Category: Films and movies

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

Contest final round

Vote Mica

The time has come: Mica’s “Walk Idiot Walk” video is in the final round for the Google Idol video competition and he really needs support if he is going to win. Those who can are encouraged to vote every day. Likewise, please pass along the message to similarly interested others.

I didn’t even know there was prize money, however:

If I were to win this competition, I have decided to donate the prize charity money to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. A close family friend of ours was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and I think it would be fitting to help her cause, and the many more that suffer from it.

His post about this is here.

This round ends on June 24th. As always, his videos can be discussed on his blog.

[Update: 18 June 2006] With six days left in the contest, Mica is winning by 36 votes: 53% to 47%.

[Update: 19 June 2006] Mica is down by 15 votes: losing 49% to 51%. Please keep voting and publicizing his video.

[Update: 20 June 2006] Mica is up by 53 votes: 52% to 48%. The lead has switched back and forth a number of times in the past 24 hours.

[Update: 22 June 2006] Mica’s up by just 5 votes, with more than 3000 cast. I have created a chart that shows the amount by which Mica has been winning or losing at various times when I have checked on it. As you can see, he has been winning in the majority of instances, though by decreasing margins as time goes by. If I had to bet on a winner at this point, based on the data I have collected, I would choose Mica. That doesn’t mean you can stop voting!

[Update: 23 June 2006] With less than 24 hours left, Mica is down by 50 votes: 1,874 to 1,924. This is the most I’ve seen him down by since the contest began, so please make an extra effort to vote today, before the contest ends. It finished on the 24th: at 7:00am Vancouver time, noon in Toronto or New York, 3:00pm in London, and at appropriately matching other times around the world. Thanks again for your support.

Note: I am going to keep this entry at the top of the blog until the contest ends in three days’ time. The race is extremely close, so a big final push would be much appreciated.

Strategy time – time strategies

I have been trying to learn what I can learn during these last few days of the Google Idol contest, in hopes of being able to maximize Mica’s chances. The first potentially relevant fact is that the website hosting the contest is registered in Brisbane, Australia. I had often found it difficult to guess what time the server would be ticking over into the next voting day, allowing all the IP addresses that had already voted to do so again.

This round ends on June 24th, but nowhere does the website specify at what time. As such, the earliest it could possibly end (00:01 Brisbane time) would be 2:01pm Oxford time on the 23rd. The latest it could possibly end (23:59 Brisbane time) would be 1:59pm on the 24th. If someone has figured out at what time of day their server ticks over, it would be very useful information.

Why?

Because the lead has been cyclical:

Chart of voting patterns

Chart based on data between 22:00GMT on the 18th and 22:00GMT on the 20th.

As you can see, the distance between the number of the votes for each video rises and falls according to an orderly pattern. I would guess that with ‘Twan, Sjoerd, Manuel en Iwin’ living in Western Europe and Mica coming from the West Coast of North America, there is about an eight hour lag between time equivalencies in the areas where most of their respective voters will be living. Those of Mica’s competitors rise eight hours earlier, vote, and go to sleep eight hours earlier.

The fact that the slope of Mica’s line is more constant may be the product of how I have been cajoling people on the east coast of Canada and the United States – as well as in the UK and elsewhere – to vote for him as much as possible. Alternatively, I may have nothing to do with it and people voting for him just vote at times more distributed across the day for some other reason or collection of reasons.

As such, it would be helpful to work out what time it will be in each place when the contest ends. Ideally, we would probably want it to end around midnight Vancouver time, when it will be about 8:00am in Europe. I think that would be about 6:00pm in Brisbane.

[Update: 22 June 2006] I have created a chart that shows the amount by which Mica has been winning or losing at various times when I have checked on it.

Mica’s Michelle video

Mica has a new video online, made for his girlfriend Michelle. I think it’s really sweet, somewhat explicit, and almost perfectly reflective of his overall character.

I hope she is the kind of woman who will appreciate it. The very last segment, shot at Cleveland Park in North Vancouver, definitely makes the greatest impression, for me.

PS. Remember to keep voting for his contest video.

Summer day, time to vote for Mica again

With the summer solstice nineteen days away, it is dazzlingly bright outside and all of Oxford’s green spaces are strewn with sleeping, reading, shirtless, ice-cream eating, ultimate-playing students. The University Parks look like English Bay, in Vancouver, on a sunny summer’s afternoon. While I don’t overly appreciate being irradiated by the sun, myself, I enjoy the spirit that seems to accompany the collective exodus to the outside world: even if I am appreciating it through library windows.

On Mica’s ‘Hives’ video
On a different matter, my brother Mica’s video has made it to the quarter final of the ‘Google Idol’ competition. I highly recommend that people take the time to go vote. You can also leave him comments on his blog. He is winning by a rather smaller margin this time, so people are especially encouraged to have a look.

My post about the previous round is here.

For my part, I am going to read a few more articles before heading off to Anna’s birthday party, way down Abingdon Road. I will also continue to dream of Amsterdam, where I feel increasingly compelled to go for a week or so, once classes end. Ideally, it’s a trip that I can convince someone interesting, with whom I have a stable and engaging relationship, to accompany me on.

Brick

Projector at the Phoenix Cinema, OxfordTonight, for the first time ever, I saw a film in a theatre in the United Kingdom: Brick at the Phoenix Cinema in Jericho. If pressed, I would call the film a kind of satire of your classic gangland genre. The characterization, plot, and dialogue are all similar to those films, though this one is set among a group of high school students. In one scene that depicts the protagonist and a Vice-Principal in a kind of police officer/informant dynamic, the comic elements of the satire are most apparent. At other times, the brutality of the film made the possibility that it was made with some kind of comic intent seem very distant.

Billed as a successor to Donnie Darko, I thought that Brick was more clever, all in all. At least it didn’t involve the agony of some of that film’s attempts at humour. To me, Donnie Darko had too much of what might be termed ‘LiveJournal angst’ – the sort that seems extremely authentic to the person experiencing it, and perhaps people in very similar circumstances, but which fails to travel beyond there and seems shallow for it. By contrast, Brick portrays teenagers as almost hyper-confident and self assured. They speak and act with a directedness quite at odds with the experience of adolescence.

In the end, the film is an experiment that doesn’t always work. Some of the visuals are intriguing, just as some of the dialogue is a clever take on film noir. At the same time, some of the characters lack any clear motivation and the reasons for layering that kind of plot onto these actors and this setting is never entirely plain. This sort of film is certain to find resonance with some people, and in this case is clever enough, on the mean, to deserve it.

Mica’s video in a contest

Many of you will already be familiar with the fact that my brother Mica makes movies. You can see a collection of them on his website, as well as search for them on Google video.

Additionally, he is presently competing in an online film contest. His video for “Walk Idiot Walk” by The Hives is in the rock category of the ‘Google Idol’ competition (not affiliated with Google Inc.). He has already made it into the final eight. Apparently, anyone who wishes to can vote. I very much encourage everyone to have a look; you can also leave him comments.

For those not familiar with any of his videos, I endorse the following particularly:

[Update: 20 May 2006] Mica’s video won the quarter-final round, with 1,061 votes to 234. I can’t find a link to the semi-final round yet, but when I do I will put it here.

The Constant Gardener

I saw The Constant Gardener with the European Film Society tonight. I found the film to be very powerful, and thoroughly dispiriting. While the specific evils portrayed are obviously fictional, there is a grim plausibility that accompanies them. Humanity has a long way to go.

The pharmaceutical plot was actually the weakest part of the film. Not to spoil it for anyone, but you can’t license a drug in the rich world on the basis of unsupervised clinical trials in Africa. That said, the portrayal of machine-gun wielding horsemen terrorizing villagers in the Sudan is probably quite accurate. Hopefully, it induced at least a bit of reflection on the part of various audiences about the moral responsibilities people in the developed world bear towards those elsewhere facing genocide or other forms of large-scale violence. Likewise, some of the depictions of the horrific toll of AIDS formed part of the realistic backdrop for the film.

Appropriately enough, immediately before the film started, I began reading the copy of Race Against Time that my mother sent me, along with some extra illumination for my bike. Written by Stephen Lewis, it is a printed version of the Massey Lectures that were delivered across Canada, and it opens with the line: “I have spent the last four years watching people die.”

I will probably finish it tomorrow, then lend it to Emily. I feel as though I should say more, but I am thoroughly overwhelmed.

Music and frustration: copy protection schemes

Chained pig, BathHaving spent the last few minutes explaining to a friend why a brand-new, legitimately purchased CD will not play in her computer due to the copy protection EMI has included, I am reminded of my considerable indignation about how the music industry is treating their customers. Yes, in this case, it was possible to disable the copy protection program just by holding shift as the CD was inserted into a Windows computer, but there is no guarantee at all that music you buy today is either usable or safe.

In the worst case, such as the notorious Sony BMG rootkit, inserting a legitimate music CD into your computer intentionally breaks it. It also causes it to report what you listen to to Sony, even if you choose ‘no’ when a screen comes up asking for permission to install software. It also creates really sneaky back doors into your system that can be exploited for any number of purposes, by Sony or random others. While Sony is currently facing lawsuits for this particular, infamous piece of malware, it isn’t nearly enough to put my mind at ease. If some 16 year old had written something comparably dangerous, they would probably be in jail.

Legitimately downloaded music is little better. Songs you buy from the iTunes music store may work with your iPod today, but they won’t work with another portable player. They won’t even play in software other than iTunes, and there is no guarantee that they will still work at some point in the future. Spending a great deal of money on songs from there (and they’ve just had their billionth download), is therefore probably not very wise. You don’t actually own the music you are buying – you’re just buying the right to use it on someone else’s terms: terms that they have considerable freedom to change.

Personally, I will not buy any CD that contains copy protection software. I will not buy a Sony BMG CD, regardless of whether it does or not, nor will I be buying any of Sony’s electronics in the near future. This is a business model that needs to change.