Category: Films and movies

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

Shaving methods

I have previously mentioned Put This On as an interesting fashion-themed blog. It seems worth pointing out that their fourth video ‘Grooming‘ is full of what I consider bad advice.

They suggest that the proper way to shave is to use shaving soap, a badger hair brush, and an old-fashioned razor. This is dangerous, takes forever, and involves terrorizing badgers.

You are much better off getting some shaving oil (like the kind sold by King of Shaves) and a modern razor like the Mach3. Shaving oil doesn’t hide your skin, so you are less likely to cut yourself, and a couple of drops per day is all that is required. It is quick, cheap, safe, and vegan-friendly.

Republican speculation, via psychic powers

The other night, talking with my friend Jessica, it occurred to me that it could be possible to set up a kind of internet sensation based around the upcoming American presidential election (how early they become ‘upcoming’!) and ‘psychic’ claims of the sort that made an octopus famous during the World Cup. All you would need is pictures of all the plausible Republican contenders and some mechanism for deciding who among them will win on the basis of supposed supernatural powers. An octopus could work. Another idea would be a very young baby, the cuter the better.

In order to draw things out and give advertisers time to start hocking their wares alongside your videos, you could follow a process of elimination, in which candidates are rejected rather than selected. Naturally, you would want to rig the selections so as to produce the most total viewership. A good idea would be to do something a bit controversial at the outset – like reject Sarah Palin. Then, start working through the no-hope candidates as you are building momentum. Rigging the outcomes would be incredibly easy: just keep making videos until you get one where your preferred selection is made.

By the end of the Republican primary competition, when there are only a few plausible candidates left in the race, there would be a reasonable chance that you could simply guess correctly, cementing the reputation of your chosen psychic vessel as the real deal, at least in the eyes of a credulous few. Naturally, you would then want to make a prediction on the actual election. Chances are, you will be able to guess correctly on the basis of sophisticated polling of the Nate Silver variety, along with an assessment of key economic indicators.

If you wanted to keep exploiting the gullibility that seems widespread within the general public, you could use your advertising earnings as seed money to start a cult.

The King’s Speech and unconventional teachers

The King’s Speech incorporates a trope that I think has been pretty well mined in Hollywood: the teacher who doesn’t follow ordinary rules of politeness. Think of Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society. The language teacher in The King’s Speech differs from his peers in that he insists on treating the king as an equal, without the excessive deference other teachers showed. It is suggested that this attitude at least partly explains how he has more success than other teachers.

This also reminds me of the psychiatrist played by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. The brilliant protagonist has no respect for the ordinary psychiatrists. Indeed, he treats them with contempt. By contrast, the psychiatrist who isn’t afraid to be abrupt and rude with him proves to be the one who he ends up respecting, and who ends up having some success with him. Another example is the brilliant but caustic Dr. Gregory House.

There is certainly some truth to the trope. Excessive deference and politeness can produce impotence, in that people hesitate to raise even rather important issues with people who they see as their clear superiors.

iTunes 10.1.1 (4) bug

One really annoying bug exists in iTunes 10.1.1 (4). When you buy a track from the iTunes Store, it doesn’t go into Apple’s default ‘Recently Added’ smart playlist. This makes it so you have basically two different ‘inboxes’ for new songs, podcasts, etc. You need to remember whether you bought a song on iTunes, ripped it from a CD, or downloaded it as a free podcast, etc.

It would be better if songs you purchased appeared in ‘Recently Added’ along with everything else. It would be especially useful when traveling and listening to previously-downloaded podcasts.

House of Cards

House of Cards is a British television series available on Netflix.ca. It is like an evil version of Yes, Minister – documenting the functioning of British politics, but with a much darker and more brutal tone. For example, the Prime Minister uses the SAS to carry out assassinations which are blamed on the IRA; security personnel murder unarmed civilians with impunity; and extensive cover-ups are successfully undertaken.

It’s the sort of show political junkies might appreciate, though I think it is probably less true to life overall than its more light-hearted equivalent.

Mythbusters and animal products

I enjoy the show Mythbusters quite a bit. I like the contrasting personalities of the hosts, and I like the way they stress how the ultimate test of any theory is experiment. The constraints of a television show can somewhat restrain them, when it comes to being rigorous and showing their work, but it is obvious that there is more thinking (and math) that goes on in the background.

One aspect of the show I don’t fully approve of is their frequent use of animal products. They often use dead pigs as stand-ins for human beings, usually when testing myths about whether something would be deadly or not. They also use lard as a lubricant, and other animal products.

I don’t think it is always wrong for human beings to kill animals for their own purposes, but I do think there are many reasons to oppose factory farming and many reasons to use non-animal alternatives when possible. In that spirit, it seems to me that the Mythbusters could find analogues for human beings that didn’t have to be raised in the kind of conditions these pigs probably were. Also, it seems plausible that testing urban legends isn’t a sufficiently important purpose to justify the use of animal products, when there are reasonable alternatives available.

In the grand scheme of things, Mythbusters is a minute consumer of animal products. Fantastically larger quantities get consumed by human beings and other animals every day. That being said, the Mythbusters are role models within a certain community, and it might have a positive effect if they established a policy on the use of animal products that takes into account some of the ethical considerations involved.

Ballet announcers

It occurred to me that one reason why having an announcer is useful when watching a competitive sport being played is because it reduces how much you need to know and think in order to understand what is going on. Announcers describe things like the histories of particular players, the roles of people in each position, and strategies. This lets you enjoy the spectacle without remembering everything about it, and without having to exert excessive effort to understanding what is going on. That is particularly useful in complicated sports with lots of rules, like baseball and football. Sports obsessives may find it surprising, but I think ordinary people tire of remembering a million complicated rules (just as ordinary people probably tire of the numerous and often arbitrary rules of grammar adored by pedants).

It also occurred to me that there are sports that forego announcers, often at least partly because they clash with the sport’s aesthetic. Dancers, figure skaters, and ballet dancers are expected to be silent and make it look easy. Having announcers overlaid on top of them seems crass, and like it would detract from the art.

It could be an interesting performance piece, however, to overlay constant narration onto an athletic performance that usually lacks it. A ballet with hockey-style announcers might be more accessible to people who don’t know much about ballet and who don’t want to spend the whole show puzzling about what is going on (the same reason there are short summaries at the start of Shakespeare’s plays – perhaps modern novels should have those too).