Films and movies – Page 20 – a sibilant intake of breath

Data storage

This evening, I was at an art gallery watching 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm films shot 25-40 years ago. Most of them were not in pristine quality, but still quite viewable. Afterwards, I got into a conversation with someone who works in archival film storage for the federal government. Contemporary society is generating far more data than ever before. At the same time, virtually nothing is stored at archival quality. An 8mm video or a 35mm negative will be fine in forty years if stored at controlled temperature and humidity. Even dumped in a box in someone’s attic, it is still likely to be comprehensible. The same is not true for how we store data today.

Basically, you have optical and magnetic storage. Optical includes CDs and DVDs, and is further divided between mass releases CDs (which are pressed into metal) and personally made CDs (which rely on dyes exposed to lasers). Neither is really archival. It is quite possible that your store-bought DVD will not work in twenty years. It is quite likely that your home-burned DVD will not work in five.

In terms of magnetic storage, you have tapes and hard drives. Many companies have learned to their detriment that poorly stored magnetic backup tapes can be useless. As for hard drives, they are vulnerable to physical breakdown, viruses, exposure to magnetic fields, corrosion, and other factors.

While is is likely that the products of my early fumblings with Ilford Delta 400 in high school will be intelligible in forty years, it is a lot less likely that my digital photos from Paris will be. That’s ironic, of course, given that the first ones can only be copied imperfectly and at a notable expense, while the latter can be copied perfectly for a few cents a gigabyte.

While some information exists in the form of so many copies that is will likely never be lost (ten thousand unsold copies of Waterworld on laserdisc), there is reason to fear that personal data being stored in the present era will likely be lost before people born today have grandchildren. While that has certainly been the norm for generations past – who would be lucky to have their lives recorded as a birth in a parish register, a marriage, and a death – it seems rather a shame given how cheap and ubiquitous data creation and storage has become.

[Update: 11 August 2010] I forgot to mention it earlier, but one potentially robust way to back up digital files is to print them on paper.

Lonely Evening competition

My brother Mica is in yet another music video competition. The ‘Lonely Evening’ video is his first based on original music. It was mentioned here previously. Voting continues until August 10th. If he wins this grand final, it will be his fifth victory in a row.

You can see all of his previous films on his website: papaflyfilms.com.

The Simpsons Movie

The other night, I saw The Simpsons Movie with Marc and some of his economist colleagues. Going in, I thought it more likely to be a disaster than a triumph. I was pleased to find my pessimism largely unjustified. While it did involve a lot of the same awkward and improbable gimmickry of the later episodes, the film was well speckled with fully deserved laughs. It also revealed federal environmental bureaucracies for the villainous and malicious entities they truly are.

Simpsons fans avoiding the film for fear it will be terrible should gird themselves to have a look; those without a long-standing appreciation for the show will probably be better off steering clear.

Unbowlerized and hatless

Working in a complex of government buildings, I feel as though I should be part of a parade of men in dark pinstripe suits and bowler hats, walking in from a train platform every morning. There should be large steam-driven clocks around, and everyone should have a crisp newspaper under the arm.

Though thousands of people must work in the four towers, the place never actually seems like a flow of people is moving in or out. This is especially curious given how pretty much everyone can be expected to vanish within ten minutes before or after 5:00pm.

Perhaps there should be an annual ’emulate a scene from a film like Brazil‘ day.

Life, the universe, and everything

During off hours, I have been watching the spectacular BBC series Planet Earth. Just seeing an episode is almost sufficient to make a person turn to a life of nature videography. Whether other viewers feel the same compulsion or not, it does seem reasonable to call the series mandatory viewing for human beings. It is both awe inspiring, insofar as it demonstrates the enduring richness of truly wild places, and chastening, insofar as it demonstrates their wholesale slaughter.

A book I am reading captures it well:

Being will be here.
Beauty will be here.
But this beauty that visits us now will be gone.

Curious, how powerful and helpless we seem to be, in the end.

Three flops, one decent film

Normally, I try to give films at least a couple of paragraphs of commentary after I have seen them. Times of late have been busy, so I will be briefer here.

Ocean’s 13: The nonsensical plot was easy enough to anticipate, but what made this film stand out as particularly poor was the overwhelming lack of style. The first film in the series looked fresh and interesting. This one is a tired attempt at spinning more money out from a franchise long past its prime.

Shooter: I saw this on the plane, and regret not using the time to sleep. The plot was preposterous, the acting and action scenes poor, and the physics abysmal. Take pains to avoid this film.

Firehouse Dog: This one, I half-watched without any sound. Even so, it was a markedly better film than Shooter.

Last King of Scotland: Jonathan and I watched this film in the form of a DVD of dubious legitimacy I bought in Morocco. Overall, it is quite well done. At times, quite funny, at others, suitably dire for a film about Idi Amin.

Mathmagic

Care to see a really unusual cartoon? Have a look at Donald in Mathmagic Land. Here are part one and two.

I remember being fascinated and bewildered by this as a small child.

Morocco videos

I am still working on processing my photos – alongside packing and saying goodbye to friends. That said, I did shoot some short and extremely amateur videos in Morocco. Much as I appreciate the power of photographs to overcome entropy, there are certainly some visual spectacles best served by video. The resolution here is low, and the camera work shaky, but the capacity to shoot video is far from the primary function of my cheap digital camera.

Marrakesh:

Djemma El Fna, Morocco (contrast with this video from Istanbul)

Essaouira:

Ouzoud:

If you want to see some good videos, have a look at my brother Mica’s site.

Film making around Oxford

All over central Oxford are vans, guards, and heaps of lighting equipment. They are working on the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. As a great appreciator of the book, I am rather nervous about the film. So much of what makes the book special turns around how the characters are presented, and there is the danger that an actor’s interpretation will overwrite whatever conception you had developed on your own. That said, it will probably feature some stunning cinematography from around Oxford. They have been cutting bicycles off fences and railings in places like Radcliffe Square for several days now.

It’s weird how the film adaptation has Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel and Eva Green as Serafina Pekkala. People might find themselves making strange associations with Casino Royale.

James Burke’s Connections

I have mentioned it before, and may well mention it again. James Burke’s Connections is a television series worth seeing. Each episode wanders through history from one invention to another, with fascinating asides along the way.

As of this evening, someone put a stack of them on YouTube. The series was made at taxpayer expense by the BBC, so there is really no reason for which it shouldn’t already be available online for free. Watch a few episodes and you will learn a wealth of interesting (though often very esoteric) facts to break out at dinner parties.

As is generally the case when I am busy and need to come up with a blog post idea in a hurry, this was yanked from MetaFilter.

PS. By the end of each exam, I was coughing my lungs out. Now, I am taking little sips from my bottle of nasty tasting (and ineffective) cough syrup every three hours or so. Now, I feel like I have an especially nasty cold, with all the ill effects involved therein.