Beyond The Lighted Stage

Beyond The Lighted Stage is a fairly typical history-of-the-band film and follows the formula without anything really new brought to the table. Interviews with the band, with their families, other people who were involved in their story, and lots of other musicians that they influenced. Film clips of the band, their performances, everything else about them they could find. The band's story told in chronological order. Enough concert footage and partial music videos to keep you entertained. The filmmakers took no risks.

Nor did they need to. The band and its story are both compelling enough to sustain interest without any additional window dressing. I learned a lot about the history of the band and its members, and was consistently entertained throughout. The discs also contain a lot of concert footage in the bonus materials, which is also reliable entertainment.

As with anything about Rush you can't help but be constantly struck by the level of their musicianship. One of the early comments repeated from several of the other prominent musicians was that Rush was the kind of band that was consistently respected by other musicians; they often commented that, if you could play Rush, you could play anything. One thing that I hadn't really thought about before seeing this is how, amongst all their incredibly impressively complex and challenging bits of music, "La Villa Strangiato" is one of the most challenging. On reflection it's clear that it's an incredible bit of music to perform, but it always came off so natural that I never really singled it out as being the top of that very impressive list.

I also hadn't really thought about how 2112 isn't just a continuation of the trend of Caress Of Steel but a defiant embracing of it. Even today most Rush fans consider Caress Of Steel one of the band's hardest to like, but of course I was too young to be aware of it when it actually happened. What the film revealed to me was that they were doing pretty well with their first two albums, but Caress Of Steel did poorly, and made them pushed by their record company and public pressure to move away from that kind of songwriting. Seen in that light, 2112 is even more gutsy than it already seemed (and given that the first side is one 20-minute song suite that tells a high-concept science fiction story, that's pretty gutsy already). I also didn't realize that 2112 was as popular as it was; I had the vague idea that it wasn't until Permanent Waves that they ever got more popular than they had been after Fly By Night. (Certainly Permanent Waves marked a big advance for them, but not their first.)

The film makes me wish even more than before that that show at SPAC hadn't turned out so disappointing. Maybe for their next tour we'll get a chance to see them at a better venue, maybe in Montréal or Boston.

FAQ About Time Travel

This BBC sci-fi (sorry, science fiction) comedy movie somehow completely escaped my notice until I happened to stumble on it while looking someone up on IMDb and the title caught my eye, so I grabbed a copy to watch. Fifteen minutes in, I realized I had to stop and wait to watch it with Siobhan. It's a fairly low budget made-for-TV movie starring Chris Dowd, best known as Roy from The IT Crowd, as a science fiction fan and one of a group of three friends; the others include another fan (and would-be writer), and one who isn't a "nerd" and looks down, in a friendly way, on fandom. The three soon find themselves entangled in a time travel tale while in an English pub.

The movie takes advantage of the fact that Chris's character Ray is a fan to poke fun something that all us fans groan a little at: how, in movie after movie, the characters are always so suspicious of, and uncomprehending of, the idea that time travel, or space travel, or aliens, or magic, or vampires, or whatever the supernatural thing is, can possibly be real. It always seems like the characters in these stories are those very few people who have never even seen Star Trek. We always figure that, if it were us, we'd be properly skeptical but once there was evidence (and we'd know what questions to ask to get it) we'd accept it and move on in a businesslike fashion.

Well, this movie lets us watch exactly that happening. Here's a pair of guys who have just finished writing a letter to Hollywood about how to fix their obsession with crap, which concludes with the requirement, "More Firefly and/or Serenity." Ray constantly corrects people who call it "sci-fi" instead of "SF" or "science/speculative fiction". These are our people. They react like we would. Only we still get those moments of disbelief: this time, it's because Ray figures his friends have set this up for him as a prank or a special treat.

As befits a movie about time travel, you can't really expect that the rules about time travel make sense if looked at too closely. Most notably the central question about time travel, the Faraday Postulate (that time is inelastic: if you went back in time to do something, that something was already in your past before you went back), is played both ways. Often the characters at one point in the film encounter themselves from other points in the film -- either later or earlier -- and yet the ability to change the past is also innate to the premise.

But all this is being played, and played well, for comic effect. What really makes the movie hilarious is how we get to see ourselves in this story. It gets a little slow in spots, but by and large, it keeps you rolling along with it start to finish. The tangle of time travel is nowhere near as unmanageable as Primer but it's enough to keep you making a list in your head of twists that you've yet to see the other side of, until you stop and just laugh along with them all.

I recommend it as some light entertainment for any fan of the genre who doesn't need to take it too seriously.

Reservoir Dogs

There's just one more Tarantino movie on my list, Jackie Brown, but there'll be a couple of others in between first, so this is the last one for a while.

While I couldn't really see what about Pulp Fiction made it a great movie, I can definitely see it in Reservoir Dogs. This is a very impressively made film. The plotting is well done with the story peeling back layers through non-linear storytelling and character exploration, building tension through spacing out the revelations. You can see, if you stop to look for it, lots of well-used techniques in the camera angles, set dressing, intonation and acting, and music, to guide the experience and build up the appropriate reactions in the audience, but while you're watching it you can also easily not notice those things and be taken along on the ride. And it's all done on a tiny budget, with a small cast, and most of the action happening in a single, very austere room.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed the movie itself. But I will say that there were times when I was reluctant to pause and wait for my next chance to watch, because I wanted to see how things would come out. Most striking of these was what I think was perhaps the best scene: Mr. Orange's backstory, as his tale weaves between several perspectives, first person, third person, and mixing up the story with its own telling. Tim Roth did a great job with it, too. But even Mr. Blonde's big scene, which was pretty unrelentingly awful, was also gripping -- even though I didn't anticipate any kind of ending that wouldn't make me sick, I still wanted to see how it would end.

But for all that, and for all my appreciation for the craftsmanship, I can't say I enjoyed the story. It was a very well told version of a story I just didn't really want to be told. I don't regret seeing it, but I don't think I need to see it again.

Business trip to New York

Next week I'll be taking a short business trip to New York City to attend the National Retail Federation's 100th show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. My employer is paying for airfare and hotel, and I get a meal stipend which isn't quite enough to pay for anything in Vermont better than McDonald's, and which in Manhattan would barely cover the tip.

I will be coming in on Sunday night, at the conference all day Monday and Tuesday, and leaving Wednesday late morning, so there won't be time for any sightseeing. Siobhan is coming though, and she will have some time while I'm busy at the show. In addition, there'll definitely be opportunities for a few restaurant visits, so it's a chance for some of those "can't get back home" meals. The timing of the conference means I can't do a lot of travelling for lunch or even breakfast, and at night, while I'll have some time, I'll be tired and not likely in much mood for a long trip to a restaurant. Even so, there should be a few chances to get some ethnic food, and maybe that simple pleasure of a knish served hot off a street cart.

January isn't the best time to visit New York, due to weather, but it's also a good time because it's one of the less crowded times -- not much holiday travel, lower tourist traffic than most times, and all the sensible people are indoors. Weather can make a big difference: in January you could easily have that biting cold where the wind whips down the canyon-like streets and makes you think Vermont sounds pretty nice around now, but a little bit of sunshine and still air can change it to a nice place.

I've been to Manhattan enough times to see most of the big sights, but there's just so much there that there's never time to do it all. And I've really only ever seen midtown and a few things in uptown: I've never seen any of Little Italy or anything else in downtown, I've only nibbled the corners of Central Park, and one could spend a year visiting all the museums and shops even in the part of town I have seen. But this isn't really a good time to try to do any of those things. I'll be mostly focused on my work mission (learning about ERP and POS technologies and retail best practices).

Snowed-in hanky panky

One thing the holiday season brings is a good reason to listen to some of the songs that are more about winter than Christmas. Of these, some of my favorites are "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow," "Baby, It's Cold Outside," and "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm." Thinking about their lyrics, it seems that there's a subtle shift in cultural attitudes to be seen in them that I've never heard mentioned, amongst the many more obvious ones.

In each of them (less so the last of them) there's an assumption of a scenario which goes something like this. A romantically interested couple can spend time together without the slightest suspicion of hanky-panky, in which both parties behave like perfect gentlemen and ladies, until a moment comes when weather forces them to stay together past the normally appointed moment when a date ought to end. Once that happens, though, there's a strange and sudden change in which things that were previously not only forbidden but never even hinted at, are suddenly hinted at, suddenly in everyone's thoughts. It's as if naughty behavior becomes possible at 10pm, and so everything before is completely on the up-and-up, and everything after is tainted with the thought of improprieties, whether acted on or simply alluded to in innuendo; and weather is the magical force, the one thing that can drag a couple across the line.

The distinction is subtle and the idea that there's a cultural change behind it even more slippery. After all, it'd be easy to dismiss this as being a simple consequence of the fact that the propriety of courtship has changed, and people are expected to be at least thinking about hanky-panky, if not acting on it, at any time they feel like. But this isn't simply that hanky-panky is accepted and expected now, and innuendo and implication is par for the course. The part that I'm focusing on is the curious idea of the transition, and how sharp it is.

Once it occurred to me, there's something similar in one of the few movies of the period that I (unwillingly) am familiar with, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. A minor plot point in that movie features a male friend of the family being at the house, visiting, which is all considered entirely reasonable and a regular occurrence not worth a second thought, until one day when the river floods the bridge and he can't get back to the train station. The same flood prevents Mr. Blandings from returning home. Thus, the same fellow who regularly is alone in the house with Mrs. Blandings is now alone in the house with her after the time when he would normally have left, and suddenly the entire tone of the situation changes. Of course, it's entirely harmless: he had no designs on her, she certainly wasn't about to cheat on her husband with him, it's a simple matter of affording a friend a courtesy. But the fact that the question suddenly had to be asked and answered, though contrived a bit to give the movie some tension, points up the odd disjunction. If they had had those inclinations, wouldn't they have had them at 6pm as much as at 9pm? It's as if there's a background assumption that everyone has no libido at all, and is perfectly civilized, all day, but when the clock strikes nine everyone transforms like a werewolf, so you have to get apart before that moment comes.

I wonder where this idea comes from and where it vanished to. It seems like the kind of thing that, if you could confront someone from the 1940s with it, they would laugh it off as absurd, because it was too deep in the gestalt to be identified except by contrast to a time when it didn't exist. (I've no doubt we have just as many things that will seem similarly silly once someone can look at them from the outside.) But it has to have come into being at some point, and faded away at another. Or maybe I'm just imagining things.

Flying

Before Christmas I knew that Siobhan had spent most of her gift budget on a single gift, and that it was one she could pick up locally from work, and which fit into her backpack. I tried not to think too much about it because I didn't want to figure it out and ruin the surprise, but I couldn't help wondering a little before I stopped myself. I had thought perhaps some kind of electronic gadget, based on the fitting into her pack part, but the area near her office isn't a great place for shopping for such things. That's about as far as the automatic rumination of my brain could get before I stopped it.

I needn't have worried. If I had wracked my brain I would never have guessed what she actually came up with, and I still can't guess how it occurred to her. What she actually got me was flying lessons: specifically, since lessons in powered airplanes are too expensive, glider flying lessons.

They came with a quite extensive and dense book to learn about flight, which I've started reading. The book is intended as a learning guide for those who seek to get an FAA flight license for soaring, so it has rather a lot more than one likely needs to study for a single lesson. There are dozens of pages about the IFS system, reading maps, the composition of the atmosphere, the physics of flight, and dozens of other topics covered in agonizing detail. The glossary alone is six pages. The subject matter is interesting although it's also quite dry.

The idea that I'm actually going to be able to go for a sailplane flight is something that is probably going to take a while to sink in. That these things happen in summer helps make it feel so far away that it doesn't quite feel real. This is the kind of activity that doesn't sneak up on me; I think about it long in advance in the process of deciding whether it's possible and making preparations, so by time it needs to feel real it already does. I suppose when spring comes and I start to try to set a date and make the arrangements, by that time it'll be feeling real, but right now, it keeps coming back to me as a surprise.

Learning to fly has always been one of those things on the list of what I would do if I won the lottery, but pretty far down. Ensuring a financially sound future and sharing with those in need are much higher on the list. (Though a cool two million dollars would secure a sound enough financial future that I could work towards it anyway.) Owning an airplane is fantastically expensive. It's not the initial purchase so much; a two-seater prop plane costs an amount similar to an automobile. It's more about how much it costs to store, maintain, and operate it. Flying lessons are expensive enough that I would never treat myself to them if I didn't have a prospect of being able to use them, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be fun, just not something I could justify treating myself to.

But that doesn't mean they wouldn't make a great gift. Even so, powered airplane lessons are very expensive, but glider lessons are, I was told, much more affordable, and a quite similar experience, or at least similarly exciting. I had never really thought about the possibility, and never considered the idea of spending the money on it, but somewhere in the back of my mind I always wished I'd have a way to try it out, the money to spend on it and the time to invest. But so far back in my thoughts that I am duly impressed at Siobhan for making the leap I never did to considering it a possibility, and thus surprising the heck out of me with the gift.

Reading the book will be a dry but interesting pastime as the winter passes by. Perhaps it will inspire me to dig out my flight simulator, hook it up to the TV for some really amazing immersion, and play with it again in anticipation. By time the summer rolls around, hopefully I'll have absorbed all of this and be ready to get the most out of my lesson. Siobhan assures me that continued lessons are affordable, so perhaps this will be the start of a new hobby. But even if I stick to just one, I'm sure it'll be an experience to remember.

Stromboli

This year, my share of the holiday meal plan comprised lasagna for Christmas Eve, and stromboli for New Year's Day. Stromboli takes about as much time and effort as homemade pizza (and the same ingredients, pretty much), but it's a much classier dish that's more of an "event". Here's how to make it.

Ingredients

• Pizza dough, about 1-2 pounds, made fresh from your favorite recipe
  
• Pizza toppings like:
  
  • Browned Italian sausage, sautéd with onions, garlic, and/or peppers
    
  • Slices of mozzarella cheese
    
  • Sliced pepperoni
    
  • Etc.
    
• Melted butter
  
• Sesame seeds (optional)
  

Directions

1. Prepare the dough as directed.
   
2. While the dough is rising, prepare toppings. Slice, sauté, etc.
   
3. Melt a few tablespoons of butter.
   
4. When the dough has risen, turn it out onto a lightly floured pizza peel.
   
5. Pound the dough down, the cut it in half. You can make strombolis from each half or freeze one half for later use.
   
6. Preheat the oven, with your pizza quarry tiles or pizza stone, to 350.
   
7. Roll out the dough into a roughly rectangular shape, about as thick as you would for a New-York-style pizza.
   
8. Spread the toppings over all but the outer edges of the dough. Cheese should be on top. Do not include sauce! Guard against the temptation to overstuff; it won't taste better, and it'll make it hard to roll up and cook unevenly.
   
9. Roll the dough up into a spiral. (You might be hard-pressed to do more than fold it in half, if you overstuffed it.)
   
10. Pinch the dough closed (you might need a tiny bit of water for this). You probably won't be able to pinch the main seam (just make it face down) without a lot of water, but you will need to pinch the ends.
    
11. Brush the top of the dough with the melted butter.
    
12. Sprinkle with sesame seeds.
    
13. Transfer from the peel directly to the stones.
    
14. Bake for about an hour, until loaf is golden brown and feels bready, not doughy.
    
15. Optionally, heat up some spaghetti sauce near the end of the baking time.
    
16. Slice into slices about 3/4" thick and serve with sauce for dipping on the side.
    

It keeps for days and is good served cold or reheated.

The photographs show the process of assembly and the final result of the one I made for New Year's Day. The fillings are Italian sausage with garlic and onions, mozzarella slices, and grated Locatelli Romano. All the pictures can be clicked to see full sized versions. You can see all the ingredients gathered in the first picture; those are sesame seeds in the tiny bowl in upper left, the sausage mix in a pan, and the cheeses in upper right. The dough has just come out of rising, been pounded down, and then cut in half before this picture.

Next, you see the dough rolled out, topped, and then rolled up. You can see how it looks ridiculously lumpy. Don't worry about that; it'll cook out from that to an even bread-loaf appearance.

In the next picture you see both loaves brushed with butter and sprinkled with sesame seeds. From here they went into the oven. One of them burst a little and overflowed some cheese, but it still came out fine; that's the one I cut up for dinner, and that's what you see slices of in the final picture.

Good roleplaying

In realspace, small group roleplaying games, people rarely talk about who is or is not a good roleplayer. It's not really a relevant factor. People aren't usually competitive about it, or if they are, it's between "us and them" -- all of our group against other groups. But in larger groups like at cons, and in big multiplayer roleplaying games like MUDs, roleplaying suddenly becomes something where people evaluate who is a "good" roleplayer. So far as I can tell, there's virtually no correlation between who gets a lot of recognition, and who actually is doing anything interesting or challenging. What attracts notice is not usually good roleplaying but merely the appearance of good roleplaying, which is almost entirely mutually exclusive with the actual thing.

First and foremost, good roleplaying is about making an interesting and realistic character, who fits into the story, and helps make it better. A good character is like a person in that you can't sum him up in a couple of sentences. Who he is derives from his past, and isn't all immediately visible, but as you peel back the layers and expose apparent contradictions you eventually also find how they're not contradictions at all, at least not the kind that a person can't realistically have within them.

In a multiplayer game, odds are that most people who encounter a character like that will never realize what's really going on, as it should be. However, when they see someone who is a very simple, very loud, very overt, very over-the-top personality, and one which is not simply "I want to win this game" but something -- anything! -- more than that, they realize, ah hah, I see roleplaying. That, and that alone, is what tends to earn merit. Of course, it's childishly easy to make a character like that, but since most people don't, it still seems unusual enough to stand out.

But it's not enough to be loud and obnoxious. There's one other element you need. See, most people play characters very like themselves, with similar attitudes, likes, and motivations. This is even more prevalent in long-term games (since you're going to have to live with that character for a while) than shorter-term games. Thus, most people assume that other people are very like their characters, and therefore, tend to dismiss roleplaying they're seeing as being merely an expression of that. However, if your character's personality or behavior is something the player clearly cannot really be, if only because a person like that would not be playing the game, then suddenly the same behavior is judged not a revealing appraisal of the player, but instead, a sure sign of roleplaying chops.

Ultimately the people who get the credit are people who have taken only one step away from "just play myself and treat it as a game" but once you get a second step into roleplaying, or more, you drop off everyone's radar. The more realistic and deep your roleplaying, the fewer people are likely to recognize it. It's a lot more so than how subtle but good acting isn't as easy to spot as brash and obvious acting: in those cases, critics and movie fans are actually looking for it. Everyone knows everyone's acting; no one mistakes actors for people playing themselves. Recognizing a better but subtler performance takes a little attention, but no more than that.

Sometimes I hope I can see some of the people I encounter in Lusternia twenty years from now, so I can watch them starting to realize the things I was saying to them all along. But maybe that's just a mix of schadenfreude and patronizing contempt, neither of which look very good on me. It's just that they're so young!

Playstation Move

A few Best Buy gift cards we got at our vow renewal have been sitting in my wallet for months, and so we finally decided to go ahead and spend them on a Playstation Move. This is the new interface for the Playstation that lets you get physical -- don't let Sony hear you say it's an answer to the Wiimote, because they insist it's so much more, but it really is.

Unlike the Wiimote which stands alone, the Move is integrated with the Playstation Eye, which is a webcam (with microphone) for the Playstation that's already used in some Playstation Network services and a few games; so the Eye is included in the Move starter bundle, which means I could now use the PS3 to video-chat with people.

Right now there aren't too many PS3 games that support the Move yet, and the only one I have is the one that came with it, Championship Games. This is a suite of physical games that take advantage of the Move. So far I've played all of them but beach volleyball, and beaten all of the ones I've played except table tennis. (I think table tennis may have been a particularly bad choice for a first game to play, as the number of movements required, and the complexity of mapping them to game moves in a way that felt natural, was a bit trickier than the others.)

Archery is more than a bit silly and feels entirely unlike actual archery. It's super-simple. You reach over your shoulder to get an arrow, then point it where you want it to go. There's a bit of accounting for range and wind, but mostly it's a matter of having a steady hand. The motions feel nothing like actual archery, and ultimately archery is not really a good match for the Move. This is disappointing since archery was one of the promotional images used for the Move, and it showed someone using the Move in combination with the secondary controller (which I don't have yet) in a very archery-like position, but if this game supports that, they don't mention it at all. (I suppose it might just not show until you have the secondary controller, though.)

Bocce was surprisingly compelling as a match for the Move. You don't feel the weight of the ball in your hand, of course, but it quickly feels natural to be throwing the ball. Sometimes it's hard to gauge how hard you're throwing it without throwing too high, but with only a little practice you can get to where that's not a problem. The same applied to disc golf (disc in this context means Frisbees).

Gladiator Duel is easily the most goofy fun, in part because the motions you're making are quick and forceful, not subtle. But by the same token, it's probably less challenging. This is made up for by adding complexity: you can move both a sword and a shield, dodge side to side, and build up to using power moves. Some of these motions are done by the Eye tracking your own movement around the room, and some with pressing buttons on the controller; it would be better if it was more of the former and less of the latter. The Move has the possibility to have the best of both the Wiimote and Kinect, but the software has to be developed that way.

Ultimately, though I had the most trouble with it, I think that table tennis might be the most compelling use of the Move. When it worked, I felt really natural, like I was actually playing table tennis. The movements were about the same, including the twists one does to put spin on the ball, but by the same token sometimes the difference between real table tennis and the game jumps out at you because you can't feel where the ball is to match it so well. I suspect a little more practice at it will narrow that gap. Playing it is surprisingly physical: exercise, but not exhausting, the way casual table tennis is.

These sports games are an obvious first Move game and show off the physical aspects, and they're well chosen to be moderately vigorous but not geared only to die-hard sports fans. But I really want to see how the Move will be used in other games. I also look forward to having a second controller and trying playing some of these things against other people. If I were a more dedicated gamer, I suppose it'd be a bigger deal. But I doubt the Move will ever be used as a drumstick in a future version of Rock Band! So in the end I'm not sure how much I'll use it.

Fiasco in the Regency period

I haven't even played Fiasco yet, and it's probably not going to turn out to be a favorite game since I don't seem to like the genre much; but I keep trying to think of places where it could be used. I think that's a natural outgrowth of my effort to understand what the genre actually is. (For instance, I still haven't gotten anyone to talk about whether it could be used to run something like The Out-Of-Towners.)

So I was thinking about whether you could use it to tell a story set in the same world as Jane Austen's books, but it would necessarily be a different story. So far as anyone I talked to can think of, there are no major works set in that period which actually tell a fiasco-like story. Protagonists often face terrible adversity but in some way, they triumph over it. Antagonists often come to messy ends, but as a result of comeuppance for their acts. There are grim things in stories, but they don't have the same character as in fiasco movies. You might even say that fiasco movies are in part a reaction against a standard paradigm of storytelling that was thrown into sharp focus during the period in question.

Thus, in playing Fiasco in that setting, or just writing a fiasco story in it, you would be fighting against the grain of all the tropes that the setting usually brings, and you would have to watch what you were doing very carefully. It would be quite a challenge. But I think if you could pull it off, the contrast and incongruity would be powerful, and force a new look at a familiar time period and setting. It could be very incredible, but it'd be very easy to get wrong.

The time period is rife with fiasco-like outcomes, though. Consider how badly ruined you are in that time if your reputation is sullied, and how hard it is to recover -- a story element Austen plays with extensively. Consider how mind-numbingly awful debtor's prison is (even if that speaks more of Victorian than Regency periods in terms of appearing in the fiction of each time, though they certainly fit into either). Consider how terrible the medicine of the time is, so even a minor injury can be crippling for life. The seemingly spotless ethics of Jane Austen's characters barely concealed a deep fascination with forbidden perversions of all sorts even amongst the upper classes. The disparities between the classes, and the way people of different races are treated, provides tons of fodder for the kind of motivations that would drive a fiasco story. And while many fiasco stories are firmly rooted in the criminal and working class worlds, with even the bigwigs little more than the biggest dung-beetle in a dung-heap, I think a lot could be done with tossing one or two upper-class folks into the mix, either slumming, or just drawn into the schemes by whatever desperate ploys one side or the other have used.

Since I am doubtful I'm even going to do "vanilla" Fiasco very well, I'm certainly not the person to explore these ideas farther. I am not even that familiar with the Regency period, and have never read any Jane Austen, beyond the snippets one can't help but absorbing through exposure to pop culture and some notable Austen fans in one's circle. I probably would have little fun playing in a Regency Fiasco. But I hope someone can use the idea.

Preserving the flaws of old technology

It's surprising how often the flaws and limitations of an old technology become something we depend upon, so that a new technology, through nothing more than eliminating a flaw, creates a problem that seems so hard to solve that instead of solving it, we reintroduce artificial versions of the same flaw to preserve the old "solution". I'm particularly thinking of things where, if the flaw hadn't always been there, no one would ever consider introducing it.

One of the most egregious examples is the noise cars make. If cars didn't exist, and then you invented the first one and it was quiet, no one would ever suggest, hey, what that really needs is a lot of loud, dissonant roaring and grumbling. In fact, over the years many efforts (most obviously mufflers) have been made to reduce the noise level. Finding ways to contain the noise is a whole facet of civil engineering; cities have to choose where to put in roads based on keeping the noise from making areas unliveable, and build sound barriers designed to channel the noise in less harmful ways.

And yet, the advent of hybrid and electric cars which can run almost entirely silently has a lot of people complaining. It's a danger: people can be crossing a road without any idea that a car is coming, because they're used to the noise, and don't bother to look. And what about those with vision disabilities, who can't easily rely on looking? It is actually being seriously proposed, and stands a real chance of coming to pass, to require silent automobiles to include an artificial noise generator, constantly running when the car is, wasting energy to create unwanted noise, just because a hundred years of noisy cars has caused us to take the noise for granted and we don't want to go back and think of better ways to ensure the "safety" that we currently get from noise, and then go through the probably difficult process of putting them into place. (We're so hesitant to make any change that requires retraining, or a commitment to infrastructure-level changes; the only big sweeping changes we can embrace are ones we can do piecemeal and haphazardly, never ones that are decided and planned and executed. That's why we still don't use metric, for instance.)

The entire issue of digital rights management exists largely because a flaw in all previous methods of copying media, the loss of fidelity, meant we never really had to address the "copying of information" question that carefully before, because the flaw left an innate limitation on how far it could go. Yes, you could always buy an LP and then copy it to tape, and yes, the record industry always made a big fuss about that; but a few tape copies here and there was a drop in the bucket compared to widespread MP3 sharing. Yes, you could always make a photocopy of a book for your friend, or lend your book to your friend, but you couldn't spread it very far that way, it was too costly and limiting; being able to share eBooks as far as you like changes things. The same for movies, photos, and any other content you can think of.

Suddenly, the progressive loss of fidelity during copies was removed, and suddenly, no one can figure out a fair way to balance the rights of the content creator, the content distributor, the distribution infrastructure, and the content owner. While it certainly doesn't help that the two middle parts of that equation (the distributor, e.g., record companies and publishers; and the infrastructure, e.g., ISPs and cable companies) are rapacious, territorial bastards without the slightest compunction about being as unfair as they can, the problem is deeper than pointing a few fingers at the obvious villains. Even when you remove them from the equation and use the power of the Internet to connect creators to consumers directly, the problem doesn't go away. Creators still need to be sure they've got a chance to make a profit commensurate with their investment of both effort and talent, or they won't bother to create; consumers need to be sure that their money will get them the product they want and a reasonable expectation they'll be able to keep having access to it for its lifetime, along with "fair use" provisions like reasonable levels of sharing with friends. On both sides, expectations have been inflated to ridiculous levels by the old system. Creators dream of "hitting it big" and even those who are content making a paltry salary and keeping a day job still nurse the idea because they can't help but compare themselves to the millions being made by others in their field. Consumers were spoiled enough by being able to freely lend and copy their stuff for friends, but are ten times more spoiled by years of using Napster and BitTorrent, and can easily expand an observation about how this record company is evil, or that rock star is a pretentious git, into a rationalization that doesn't allow for any content creator to get fair recompense for his work.

Some people have actually proposed reintroducing loss of fidelity to copying, but no one really has the power to do that; the genie is way too far out of the bottle. Instead, most of the overzealous attempts to reintroduce the old flaw have gone even farther by completely eliminating all copying opportunities. They're kind of forced into that because once you can make a copy there's no way to limit what you do with it. But they've also gone too far. Even when they completely control the format, so they could introduce appropriately limited copying rights, consumers argue that they should have far more, and they overreact by giving them essentially none. There's a fairly obvious happy medium where both sides give up their unrealistic expectations and meet in the middle, but no one's moving towards it.

This reminds me of another juicy one: when CDs were new, a lot of people insisted that they sounded worse than LPs for many years. Of note was the fact that classical music fans latched onto CDs instantly and without hesitation. Classical music recording was always about capturing the experience of being there in front of the symphony or quartet, and CDs did that far, far better than LPs. But pop music fans had been, for decades, listening to albums which had been mixed by sound mixers who knew about the limitations of LPs, the distortion and hum that would later be called a "warm" sound, and had been mixing their albums around it, making sounds more austere and harsh and "cold" so that when the LP added its hum the sound would be what they wanted. There were certainly sounds you could never achieve this way, but at least the sounds we got were good ones. The first CDs were simply pressed from the same recordings, and we heard them as they were, not as they were intended, for the first time, and a lot of people balked. It's so cold and bland. Time to get the LPs back out.

Then the CD makers realized what was happening and started remixing for CD, and most of the LP-diehards came around, though they still remain as a marginal subculture. (I'm not counting the people who like phonographs to play old things not available on other formats, or who just like the nostalgia; I mean only those who still insist LPs have better sound quality than CDs.) And nowadays those who mix music don't have to guess at what a particular phonograph will add to the sound; they take the sound they want and put it on the CD and bang, you get it. If they want the "warm" sound of a late 60s Beatles album, they can do that, and if they want something a 60s LP could not have done, they can do that, too. But for a while, everything was simply carefully recreating and reintroducing the distortion of old LPs because that's what people were used to; and there's still a surprisingly large amount of that.

There's plenty of other examples where we've taken a flaw we're used to and preserved it artificially. If only we could learn how to, as a society, step back and ask how things should be, how we'd make them if we could wipe the slate and start clean with the resources we have now; and then let that inform what we do, instead of always doing things by tiny, big-picture-free steps.

Inglorious Basterds

Of the Tarantino movies I have watched so far, Inglorious Basterds is easily my favorite. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I enjoyed it.

In some ways, it is the most "conventional" of the three, at least in terms of storytelling: more than the others it's a single story that builds to a conclusion, with mounting tension and plot complications. The classics are classics for a reason: they work. And yet this makes it sound like that's the only kind of story I like, and I don't think that's true. I can think of plenty of things I like that don't follow that structure. But there are a lot of ways to put a film together other than the classic formula, and I can not like a particular few (like the ones Tarantino seems fond of) without disliking others.

What I like best about the movie ultimately is Aldo Raines. I don't know how much of the credit to give to Tarantino (as writer and director) and how much to give to Brad Pitt. I just know that his totally brash, artless, straight-as-an-arrow spirit stole every scene he was in. His explanation for what was wrong with fighting in basements was a delight.

The depiction of Hans Landa also stands out as impressively nuanced and unusual. Nazis are the very definition of one-dimensional villains, but Hans is smart, polite, socially awkward, brash, and stops just short of being sympathizable. It's not even the occasionally-used trick of him being charming just to make his ruthless brutality seem more stark or disturbing. No, Hans is an interesting person who happens to be both a Nazi, heir to all the cultural conditioning and viewpoints that brings, and a brilliant detective.

Spoilers Below

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Throughout the whole movie there's a suspense that mostly comes from the fact that you know how it has to end, and yet, you don't know how it can possibly end. After all, you know how World War II ended. How can the story we're seeing end up fitting within that? As the minutes tick away and the end of the movie approaches, you're wondering, how can he possibly get to a resolution that will fit what we know, or at least explain the difference between what "really" happened and what all the history books tell? The movie keeps refusing to start showing how it's going to get there, and that builds up a potent suspense.

And then in the final chapter, the answer that comes out is a surprise. Tarantino managed something unexpected: a historical film, set in a period whose history we all know, that has a surprise ending. The surprise is this: this isn't our history, our world. World War II doesn't end here like it did for us. Which means, we suddenly realize as we watch Hitler's body riddled with bullets, that all bets are off. Everything is up for grabs. Even as we watch the theater burn and then explode we're wondering all the usual cop-outs -- it was all covered up, it's just a dream, there are clones of Hitler and Bormann on ice, and so on -- but by the time the last pieces of glass fall to the pavement it's clear that that's not going to happen. This is not that story. And suddenly you realize you have no idea how this movie is going to end.

This is a remarkably gutsy decision. I don't think I would ever have come up with the idea to do it. Sure, the idea of an alternate history version of WW2 is easy enough, I've seen that a zillion times. But it's always clear from early on that it's going to go that way. I've never seen a movie string us along until the very end before making that clear, and yet, at the same time, when you think back on it, nothing in the movie ever precluded the possibility. The movie never put the possibility on the table, but it never protested too much against it, either. Taken as the story that leads to the ending it has, it was simply telling us what happened, completely honestly and in a very straightforward way. It's just that we brought our preconception about what could happen -- quite honestly earned, since it's what did happen -- and the movie never had to say anything one way or the other, to let us do all the work of fooling ourselves. If it had indulged itself in something that we could look back on later and say, ah hah, there the movie was winking at us about what it was going to do, egging us on, that would have cheapened it a little. Full credit to Tarantino for not only taking the gutsy choice, but also doing it honestly, without trickery, and standing behind it.

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is a very well received movie. Not only do many people think very highly of it, but so do a lot of people whose opinion I respect on such matters. Not just fans, and not just critics, but also people who make movies, and who make good movies. This makes it hard for me to say much about it because I don't have much good to say.

And I don't just mean in the sense of "it's a well-made movie that just doesn't interest me" -- I don't even see where it's a well-made movie. But I don't mean to be disagreeing with all those people in the way that one would expect, where I think I'm right and they're wrong. I fully, honestly, sincerely imagine maybe there's something I'm not picking up. Trouble is, when people say that, so often they mean they really do think they're right and everyone else is wrong, but they don't want to say so, because it sounds arrogant. Everyone knows that, though, so when people demur from that claim, everyone reads in the subtext.

So anything I say about the movie inevitably has to come off confrontational, like I'm claiming it's not nearly that good a movie as people think, and I'm the only one who sees that (which I actually did, to some extent, with The Matrix). So I say things about the movie as an act of taking a risk: maybe I'll get some more insight into the movie, but more likely, I'll just offend people who like it and think I'm dissing it.

First, what was good? Certainly some of the tense moments had a tension I appreciate. I was intrigued by the unexpected use of non-linear storytelling -- we get about halfway through the movie before we even realize that things aren't entirely chronological. While a lot of the acting felt too distant for me to know if it was good, what I saw was solid, convincing, engaging. Harvey Keitel's character was amusing to watch, and the oddly-themed restaurant was interesting. Several scenes had some incidental-seeming conversation that was amusing, in the sense that if you deleted a few dozen F-words from it and retooled it a bit, a stand-up comedian could have made some material out of it.

What didn't work for me, though, is two main things: the plot and the characters. My problem with the plot is that it doesn't seem so much like it had one, as it had a bunch of parts of one that never entirely got to go anywhere. Maybe half of the things that happened probably wouldn't've changed much if they hadn't happened. Most of the things that started never finished; in fact, the whole movie doesn't actually end so much as come to the conclusion of a scene and then fail to have another one after it. Don't get me wrong: I am not the kind of person who only likes movies where everything is tied up in a neat bow at the end, far from it. But I am conventional enough to want a story to go somewhere, and I don't feel like this one really ever did.

I was trying to think about what about the characters bugged me and I suspect people might think it's because I find them unlikeable or alien. I think that's missing the point. To me, as I go through the characters, I think every one of them can be summed up in precisely two sentences, and short ones at that. The first sentence says what the character obviously appears to be: a hedonistic, shallow trophy wife; a hard-ass gangster; an opportunistic, washed-up boxer. The second sentence describes what is revealed in some single scene to also be true of the character, which isn't obvious from the first sentence, or may even appear to contradict it. The boxer also has a conscience; the gangster wonders what it's all about. And that, so far as I can see, is it. That's all the complexity, all the development, all the humanity any of them have.

Admittedly, that's more than characters sometimes have in action movies. How much more could you say about Dallas from Alien, or Sarah Connor? But those movies aren't counting on there being a lot more depth or layers, usually. There's other things you're going to those movies for. Pulp Fiction acts like it's primarily a character study, a vehicle for a bunch of characters to interact with one another, change, or reveal things about themselves.

So is it not really primarily a character study; is there something else and the characters are just there to move through it? Or if it is, what am I missing about the characters?

If I got answers to these things that satisfied me, it would probably change my reaction to "okay, so it's well done, and Tarantino's style is just not to my tastes," which is why I'm not looking forward to the other of his movies on the must-see list, and tempted to set them aside and watch something enjoyable for a bit before going back to the chore. But as of this writing I've seen most of Inglorious Basterds (the copy I had on my Archos was cut off, so I have to watch the rest at home), and a bit of Reservoir Dogs, and I'll at least see those through before I take a break.

Tron: Legacy

We now interrupt the string of movie reviews of movies I watched while travelling, for a... movie review, of a movie I watched after travelling. We saw Tron: Legacy in 3D the opening weekend, and I definitely think it was worth seeing in the theater, and in 3D.

Avatar has really set the bar for using 3D the right way: to bring you into the world and intensify the action, without cheap gimmicks (like the "axe flying at you" thing that the Resident Evil movies, at least according to the trailers, seem to think is what 3D is for, harkening back to Friday the 13th sequels). Tron: Legacy doesn't do as well as Avatar but it does a hell of a lot better than Clash of the Titans at using 3D. Notably, it uses 3D both for some breathtaking visuals and for some story elements (such as the transition between worlds).

Visually the movie is amazingly done. Very little of it feels too frenetic to be watched, even in the fast action scenes -- the director hasn't bought into the idea that the key to intense action is not being able to see it, and there's no shakycam and only occasional overuse of too-close, too-fast cuts. Compared to the digital world of the original, it's even darker, and there's less color, but the color that's there provides greater contrast. I don't just mean that in the sense of the colors popping off the screen (though they do); I also mean there's more contrast between one place in the digital world and another, and what kind of feels those different places are intended to have.

The story feels a little less deep and full of wonder than the original to me. They can't just make another version of the first movie because so much of the first movie was built around the wonder of Flynn figuring out what was going on around him, and us figuring it out with him. The original made the wise decision of not having Flynn stagger around in disbelief for half the film, as many movies with that much "culture shock" do; and the sequel, again wisely, has Sam do even less of that, because Flynn has brought him up with stories of this world (though told as bedtime stories which maybe Sam wasn't supposed to believe literally, or maybe was). 30 minutes of Sam going through the same discovery as Flynn would simply have felt dull to us now.

But what do they replace it with? There are a few new things to discover: changes in the world from what we knew, and new developments. But mostly the movie fills that gap with a new story that raises the stakes, but in a conventional action-movie sort of way. It's compelling, but not in quite the endearingly goofy way that the first movie had.

Both movies also go much farther than most movies in failing to spell out just how things work, except when the story requires it. If you try to imagine running a roleplaying game in that world, you'll see just how much we don't know about what programs can and can't do, what powers users have, what would happen if you did this or that. Despite that, in some ways, the internal physics of the digital world holds together a little better in this movie than the previous one.

Though there are three glaring exceptions that make no sense, but which probably won't bother anyone. Since they're all spoilers, I'll encode them with ROT13. Click to decode:

gur fcbagnarbhf trarengvba bs Vfbf juvpu unir punenpgrevfgvpf fvzvyne gb bgure cebtenzf vapyhqvat fncvrapr; gur snpg gung Pyh naq Sylaa pna qrfgebl rnpu bgure bayl ol pbzovavat va na betl bs zhghny qrfgehpgvba; naq gur vqrn gung gur erny-gb-qvtvgny genafvgvba pna or erirefrq, cebqhpvat n jbexvat obql bhg bs abguvat va gur erny jbeyq sbe n cebtenz

As far as acting, very little is asked of Garrett Hedlund; he just has to be cocksure and swaggering a bit, and he does just fine. Olivia Wilde gets a little more material and handles it well, but one feels a bit short-changed that she isn't explored more and given more of a chance to act. But Jeff Bridges does enough acting to make up for everyone else in the film. The man really can carry off some complex balancing acts between different viewpoints. Kevin Flynn seems on the surface like a jumble of oddly mismatched mannerisms and ideas, but they absolutely work together and make sense. And when you're seeing Jeff acting opposite his digitally-younger self, the two Jeffs absolutely come off as two distinct characters without making you conscious of the duplication, as you often see in the slightly stilted timing and movements you're used to seeing in actor-playing-against-himself trickery in the movies. Jeff is pulling off some very impressive expression of considerable depth and non-obvious character exploration at the same time as he's treating the challenges of acting against a green screen like they didn't exist, like he was really in the computer. The man deserves a lot more credit than he gets, and given in what low regard effects-heavy action movies are held, more than he's ever going to get for the performance he gave here and the challenges he overcame giving it.

If you haven't seen the original movie, or just not recently, you might actually miss the many allusions, which just goes to show how gentle they often are -- and still just as satisfying as a stroke for those of us good kiddies who remember the first movie. A number of key lines got repeated, but very rarely did they feel forced in, or recited because they had to work them in somehow. Wisely, there was no allusion at all to Bit. (There's one thing that might have been intended as one, but it wasn't really that shape, so if it was, I don't know why they did it like they did.) There are also some lovely allusions to the time of the original movie; the authentic arcade sounds when Flynn's gets powered up are a little bolt of amusement for anyone who lived then.

I love the way they updated the light cycles game. The original game seemed a bit limited: a faster engine or greater numbers should always win, and there was no good reason why the engines got faster and slower at times, but tactically the game just didn't seem like it could go anywhere. The new twist preserves what was great in the original game, is visually exciting, and also makes the game itself a lot more compelling. Usually they pay no attention to making the game also work as a game, and focus only on it making good movie footage. (Space Paranoids certainly fits that, from the original movie.) Maybe they thought about how the Tron arcade game made tons more money than the Tron movie, and that's even more important nowadays when that kind of game/movie tie-together is de rigeur (it was fairly odd back in the days of the original movie).

Speaking of which, I know their focus for games will be consoles and PC games, and those already are lining your Best Buy's shelves. (I still don't know if the PS3 game is Move-compatible; I want to throw discs!) But will they make a new coin-op arcade game? They do still make coin-op games, and most of them are tied in with movies, so there was never a more natural extension; yet I haven't heard anything about one. I wonder if it's pie-eyed to imagine a Tron arcade game reviving interest in coin-op arcades just a little bit.

In all this is a movie well worth seeing. I don't think it's going to have quite the impact and longevity of the original, but it's still a great movie, which both inherits the legacy of the original and manages to refresh and reinvigorate it. There are so many interesting ways the next movie (I assume there will be a next movie) can go, and I look forward to seeing which one they take.

Predator

Yes, I really had never seen this movie. I think I'd seen a few minutes here or there, but that's it. As the movie's been around a long time and doesn't really depend on suspense, I won't work too hard to avoid spoilers here.

There's certainly a lot of badass in a concentrated place and tons of action-movie checklist items; but the movie was surprisingly slow, and really dull as a result. I am trying to imagine if maybe all that slowness was more impactful when the movie first came out. Goodness knows Alien is slow-paced, and has as little, maybe less, actually happen; and yet it is still one of my favorite movies of all time. I don't think the slowness in Predator works in the same way, though. And that's because, despite the obvious similarities that beg comparison, from the basic premise to the checklist of plot elements, they're really completely different movies.

The reason for that is the characters. The aliens are not that different, but the human characters could hardly be more unalike. Everyone in Predator is so stoked with Badassery that they can hardly see over their bad asses. It is the defining trait of everything they do, and thus, of the entire movie. It sets the tone of everything, even the times they're being hunted, even their losses. The characters in Alien are not, in the slightest, badasses, and that sets the tone for everything they do, and for the entire movie. (Sure, Ripley ends up a badass in the sequel, but in the original, even the homicidal superhuman android manages, while in the process of attempting to murder one of his shipmates, to come across as slightly effeminate. Think about the tone that sets, compared to what the whole movie would have felt like if Ash had been more like a Terminator, the way everyone in Predator is.)

There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a bunch of badasses against an alien predator. That's essentially what Aliens is, and that movie absolutely works. But to pull that off you need to use the right pace, and the right tone. Predator is like the premise of Aliens made using the stage dressing of Alien, and the combination just doesn't work. It just makes the slowness feel slow.

The scenes with ArnieDutch making traps puzzled me. Maybe I wasn't watching closely enough, or the small screen I was watching hid important details; but while I got the general gist of the traps, I didn't really get much of a sense of what most of them actually were, or how they worked. Again, that's fine, I don't have to, but they spent a lot of time showing me their construction, but still managed to do so in such a way that I didn't actually know how most of them were constructed or what they would do.

I'll give the movie credit for introducing some concepts that were relatively fresh at the time. Aliens were rarely "amongst us" then and when they were it was invariably as moles within society, meaning humans were somehow important. The best thing the movie does is demote Earth to a backwater that's regularly visited but for no reason other than going on safari. There were also some nice touches in how the creature needed heat (I was surprised that this didn't prove instrumental to its eventual defeat) and how that was reflected in its vision, both augmented and unaugmented; I suspect if you sat down and thought through the biology, you'd find it holds together better than a lot of aliens do, particularly aliens in movies like this where there's really no need for it to be consistent.

It could have been so much better if it had played a little more than it did with the idea of "good sportsmanship." We saw some of that. Billy squaring off against the alien for a "fair fight," that mad look in his eye clearly driven at least in part by respect for the alien's warrior-animal-spirit. The alien eschewing its shoulder-gun to take on Dutch mano-a-mano, or earlier, refusing to attack the unarmed (although it did regularly hunt people from the villages in previous years). But too often that part was ignored when it mattered. Sometimes the alien turned down easy kills and then at other times it took even easier, less sportsmanlike kills. The end didn't end up trading on the idea of a fight between two great hunters or warriors (apart from that one bare-knuckled-fight bit). It came down to a stupid bit of luck.

And then whatever credit they'd earned, they threw away with that awful, awful laugh. Was there anyone who actually found it menacing or anything but comical? It grated on me that, after so much attention was paid to making the alien alien, they give it a laugh that sounds just like any maniacal scenery-chewing villain. All I could hear in my mind was Wash saying "Mine is an evil laugh!" It felt like the movie stopped for thirty seconds to spoof itself, and then expected us to pretend it hadn't happened once the thirty seconds was over.

Ultimately I groaned a lot at the movie, and cheered very little. I hope that the takeaway is that the movie didn't age well. But I feel like I wouldn't've liked it that much even back when it came out.

Donnie Darko

Beyond the chorus of "you have to see this" and the knowledge that it's supposed to have a mind-blowing twist, I knew nothing about Donnie Darko when I started on it. Not even who was in it, and so I was surprised to see how many people I recognized; I had gotten a vague idea it was a low-budget movie somehow. I also don't remember if I saw the theatrical edition or the director's cut, as it was months between when I loaded it onto my Archos and when I watched it.

All in all, I'd say I enjoyed it, and it held my suspense as I tried to figure it out. By twenty minutes in, I'd gotten a grasp on the tone and style, and after that, it mostly went the way I expected; yet there were some surprises, notably on which of the various plot threads were picked up and which never panned out.

Much of the credit the movie's gotten is in how you really have to think to figure it out, and even if you think you have, you can't be entirely sure. I certainly appreciate that you have to think it through, but what I am not decided about is if there is an answer. The appeal of a mystery loses a lot (not all, but a lot) of its edge when it becomes clear to me that either there isn't an answer, or if there is, the filmmaker deliberately didn't give us enough information to figure it out, no matter how clever or deliberate we think about it. That's just too easy a path to the appearance of profundity. As Nietzsche said, "Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial."

For an example of what I mean, compare Memento with Primer. The former includes everything you need to figure out what was actually going on, but boy, is it quite a puzzle to actually figure it all out. The latter deliberately excludes a lot of necessary clues, and deliberately obfuscates much of what it does include. I enjoyed both movies, but I respect Memento a lot more, and I consider the "it's such a puzzle!" aspect of Primer to be a red herring; it's not really a virtue at all, it only seems that way at first glance. I'm not sure where Donnie Darko falls on this spectrum. It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Primer, and I feel it quite likely that the filmmaker did have actual answers in mind, but I suspect there's some things that are simply unexplained in the film. That said, I admit I might just not have put it all together. I didn't work as hard on the mystery as I might have, mostly just because I didn't have the free time to do so.

One thing it has in common with Primer is that I don't think the filmmakers really intended the mystery to be the point of the movie. The primary point of the movie was the feel. The mystery isn't nothing, and it's not merely a device for establishing feel, but when the two conflict, the tone wins. So not answering some questions, and not picking up on some apparently storyline elements, is an intentional way of directing the feel of the film even when that interferes with the idea of treating it as a puzzle.

All in all, I appreciated the movie, and of the many movies I watched during my recent travels it was one of the more suspenseful and enjoyable, but it's not one I would hurry to watch again. There's nothing wrong with the movie. It's well produced, well acted, and tightly scripted. It just doesn't grab me. The feel and tone sustain my interest only so far, and the mystery doesn't make me feel compelled to rewatch it to try to solve it.

Blood Simple

The last of the fiasco-genre movies I watched (at least for the sake of familiarizing myself with the genre -- other movies I watched are in the list, maybe, but that's not why I watched them) was Blood Simple. Of the three, A Simple Plan was my favorite, and Blood Simple my least favorite, with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels falling squarely in the middle.

Mostly, it's because the story in Blood Simple didn't interest me at all. It's not just that I didn't care about the characters, or what happened to them. It's also that I really didn't find there to be much there even to be disinterested in. It felt like there was about 30 minutes of movie, and then an hour of moody camera angles. With everything so slow, and every character so miserable that you didn't care what happened to them, it seemed like the movie tried to overcome the ennui by making sure what happened to them was so, so, so awful that it somehow overcame the unconcern. But even when it got to its worst (those who've seen the movie might guess which scene I'm thinking of -- though I have two in mind) and my reaction was suitably (though mildly) horrified at the idea, I still didn't quite care.

I can't blame the acting or production or even the direction (apart from the incredibly slow pace). It really comes down to that there was nothing about the story to intrigue me at all, and there wasn't anything else.

But since I wasn't watching it for enjoyment but instead to understand the fiasco genre, I think it served that purpose.

A Simple Plan

The second movie in the "Fiasco" genre I watched, after Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, was A Simple Plan. Of all the fiasco movies I've watched, this one was my favorite, and the most impactful. I'm going to avoid spoilers, but inevitably in the process of talking about the movie I'm going to reveal some things about the tone that might hint at the plot a little and dampen the impact of parts of the story, so if you haven't seen it and want to avoid spoilers it still might be best to avoid reading this.

The thing about LS&2SB that made me feel largely unengaged was that I didn't care enough about how it was going to turn out to either root for or against anyone, or for or against any particular outcome. I wrote a fair amount about why that is in my previous post, but I think the biggest reason is the one I came up with last. In a conventional "good guys win" movie, you know how it's going to end, roughly; but you don't know how it'll get there, and therefore, you don't know what the effects will be, what the costs and consequences will be on the characters, that come from how they got there. The one thing you do know -- that the good guys win -- is only one of several important things you want to know. The other important things are, what does the victory mean to the characters, how does it affect them? In a fiasco movie, however, the one thing you do know -- that the characters will all end up screwed -- is really the only thing that matters. There's no analogous second question about which there may be suspense. The only thing you don't know is the precise path they take to get to their miserable ends, and which specific miserable end they'll have, but that really doesn't matter that much.

This does affect A Simple Plan somewhat, and this is enough to ensure that if I had never seen it I wouldn't feel like I missed out. However, A Simple Plan still struck me as a much better movie because it engaged me a lot more, and that's for one simple, even simplistic, reason: I could identify with the characters. As they progressed down the path to eventual ruin, I felt like the path was one anyone could have ended up on. I could have, or anyone I know could have, ended up in the same situation easily enough, if the dice had happened to fall the right way, and just a few easily-made mistakes got made.

Contrast that to LS&2SB where the characters, one and all, are in the messes they're in not just because of mistakes they make, but also because of the kind of people they are and the kind of life they've chosen. It's a life that feels alien to me, and perhaps I'm being condescending when I say it, but I feel like they're at least partially to blame for their situation: they put themselves into a world where that kind of thing happens to lots of people.

But the characters in A Simple Plan are fairly ordinary people dealing with fairly ordinary challenges who happen to run into something that is unusual, but could plausibly happen to almost anyone. They make some poor decisions, and they have a few notable cases of bad luck, terrible timing, and the like, but by and large, they find themselves drawn, step by step, into a ruin for which they can only blame themselves. Before long they're looking back saying, how did it come to this? How did I end up doing the things I've done, that I would not have thought myself capable of? That's not something that almost anyone in LS&2SB can get away with saying with a straight face.

For this reason I found the story and the characters far more compelling. I suspect that what's really happened here is, I don't particularly care for the fiasco-genre part of the story, which is why I haven't really enjoyed any of the other fiasco movies I've seen; but I have found something else to like about this movie, a different place to latch onto it. I don't mean to suggest that what I like about the movie is something the creators didn't intend, because I'm sure they absolutely meant me to feel what I felt. The movie is simply operating on several levels. It's a fiasco movie, but it's also using that to do things that not all fiasco movies do, and it's that other stuff that was working for me.

The movie's craftsmanship was also pretty amazingly well done. Most notably the casting was fantastic. Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton were just perfect, and did a great performance. I don't know how flexible Paxton is; I have seen him in a number of roles and never been wowed, but never felt like he did a bad job. (Though some of his delivery in Twister was pretty clumsy.) But there's nothing he does better than the regular schlub with whom you can sympathize. And Thornton is incredible. There wasn't really a lot of noticeable cinematography or other production stuff, but the production did precisely what it should have done, facilitated the story. In hindsight I'm impressed with what they had to go through to get the story to work and to deal with the winter setting, but at the time I didn't notice any of that.

For all that, I wouldn't've missed the movie much if I hadn't seen it. It was a solid movie, and it's impressive how well they strung the story together, but it's not a story I really needed to be told.

Liking movies

I have been watching a lot of movies lately that I feel I should have seen, or that people, on hearing I haven't seen them, react with surprise. Some of these I have liked some, some I have liked not much, and some I haven't liked at all. There hasn't been a single one yet to which my reaction was "that was great" or to wish I'd seen it sooner. But they're all ones that I really ought to be familiar with, as part of being aware of the pop culture in which I live, and for other reasons.

In the process of thinking about them, and why some people I know like them so much more than I did, I put my finger on a thought about the way I appreciate movies and how it differs from how other people do. It's not easy to explain so I'll use an analogy even though the analogy will only get us so far before proving to be flawed. But it'll frame the idea in the right tone.

Some of the music I like tells stories -- think of the works of Harry Chapin, for instance. Some music tells interesting stories, but a lot more music tells a story that, if you took it out of the song and just started telling it, it wouldn't be a very interesting story at all. And lots and lots of music doesn't even try to tell a story. When a song tells a story that's interesting that might be part of why I like it, but even if it tells a dull story or no story at all, I could very well like it. A song which told a really awful story might annoy me enough to not like the song, but that'd be fairly rare; if the song is good, the story won't be enough to make it bad, generally. In the end, I like the music itself, for itself. I like the medium of a song, the form, the way songs are put together.

Drawing an analogy between this and movies doesn't really work because the story is a much more central part of what a movie is than what a song is. Even so, I think the analogy helps me pin down the difference I'm looking to pin down.

If you took a story that I wasn't interested in, and made it into a movie that was really excellently well done, with great production, great acting, great effects, great cinematography, great direction, great costuming, and so on and so on, you'd have a movie that might be a great movie, but which I simply wouldn't like. If you took a story that I found really interesting and made a very bad movie out of it, I might not like it, but I would still probably like it better than the well-done movie about a story I found wholly uninteresting.

However, I think for some of my friends, while they certainly can love or hate the story of a movie, and that will certainly impact how much they like the movie, they have an appreciation for the movie itself -- for the form, the medium, the way it's put together, the experience of simply watching a movie -- that I don't generally have. They can enjoy the movieness of the movie even when the story isn't one that, if it were distilled away from the movie and retold in another form, wouldn't interest them, and I rarely can.

This is certainly not a cut-and-dried thing. I don't mean that they can like the cinematography of a terrible movie in which nothing happens, or like the story doesn't matter. And I don't mean that I will have no appreciation for the craftsmanship of a finely made movie about a dull story. But I think the difference helps me understand why sometimes I feel like I'm being too picky about movies compared to other people, and helps me feel better about the idea that I not only can, but very often do find myself saying (or at least thinking) "it's a great movie, I'm sure, I just don't like it" and knowing something about why. It's similar to how I feel when I talk about music to people who only like music that they can dance to, and don't know how I can appreciate music that doesn't lend itself to dancing (or if not dancing then any of many other possible things they need to take from music to appreciate it).

Quite a few of the movies I've been watching recently will fall into this category. I'm sure they're great movies. And when I say I didn't particularly enjoy watching them, I really, really mean that that doesn't take anything away from the craftsmanship of the movie or my appreciation for the people involved. It just means that the story itself didn't interest me. Hopefully that focus will help clarify the reviews I intend to write soon.

Last-minute flying

The second half of last week we spent on an unplanned trip to Florida for three days, though really it was one day there, and two days in transit. We flew out Wednesday morning, arrived Wednesday evening in Orlando, drove to Ocala, then returned Friday morning and got home Friday evening.

We had pretty good luck with the air travel itself. On three out of four flights, we had at least one empty seat in our vicinity, and boy, does that make all the difference. One of them, when we booked all we could get was middle seats on opposite sides of the plane, but there ended up at least a dozen empty seats around us and we got to have a row together to ourselves. The only flight we got crowded on was the last one (which was also the only one that got delayed); that one was a tiny plane with only three seats per row, one on one side and two on the other. That flight was uncomfortable for a number of reasons, but still not as bad as being two of three people in a three-seat row.

This was also my first flight using the noise-cancelling headphones I'd purchased from Woot. Previously I had used them mostly while exercising and I was dubious about them. With them turned on, they did block a bit more noise than with them turned off, but not as much as you'd imagine. The form-fitting ear cups did most of the work, and the creaking noise that the recumbent bike at work makes was able to cut through that, making it hard to hear the movie on the Archos sometimes. However, their intent isn't really to block short, loud noises, so much as to dull them. What they really do is cancel out low, constant drones, like the one the plane's engines make. And they really worked at that.

I can safely say that after each trip I got to wear them, I felt a lot less exhausted, drained, and cranky than I have after flights in the past. I can't say how much of that is due to the hypothesis that cancelling out that engine drone is a key part of it, and how much is because of having had shorter flights, more comfort, and a psychosomatic sense that it should be better because of the headphones. But I'm certainly planning to keep using them this way.

I didn't actually use them for music (that might actually work better at drowning out airplane noises), but for watching movies; I've been working my way through the list of movies that I really should have seen, or that everyone assumes I would have seen, but that I haven't seen. In fact, upcoming blog posts will be including a number of movie reviews.

I also brought my Kindle but in the end I didn't use it on the whole trip. Even so, it did occur to me that there's exactly one way in which the Kindle is inferior to a printed book: that limitation, which for all I know is entirely arbitrary, against electronic devices being used at the start and end of flights. (I seriously doubt a Kindle with its wireless turned off could possibly be emitting anything at all that could even be detected at 20', let alone interfere with things. But I can certainly understand why the airlines don't find it worth it to set up a program by which electronics manufacturers certify their equipment as plane-safe. I mean, we can't even bring a bottle of Pepsi onto a plane. Are they going to start trusting that that Kindle is really a Kindle, not an IFS-jammer?)

The visit to Florida wasn't for pleasure, it was for a funeral, and we didn't even set out to visit nice restaurants. (By happenstance we did get to have one unusual and good meal, though.) For all that, it was kind of nice to have a couple of days of sunshine and even some warm weather as a little break from the relentless grey that is December in Vermont. But it was really nice to be back home too.