky to have their lives recorded as a birth in a parish register, a marriage, and a death – it seems rather a shame given how cheap and ubiquitous data creation and storage has become.

[Update: 11 August 2010] I forgot to mention it earlier, but one potentially robust way to back up digital files is to print them on paper.

Lonely Evening competition

My brother Mica is in yet another music video competition. The ‘Lonely Evening’ video is his first based on original music. It was mentioned here previously. Voting continues until August 10th. If he wins this grand final, it will be his fifth victory in a row.

You can see all of his previous films on his website: papaflyfilms.com.

The Simpsons Movie

The other night, I saw The Simpsons Movie with Marc and some of his economist colleagues. Going in, I thought it more likely to be a disaster than a triumph. I was pleased to find my pessimism largely unjustified. While it did involve a lot of the same awkward and improbable gimmickry of the later episodes, the film was well speckled with fully deserved laughs. It also revealed federal environmental bureaucracies for the villainous and malicious entities they truly are.

Simpsons fans avoiding the film for fear it will be terrible should gird themselves to have a look; those without a long-standing appreciation for the show will probably be better off steering clear.

Unbowlerized and hatless

Working in a complex of government buildings, I feel as though I should be part of a parade of men in dark pinstripe suits and bowler hats, walking in from a train platform every morning. There should be large steam-driven clocks around, and everyone should have a crisp newspaper under the arm.

Though thousands of people must work in the four towers, the place never actually seems like a flow of people is moving in or out. This is especially curious given how pretty much everyone can be expected to vanish within ten minutes before or after 5:00pm.

Perhaps there should be an annual ’emulate a scene from a film like Brazil‘ day.