Monthly Archives: January 2010

40′s movies marathon – part 62

Caesar and Cleopatra (1945, UK, Pascal) – Is it time for a new generation of toga epics now?  If so this is a cheerful beginning.  Claude Raines is a sly Caesar, and Vivien Leigh a Cleopatra who approaches learning how to be a queen as a sort of fun game.  Nobody is taking things too seriously here, which is fine by me, and the tight script, based on George Bernard Shaw’s play, keeps the epic excesses at bay.  Watched it all.

God is My Co-Pilot (1945, USA, Florey) – It seems that out of all the millions of victims of World War II, God is going to save the life of Colonel Robert L. Scott.  Because he’s special.  Watched: 9 minutes.

Salome Where She Danced (1945, USA, Lamont) – A newspaperman with little manners has adventures in the world of the 1860′s.  I almost expect him to run into Harry Flashman somewhere, it’s that kind of world, with Bismarckian officers, mysterious Chinamen, Russian aristocrats, and bandits from the Wild West all in one place.  Watched it all.

Without Love (1945, USA, Bucquet) – Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn have another romance.  Watched: 19 minutes, and I think I can guess the rest.

The True Glory (1945, USA, Kanin) – The final year of the war with Germany, told partly in the voice of soldiers, and partly as a sort of epic poem.  Watched it all.

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945, France, Bresson) – Serious people talk seriously about love and have serious affairs.  Lighten up!  Watched: 9 minutes.

Har vinden snudd i alkoholdebatten?

Svein Tore Marthinsen skriver at vinden har snudd i alkoholdebatten: Nå støtter folk opp om strenge reguleringer.

Siden han selv er tilhenger av disse strenge reguleringene er det ikke så rart at han mener at dette har skjedd fordi argumentene for det er så vanvittig gode.  Men jeg er nysgjerrig på premisset her: Stemmer det virkelig at mange har skiftet mening?  Det eneste han underbygger påstanden med er at FrP ikke roper så høyt om alkohol lenger.

Finnes det spørreundersøkelser om dette?  Kanskje er det bare debatten som har stilnet?  Det kan det isåfall være mange grunner til, f.eks. at reguleringstilhengerne klarte å stemple motstanderne som harry.

Selv merker jeg at engasjementet mitt mot alkoholreguleringer har sunket i takt med lavere alkoholforbruk og høyere inntekt, men jeg synes fremdeles det er forkastelig å gripe inn i folks liv på denne måten.  Dette handler ikke om alkohol, men om prinsipper, og prinsipper sitter gjerne litt dypt.  Det ville være feil å konkludere at, fordi jeg aldri skriver om alkohol, så synes jeg alkoholregulering er riktig.

Hva andre synes vet jeg ikke.  Og det tror jeg egentlig ikke Svein Tore Marthinsen gjør heller.

What it was like

In 1999, Henry Allen at the Washington Post wrote a series of articles where he tried to capture what it was like to live in each decade of the 20th century.

Here they are: 1900′s, 1910′s, 1920′s, 1930′s, 1940′s, 1950′s, 1960′s, 1970′s, 1980′s, 1990′s.

It’s similar to the approach Andrew Marr recently used for his Modern Britain documentaries.

This is what I find so fascinating about the 20th century: The speed at which perceptions of the world were changing – and still are.

Thus we come to Steven P. Jobs

Michael Hiltzik - Dealers of Lightning

The work the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center did in the 1970′s is legendary.  That means that some of the stories about it aren’t true.  It’s true that they either invented or contributed significantly to the technologies that would later become part of the PC revolution: The laser printer, the visual user interface, desktop publishing, local networks, object-oriented programming and video animation.

And it’s true that Xerox failed to use these inventions to launch the PC market, as companies like Apple, IBM and Microsoft would eventually do.  But Michael Hiltzik writes in Dealers of Lightning that it’s not true that Xerox never made any money of PARC.  The laser printer became hugely profitable.  It just took a while to convince management that it was worth launching.

Xerox PARC lived apart from Xerox proper, separated by both geographical distance and cultural distance.  PARC had the smartest and most far-seeing people in the field of computing.  Xerox had a cautious corporate culture, and a vague sense that maybe it ought to invest some of its profits into computer research.

It wasn’t a good match.  But it’s too simple to say that if Xerox hadn’t fumbled, the unborn PC market would have been theirs for the taking.  Success in computing is difficult, and often short-lived.  Apple and Microsoft both got started with ideas from Xerox, but the fact that these companies are still relevant today, 30 years later, is because they’re still making great stuff – and because they’ve been very lucky. Xerox wasn’t.  They just had some damn fine ideas.

Wings for This Man (1945)

Two things I note here:

1) For some reason the narration got me thinking about Reagan’s 1984 Morning in America ad.  Turns out it wasn’t just because the style is similar, with calm, simple statements in the present tense, and an optimistic tone.  The narrator actually is Ronald Reagan. (Btw, I rather like Reagan as an actor, and I don’t understand the mockery about him being a B movie actor.  Possibly a myth that stuck because nobody could be bothered to actually watch those movies.)

2) Notice the way it tip-toes around racial issues.  This movie is clearly intended to give credit to African-American soldiers for their contribution to the the war effort, but it doesn’t actually say so.  Without the pictures, the words would lose their anti-racist meaning.  How odd.  I wonder who the intended audience was.

40′s movies marathon – Hell in Europe edition

As I watch all these World War II movies I know that I only see a glamorous reflection of the horrible things that were happening at the time.  I’m not seeing reality, but the fantasy life of the American and British movie audiences.

The image these movies present of the world contains lies and gaps.  They treat China and the Soviet Union in a way that bears no relation to reality.  There are almost no references to European Jews, and then only to “oppression”, not mass murder and genocide.

Wartime movies usually present Germans as authoritarian – and not much more.  Evil authoritarians, naturally, but the “evil” part often feels like a patriotic exaggeration.  Like something you’d say because you’re a war.  The Germans are a dangerous enemy, but they wouldn’t do anything truly inhuman.  Or at least movie goers wouldn’t accept it.  A wartime movie that told the truth about Nazi Europe would have been campy.  It wouldn’t have fit inside the plot structures studios were operating with.

So now it’s 1945, and the first footage from concentration and extermination camps shows up in my marathon. Like this one.  Which is basically 50 minutes of footage of corpses, some of them alive, and of German civilians forced to see, carry and bury the corpses.  As I watched these revolting pictures, I asked myself why I was doing it.  The answer I arrived at is that, after all those Hollywood fantasies, turning off this would have felt like lying to myself.

Ja til billige, dårlige vikingfilmer

Adrian Plau formulerer det så bra som det kan gjøres i Nyss: Vi trenger ikke én god vikingfilm, vi trenger ti dårlige.

I disse dager planlegges det faktisk å lage en skikkelig vikingfilm her i landet. Det skal ikke spares på noe; Roy Jacobsen skriver manus og Mads Mikkelsen spiller hovedrollen. De skal ha for de gode intensjonene, men jeg er redd dette er et gedigent feilgrep. For de 35 millionene som skal brukes på denne éne filmen burde man klare å lage minst 10 dårlige vikingfilmer som en investering i fremtiden. Vi trenger 20 år med spekulative B-vikingfilmer, fulgt av en 10-15 års pusteperiode.

Jess!  Jeg maser om dette hver anledning jeg får: Vi i Norden har gjort alt for lite for å utnytte underholdningspotensialet i mytologien vår.

Plau sammenligner med westerns og samurai-filmer, og jeg er helt enig: Man trenger B-filmene for å bygge opp mytologien, og så kan man eventuelt senere lage noe påkostet som gjør noe spennende ut av klisjéene. Og av de mange dårlige vil en og annen treffe ekstra godt med manuset, og bli en (kult-)klassiker for kommende generasjoner.

Det vi trenger er rett og slett at noen dytter ut minst én billig og gøyal vikingfilm i året.  Ikke en “storfilm” nå og da.

40′s movies marathon – part 61

Spellbound (1945, USA, Hitchcock) – Gregory Peck suffers from a quite incredible psychosis, and gets help from Ingrid Bergman, who is somewhat less insane. I like plots based on psychoanalysis, even if it’s bullshit.  It’s also a good excuse to hire Salvador Dali to design the sets of your movie.  Watched it all.

Along Came Jones (1945, USA, Heisler) – Gary Cooper does his honorable-and-dumb-but-actually-kind-of-smart routine in the Old West.  Watched: 35 minutes.

‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ (1945, UK, Powell & Pressburger) – Mary Poppins goes to get married on the Hebrides, which is full of eccentric Scotsmen.  Watched it all. 

Journey Together (1945, UK, Boulting) – Goddam Edward G. Robinson shows up everywhere, even in RAF docudramas.  I wish he’d stick to gangster movies, then it would be easier to avoid him.  Watched: 22 minutes.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945, USA, Lewin) – Another Victorian morality tale that never goes out of fashion, long after Victorian morality has.  The picture of Evil Dorian, shown suddenly in color in this black and white movie, is the most shocking visual in the marathon yet.  Watched it all.

Woman Who Came Back (1945, USA, Colmes) – Arguably the least spooky way an undead witch can punish the town that murdered her 300 years ago is to confuse people to death by dressing and cackling like a senile old woman.  Also, I firmly believe that any condemned witch who rises from her grave to avenge herself invalidates any claim to her own innocence.  Watched: 6 minutes.

Could I try that mouse thing?

The audience watched people send and receive real e-mail, collaborate on joint projects, write memos in Japanese characters, and conjure up engineering schematics on the Alto’s arresting black-on-white display – all live.  Secretaries typed letters and shot them over the network to a laser printer, while engineers designed buildings on a video screen and software developers debugged code.

[..]

The results were mixed.  [..]  Xerox’s top executives were for the most part salesmen of copy machines.  From these leased behemoths the revenue stream was as tangible as the “click” of the meters counting off copies, for which the customer paid Xerox so many cents per page (and from which Xerox paid its salespersons their commissions).  Noticing their eyes narrow, Ellenby could almost hear them thinking: “If there’s no paper to be copied, where’s the ‘click’?”  In other words: “How will I get paid?”

For Geschke, the most discomfiting revelation was the contrast between the executives’ reaction and those of their wives.  “The typical posture of the Xerox executives, and all of them were men, was this” – arms folded sternly across the chest. “But their wives would immediately walk up to the machines and say, ‘Could I try that mouse thing?’” [..]

“It didn’t register in my mind at that event, but that was the loudest and clearest signal we ever got of how much of a problem we were going to have getting Xerox to understand what we had.”

- Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

Den ultimate mandagsfølelsen

Jeg elsker mandager.  Jeg liker alle dager, men mandager spesielt.  Mandag er et blankt ark du kan fylle med hva som helst.

Dagen i dag, årets første arbeidsdag, i et nytt tiår, er dermed den ultimate mandagen.  Mandagen alle andre mandager misunner.  En mandag for optimisme og store planer.

En mandag for å høre på usannsynlig heroisk filmmusikk: