Monthly Archives: March 2009

The audience will laugh them off the screen

At first glance, Hollywood and pirates would seem to be made for each other, but in fact they are not. Apart from the technical difficulty that sailing ships are nightmare machines which refuse to stay still, and even large models have their problems, there is the plain fact that pirates – the real pirates of history – the Blackbeards and Morgans and Kidds and Calico Jacks – are too bizarre, too larger-than-life, too unreal even for the cinema. That they were real is irrelevant; their truth is too strange for fiction, and pantomime and Peter Pan have turned the grim reality into a comic figure which usually defies attempts to fashion it for conventional drama, or even melodrama.

Madmen who run about with blazing fireworks in their whiskers, eccentrics who hold religious services and prohibit swearing on their unholy cruises, red-headed hussies who put to sea disguised as men and fight duels to the death – they may do for send-up, but try to present them as they truly were, and the audience will laugh them off the screen.

- George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World

En hilsen til besteforeldre

No rights were ever given to us
By the grace of God
No rights were ever given
By some United Nations clause
No rights were ever given
By some nice guy at the top
Our rights – they were bought by all the blood
And all the tears of all our
Grandmothers, grandfathers before.

For all the folk who gave their lives for us
For all the folk who spit out – never say die
For all the fires burning on our highest hills
For all the people spinning tales tonight
Fight all the powers who abuse our common laws
Fight all the powers who think they only owe themselves.

- New Model Army, My Country

30′s movies marathon – part 21

Dead End (1937, USA) – Excellent drama about street kids in a poor New York neigbourhood. Smart and unsentimental, with great performances by the kids, and a fine supporting job by Humphrey Bogart as a bitter gangster. Watched it all.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, USA) – You know, I find it hard to believe that Snow White and the queen are the two most beautiful women in the kingdom. It’s .. unlikely, and not borne out by the visual evidence. The movie looks great for its time, but the story is stupid, full of cute animals and cute songs – in other words a typical braindead FX movie. (Besides, I think this is how it really happened.) Watched: 27 minutes.

Love From a Stranger (1937, UK) – Another terrible British movie. Watched: 6 minutes.

Souls at Sea (1937, USA) – Gary Cooper isn’t the right actor to play a slave trader, even one with a conscience. Watched: 19 minutes.

Stella Dallas (1937, USA) – Character drama that feels too much like a novel. Watched: 17 minutes.

The Last Gangster (1937, USA) – Is that a promise? Good enough, but I’ve seen it all before. Watched: 15 minutes.

Lost Horizon (1937, USA) – Silly but well-made oriental adventure with something of a Spielberg flair. Watched: 37 minutes.

Movie colorization

I just noticed that three of the DVD’s I’ve bought because of my 30′s movies marathon, She, Things to Come and My Man Godfrey, contain both a black & white and a colorized version of the movie. In other words, movie colorization is back.

What a great idea. I know – colorization has a bad reputation. But it’s undeserved. These movies look great. There’s nothing wrong with the quality. That is, Things to Come both looks and sounds bad, but so does the black & white version.

I don’t see any good reasons not to colorize old movies, now that the technology is good enough. The last stand of the purists is that “they weren’t meant to be in color”, which is a stupid thing to say. Of course they were meant to be in color. They just didn’t have the money. Color technology existed in the 30′s, but it was expensive. Few directors would have said no if they’d had the option.

There are movies that would look worse in color. Black & white is a tool, and some directors knew how to use it. But most black & white movies are just .. colorless. To oppose all colorization is to give blind obedience to accident, (this movie got the budget, that movie didn’t).

One critic of colorization is George Lucas, (yes, George Lucas, the man who changed Star Wars!), who is afraid that old comedies may be less funny in color. If so, the problem is hardly the color, is it?

The Bechdel test

The Bechdel test was formulated in 1985 in a cartoon by Alison Bechdel, where a character says that she only watches movies that meets three basic requirements:

1) It has to have at least two women in it, who
2) talk to each other, about
3) something other than a man.

The joke is of course that there aren’t many. If you live by the Bechdel test, you don’t see movies very often.

The Bechdel test is simple and obviously sensible. It’s not about watching movies with a stop watch to ensure equal time between the sexes. It’s not about someone’s subjective idea of what is or isn’t offensive. It’s about a basic measure of intelligence.

“You mean you’ve made a movie where the women don’t talk to each other? Or they do, but all they can think of talking about is the male lead? Which planet does this take place on?!”

And it’s not like we can put all the blame on the film industry. Yes, they make movies that only rarely treat women as actual people. But the audience doesn’t notice, or care. The fact that there’s even a name for this test is proof that it’s needed.

Please notice it.

Not a very comfortable seat

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

………………………………………………………………….
……………..

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!1!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!

Okay then. George R. R. Martin. A Game of Thrones.

Perfect. Brilliant.

The fans who are pestering Martin about when he’ll finish the series are assholes. Of course it takes time to write this good. I wouldn’t even mind if there was only this one book. It’s that good.

And yes, this is the perfect material for an HBO series.

No more to say. I’ll try to do better with the next one.

30′s movies marathon – part 20

Stage Door (1937, USA) – Loud comedy about a boardhouse for girls who want to make it in the theatre. I especially like the scenes where Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn are sniping at each other. (Now why is is that the few 30′s movies I’ve seen that are Bechdel compliant are about actresses?) Watched it all.

Festliches Nürnberg (1937, Germany) – Having finally freed itself from Jewish oppression, the German people celebrates with a spontaneous outburst of goosestepping. You know, sometimes I feel sorry for the regular German people I see in these movies. Other times I feel they got just what they deserved.

Marked Woman (1937, USA) – This gangster movie taught me a new word: clip joint, a shady club that scams its customers. Watched: 23 minutes.

Paradise Isle (1937, USA) – An American washes ashore a South Sea island where the white men (including himself) are arrogant jerks, and the natives are happy, subservient and child-like. Watched: 15 minutes.

Pensionat Paradiset (1937, Sweden) – Light summer vacation farce. Watched: 18 minutes.

Kid Galahad (1937, USA) – Just some lousy boxing movie. Watched: 6 minutes.

Nothing Sacred (1937, USA) – I love what this satire about a fake victim of radiation poisoning who becomes the darling of the New York press is trying to do: It’s full of odd jokes and black humor. That doesn’t save it from being, at times, kind of bad, but I refuse to hold that against it. Oh, poor, doomed Hazel Flagg! Watched it all.

Dårlige spådommer er verre enn ingen spådommer

Kjetil Johansen skriver om spådommer for the 21te århundre:

“Å spå om framtiden er risky business, men like forbannet en nødvendig aktivitet.”

Nei. Absolutt ikke. Dårlige spådommer er verre enn ingen spådommer. Dårlige spådommer gir deg illusjonen av kontroll, de setter deg fast i et spor og gjør deg mindre oppmerksom på uventete og ukjente faktorer. Og alle spådommer som går 100 år – eller 5 år – frem i tid er dårlige spådommer.

Spådommer ekskluderer, en spådom er den “mest sannsynlige” av alle scenarier, derfor lander man på én og slutter å lete. Hvilken du lander på sier mye om deg, lite om framtiden. Let heller etter muligheter. Muligheter akkumulerer. Desto mer du observerer, desto flere muligheter ser du.

Kuren for spådomstrang er å møte hver dag med tre erkjennelser:

1) Jeg kan ikke ta noe av det som finnes nå for gitt.
2) De viktigste hendelsene som skjer i dag får jeg ikke får høre om.
3) Jeg aner ikke hva som kommer til å skje videre.

Dette gir deg ingen kunnskap om fremtiden, men det gir deg et forsprang på alle andre ved at du ikke tar beslutninger basert på verdiløse spådommer.

Å spå er som å se med øyne som nesten aldri gir riktig informasjon. Da er det bedre å lukke dem, og trene opp de andre sansene dine.

Saxons, grocers and other Fundamentalist Materialists

Patapsychology begins from Murphy’s Law, as Finnegan called the First Axiom, adopted from Sean Murphy. This says, and I quote,”The normal does not exist. The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured.” In less technical language, the Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one million Irish punds [around $700,000 American] to any “normalist” who can exhibit “a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary.”

In a world where no two fingerprints appear identical, and no two brains appear identical, and an electron does not even seem identical to itself from one nanosecond to another, patapsychology seems on safe ground here. [..]

The canny will detect here the usual Celtic impulse to make hash out of everything that seems obvious and incontrovertable to Saxons, grocers and other Fundamentalist Materialists. Patapsychology follows in the great tradition of Swift, who once proved with a horoscope that an astrologer named Partridge had died, even though Partridge continued to deny this in print; Bishop Berkeley, who proved that the universe doesn’t exist but God has a persistent delusion that it does; William Rowan Hamilton, who invented the noncommutative algebra in which p times q does not equal q times p; Wilde, who asked if the academic commentators on Hamlet had really gone mad or only pretended to have gone mad.

- Robert Anton Wilson