Category: Films and movies

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

War photographer

In my photojournalism class, we watched the 2001 documentary War Photographer, about the work of James Nachtwey. The film showed him working in both conflict zones and zones of acute poverty, including Indonesia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. It was interesting and well done, and may well have been a balanced portrayal, but the absence of any kind of critical comment on Nachtwey made it feel somewhat like a hagiography.

It may well be the case that Nachtwey is a talented and self-sacrificing man who has helped to increase public concern about various sorts of severe suffering. At the same time, an account based on his own perspective – along with that of his friends, admirers, and co-workers – cannot make that case convincingly. I suppose this is a fundamental problem with autobiographies. Perhaps there should be some sort of third-party certification process where impartial outsiders compare the content of a book or film with all the information they can gather, and then certify or refuse to certify the content. Of course, not many politicians or other public figures would be willing to go through such a screening.

One potent message conveyed by the film is about extreme poverty. Seeing families living right beside dangerous railroad tracks in Indonesia sends a powerful emotional message. Of course, our intellectual response to seeing that varies depending on a constellation of other beliefs. Some people will see that and think: “This shows why economic growth is such a vital phenomenon, when it comes to improving human welfare”. Others will focus more on distributive justice, and say that the issue is less about enriching everyone, and more about transferring wealth from the affluent to the desperately poor.

It Gets Better

I think people living in places like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa sometimes get a distorted sense of how much anti-gay hostility still exists in the world. Gay people living in more conservative areas still face a substantial amount of discrimination, bullying, and condemnation. Dealing with that must be especially difficult for young people, who don’t yet have access to the kind of resources, networks, and self-sufficiency they will acquire with time.

As such, I think Dan Savage’s ‘It Gets Better‘ initiative deserves praise. The project consists of videos arguing that the lives of gay teens will improve, with the specific aim of discouraging people from committing suicide. Savage says the project seeks to “speak directly to LGBT kids about surviving bullying and going on to lead rewarding lives filled with joy, family, and love. We didn’t need anyone’s permission to tell them — it gets better”.

Groups that have contributed include Google employees and other individuals and organizations. There is also an active Facebook page.

Netflix streaming in Canada

I used to be a subscriber to Zip.ca, a DVD by mail service. I decided to give it up for a trio of reasons:

  • Since I couldn’t really choose the order in which I received films, I often got ones I wasn’t in the mood to see
  • The service was fairly expensive
  • I received a number of scratched and unplayable discs

Now, I am trying the new video streaming service offered in Canada by Netflix.

By far the biggest problem is selection. There are some fairly obscure television shows like Blackadder and League of Gentlemen, but no Simpsons, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Sopranos, 24, Mythbusters, etc. The same goes for movies. I start searching for high quality films I have been meaning to see, and rarely find what I am looking for. With the Netflix streaming service, you watch what is available rather than what you want. Some of what is available is certainly decent – such as the first three seasons of Mad Men – but it definitely doesn’t have the same scope of options as the iTunes store or Zip.ca.

That said, Netflix streaming is quite cheap. It only costs $8 a month, which probably explains how popular it has become:

According to Sandvine, a network management company that studies Internet traffic patterns, 10 percent of Canadian Internet users visited Netflix.com in the week after the service launched. And they weren’t just visiting—they were signing up and watching a lot of movies. Netflix videos quickly came to dominate broadband lines across Canada, with Netflix subscribers’ bandwidth usage doubling that of YouTube users. At peak hours (around 9 p.m.) the service accounted for more than 90 percent of the traffic on one Canadian broadband network.

My sense is that Netflix streaming is really competing with free streaming sites. Against them, it has a number of advantages. The interface is fairly good, and it is unlikely to be laden with malware. There aren’t heaps of broken links to be dealt with. Also, there are no daily time limits for use.

Given how much bandwidth Netflix is eating up, it seems likely that there will be an outcry from internet service providers (including those rendered more powerful by a recent CRTC decision). Netflix itself will likely face pressure to pay ISPs, while users are likely to find themselves hit with extra charges for bandwidth usage.

The Young Turks

When Jon Stewart interviewed former president Jimmy Carter recently, the topic of Stewart’s upcoming ‘Rally to Restore Sanity‘ arose. Carter commented that Stewart was now becoming involved in politics. At the same time, fellow comedian Stephen Colbert testified before a congressional committee.

At the same time as Stewart and Colbert are moving in new directions, a new satirical news source has emerged. The Young Turks is a website and media show sponsored by Sirius Satellite Radio. It has a kind of unpolished authenticity, lacking the production values of Stewart and Colbert’s offerings. It skews younger and edgier, and the website will start playing a Sirius Satellite stream if you leave it alone too long.

Many young people who I know don’t own televisions, and watch only Stewart and Colbert as video news sources. I am not sure how to feel about that, all in all. Neither seems too partisan, in the end. They mock Obama and Democrats about as much as Republicans. At the same time, perhaps it is worrisome that people (myself included) only absorb American news by means of a couple of spoof shows. There is a risk of fostering confirmation bias, and of developing a distorted sense of what political figures stand for and how influential they are.

On the other hand, most people I know also get a lot of print news from online sources (and sometimes even old school printed newspapers). Stewart and Colbert make intelligent arguments in clever ways, and don’t usually seem to misrepresent people too egregiously. Also, watching those shows helps people stay in touch with the general state of discussion about American politics, which probably resides more on television than online, at least for those who aren’t part of the tech-savvy subset of news consumers.

Northern lights webcam

The Canadian Space Agency has set up a website that allows the live viewing of the northern lights from Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. You can watch live during the appropriate hours, as well as watch the previous night’s video in time lapse and selected videos from especially active nights.

The videos are pretty small and not super high resolution. The ‘AuroraMAX’ site would probably benefit from the addition of some large still photos. The sun’s 11-year cycle of activity is expected to peak in 2013, and the site has a mandate to carry on until then. The site doesn’t say what kind of equipment is being used, but it seems to be a fisheye lens on either a video camera or dSLR.

Blu-Ray encryption broken

The content of DVDs is theoretically protected by the Content Scramble System (CSS), a cryptographic Digital Rights Management (DRM) system meant to prevent the copying of discs and restrict which devices discs can be played on. For instance, when DVDs were first released, they could not be watched on Linux machines. That changed with the advent of DeCSS: a program that circumvents the copy protection on DVDs.

Blu-Ray discs use a DRM system called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) to try and accomplish the same things as CSS. Now, the master key for the system is publicly available, which will allow full resolution copying of discs and circumvent the ‘revocation’ system built into HDCP.

The message? You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.

Inception

This past weekend, I saw the film Inception. To a large extent, it felt like an updated version of The Matrix with dreams in the place of computers and less automatic weapon fire. It was also a pretty well constructed jewel heist type movie. It included some neat things conceptually and visually, and didn’t contain much that was frustrating or perplexing.

The image of a beach as where you end up when trapped at the lowest level of dreaming may have been inspired by what artificial intelligences can do to unwary hackers in William Gibson’s Neuromancer universe. It was also interesting to see who head related devices seem to be out, when it comes to mind-machine interfaces. Now, people connect tubing to their inner arms, probably to evoke the addictiveness and danger of intravenous drug use.

All told, I thought the film was well worth seeing.

Burn After Reading

The Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading is an entertaining character comedy – a bit like The Royal Tenenbaums, insofar as the oddity of the characters is the main source of humour. That said, it is significantly darker and has a bit more of a political message: namely, that we might be wrong to assume that the CIA and comparable organizations are actually competent.

In any case, I found it entertaining and amusing.