Category: Films and movies

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

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I was feeling kind of down as I went in to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but that situation could not persist. Every scene challenges your mind with something even more ludicrous: whether it is non-sensical plot points, egregious physics, or absurdly over-the-top scenarios. It is no exaggeration to call the plot incoherent and trivial, and most of the acting wooden. Indiana’s James Deanish young foil is particularly flat and uninteresting. This is no thinking man’s film; nor is it one for the DVD library.

That being said, the film does a good job of redeeming itself as a piece of entertainment. It may feel like an awkward, alien-obsessed re-imagining of the original trilogy, but there is still some humour and charm. The main appeal of the film is that it provides you with ample fodder for internal joking criticism, as well as plenty of mindless sequences in which to mull it over.

One side note on the graphics: for some reason, the set design, lighting, and computer graphics were all strongly reminiscent of the Harry Potter films. Both the indoor sequences and the outdoor shots had the same distinctive feeling, less cartoonish than untextured early computer graphics, but still inescapably false.

[Update: 12:53am] Emily has also written a review.

Fevered imagination

Yellow spring flower

While sleeping off fever, I had a surprisingly coherent and well developed dream. If anyone wants to turn it into a Major Motion Picture Event, they can contact me about the rights.

It begins with a medium-sized dry cleaning shop in an American town dominated by a huge army base. The shop is struggling because the huge majority of the business comes from the armed forces, and it is all assigned through huge low-bid contracts. The owners decide that, small or not, they need to get into that system. Hoping to build some name recognition, at least, they decide to put in an a bid they feel sure will be higher than that of anyone else for the next thing to come up.

Meanwhile, some high ranking officers are discussing a problem. Due to a shipping problem, the dress uniforms of 1,000 soldiers returning from abroad have become soiled. (The film includes a shot of a non-waterproof cargo container sitting on the tarmac beside some jungle in the pouring rain. A mid-level officer has a muddy uniform half-pulled out and is shouting at someone more junior, though you cannot hear any of it through the rain.) They uniforms are needed clean for a big ceremony occurring in 24 hours. As a result, an urgent tender for contracts is posted on a government website.

Seeing the order, the dry cleaning shop owners decide that this is their chance to get noticed. They don’t have the resources to handle 1,000 uniforms in a day, but it’s not hugely beyond their capabilities. This is the kind of deal they want the military brass to consider them for. Not wanting to take on something they cannot handle, they bid $15,000,000 and leave it at that.

At computer terminals across the city, brief scenes show the big cleaning companies considering the contract and deciding it is too small to bother with. As a result, nobody else files a bid.

As a result, the small firm finds itself with a contract to clean 1,000 uniforms in 24 hours, for $15,000 each. Working flat out themselves, they are sure they can manage about 350. In the opportunity of a lifetime, they offer two other similarly sized companies the opportunity to clean 350 uniforms each for $10,000 a piece.

The portion involving the actual cleaning has your standard movie mixture of minor problems, clever solutions, and emotive demonstrations of why the various cleaners really need the money (to deal with higher interest mortgages, pay medical expenses, etc). At the last minute, the biggest truck owned by the dry cleaning firm breaks down, but, through a favour from the Hispanic army officer cousin of one of the owners, a big army truck comes by to collect the uniforms.

Sitting around celebrating with pizza and beer, the cleaners are surprised when a flashing message appears on the army requisition computer. For completing their contract on time and on budget, they are being given a 20% bonus.

One odd thing about my experience in dreaming the above is that the actual dream alternated between watching segments of the film which I had made in a room in my high school and walking around the building explaining various aspects to friends and acquaintances of mine. For instance, I was explaining to my friend Kate how, ideally, the film would work on two levels: as a feel-good story about an upstart out-maneuvering big competitors and winning a big reward and as a comment on the wastefulness of the armed forces. It would appear the the combination of influenza, NyQuil, and chocolate chunk cookies can have strange effects on the human subconscious.

The Aragorn Fallacy

Stencil chicken

Watching films, I find myself very frequently annoyed with what I shall call The Aragorn Fallacy. The essence of the fallacy is to equate importance with invulnerability, especially in the face of random events.

Consider a battle that employs swords, spears, and bows and arrows. To some extent, your skill reduces the likelihood of getting killed with a sword (unless you are among the unfortunate individuals who find their line pressed into a line of swordsmen). No conceivable battlefield skill makes you less vulnerable to arrows (or bullets) once you are in the field of fire. As such, mighty King Aragorn is just as likely to be shot and killed as some forcibly drafted peasant hefting a spear for the first time. Sensible military leaders realize that their role is not to serve as cannon fodder, and that they needlessly waste their own lives and those of their men by putting themselves in such positions.

Of course, people will object, there have been military leaders who ‘led from the front,’ put themselves at points of great danger, and went on to high achievement. The problem with this view is that it completely ignores all the young would-be Rommels and Nelsons and Pattons who got felled as young captains or lieutenants by a stray bit of shrapnel or gangrene in a wound produced by a stray bit of barbed wire. With a sufficiently large starting population, you will always end up with examples of people who were reckless but nonetheless survived and thrived. The foolish conclusion to draw from this is that recklessness is either justified or likely to produce success.

Clearly, storytelling and life are different things. We admire superhuman heroes who shake off bullets and arrows like awkward drops of water. We may rationally accept that nonsense like throwing all your best commanders into the front line of a battle is strictly for the movies. The fallacy here is less that we believe these things to be true, and more that we feel them to be excellent. The grim fact that war is a brutal and largely random business sits poorly with our general affection for the things.

Thoroughly impressed by TED

Steel girders and sky

Initially drawn in by the Al Gore video, I have been watching lots of the films from the TED conference, and being impressed by many of them. I am more impressed than ever by cephalopods, and some of my idle curiosity about how ants decide what to do has been satisfied. I also learned about some new reasons for which we should be wary about the long-term use of antidepressant drugs.

Putting these short lectures online is an excellent way of demonstrating the power of the internet to distribute ideas. Even for those of us who would balk at flying to California to attend some very neat talks, fiber optic links provide a low-carbon alternative.

Al Gore at TED

Safety sign

The Technology Entertainment Design Conference takes place annually in Monterey, California. At the most recent one, Al Gore presented an updated version of his climate change slideshow, made famous by his film An Inconvenient Truth.

It seems a bit remarkable for me that when I first saw that film in Oxford, I wasn’t yet convinced about the full extent of the threat of climate change. Since then, I have devoted the majority of my time and attention to this issue. If you have not done so yet, I encourage you to watch the video linked above, and perhaps read some of the posts in my climate change index.

It is not unrealistic to say that climate change will be the defining issue of the next century, and possibly far beyond. Gaining a strong understanding of it is the least we can do as educated people today.

Airsick

This short video on climate change, produced by Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk, is very elegant. It doesn’t have a great deal of substantive content, but it includes a lot of striking visual images. Rather than being shot continuously, it consists of 20,000 black and white still images.

The video, and some of the claims made in it, are being discussed on Metafilter.

Dark comedies

I first experienced Jhonen Vasquez‘s work in the form of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: a darkly comic feature of my high-school days. Johnny is insane and believes he needs to keep a wall in his house painted with fresh blood so that demons do not push through from the other side. On the basis of that, you might wonder why Nickelodeon decided to produce a children’s television show created by the same man. Invader Zim is not nearly as dark as Johnny – though it definitely has its moments – and I think it is funnier overall. In one episode, the megalomaniacal alien Zim is concerned that a human nurse will uncover his secret identity as an alien because he lacks human organs. His solution is to start stealing them from his classmates in a macabre and hilarious episode called “Dark Harvest.”

The series is worth watching just so that you can exchange the most hillarious lines with other devotees.

For those already enamoured with Zim it is worth noting that you can buy every episode on DVD for $29.59. At that price, it may soften the rueful chastisement embodied in the angry fist you wave at those $70 seasons of The Sopranos. They even had the gall to split series six in two parts, so they could rob people twice…

Evolution and Ben Stein

Rusty bike parts

It is always surprising when a seemingly intelligent person adopts a hopelessly indefensible position. This seems to be the case with Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie. It is still possible to argue that some kind of deity must have created the universe. What is not possible is to argue convincingly against the central elements of the theory of evolution: namely how mutation and selection drive change and how all life on earth is descended from a common ancestor. There is simply too much evidence for both claims, and it is too good:

  1. The fossil record shows overwhelming evidence for a branched tree of life, connecting existing organisms to ancient ones that preceded them.
  2. Comparative embryology provides good anatomical evidence of both evolution and common descent.
  3. Concrete examples of evolution on human timescales can be easily found. These include plant domestication, moths that darkened in response to coal soot, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.
  4. The geographic distribution of species provides evidence for speciation and adaptation to new biological niches.
  5. Both nucleic and mitochondrial DNA provide excellent evidence for both common descent and evolution through selection.
  6. Common aspects of biochemistry are demonstrative of both claims: especially those features which are arbitrary yet consistent among living things

I haven’t seen the film, and it probably argues something more sophisticated than “the world is 6,000 years old and every creature that has ever lived is alive now, in the exact form in which it was created.” Even so, it is depressing to see someone commonly associated with intelligence fuelling a false debate centred around ignorance.

There are certainly many incredible mysteries that remain in biology – including many of the details on how evolution functions and has proceeded. Similarly, a questioning attitude is essential to scientific advancement. Those things freely admitted, purporting to challenge things with so many strong and independent collections of evidence supporting them is much more likely to retard the advancement of human knowledge than it is to advance it. This is especially true when a contrived debate runs the risk of forcing sub-standard education on children.