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Careless

Careless

Careless

You can’t make a movie about an aimless post-college man finding a severed body part without invoking Blue Velvet. But where Blue Velvet turns on the slow uncovering of the seedy underbelly of conventional and perfect suburban life, Careless meanders along more slowly, with its character already wallowing with his chain-smoking father in a dead-end job and a shitty apartment.  Plus, it’s a comedy.

Some thoughts:

  • The Netflix description of the movie highlights the fact that our protagonist, Wiley Roth, works at a mystery book store and reads mysteries.  This seems like it might make for interesting fodder.  Alas, he doesn’t like mysteries and the fact that it’s a mystery book store never really becomes an issue.  Sure, he tries to figure out where the finger came from, but wouldn’t you?
  • A nice surprise was Fran Cranz, the computer uber-nerd from the now-canceled Dollhouse, as the wiseacre best friend, Mitch.  Then there’s Tony Shalhoub as the slovenly chain-smoking father who hates Mitch.  Comedy gold.  I particularly enjoyed his command to the corn-dog stand man: “Dog me!”
  • In some ways, the movie feels a bit like a comedy version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, with a reluctant detective investigating a case that may or may not be a mystery, finding little, and obsessing about it anyhow.  Wiley obsesses about the finger, in part, because he has nothing else to do.  Unlike Dan Quinn, however, he hasn’t got the tragedy of a dead wife to weigh him down.
  • I also reflected that Wiley seems like a Kevin Smith protagonist, with less clever dialog (and far less swearing).  He mopes around with a scraggly beard, obsesses about and messes up his relationship, hates his job but stays in it anyway, and doesn’t know what to do with himself most of the time.  Essentially, Dante from Clerks.
  • Minor spoiler: The end of the movie tries to make you happy with some of the unanswered questions by implying that Wiley has settled to be happy with these questions unanswered, but I don’t buy it.  There are too many Macguffins scattered through the story–throwaway bits of dialog and detail as well as more significant elements.  In that regard, the story is somewhat unsatisfying.

All this makes it sound as if I didn’t enjoy the movie.  It wasn’t bad, but it tried to be cool without quite getting there.

2010 03 09 Digital Sextant Detectives
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Zombies on my table

I just got this in the mail.  Now all I need is to gather three friends who want to play it.

Last Night on Earth

Last Night on Earth

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2010 03 08 Digital Sextant Games
Living Dead
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Mister B. Gone

Mister B. Gone

Mister B. Gone

by Clive Barker

Mister B. Gone purports to be a 600 year old manuscript imprisoning the eponymous minor demon forever.  Periodically throughout the book, the demon begs you to burn the novel, freeing him from the endless cold torment of his dungeon.  When you refuse, he tries to pursuade you by telling the story of his life in all its villainy and horror.  It’s not a bad read, but not really that great, either.  Some more comments below, though I must warn you there are spoilers ahead.

  • In many ways, it’s a bildungsroman about a young demon making his way in the world.  It’s gruesome and detailed and, before you know it, the story ends.  I’m not sure what it is about the shape of the story, but it feels like it never gives the main demon time to get rolling before we reach the conclusion.
  • It’s also a story about storytelling.  As I wrote above, Jabotok (that’s the demon’s formal name) exhorts, pleads, threatens, and chides you to burn the book at every turn.  While it gets a little tiresome at times, it also wears on you a little bit.  One of his threats has to do with the idea that reading to the end of the book will release him from its pages and, cynic and modern person though you are, you can’t help but ponder for a moment what an utter horror it would be if it were true.  Of course, working in the novel’s disfavor, in that regard, is its publication.  A one-of-a-kind manuscript would be much more convincing in this way.  But it continually reflects on the idea that you won’t stop reading, and calls you both stupid and cruel for continuing.
  • The end of the book turns, too, on the immense value of the printing press for humankind, and the dark Secret, that Heaven and Hell are in a detante, and that they’ve divided up the world in order to maintain the balance between them.  Grim, but also an amusing and cynical idea.
  • Where Barker succeeds the best are, as usual, the passages of extreme horror blended seamlessly into the story.  As a demon, the title character engages in a number of appalling acts that are communicated in nauseating detail and yet don’t make you completely dislike him.  It’s the power of the first person narrator, to bend the reader to sympathy even as we revile the acts s/he engages in.
  • Finally, and this is a little thing, the title really bugs me.  The main character’s name is Jakabok Botch, but he goes by Mister B among friends.  The title doesn’t really make a lot of sense and feels, to me, like a cute pun.

Overall, not a bad book, but not Barker’s best either.  I enjoyed both The Great and Secret Show and Arabat more.

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2010 03 08 Digital Sextant Books I Read Comments (0) Permalink

The Physicists

by Friedrich Durrenmatt

The Physicists is a two act play about three madmen in an upscale madhouse, two of whom have murdered their attending nurses recently.  Over the course of the play, we learn plenty about the three men who believe themselves to be Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Mobius.  It’s a strange little play with good humor and a nice ending, but I can’t write much more about it without giving the story away, so  below the picture will be plenty of spoilers.

The Physicists

The Physicists

Over the course of the play we come to learn that none of the three men are mad.  Two are physicists turned spies from opposing governments who have smuggled themselves in to try and woo the third, a physicist with breakthrough ideas who has sequestered himself in the madhouse for fear that his ideas would destroy the world.  And in the finale, it turns out that the woman running the madhouse is also a spy who has successfully stolen the secrets the third man was trying to hide.

The play’s Brechtian quality (with notes in the stage directions that are charmingly audience oriented) pushes us to think about the dilemma men of science face.  At one point they acknowledge that learning how to do things actually becomes a challenge when engineers take these grand ideas and make them into weapons.  They actually characterize “using” knowledge as evil.  All people in the modern world, where industry funds science, face this dilemma — progress in technology usually stems from progress driven by money or war.

There’s also quite a bit of humor in the play, with some amusing silliness about who is allowed to smoke and drink in the madhouse and who is not.

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2010 03 06 Digital Sextant Books I Read
Science
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Did I mention we got a new kitty?

Circe

2010 03 05 Digital Sextant Familydamily
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More about Pluto

Pluto and Charon and the two little moons

Pluto and Charon and the two little moons

The Case for Pluto by Alan Boyle

After reading The Pluto Files a couple weeks ago and posting about it, I got a comment from a ubiquitous blogger who’s on the “pluto IS a planet” side of things.  Her blog recommends The Case for Pluto as an explanation of why Pluto should be called a planet, so in the interest of due dilligence, I read that too.

Boyle gives a more thorough discussion of the two conflicting viewpoints about the word planet, and gives a more balanced discussion of why the IAU decision was so thoroughly disputed.  I’ll discuss that bit below, but first a couple tidbits from Boyle’s book that I enjoyed:

  • The guy who named Pluto’s moon wanted to name it after his wife, Charlene, so he decided to take the first syllable of her name and add the suffix -on to be similar to proton or neutron.  When the committee on naming things told him he had to name it after a god, he was bummed.  But then he discovered that the ferryman across the river Styx was named Charon.  In Greek, it’s pronounced “Care – on” but apparently astronomers use the pronunciation “Share – on” to reflect the original intent.
  • One of the first people to raise the “should Pluto be a planet” question did so at the 50th anniversary of Pluto’s discovery, in front of Tombaugh and his family.  Gaff!
  • In the next few years, we expect to find many pluto-sized bodies (or bigger) in the Kuiper belt.  There will probably be some as big as Mars.

The whole things turns out to be a narrow window of semantics that gets spliced onto a question of common concern for regular people.  Here’s how it breaks down:

Planetary scientists generally think anything big enough to be rounded by its own gravity and small enough not to have fusion at its core should be a “planet.”  Then, they suggest that we should have a series of adjectives that describe what kind of planet we’re talking about: rocky dwarf planet (Ceres), ice dwarf planet (Pluto, Eris, et al), rocky planet (Mercury-Mars), Gas giant planet (Jupiter, Saturn) and Ice giant planet (Uranus and Neptune), with more to be added as needed.  The distinction here is that all rounded objects would be planets.

Dynamicists are scientists more interested in the way bodies influence one another through gravity and so on.  For example, Neptune was discovered because the gravitational mathematics said there should be a big planet somewhere in that neighborhood.  To this layperson, such calculations seem unreliable, as other predictions have failed to turn up similar discoveries.  (At one point, there was thought to be a planet called vulcan inside Mercury’s orbit.)  Dynamicists prefer the IAU designation because it defines planet as something that has “cleared its neighborhood” of bodies, like the classic 8, while something that hasn’t cleared the neighborhood would be a dwarf planet.  “But not a REAL planet.”

As I said, to the layperson this seems like a pretty minor difference, as both are using multiple sets of criteria, while the IAU version puts “planet” above “dwarf planet.”  Where the extra tension comes from, for me, is the public complaint about Pluto’s being ‘demoted’ to dwarf planet.  I think the ruckus in the public sphere has to do with the change from the “original 9″ to a different definition.  When people learn that having Pluto be a planet means that we will also have four more right now, plus dozens to come in future years, I think they’ll be equally irritated with the change.  In other words, there are two groups complaining about Pluto not being a planet anymore.  One group of scientists have a legitimate beef and want all the rounded objects to be recongized as planets.  But the citizenry, who appear to be on the side of these scientists, are really in favor of keeping the old order intact.  They don’t just want Pluto to be a planet, they want there only to be nine planets.

So I guess I’m convinced that any rounded object should be called a planet.  But I’m also convinced that given our current information, it’s not appropriate to put Pluto in the special category it’s been in for all these years (as one of nine).  Thus, the decision Tyson made in The Pluto Files was right on — Pluto is better represented as part of the Kuiper Belt objects.  A “planet,” yes, but one of a group separate from the other eight (who are, in fact, two or three different groups themselves).

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2010 03 05 Digital Sextant Books I Read
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My Breuer

St. John's University Abbey

St. John's University Abbey

A short essay on Marcel Breuer and the Bauhaus spirit at my alma mater, St. John’s University, appeared recently on the BAUHAUS 9090 site. It’s the 18 August 2009 page. Isn’t that the delight of the Internet? You can retroactively publish something. Anyhow, here’s an excerpt from my essay about SJU’s Bauhaus buildings:

…The campus has a distinctly divided architectural flavor. On one hand, many of the buildings are red brick and stately. The stately Monastery itself, the “Quad”, and a few of the dorm buildings preside over the grassy expanse of campus. They feel old, weighty, traditional. And then there are the Bauhaus buildings: the old science building, a couple more dorms and the library. These buildings feel modern. Not trendy, modern; they bring this century, this country, the modern world into the alcove of medieval tradition that monasteries represent. If this were the whole of the experience, the campus would feel shockingly divided. The grey, modular buildings striped with cold bands of concrete would stand in contrast to the weathered old brick buildings.

Instead, the crowning achievement of Breuer’s work at St. John’s acts like a keystone supporting the two styles on campus: the Abbey church. (more…)

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2010 03 04 Digital Sextant Design
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Do you know where you’ll be on May 23rd?

The 39 Steps, the musical!

The 39 Steps, the musical!

I know where I’ll be.

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2010 03 03 Digital Sextant Theatre Comments (0) Permalink

The Singularity

Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

The idea of singularity rides roughshod through modern science fiction.  As one fellow enthusiast I know put it, “Anyone writing a futuristic story now has to deal with the question of singularity.  Did it happen?  If not, why not?”  For the uninitiated, the singularity is the moment (and brief aftermath of that moment) when technological progress accelerates so rapidly as to create a sea change in society at the blink of an eye.  This possibility is often connected with some sort of A.I. that can build machines — once we can make machines that make machines, everything we hold dear breaks down and our future becomes uncertain.

In Stross’ world here, the singularity resulted in cornucopia machines, which allow the user to make, well, anything.  As you can guess, once you can make anything, nothing is scarce anymore, and the balance of society changes completely.  For a book-length meditation on this effect, check out Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.  Stross tells the story of a luddite world visited by an informational omnivore called “The Festival,” which exchanges stuff for information, and wreaks havoc on the world.  We follow a few enlightened souls and a few despotic remnants as they try to deal with the upheaval the Festival brings.

  • This isn’t hard sf, but it’s got a heavy strain of military SF, which can be kind of a drag.  I found a few places where the military dialogue about incoming missiles and stuff got a little too detailed, but what can you expect from a story about a military expedition?
  • I loved Stross’ choice to transplant the pre-revolution Russian society to the “New Empire,” to overlay the Communist secret police structure onto it, and to foment a new peoples’ revolution in the middle of the visit from the Festival.
  • I really enjoy SF novels that include a lot of little detail ideas.  The vast scale of the Festival, with its solar energy harvesting and its planet-consuming cornucopiae was fun to contemplate; the parasitic plants and beings that follow along with the Festival are pretty amazing in their own right.
  • And then there are the Mimes.  There’s a small sequence, mostly unresolved, that reveals one of the groups following the festival seems to be a circus… of death.  There are mysterious characters called Mimes who seem to leave havoc and violence in their wake, and the circus itself causes no end of grief.  But we don’t get much more out of the story than that.  I’m reminded a lot of the Carnival of Industrial Destruction in B.F. Slattery’s Liberation.
  • I’m also amused by the irresponsible gorging the people of the planet do once they get cornucopiae.  Having only heard third-hand stories of old technologies, they ask for all sorts of things they don’t really understand, and thus the Festival (with no solid knowledge of human idiom and custom) builds all sorts of crazy contraptions to meet their requests.  Someone asks for a way to surveil the city (like London’s CCTVs, for instance), but since they don’t really know what system they’re asking for, they end up with organic cameras and telepathic worms that bring the camera feeds into their minds.  Like an Orwellian Babelfish, I guess.

A delightful read, with solid characters and an intriguing universe.  Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in modern SF and its treatment of the singularity.

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2010 03 03 Digital Sextant Books I Read
Prognostication
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A victory in the fight for free speech and the free internet

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Via Boingboing:

The mother of a dancing toddler is dancing after winning a closely watched copyright case. US District Judge Jeremy Fogel granted partial summary judgment to Stephanie Lenz last week in her battle against Universal Music Group, putting a halt to Universal’s attempts to paint Lenz as having “bad faith” and “unclean hands” in her lawsuit. As a result, the doors have been opened for Lenz to collect attorneys’ fees in her case, though other damages aren’t likely to come Lenz’s way. (link)

This decision is really important, as it solidifies the idea that contingent use is fair and not liable.  Makes me want to dance, too.

2010 03 02 Digital Sextant Copyfight
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Night of the Comet

Night of the Comet

Night of the Comet

Night of the Comet is an interesting zombie film that mixes conventions from a lot of different films.  It’s got an interesting story that moves in surprising directions, and despite the glacial pacing, ends up being pretty entertaining.  Here are some of the moments that work in similar ways as other movies:

  • Dawn of the Dead – When the Valley Girl kids get a moment to themselves, they head for the mall to do some shopping.  In classic 1980s style, the shopping scene uses “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” as its anthem.
  • Day of the Dead – The film’s full of clueless scientists.  Like those in Romero’s third Dead movie, but more malevolent.  A couple amusing quotes: ‘the whole area’s a monument to consumerism’; ‘let’s apply a little deductive reasoning.’
  • 28 Days Later – The young men who capture the two lovely girls menace them in a most evil way, but then they don’t follow through on the sexual threat, trying instead to kill them.  What I thought was going to be a 28 Days Later situation ended up being not quite the same.
  • The Omega Man – the early scenes of the film seem a lot like the classic Heston movie, with the lonely city working as a creepy backdrop to highlight the grim reality of the missing people.  You also have some strange mutant zombie creepos, though most of the actual zombie imagery comes in dreams.

The humor of the film completely overruns the grim elements in the story, though it does maintain a good level of creepiness throughout.  The upbeat music at the end is particularly amusing.  Ultimately, much more enjoyable than I thought it would be, if you can put up with the slow pacing.

2010 03 02 Digital Sextant Living Dead
Movies
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A little Baader-Meinhoff

So after learning what Unobtanium was from Avatar, I’ve now encountered it twice more in recent weeks:

  • Charlie Stross’ Singularity Sky mentions it as the elements included in the kernel of the cornucopia machine: the elements that are very hard to come by.
  • “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” this week, Peter Segel mentioned it in joking about the Russian skater who now says he won a platinum metal.
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2010 03 01 Digital Sextant Nerdistry Comments (0) Permalink

A Stir of Echoes

A Stir of Echoes

A Stir of Echoes

by Richard Mattheson; narrated by Scott Brick

Mattheson tells the story of Tom Wallace, a regular guy living in a normal suburban neighborhood.  One evening, at a party, he gets hypnotized and afterward he starts having visions, seeing the future, seeing inside peoples’ minds, and catching glimpses of a creepy woman in his house.  It’s a really solid character-driven novel with disturbing horror elements that don’t overwhelm the plot.

A few extra thoughts:

  • I’d seen (and enjoyed) the film adaptation of the book, which keeps the same premise but changes much of the story to fit more modern temperments and attitudes.  The novel has a bit more wide-ranging set of concerns and characters, too.  I’d say the horror elements get minimized, but that makes them all the more creepy.
  • One element I wasn’t expecting was the novel’s criticism of the 1950s family life.  Aside from the main character’s family, pretty much every other family is harboring horrible relationships, grim jealousies, adulteries, and worse.  At one point, Tom suggests that everyone is a monster on the inside; the novel’s depiction of 1950s society suggests that he’s right.
  • While some of the psychic stuff is creepy, by far the creepiest moment comes when Tom’s son (who happens to be just about the same age, maybe six months older, than my son right now) starts speaking with the voice of the dead ghost woman.  Terrifying.  It was made even more creepy by the brilliant voice acting from Scott Brick.  I got chills even though I was walking along Congress Avenue in downtown Chicago.
  • At one point, Tom goes to a psychologist who speaks quite assuredly on “psy” powers, explaining with great confidence what Tom was experiencing.  The novel doesn’t go out of its way to comment one way or another, but all the people who seem to know what’s going on end up being wrong, with only Tom and his intuitive experience of the psychic abilities figuring things out.
  • The best part of the novel is the relationship between Tom and his wife, Annie.  Mattheson gives them realistic reactions to an unreal situation, driving the story with the worry and wonder they experience as he gets glimpses of the future, bits of telepathy and readings from objects.  The roller coaster Annie goes through is almost as visceral as Tom’s, and their shared concern for Richard, their son, adds another level of tension to the story.

As usual, Scott Brick does an excellent job with the narration.  Particularly impressive are the intense moments, when his voice gets low and serious.  And, as I said above, the moments when he’s depicting the ghost speaking through other people  stand out.

2010 03 01 Digital Sextant Audio
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Zombies and the First Ammendment

God Hates Zombies

God Hates Zombies

From The Raw Story

They’re said to utter little more than an occasional groan, but zombies — the blood-drenched monsters of Hollywood “B” movies — still have a right to free speech, a US court ruled this week.

An appeals court in the northern US city of Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday allowed a group of zombies — or rather, several protesters costumed as such — to press ahead with their lawsuit against police who arrested them for disorderly conduct.

The appeals court overturned a lower court in finding that the group of seven “zombies” had been wrongfully detained during a 2006 shopping mall protest against consumerism. (link)

*image by “Jenn Mau” used under CC Attr-Noncom-Sharealike license.

2010 02 28 Digital Sextant Living Dead
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The Brothers Bloom

Why haven’t you seen this movie yet?

The Brothers Bloom

The Brothers Bloom

The Brothers Bloom is an irreverent oddball character caper movie, not unlike one of my all-time favorites, Rushmore.  I’d say Rushmore wins in a head-to-head, but if you like Wes Anderson’s masterpiece, you probably will like The Brothers Bloom too.  A few thoughts:

  • The opening sequence has the delightful summarizing and stylistic flair that makes movies like Rushmore and The Zero Effect so charming.  (Note, I’d not put those two movies together in any other context except to highlight a certain kind of opening sequence).  At one point, the young brothers find themselves in a “one hat town,” which the narrator (the magician Ricky Jay) also describes as a town with one stoplight, one cafe, one car wash, and one cat, that through a bizarre set of circumstances, had only one leg.
  • Like many movies about confidence men, you spend much of the time trying to decide how much the brothers are in control of and how much is extra.  The movie’s stylistic flair doesn’t help much in that regard, since Steven (the architect and author of their plots) also produces his events with flair.
  • An interesting element of the film is “bang bang,” a nearly-mute Japanese character who accompanies the brothers as their explosives expert.  She reigns over the scenes she’s in like an avenging angel, with motives that exceed anything we can understand.
  • The movie spends much of its time pondering the nature of the profession the brothers share.  Most movies about confidence men focus on the idea that the people being conned deserve it.  In the show Hu$tle, it’s through the slogan “you can’t con an honest man,” while in the show Leverage, it’s by conning only villains (ala Robin Hood).  The Brother Bloom considers what happens to one’s life when one’s occupation is trickery.  In some ways, it reminds me of spy movies as much as anything else.
  • One element of the aesthetic that stands out for me is the movie’s timelessness.  While there are glimpses of modernity (cell phones, wire transfers), the characters travel by train and steamer, they occupy timeless places around Europe, they send telegrams, and they have the fashion sensibility of the Roaring Twenties.  It’s delightful.
Oh, sweet Jesus

Oh, sweet Jesus

It makes me sad that I haven’t heard more about this movie.  Its flair and style fit the setting (as opposed to some movies that layer style on over nothingness.  As I said at the beginning of the review, “why haven’t you seen this yet?”

2010 02 27 Digital Sextant Humor
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