Films and movies – Page 24 – a sibilant intake of breath

A pocket protector too far

If you have ever felt the urge to take your geek tendencies and just run with them – much like how Macbeth did with his thirst for power – I recommend becoming embroiled in the controversy about the hypothetical atmospheric and biological consequences of a fictional explosion in a film starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher – who I prefer to remember as the bazooka-wielding assasin from The Blues Brothers.

Would the destruction of the second Death Star in The Return of the Jedi have inevitably annihalated the ewok race that aids the rebel commando team? Some people say yes. Others say no.

They all have way, way too much time on their hands. The same is true of these people, but at least they have provided me with considerable amusement over the years. Their reviews (1, 2) of recent Star Wars films definitely lay to rest the idea that they could possible be considered consistent or accurate.

This whole discussion was promted by a post on MetaFilter, which I can thank Nick Ellan for addicting me to years ago.

A Scanner Darkly

Antonia invited me to see the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s book this evening and, despite having watched the first twenty minutes as a free online trailer, I found it well worth paying for. Based on our discussion afterwards, I have tentatively concluded that it is a film unusually subject to people taking away more or less what they expected to find. While it will appall traditionalists to hear, I didn’t feel as though I got much out of the book, when I read it a few years ago. As such, I had modest expectations for the film which were not disappointed.

The film is odd insofar as it combines a society of total electronic surveillance with the complexities of informants and undercover agents. The combination of knowledge and secrecy that results is sometimes more perplexing than Orwellian, though it does effectively highlight the corrupting nature infiltration strategies of crime fighting can have on police forces. You are, however, frequently left wondering why any state or police force with such power would devote such attention to a group that seems pretty obviously hopeless, when it comes to posing any real danger.

The most immediately obvious thing about the film is the modification of the video stock and the addition of animated elements. The posterized faces with their bold, exaggerated edges, in particular, contribute to an ongoing visual effect with some thematic merit. All told, the visuals and the story were complementary and well integrated. Neither was simply a crutch for the other, as is so often the case in visually unusual pieces of film. As Antonia pointed out, it probably detracted from the film to have recognizable actors in the roles. There is just too much written into Keanu Reaves, for instance, for him to really be able to take on a new role.

My thanks to Antonia for a worthwhile suggestion.

Reading and Sin City

I called the repair centre today and they said that a technician hasn’t even looked at my dust-laden digicam yet. They say they have a backlog of several weeks. As such, we are going to have to see how long I can keep finding suitable photos of the day in my archives. Within the collection that lives on my hard drive, most of the good photos have already been put online somewhere or other. Apologies to those diligent few who may have already tracked these down.

This photo was taken during the summer after my first year at UBC. It was taken in Vanier Park, near the Vancouver Planetarium.

Aside from zipping around on a number of administrative projects, today largely comprised sedate reading. I am two thirds of the way through John MacNeil’s Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. I picked up a surplus hardback copy from the county library in excellent condition for £1. Mostly, it is familiar reading, though it may be useful to have a source to which so many stories I might tell in the thesis can be attributed.

Later in the evening, I watched Sin City with Kelly. The atmosphere of the film was definitely well-assembled, with good cinematography, costumes, and general verisimilitude. The plot is a triptych of very classic revenge tales: all bound up with underlying assumptions about roles people play and the duties that attach to them. Actually, the extent to which these stories are so automatically comprehensible makes you question the bases according to which you assign social expectations.

The most startling moment was near the end, when I finally realized why one character was so familiar looking; she is the same woman who played Rory in the many episodes of Gilmore Girls that I watched with Nick’s sisters over the years. Not quite the same as seeing the farmer from Babe become the hardbitten chief in L.A. Confidential, but a somewhat similar instance of contrast. To say more risks ruining plot elements. In essence, the film is well worth seeing. Because of the heavy visual focus, it would probably have been especially worthwhile to see in theaters.

Let the market provide?

The way the Oxford County Library deals with audio-visual materials strikes me as rather illegitimate. They charge for renting CDs and DVDs at rates comparable to commercial venues. As such, they are using a tax subsidized situation (free rent, plus funding from local taxes) to complete directly with private enterprise in an area where there is no market failure. I don’t need a governmental service to charge me three quid to rent The Life Aquatic, and the existence of one that does quite likely crowds out commercial venues that would do a better job (have more than one copy, offer deals for frequent renters, etc).

I am all for libraries having a collection of educational CDs and DVDs, but they really should be lent out in a way that is in keeping with the idea of libraries as publicly funded providers of public goods.

That said, I have been enjoying the use of my new headphones with the opera CDs that I paid £6 to borrow. Reproduction of classical instruments and male vocalists seem to be the two areas where there is the most difference between these and the default Apple earbuds. It can also be amusing to not how often you faintly hear people shuffling around the studio, coughing in muffled fashion, or turning pages in CDs that you have heard a hundred times. You can even hear someone’s watch ticking faintly in a Nine Inch Nails B-side I have.

Movie physics

Apparently, the physics in The Da Vinci Code are no better than the history or theology. (Though this review is more about general plausibility than physics, per se.) Let it be known that Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is among the greatest of all websites.

The review of The Core is funny enough to be worth reading, even if you haven’t seen that awful, awful film. People making films should probably take a careful look through their generic list of bad physics. Of course, scientific accuracy may not be terribly likely to put people in cinema seats, or sell DVDs.

Heading South

In a number of ways, Heading South is a film that reverses expectations and thereby leads you to question the ways in which an issue is understood. The film is essentially about sex tourism, though the clients are aging women rather than the middle-aged men who would probably be demonized in the standard documentary treatment of the subject. While such condemnation may well be deserved, it doesn’t attach itself so easily in this case. The tensions between the women, and the insecurities within them, provide the dramatic energy that drives this frequently provocative film. The most interesting scenes are a series of confessional sketches, in which different characters direct monologues at the camera. The decision to employ such a technique highlights the quasi-documentary quality of the film.

Primarily in French, with subtitles, the film may appeal to those who know some French and are concerned about having it slip away from them (this is the case for almost everyone I know who was in French immersion.) The portrayal of Haiti under the Duvalier regime of the 1970s is powerful but indirect, consisting largely of a few vignettes showing the lives of people subjected to arbitrary power.

Morally complex and artfully produced, Heading South is a film to see when you want something to think about.

Another Papa Fly Production

Fans of Mica’s videos may want to know that a new one is online. This one is filmed in the gym where I used to have judo practice: at the church approximately equidistant between my parents’ house and Nick’s. It stars the younger siblings of at least two of my friends: including my friend Jonathan’s younger brother Justin and Peter, the younger brother of my friend Ryan (who was also my former boss in the sound and lighting crew at my old high school).

The song is quite catchy. I wish I knew what the band was called.

Here is a direct link to Google Video, for those who don’t want to go via his blog.

Thank You for Smoking

Happy Birthday Antonia M

At Jericho’s Phoenix Cinema, I saw the dark comedy Thank You for Smoking with Antonia tonight. While it’s not without flaws, it can be quite clever – and even very funny – at times. It documents the life and work of a ranking tobacco lobbyist in a way that pokes fun at the connections between business and politics, especially within industries termed ‘merchants of death’ like tobacco and the gun industry.

My favourite single moment of the film is when the protagonist is sitting in the lobby of an aggressively image-focused Hollywood agency and a plasma television is showing an orca with a seal in its mouth, dashing it against the rocks. The juxtaposition between the spin of the advertising industry – which has been applied to whales as much as anything else – and the sheer, direct, and unapologetic happenings of nature was poignant but not overstated.

Not to ruin the film for anyone, but it seems unlikely to me that a successful lobbyist would so thoroughly fail to be circumspect in his dealings with the media, but it’s not a plot failure that compromises the film too badly, overall. Some interesting questions do get raised about the character of personal responsibility within democratic societies. While the lobbyist does have an agenda, it’s not one he advances through outright deceit. It’s more like the self-interested peddling of a libertarian ethic.

Thank You for Smoking is a film that gains little from being seen in theatres, so I would advise people to wait until they can see it on DVD.

On television licensing

Apparently, the BBC has claimed that anyone who watches video clips from their website online must have a television license, or be liable to prosecution and fine. As a North American, I find the very idea of a television license offensive. Our flat has received a notice that an inspector will be coming at some future point to look for televisions. The letter reads, in part:

Your address is now on our priority list and an Enforcement Officer is planning to visit you shortly. [Emphasis theirs]

My personal inclination would be to refuse to consent to having our premisses searched – despite the fact that we have no televisions – because there is no probable cause under which to search us, and no warrant to do so issued. In the United States, I would expect such a search to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. In Canada, I would expect it to be a violation of Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Of course, that intuition is not grounded in any familiarity in British law. I assume that these inspectors do have the legal right to search a flat without consent or a warrant. It couldn’t hurt to issue a verbal refusal, at least.

The idea that the state has the right to search your home on suspicion of owning a television, then fine you if you don’t already have a license seems preposterous. The courts in Canada and the United States have generally considered the searching of a home to be a serious legal action that generally requires a warrant. To do so in order to uphold the fiscal solvency of a public broadcaster seems like a serious confusion of priorities. I understand the need to fund the BBC, but this seems like an unjustifiable imposition.

That is especially true once extended to computers which may or may not be used to watch television programs. In 2004, the Secretary of State ruled in the Television Licensing Regulations that:

“‘Television receiver’ means any apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving (whether by means of wireless telegraphy or otherwise) any television programme service, whether or not it is installed or used for any other purpose.”

Using my iBook to watch “The Daily Show” would appear to make it a ‘television receiver’ under this definition. When the BBC chose to put video online, it couldn’t legitimately claim to have thereby unilaterally extended the requirement for television license to all people in the UK with computers capable of viewing the information. If they made headlines available by text message, could they begin taxing anyone with a cellular phone? Can they tax people whose cellular phones can access the internet now?

I do see value in public broadcasting, insofar as it can serve some purposes that the mainstream media does not. That value does not, in my mind, justify the kind of threats that are being made.

Google Idol victoriously concluded

Our estimation of when the day ticked over on the Google Idol server was wrong. Rather than doing so at 3:00pm GMT, as expected, it did so at some time before 10:30am.

That said, it doesn’t really matter: “Voting is closed! Mica Prazak has won! New competition beginning shortly.” Anyone wishing to comment on this can do so on Mica’s blog.

Many thanks to all those who helped. It’s a relief to have the contest over. Now, I can put something else up at the top of my blog.