Category: Films and movies

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

The Seventh Seal

Tonight, I watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal with Gabe. My overall impression is that the film is a bit like high runway fashion: impractical, often incomprehensible, but likely to filter down and become part of many subsequent pieces of mainstream art.

All told, I prefer more straightforward storytelling. Excessively arty and intellectual films annoy me. This film doesn’t quite cross into that territory (unlike films like The Hours and Lost in Translation, which I strongly disliked), but it has a similar rarefied, abstract quality. I don’t feel annoyed for having watched it, but I don’t think I got any of the messages the film-maker intended, either.

Video on copyright in Canada

Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law is a 50 minute film about copyright in Canada, produced by Michael Geist and Daniel Albahary. It is largely a response to the Conservative government’s deeply problematic proposed copyright legislation.

Equitable copyright laws are an important issue. In the first instance, that is due to the overwhelming importance of information, who controls it, and who can do what with it. Secondly, it has to do with societal decisions about what kind of conduct is acceptable, who enforces the rules, and what the consequences for violating them can legitimately be. Rules on when technical means of copyright enforcement can be legitimately circumvented are especially important, since that is a new sort of right potentially being extended to content owners. As such, the balance between the societal interest of fair use and the content owner’s claim to protection needs to be evaluated in a more profound way than has occurred so far.

As with many of the new developments on this issue, I found out about it through BoingBoing.

Legit Monty Python becoming available online

In another victory for the internet at large, Monty Python has launched a YouTube channel – providing free access to an increasing number of their videos at reasonably high quality.

For the uninitiated, and those seeking to rekindle their appreciation for all things Python – I offer a few viewing suggestions:

They will be using the channel to try and sell DVDs of their films and television episodes, but that seems very fair.

I look forward to when some of my other favourite sketches become available, such as the Cheese Shop sketch, the ROMANES EUNT DOMUS segment from The Life of Brian, the Crunchy Frog sketch, ‘I Wish to Report a Burglary,’ and the ‘I’d Like to Get Married’ sketch.

The Wicker Man

Last night, I watched the 1973 film The Wicker Man. Basically, it is about a Christian policeman who (a) tries to prevent murder in and (b) tries to suppress paganism in a Scottish island community. It was a bit perplexing from a contemporary standpoint. Most of my friends would agree that the state has a critical role to play in deciding what children should be taught and the legitimate terms under which lives can be ended. At the same time, most of them would likely consider paganism less objectionable than Christianity, if one was forced to choose a religion.

As such, the film felt oddly disconnected from time, like a satire from a place and era you do not understand. From my current perspective, it was almost at the precise balance point between mocking the pagans and mocking the Christians. Neither had any claim to empirical validation of their belief structure.

It is enough to make one wonder about how today’s satire will be viewed in 25 years. Will people find themselves uncertain about whether The Daily Show was mocking or praising the Bush administration?

Loggers and tree-huggers

HSBC has released the strangest environmentally related ad I have ever seen. Usually, environmental advertising is absurd because filthy companies like Exxon pretend to be clean, or because they horribly distort environmental science. This one is strange both because it doesn’t make much sense internally and because there is no sense in which it constitutes a genuine endorsement of HSBC. The ad is bewildering if you take the logger to be the protester’s father; it becomes a bit more disturbing if you take them to be romantically involved. Either way, the best shot in the piece is the older male protester putting away his glasses while the police approach.

John Swansburg has produced some fairly extensive analysis.

1958 climate change video

Boing Boing came up with quite a find today: a video from 1958 that is both amusing and full of relatively accurate information about climate change. Entitled “The Unchained Goddess,” it was produced as an episode of the Bell Telephone Hour.

As I have described before, the idea that climate change only entered the realm of scientific knowledge within the last few years is quite mistaken. Notice also how the announcer in the video is concerned about emissions of “six billion tonnes per year of carbon dioxide.” The figure today is closer to forty billion.

Video explaining runaway climate change

I have often spent time thinking about the danger of a tipping point into runaway climate change – particularly about the ways in which the concept can be conveyed to non-experts in a comprehensible manner. This eleven minute video does a good job. The script, with peer-reviewed references and additional information is at wakeupfreakout.org.

Here are some related prior posts:

I discovered the video linked above through this Gristmill post.

[Update: 4 February 2009] Here is a post on the danger of self-amplifying, runaway climate change: Is runaway climate change possible? Hansen’s take.

Passchendaele and glory in warfare

Before several recent films, I have seen the trailer for Passchendaele – a film that seems to provide a heroic and pro-Canada take on this WWI battle. If anything, this actual history of Passchendaele demonstrates that war is rarely heroic, and that many narratives of heroism are self-serving for those that generate them. Both sides were fighting in defence of imperialism. Furthermore, the battle served little strategic purpose. After being taken at huge cost of lives – nearly one million killed, wounded, or captured on both sides – the terrain was abandoned so the Allies could respond more effectively to the German Lys Offensive.

Of course, Passchendaele joins a large collection of films of dubious historical quality. While I have yet to see it, the trailer is guilty of mindless patriotism, historical revisionism, and perhaps the Aragorn Fallacy. It would behoove us to remember a few key things about WWI: that the war was hugely costly in lives and suffering, that none of the major powers participating got the outcome they wanted at the outset, and that it ultimately did nothing to address the imbalances in Europe caused by the unification of Germany. Of course, films that highlight such things are unlikely to be blockbuster smash hits.

Generation Kill

Written by a journalist embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Corps, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill describes the experience of invading Iraq alongside them in 2003. The book provides a graphic account of what transpired among the men of the Battalion and its subsidiary units, as well as on battlefields between Kuwait City and Baghdad.

Some of the more notable elements of the first person account include the lack of coordination between different units, poor logistics and intelligence, near-total lack of translators, wide variations in competence and attitude between officers, and the force with which the sheer terror and agony of the experience is recounted. While large portions of the invading army may have had tents, cots, and warm meals, the recon Marines operate for the entire war on pre-packaged food and holes laboriously pick-axed into the ground. They spent much of the war in bulky chemical protection suits, fearing gas attacks that never came. The Marines are intentionally sent into ambush after ambush, receiving massive amounts of fire from within open-topped Humvies, as a feint to confuse Iraqi forces about the overall American strategy. The book certainly does a good job of conveying the brutality of it all: for the Marines, their Iraqi opponents, and for the civilians all around. The most interesting aspects of the narrative are definitely the characters of the individual Marines, as effectively illustrated through quoted statements.

The book does reinforce some broader conclusions that can be drawn about the war: particularly in terms of how the treatment of the civilian population has been mismanaged. What is less clear is whether the lesson to be drawn is that much more attention needs to be paid to post-occupation planning in future conflicts, or whether expectations of anything other than absolute carnage following a ‘regime change’ are misguided. Probably, the answer lies somewhere between.

The book has also formed the basis for an HBO mini-series of the same name. The series and the book parallel one another very closely. Indeed, given the arguably greater capacity of film to depict the majority of the events described, just watching the series may be a superior option to just reading the book.

Frontline episodes

The entire archive of the PBS investigative journalism program Frontline seems to be available online for free. Some of the more interesting topics covered include:

There is certainly a consistent – and fairly critical – focus on the controversial actions of the second Bush administration. That being said, the quality of the programs seems to be quite high.