Friday afternoon I rode the bus down to Gallery Place to watch the new James Bond Movie. I got there just in time for one of the early showings - plenty of seats to be had even after the first few minutes of previews. I brought along “American Lightning” to read just in case I had to wait for a later showing of the movie, and read some of it on the bus down.
A quick note on being alone in movie theaters: I used to think it was extremely pathetic to go to a movie by yourself - Now I find it preferable. My lifetime of movies more or less started with being taken to the movies by my parents, then joining up with groups of friends, and then finally as something to do on a ‘date’ - even though this was usually with a movie-obsessed friend. But my position is reversed now: One day nobody would go to see “Barton Fink” with me, and had the time, the motivation and the opportunity, so in I went, solitary man sitting in a dark room full of people. Although that wasn’t the day I changed my mind - I found it somehow embarrassing that day - I eventually understood that I prefer to watch movies by myself. People may disagree with me about this, but I always thought there was something weird about “spending time together” paying attention to something else. I’m happy to discuss what I saw on the screen… But can we please not refer to the viewing as genuine togetherness? Togetherness sounds like fun to me, but I hardly ever achieve that when I’m around other people. And, don’t say that there is something wrong with me… I knew that already.
I have to keep fighting off the temptation to criticize the trend in mainstream entertainment… I rather enjoyed “Quantum of Solace”. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s not so important - I didn’t expect it to. There is a lot of shooting and plenty of stuff blows up. Part of me worries that the plot is too flimsy. In many ways what we have here is a post-modern pastiche: Moral certainty is out the window. Disobedience is okay as long as your boss is wrong? Isn’t it? That seemed to be the lesson I got from the movie.
Give the people what they want: “Quantum” is to be understood as a sequel to “Casino Royale”. It might have been nice to watch them back to back - my mistake, I’ve got a DVD player, after all - because I forgot who some of the supporting characters were. It’s been two years since I saw the last film. But, the major element in a franchise is repetition: Give it just enough variation to be interesting, but don’t stray too far into the unknown. Car chases and fist fights are just interesting enough to make you forget you’ve seen it all before in a hundred other movies. The Daniel Craig version of Bond has a new martini recipe, even though we see him down more whiskey.
I read a bit of Bond criticism lately. I agree in principle: A formula that made some sense in the context of the cold war, blatant sexism, too many gadgets. But there is also the alchemy of this bumbling hero whose idea of infiltrating is being captured. How do they do it? My earliest memories (much younger and impressionable then) are of Bond as a tough customer and a brilliant escape artist. Neither were true on subsequent viewings. We - and by ‘we’ I mean pre-teen boys - could be ushered into a gadget culture that had yet to become reality. We were the recruits. “Quantum” has the coolest mobile phones and computer screens you can imagine - or you can’t imagine anything else after seeing them. So the relentless push of techno-futurism continues to the present day.
Okay, stop me… This has taken two days of on-again, off-again writing to become virtual mulch. I had four of five important things from the movie I wanted to discuss and I keep getting distracted. Maybe this isn’t the right time…
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:35:00 GMT
(Or, Should I Really Bother Waiting for the DVD of this show?…)
Something Jason Kottke said the other day about television shows irked me, and I didn’t know why at first. I am talking about the “Megamovie”:
Megamovies take television seriously as a medium. They have dramatic arcs that last longer than single episodes or seasons. Megamovies often explore themes and ideas relevant to contemporary society – there’s more going on than just the plot – without resorting to very special episodes. Repeat viewing and close scrutiny is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the material and its themes… …For many, bingeing on entire seasons on DVD or downloaded via iTunes has become the preferred way to watch these shows.
Yes, maybe they’re right. ‘Bingeing’ does seem to be the way to go with a lot of television. But, I’m still suspicious…
For one thing, I’ve never been all that comfortable with standardized packaging of stories: Movies that take about 100 minutes, television shows lasting precisely 23 or 47 - and, I’m talking here about televised fiction, not unscripted reality or game shows. This causes a lot of what I consider to be time-wasting subplots - a watering-down of the main storyline by carrying on multiple stories. Sometimes you have several parallel developments that create a species of suspense based on the uncertainty of how those developments relate, and other times you have subplots which only serve to develop minor characters.
Now it is quite possible that if you sat down to watch all the episodes from start to finish, the weaving of so many subplots, unresolved for hours at a time could create brilliant effect. But that’s exactly my point - “The West Wing” clocks in at over 100 hours… Much of that is a waste of time. When am I going to get the story?!?!
The changes in media that go along with the popularization of the Internet are potentially as sickening as driving straight off a cliff. Maybe people are scared to pay attention to what is really happening when they can pretend they are still happily cruising over the pavement. Luckily, the Internet isn’t quite so life threatening as all that… If I care about a show on TV I am forced to be there the moment it is broadcast. And, now they’re telling me that in February I will also have to get new receiver gear or switch to a leased system like cable.
When I spend much of the day examining the Internet, practically at random, utterly fascinated by one thing or another for a while, then switching to a new thing, I feel absurd coming home (or these days just switching on the TV) to watch only the handful of channels that are available. Or resequencing my evening to be in front of the set, as I might very well do tonight. I have demonstrated an ability to be in front of a TV set when ‘they’ require it of me should I value the result. Varying start times would be much more difficult to keep track of, so I must concede the fixed duration of episodes, no matter that I think it means a lot of wasted time with subplots that delay the main action.
Deep down, I just know none of this is earth shattering… Television writers and producers create episodic stories. The good ones revel in working within tight constraints. I am not actually arguing against creative constraints. Some of the results are very entertaining. I don’t know if I consider it “Art” - that may be arguable.
To get back to the concept of the “Megamovie”… I think the entire idea of sitting through multiple episodes of a TV show on DVD is misguided. It is presented as if the same viewing constraints are still in force. They’re not. I, like generations of viewers, tuned in to weekly prime-time shows - many of them with suspenseful cliffhangers from one week to the next - and felt vaguely dissatisfied that I had to stop watching. Presented all at once, these shows could omit much of the devices that were intended primarily to ‘level off the measuring cup’ of 47 minutes, or what ever size they were going for. There are things you would do to slow the progress of a series that you would not do in a 100+ hour long movie. Am I wrong?
For example: In 2001, I thought “Alias” was a good show: I missed the first couple of episodes due to the normally bizarre scheduling of fall network television premiere scheduling, but the pilot was rebroadcast and I saw it ‘by mistake’. It had a strong woman character, an interesting premise, good spy-movie action, and just a bit of self-conscious James Bond campiness. I watched the first season mainly by videotape. (I can no longer remember what prevented me from being at home to see it on occasion - but the ability to ‘time-shift’, review and pause episodes was helpful - that’s part of my larger point…) And, eventually, the gaps in my viewing memory (and tape collection) were filled in with reruns.
One day a few years later, I saw the Season 1 DVDs up on the shelf at the video store. I got very excited for about three minutes. I cringed at the realization that there were a lot of time-wasters I would prefer to edit out… I would prefer to relive the experience in a different way.
There is a lesson here for me: It holds up a mirror to show me my habits of interpretation… I cared about less than half of what I saw. I wanted better exposition on what I did care about, but I didn’t get it. Like drinking diet cola, it didn’t get any more satisfying as I consumed more, and the taste in my mouth kept getting worse. Why was it one of my favorite shows? I regret a proportion of the time I spent watching it - the joy and satisfaction related to the remaining bits: Those well constructed moments. The whole experience is reduced to a thin oatmeal, made briefly exciting when I got the occasional raisin(!).
Life isn’t going to be very fun if I continue to be this critical.
Posted in film-and-TV, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:07:00 GMT
WETA is showing Wall Street tonight. I’ve always wanted to watch it. More so now that the real Wall Street is getting into trouble.
Small Is Beautiful
When I was in India, I bought a copy of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”. It’s a book that relates well with the Peak Oil school. I’ve read some criticism of Schumacher somewhere along the way, but I don’t expect every author I like to be 100% right, all the time. Do you?
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that we are headed into an energy scarce future. Survival in that future will not be easy - not just because there will not be enough easy wealth to go around (is there enough now?), but because not enough people have the skills they need to survive it.
Say what you want about Malthus, but I think he is going to be our guiding star once more, should we actually live long enough to see it. This many people extracting what they need to survive is not going to be viable. If we are successful, it’ll be hell on the planet, and if we fail… well, that’s a bit dark for this discussion.
I’ve mentioned price as a negative feedback mechanism before, right? It’s no different from the electrical feedback that stabilizes an amplifier - at the cost of reduced output. Did you want stability or maximal output? That’s a matter of taste, I guess. Like strapping a rocket on your car to go faster, but then, always in danger of being blown to bits.
High prices are a signal. They say: “Use Less”. If prices are kept artificially low, then people do not use less. It’s business as usual.
My feeling about “Small Is Beautiful” - and I think it deserves to have me defend it - is that the lesson applies at all scales. Big isn’t necessarily bad - size should be sensible relative to the goal. We see it now in space exploration: Small companies are getting into the launch business. We have NASA precisely because we needed an escape valve for all our excess wealth. In many ways it was a good investment, but I wonder at the cost of it all. How dearly did we purchase the benefits of the space age? Did we perhaps lose opportunities to do something better with that money? Things that we simply failed to imagine?
Maybe it’s just human nature to want to gamble with the whole wad - take stupendous amounts of surplus (even when the surplus is a temporary illusion and the next disaster is on its way, unbeknownst to us) and blow it on that one big spectacle. This may be why we also developed a brain. Maybe human nature was leading us astray so often that only the smart survived - those people who could prudently circumvent their human nature when it was most advantageous.
There is this presumption that solving the problems of each little individual is not worthy of our attention. Especially when we can have something flashy that no one person could have paid for. Credit and Banking are certainly necessary - I would never claim that there is nothing big worth doing - but, bigness for its own sake is misguided. The larger the goal, the more we need to be in agreement about whether it is worth pursuing. But, this doesn’t stop the scoundrels, who pervert the real good Capitalism does in creating wealth, satisfying needs, and improving the lives of all.
Who decides what is worth doing? And, for how much? Once again, it’s the price. If you create the illusion that gasoline is cheap, then people will drive like there is no tomorrow. If you structure a mortgage so that a poor guy with a family thinks his payments will always be that low, he will buy a house he cannot afford, then be unable to interest anyone in buying it at half the price later. And, if we allow Wall Street players to create bizarre investment vehicles where nobody can gauge the real risk - because it makes rich people so happy, chances are those things weren’t priced correctly.
Wall Street is a hell of a lot more complicated some 20+ years after the fictional Gordon Gecko, but I know GG is still the guiding light.
Henry Ford
I use Henry Ford as my code word for a particular factory scenario. Whenever I tell people that I can’t unravel this issue, they tend to treat me like I’m an idiot. I, on the other hand (and I accept that I might just be missing something, in an intellectually obstinate fashion…) think that they are all just afraid to question the sources of received wisdom.
Henry Ford thought he could sell more cars if he paid his workers enough that they could also buy one. And, apparently it worked.
Every time I look, I see the factory, taking land, labor and capitol to transform some amount of material into some number of finished automobiles. You have fixed costs of setting up the factory (buy the land, build the shed, take delivery on the equipment, and pay the industrial designers), then you have variable costs to transform inputs to outputs (rubber, wood, and metal as the materials; electricity to run the machines; paychecks for the workers) What comes out is more valuable that what goes in, otherwise there are no profits. Economies of scale allow you to produce enough units to amortize the fixed costs as a small fraction of the variable costs. With their paychecks, the workers can afford to buy a car that they just participated in manufacturing. But all the workers together cannot buy all the cars - it takes them some time to earn enough for one, and during that time each worker probably contributes the equivalent effort necessary to build hundreds (hard to gauge with specialization, but it’s in there). The cars bought by workers are not going to be much more than 1% of the total. The other 99% are bought by people who are not employees. So paying your workers enough to be able to afford one of your cars is a bit of a red herring, if you ask me.
Going back to price… I think that profit may only be possible in cases where an input is undervalued. And, can you see now why the idea of paying the workers more sets of an alarm bell for me? If workers are so undervalued that you can pay them more and still profit, then what other input is being undervalued? The factory is “getting away with murder” - some externality that subsidizes the cost.
One of the things you notice in Open Software projects is that people will contribute effort without pay. They are being ‘paid’ in other less tangible ways. This translates to other workforces… Any time you can inspire people to take part of the full monetary value of what they do as something non-monetary, you’ve got a shot at success: Any worker can be proud of what they help accomplish - all the more so if it’s a tangible output. And, the bigger the better: “Hey, I put five rivets in that jumbo jet! - It wouldn’t fly without me. I was integral to the success of this great thing.”
Posted in economics, film-and-TV, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:58:00 GMT
This weekend as tropical storm Hanna was gathering, I watched Jacques Tati’s “Trafic”, a delightful French comedy from 1971 with Tati playing the role of Mr. Hulot. In the course of transporting their newly designed “camper car” to an auto show in Amsterdam… a lot of funny things happen. And, they don’t make it in time for the show. I probably liked “Mon Oncle” better, because Mr. Hulot is more befuddled by the suburban gadgets, providing more intense physical comedy. Most of the joy in Trafic comes from the observation of vehicles and their occupants, but when the police impound their truck with the camper for not stopping at the border, they are forced to unveil all the camper’s features. I also enjoyed some good shots of people crowding around to inspect the cars at the car show.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:36:00 GMT
Later today I’m hoping to write about the Stan Brakhage films on a DVD titled “By Brakhage”. I just watched a small portion last night. The films are fascinating so far, but the most useful part was the interview, which I watched straight away. Lots of good stuff about “seeing” and “vision” and the difference between film and movies.
Which brings me back to “Triplets Of Belleville”, and hopefully forward again to more Godard films…
Something was bothering me about “Triplets” that I couldn’t put my finger on: The look of the animation was amazing, and they acknowledged a debt to “101 Dalmatians”. Music is an essential part of the story - I didn’t understand what bicycles had to do with singing triplets at first, but now I do…
But music is the clue to what’s missing: Hardly anybody says anything. As if words were not necessary for communication. A lot of effective communication is taking place in the story without anybody saying anything. It can’t be explained away in the story as a language barrier - everybody is French, and I even felt that the entire universe of the film was comfortably French. Belleville itself is clearly “overseas” based upon how they got there, but it is as much Montreal as it is Gotham.
I hope it’s not ironic to aspire to writing while wishing there were fewer words. It’s clearly ‘swimming against the current’ in some sense. When I see these animated characters express everything in glances or facial expressions, I see into some weird promised land of more effective communication, free of needless chatter. And when I look back at the real world around me, I think it’s because people are losing the ability to communicate non-verbally. And here’s where I also see more value in the written word, not less: Whether printed on dead paper, or glowing temporarily in phosphors switched by a microchip to match codes spinning past the detector on a magnetic platter, words are about durability - in how they can be selected, filtered and combined in thoughtful ways intended to last. So much of the volume is in redundancy - a form of distributed storage as old as the hills.
I also thought that the dog was the wisest character. The dog’s dreams convinced me: He spends his life barking at trains, and then has a dream of riding on a train past his house only to see a person barking at him. The dreams show the dog has a clarity of vision that few other characters in the movie share. The next best trait is determination / perseverance. The ambient humans are sloe-eyed and obese - whole families are sitting around a table eating and watching TV… Until you get to Belleville, where everything is exaggerated beyond belief. I can’t imagine any of the people would fit in the elevators to take them up the absurdly tall and slender skyscrapers.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT
I just watched Les Triplettes de Belleville. When the Tour de France was on, I saw it playing in the bar one night - some of the bike messenger crowd takes it seriously, which actually makes sense after a few drinks…
But I remembered right then: I never saw The Triplets Of Belleville when it came out, and: Shouldn’t I try to rent a copy?
Ah, the vagaries of memory… The next day the thought had fled. Lucky for me it didn’t go far. Once again, serendipity was required: I saw the DVD on a sales report at work Monday. It had to wait a day - Tuesday was the day I planned to drop in the store and fix a minor computer problem.
Somehow, I remembered about the movie. I’ve been overwhelmed by the Godard marathon - I know, it’s been more than a week now. I planned to go back to re-read bits of the book and re-watch some of the films. It’s almost impossible to sequence them chronologically - I might as well just give up on that - because some of the early short films are packaged together with one of the feature-length films. It’s tiring to be a perfectionist some days.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:29:00 GMT
I continue to struggle with the label printer at work. By studying the manual, I was finally able to get a printout of the communication settings. They were exactly what I was told they would be, and so it should have worked the first time around. So why didn’t it? It is still as mysterious as ever.
A brief summary of Godard films I’ve been watching and still have to write about:
- Band Of Outsiders
- Contempt
- A Woman Is A Woman
- Pierrot Le Fou
Posted in film-and-TV, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:15:00 GMT
I should probably be doing something more productive than watching reruns of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”…
Today at work I had to think about recycling a bunch of old computer equipment. I’m not so good at throwing things away, but in this case the decision is comparatively easy. But now that I sit here watching bad science fiction - well, it’s very melodramatic - I can’t help thinking about our enslavement to technology.
Posted in film-and-TV, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:48:00 GMT
So, if I’m reading a biography about one of the most memorable directors of the French New Wave, I’d better make sure to watch some of the films, eh?
“À bout de souffle” seemed like a good place to start. You probably know it as “Breathless”, and it was Godard’s breakout film from 1960. From this remove, it can be hard to see how revolutionary it was. I wasn’t watching a lot of the films that existed before it. Heck, people were still getting fussy about hand-held camera on the TV show Firefly in 2002. So the technique still isn’t that acceptable. The excuse given in the book “Everything Is Cinema” was that it was filmed as a documentary - a fictional story ‘captured’ as it was acted out. Both the book and the interviews on the DVD (which, I’m guessing constitute some of the primary material for the book anyway) make a point of how skipping all the rigging, cables, and crew allowed them to casually record without too much planning. They ignored how films were supposed to be made.
On the other hand, it’s also a film known for its jump-cut editing well before rock videos started doing it. The whole thing is recorded without sound, which meant overdubbing in the studio.
In the book, Brody has a remark that startled me when I first read it:
“[Antonioni’s next step was] to show a society of mass culture and media, of technology and ostensible progress, and to consider the transformations in individual consciousness that were taking place in this new world”
Cause - you know - I wish I could do that. It wouldn’t take too long to come up with a list of SF writers who do that. Maybe it comes through when those films are made, but… Wait! There’s more:
“Rossellini believed so strongly in the freedom of individuals that he could not make sense of the idea that […shouldn’t this be ‘of’?] people who could be alienated from themselves by the mass media, which he considered merely to be a form of rhetorical persuasion that should be rejected by claims of reason.
Yes, that’s right, Rossellini! it should be ‘rejected by claims of reason’. So explain to me why it isn’t.
This is one of those subjects where I can be pretty sure a lot of ink has already been spilled. I don’t see what sense I can contribute to it today. But we can leave it at this: The jump cuts, when I pay attention - you see, they’re not even noticeable to me under normal viewing conditions - are brilliant. The scenes are not necessarily even in the order they were shot, as film running through the sprockets usually demands. Or, might I add, the sequential instructions of computer code. That overdubbing is a concession to convention. If you’re going to chop up the frames and rearrange them however you want, then why even have dialogue? Why have events in sequence? Why not ‘ensembles of imagery’, like the junk in a junk shop, which probably could tell a story, but lies around in piles instead?
Posted in film-and-TV, books, media-studies, writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:22:00 GMT
