Narnia for Atheists?
A few hours ago a friend sent me mail about Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials. One of the novels in this series was recently made into a movie called The Golden Compass. Apparently there is some controversy over this series, which I have not read and only heard about recently, that the books are propaganda for atheism posing as genre literature.
As an atheist, I don't quite see what the problem is. Isn't that what C.S. Lewis did with for Christianity with his Narnia series? If His Dark Materials becomes the atheist's Narnia, fair is fair.
A long parenthetical comment follows:
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Posted by Pace Arko at 1:04 AM on November 2, 2007 | Comments (4)
Well--at least it's about movies.
The B-Movie Comic was recommended to me by the folks of the In Sect. B-Movie is pretty funny! Imagine archeologists, the British Raj, dodering professors, plucky Chinese orphans, goths, a doomed family of Egyptians, jocks and ancient priestly mummies wearing t-shirts all suffering at the hands of bad continuity and low budgets in a cheap horror movie.
Posted by Pace Arko at 1:28 PM on July 29, 2005
Primer
A few months ago I rented Primer on DVD. Primer is deeply elusive movie about time travel. More exactly, it's a story about what would happen if someone really invented a time travel device. I suppose some people may find it little frustrating but, I liked it. The acting is understated and restrained and that only serves to make everything more realistic--sort of reminded me of Kubrick's stuff. It's a low budget, film schoolish project but it's a heckuva lot more original a lot of the dreck Hollywood is passing out these days.
I think Primer is a movie designed to really take advantage of the DVD concept because the plot is so utterly nonlinear. I watched again and again, trying to figure out what really happened. It's deliberately evasive about time travel and, so far, I can see how the movie could resolve in several ways. It's actually one of those flicks I would really want to buy the DVD of, not because of audio commentary or extra footage or other such frippery, but to see it again and again and try to figure out the movie itself.
Mr. F says check it out!
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:27 PM on July 1, 2005 | Comments (0)
Computers in the movies
Computers in the movies are much more noisy and visually exciting than in real life. The truth is that computer crime is visually very boring to watch. The criminal just sits there switching between prompts and editors typing in cryptic commands and getting getting very terse output as feedback. All that's heard is the tick of keyboard, the rattle of disks and maybe the whir of cooling fans, assuming they haven't taken steps to quieten their machines. Maybe they've got some music in background. Movie directors usually can't abide silence or visually dead scenes. This is why we have space vehicles in science fiction epics that bank like airplanes and make noises like insects with Tourette's Syndrome. The same applies to computers.
Reality apparently doesn't make for good cinema.
Posted by Pace Arko at 12:56 AM on September 22, 2004
Grumble, i, robot, grumble
Well, I'm not surprised. The movie, I, Robot, apparently lacks depth. It's impossible for any project that large, involving that much money, to have any depth.
But it's still disappointing. Here we are on the edge of an explosion in artificial intelligence and the issues aren't really being explored.
Posted by Pace Arko at 1:50 PM on July 17, 2004
Disaster Movies and the Electric Power Grid
So let's assume it's the End Times, the Wrath of Gods has decended upon us heavily in the form of flesh-eating ghouls rampaging in the streets. The question is asked, "If zombies attack, how long before the power grid fails?" Of course the question is rather silly, perahaps only for escapist horror movies, but it might have some application in development of advanced nanoweapons too. For example, suppose someone builds and seeds a plague of sleep?
Posted by Pace Arko at 4:44 PM on June 16, 2004
A four syllable Matrix Revolutions review
Watch TRON instead.
Posted by Pace Arko at 6:14 PM on November 12, 2003 | Comments (2)
Once again Hollywood fails to take a chance.
Okay. I just got wind that they are going to make a movie about a murder mystery in a future of ubiquitous robots. They've got the audacity to call it I, Robot. Now, I think it's really cool that they've got Will Smith to play one of the lead characters in the movie. Hollywood's portrayal of the future definitely needs more people of color in it--sometimes it seems like the future only takes place in Finland or something.
But here is my problem with them calling this movie I, Robot. Look who they have playing Susan Calvin. If you ever read any of Asimov's robot stories that feature Calvin, you know she didn't look anything like this. Lois Smith, the geneticist in Minority Report, seems infinitely more appropriate to me. Someone like Kate Reid, who played the microbiologist in The Andromeda Strain, is much closer to Asimov's idea of Calvin. If we need someone younger, fine--how 'bout, Kathy Bates or Camryn Manhiem? Or someone thin, yet very plain looking. Calvin wasn't a barbie doll. She was a devestatingly intelligent, tough, and yes unattractive, spinster of a gal who had no patience for idiocy. That's how Asimov wrote her. That's her appeal to me.
Now, I don't have any problem with attractive actors or actresses in film, but what they've put together here for I, Robot isn't what Asimov wrote. Why is Hollywood so afraid of putting older, or less attractive, women in stereotype-defying roles? Ah! Nevermind! I'll probably go see the flick anyway and simply ignore any attempts to link it with Asimov's work.
Posted by Pace Arko at 7:27 PM on October 9, 2003
Hollywood Creates Another Cliche
Apparently the bad guys use Microsoft--boring, stogy, patronizing--and the good guys use Apple--cool, stylish, friendly (Although I'd argue just as patronizing, at least before the release of OSX.). Out in the real world of course, we all know this really isn't true. Most of the real work of evil government officials and corporate drones gets done on some closed form of Unix. Or with a lot of embedded systems running some proprietary OS.
Microsoft has been dropping big coin for years to get NT-flavors into this market of stogy, evil establishment types but they haven't succeeded yet. Apple, by finally moving their GUI onto Unix, is probably going to try use OSX+ to somehow capture the server needs of the anti-establishment (perhaps these are the "good guys") but they'll probably be headed off by Linux or various ports of BSD. In other words the serious work, good or evil, still consists of scrolling text and bash prompts, rather boring in terms of the visual appeal of film and television but, there it is.
Posted by Pace Arko at 7:49 AM on February 17, 2002
The Screen Actors Guild better start worrying
Most of you out there probably saw this coming for a long time but, it is now getting almost impossible to tell computer generated images of humans apart from real humans. For example, Final Fantasy's Dr. Sid is not real, he's just a bunch of binary numbers on a disk. Of course his voice still requires a real person and his movements require body mapping from real people but this is still much cheaper than hiring real actors and even stunt doubles. Imagine what Hitchcock, who was a massive control freak and referred to actors as cattle, would have done with computer graphics.
Posted by Pace Arko at 10:15 AM on July 10, 2001
A kid in search of a software patch
Went to see A.I. yesterday.
Anyway this isn't exactly a review of the movie. It's more an exploration of the ideas behind the movie. No spoilers.
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Posted by Pace Arko at 12:06 AM on July 6, 2001