Category: Films and movies

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

No Country for Old Men

Right up until the abrupt conclusion, the new Coen Brothers film is a melange of suspense genres, built around some of the cinematic elements that link the diverse offerings of the talented pair. On the basis of the first viewing, it shares some of the nihilism of Fargo – with chance and greed driving the bloodshed. Like, The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, much of the drama derives from over-the-top characters, though the theme seems to reside with the more demure ones who serve as their foils. Saying little of consequence throughout the film, Kelly Macdonald is nonetheless subtly captivating.

The film is imbued with a wonderful sense of place: showing the combined spirit underlying empty prairie and sleek Houston oil high-rises: the swagger and determination of the cowboy genre. It certainly gives a person an appreciation for the vastness of the American Southwest, and the way in which it is an inescapably rifles and pickups kind of place.

While additional viewings would probably improve one’s appreciation for the clever touches, it seems unlikely that anything but one’s first exposure will carry the full force of this film. That’s not because anything terribly surprising happens – this is not 24 – but rather because it is stark enough to stand for itself, appearing as a plain to be appreciated at a glance, rather than a dense wood with many paths to follow.

Nicholas Stern video

Emily kindly sent me a link to the video of Sir Nicholas Stern’s presentation in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February of 2007. I was lucky enough to attend in person; I even got to speak with him at the exclusive reception afterwards. My notes are on the wiki. This is your chance to compare a verbatim record of the talk with my notes and thus determine my particular strengths and failings as a note taker.

The talk is well worth watching, not least because Stern is obviously very well informed and quite a capable speaker. His report is fully deserving of its status as the seminal discussion of the economics of climate change.

Immersed in medical drama

Recent obsessive watching of House has taught me something: while whiteboards are the new standard, in relation to blackboards, the smoked plastic board is the cool option.

Also, pharmaceutical drugs are powerful, the human body is complex, and keyhole surgery changes everything. Also, people underestimate Rabies.

[Update: 4 February 2008] One medical inaccuracy I noted in this series concerns MRI machines. At several points, there are interactions between metal and the machine. In one case, bullet fragments that House shot into a corpse; in another, metal-laden prison tattoos. In both cases, there is no effect on the metal before the scan begins. This ignores how the magnet in an MRI machine is always on. The magnetic field is always there, aligning the magnetization of hydrogen atoms. The actual scan consists of radio waves used to alter the alignment of the magnetization. As such, the metal would have been drawn into the bore of the machine as soon as it got near it, not after the scans started.

Leguminous illustration

A comic in which Emily’s artistic talents have been combined with my egregious printing is now on her beanhead site. It is also mentioned on her blog. Tristan has produced a video about the whole beanhead phenomenon, featuring exclusive footage of Emily and I walking around in Vancouver’s Chinatown and inventing silly answers to silly questions.

Rejecting Canada’s new copyright act

As a student, I was constantly being called upon to support various causes, through means ranging from making donations to attending rallies. Usually, such activities have a very indirect effect; sometimes, they cannot be reasonably expected to have any effect at all. Not so, recent protest activities around Canada’s new copyright act: a draconian piece of legislation that would have criminalized all sorts of things that people have legitimate rights to do, such as copying a CD they own onto an iPod they own.

Defending the fair use of intellectual property has become a rallying point for those who don’t want to see the best fruits of the information revolution destroyed by corporate greed or ham-fisted lawmaking in the vein of the much-derided American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At their most controversial, such acts criminalize even talking about ways to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology, even when such technology is being mistakenly applied to non-copyrighted sources: such as those covered by the excellent Creative Commons initiative or those where fair use is permissive for consumers. Watching a DVD you own using a non-approved operating system (like Linux) could become a criminal offence.

For now, the protests seem to have been successful. Of course, the temptation for anyone trying to pass a controversial law is to hold off until attention dissipates, then pass it when relatively few people are watching. Hopefully, that will not prove the ultimate consequence of this welcome tactical victory for consumer rights.

Related prior posts:

Feel free to link other related matter in comments.

Entertaining physics demonstrations

His name is Julius Sumner Miller and physics is his business.

For those who lacked my good fortune in seeing most of these demonstrations a number of times at Vancouver’s Science World, the videos should give a sense of how physics can be made universally comprehensible and exciting. The facts that Mr. Miller looks like a mad scientist and that he has a penchant for hyperbole may well contribute to his ability to hold one’s attention.

My involvement as a camper and leader at SFU’s Science Alive daycamp also impressed upon me the effectiveness of physical demonstrations in sparking children’s interest in science. That is especially true when the demonstrations involve rapid projectile motion, strong magnets, cryogenic materials, aggressive combustion, and explosions.

Comedy cut-off

I haven’t seen The Daily Show or The Colbert Report in ages. The American Comedy Central site is blocked in Canada, and the Canadian site you get re-directed to isn’t Mac compatible. For a while, the new Daily Show website worked here. Now, it just shows a never-ending string of ads.

These shows were the only television news I had ever watched with any regularity. Until their online infrastructure changes, it seems that print and web sources will be my sole connection to the mass media.

[20 August 2008] Ashley has kindly informed me that full episodes of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are available in Canada through CTV.ca. It looks like I won’t need to set up a special US proxy system after all, though Pandora may still tempt me to do so.

On technology and vulnerability

The first episode of James Burke’s Connections is very thought provoking. It demonstrates the inescapable downside of Adam Smith‘s pin factory: while an assembly line can produce far more pins than individual artisans, each of the assembly line workers becomes unable to produce anything without the industrial network that supports their work.

See this prior entry on Burke’s series

Children of Men

When was the idea of the post-apocalyptic future invented? I went to Blockbuster tonight in hopes of renting some clever comedy. Because of the unavailability of certain titles, recommendations from staff, delayed consequences from my trip to Morocco, and random factors, I ended up watching Children of Men instead. It makes for an uncomfortable accompaniment to my ongoing reading of The World Without Us. Then, there is Oryx and Crake and 28 Days Later. Even Half Life 2 had similar nightmare-future police-state fixations.

I wonder if it could be traced back, Oxford English Dictionary style, to the point where the first work of fiction emerged that envisioned the future as a nightmarish place. Furthermore, the first such fiction to envision human activities as the origin of the downfall. I wonder if ancient examples could be found, or whether it would all be in the last hundred years or so.