Monthly Archives: December 2010

1950s movies marathon – part 7

Winchester ’73 (1950, USA, Mann)

Aka the Brotherhood of the Travelling Winchester, the perfect gun that brings out the murderer in everyone – especially murderers.  Watched it all before, and again now, because there’s nothing quite like an Anthony Mann western, and James Stewart is so adorable at this point you just want to hug him.

Highway 301 (1950, USA)

This much is certain: When a movie opens with three separate state governors declaring that the story is based on cold, hard facts, well, then maybe it is based on cold, hard facts, but it’s not going to be very interesting.  Watched: 3 minutes.

All About Eve (1950, USA, Mankiewicz)

The way I remembered it, it was Marilyn  Monroe, the star of the 50′s, who came in at the end and is destined to kick Anne Baxter off the throne she herself had just kicked Bette Davis, the star of the 30′s, off.  But that would have been too prophetic.  Monroe’s character gets shuffled off to play in television.  Watched it all many times before, and I’ll watch it again any time I get the chance.  I’m actually supposed to hate movies about actors, for the same reason I don’t like it when bloggers blog about blogging, but somehow I keep forgetting that principle the moment George Sanders starts speaking.

State Secret (1950, UK, Gilliat)

Decades of Cold War thrillers have made me expect something a bit more campy than this from the adventures of a Westerner stuck in Generic East Bloc Country.  But I guess every genre has to start somewhere.  Watched: 21 minutes.

Om fakta og prinsipper

Jeg har en artikkel på Minervas nettsider om å skille mellom fakta og prinsipper i politiske debatter:

Politiske debatter går gjennom tre faser. De starter med utskjelling og latterliggjøring. Her slutter de som regel også, men hvis debattantene er ivrige nok beveger debatten seg til fase 2, hvor man diskuterer fakta: Jeg mener at verden ser slik ut, du mener derimot den ser slik ut.

Debatten stopper fort opp her også, eller den beveger seg tilbake til utskjellingsfasen, men hvis debattantene er ekstra ivrige og saklige borer man seg dypere ned i emnet, og ender opp i den tredje og mest verdifulle fasen, hvor man diskuterer prinsipper.

Les resten hos Minerva.

1950s movies marathon – part 6

Devil’s Doorway (1950, USA, Mann)

The best westerns were always about law and anarchy, property and theft, the building blocks of society.  Sociological SF.  And this is one of them.  All the forces are in balance: Nobody’s entirely right, but nobody knows how to act otherwise, so everybody loses.  Watched it all.  Also, when it comes to Hollywood anti-racism and feminism, I’d rather take Anthony Mann’s brand of it than anyone else’s.

A Woman of Distinction (1950, USA)

Ah yes, this is that movie where the successful career woman learns that she needs a man in her life after all.  Watched: 2 minutes.

At War With the Army (1950, USA)

Hey, this is something new: A comedy that isn’t completely execrable.  I even find myself laughing from time to time.  It’s basically just Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin goofing around on a cheap set, doing all the usual military jokes, but it’s fresh.  Watched it all.

La Ronde (1950, France, Ophüls)

I find it very annoying when a movie opens with a character who speculates on whether he is the author of the story we’re about to watch, or a stand-in for the audience, and whether the movie is set on a stage, in a studio, or in the magical magical past.  Watched: 5 minutes.

Lecture roundup

Here are some good lectures and speeches to watch on a Sunday morning, (or a Monday afternoon, or really any time).  I’ve posted most on these links on Twitter over the last couple months, and here they all are again, because this really is worth watching.

Niall Ferguson, who like all people with strong views about the big picture should be listened to with fascinated skepticism, talks about how empires fall, and about taking an evolutionary approach to finance history.

Frank Gavin is more grounded to earth when he talks about how to take the right lessons from history.

In Swedish, Hans Rosling explains that the taxonomy of industrial vs developing countries is 50 years out of date.

P.J. O’Rourke talks about his new book Don’t Vote.

Norman Doidge explains how neuroplasticity means your brain never stops changing.

Neal Stephenson talks about what science fiction is, and how it’s connected with mainstream culture.

Not having read anything by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I must say she’s less fanatical than her reputation.

In Norwegian, Asle Toje talks about the Norwegian culture war.

Not a lecture, but an experimental documentary from my favorite documentarist: Adam Curtis presents an unnarrated view of the year 1970.

For your next two months of commuting, here’s Robert Shiller’s course on financial markets, and John Merriman’s on France Since 1871.

And, of course, Milton Freedman’s 1980 documentary series Free to Choose, which I wrote about recently.

Suggestion: Watch these videos instead of the news every other day or so.  You won’t miss anything.

1950s movies marathon – part 5

Gun Crazy (1950, USA, Lewis)

John Dall’s not such a bad boy really, he just likes to steal guns, and fondle them at night, and maybe shoot them, that’s all. It takes reform school and a Bad Woman to turn him into a criminal. Watched it all before, and again now. Dall’s performance in Rope was so great that it rubs off on his character here.

A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950, USA)

Look, I don’t ask much from special effects, but don’t show me what’s obviously just a model train, making me expect a movie about model train enthusiasts, and then tell me it’s supposed to be real.  Watched: 5 minutes.

Broken Arrow (1950, USA, Daves)

The Apaches here are played and written like Klingons, or is it the other way around?  Whatever it is, this is one of those movies where every scene resonates like the lines of an epic ballad.  Watched it all.

Scandal (1950, Japan, Kurosawa)

The photograph of Toshiro Mifune standing next some random woman is a big deal to the scandalsheets, and to him too, for some reason.  Watched: 25 minutes.

The White-Haired Girl (1950, China)

The oppressed peasants of China truly are wonderful people.  Let’s hope some over-educated fool doesn’t come along and starve them all to death.  Watched: 8 minutes, then fast-forwarded to see the Red Army reunite the young lovers who were torn apart by their cruel landlord, which inspires the People to break out into a song arguing for the landlord’s execution.

1950s movies marathon – part 4

Rashomon (1950, Japan, Kurosawa)

Truth is a slippery thing. Some say Japan’s war aim was to liberate Asia from its European oppressors.  Others say they themselves were the evil imperialists.  Who can really know for sure?  Perhaps the truth lies somewhere inbetween.  Watched it all before, and again now, because this really is Kurosawa’s best so far, even if the message he sends is kind of convenient.

Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone (1950, USA)

“Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone, a pair of wacky characters the like you’ve never known”, the title song tells us.  And they’ve written everything in a wacky font, too.  Watched: 3 minutes.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950, USA, Huston)

I’m trying to figure out what it is that separates the bad gangster and noir movies from the good and truly excellent ones.  I don’t know what it is, but I know how it feels: It feels like the difference between a blurry photograph and one that is in focus.  And this – this is so much in focus that it hurts.  Watched it all before, and again now.

Champagne for Caesar (1950, USA)

Is Vincent Price spooky yet?  No?  Only a little peculiar?  Moving on.  Watched: 5 minutes.

Les Enfants Terribles (1950, France, Melville)

The young ones enter adulthood like whirlwinds, making their own rules about life.  Watched it all.  This is a silly but intense movie, as are its characters, but what’s really memorable is the eyes of Nicole Stéphane.


Sosiale medier – hvordan ta over verden uten å gå ut av huset

Jeg har anmeldt Virrvarrs bok om den norske nettkulturen:

Å skrive bok om livet på sosiale medier er litt modig. Du risikerer at teknologiene du skriver om allerede er gammeldagse innen boken går i trykken. Kanskje ender du opp med å forårsake latteranfall hos en tenåring som finner boken i et offentlig bibliotek om en femten års tid.

Men bak alle de opphypede medienyordene 2000-tallet ga oss – som blogg, Facebook og Twitter – ligger det en fellesnevner, en ny offentlighet som bruker, men ikke er bundet til, bestemte teknologier, og derfor vil kunne overleve dem. Det er denne nye offentligheten, med sine nye regler og nye muligheter, Ida “Virrvarr” Jackson beskriver i boken Sosiale medier – hvordan ta over verden uten å gå ut av huset.

Les resten av anmeldelsen i Humanist.

I hate iTunes

I hate iTunes.  Not because I have paranoid fantasies about Steve Jobs and the way he unfairly gets all this really good press, (“all Apple does is consistenly releasing excellent devices that everyone likes, what’s so great about that?  Ptui!”)

I hate it because it has so many good qualities, combined with so many bad.  The good ones are the good qualities of all Apple products.  It’s simple and obvious to use iTunes in a lot of powerful ways.  The bad ones are the bad qualities of all old, bloated software products.  Like the way you click, and five seconds later something happens.  Maybe.  Or the way once a track has been added, it can’t ever be deleted, even if you delete the file.

But finding a replacement isn’t easy either.  I’ve tested a few.  They have none of iTunes’ bad qualities, but also very few of its good ones.  For instance, there’s MediaMonkey, which was obviously designed by a bunch of programmers who wanted to cram every single feature anyone could ever want into the UI.  And you can extend it in any way you want.  Translated, this means that if there is a feature you miss from iTunes, you’ll have to scour the MediaMonkey forums for an addon, then write your own SQL code to customize it.

I’ll stick with iTunes.  For now.  But I advise Apple to outsource iTunes to someone who has experience with cleaning up old bloated software.  Like, say .. the Office team at Microsoft?

Free to Choose

There are two reasons you need to watch Milton Friedman’s 1980 documentary series Free to Choose.  The first reason is that it lays out clearly a principled, coherent approach to free market capitalism, and whatever you may think about those views there is no excuse to be ignorant about what the views you disagree with actually are.

The second reason is historical.  Free to Choose is basically a half-implemented blueprint for the last 30 years.  It captures a moment in time when political momentum was shifting to the right.  The next decades would give us deregulation, globalization, the end of Communism – basically, the world we live in today.  And Free to Choose is the mission statement of that process.

You see this moment most clearly in the debates that follow each program, where Friedman defends his ideas against intellectuals, union leaders, business people, politicians, etc., even one or two genuine socialists.  The debates are surprisingly interesting, they feel fresh, not like the festering wound such debates are today.  But more than that they show the high water mark of a particular approach to leftism, which over-extended itself, and had to retreat and regroup, giving us the savvier third way leftists of today.

You can watch Free to Choose here.  Watch out for a young(er) Donald Rumsfeld and Thomas Sowell.  For extra fun, look up all the names you see in the debates on Wikipedia, to find out how the next decades would treat them.

1950s movies marathon – part 3

Summer Stock (1950, USA, Walters)

There are two views on super-cheerful musicals like this: One is that they are naive and old-fashioned, because everyone knows you can’t have real art without despair.  Mine is that any hack can portray angst, what’s really hard is doing larger-than-life cheerfulness right.  Watched it all before, so this time I just fast-forwarded through all the talkie parts.

The Wooden Horse (1950, UK, Lee)

Hey, I read this story in Donald Duck & Co once!  It’s the one where the Beagle Boys use a vaulting horse to hide the tunnel they’re digging out of prison.  Except here it’s British POW’s, for some reason.  Watched: 2 minutes, then fast forwarded to see how many details the Beagle Boys got right.  I’m not sure I like POW movies, anyway.  There’s something phony about doing a movie about the two guys who escaped to freedom, while millions were dying randomly all around them.

King Solomon’s Mines (1950, USA)

It’s very principled of Deborah Kerr to head out in the African wilderness wearing a corset.  One must have standards.  And it’s absolutely adorable the way she says, about Quatermain, “oh, he’s a dreadful man”.  Watched it all.  But what this movie really needs is some airships.  It makes me shiver just thinking about it.

No Way Out (1950, USA, Mankiewicz)

Hollywood.  One moment they make all-white and borderline racist movies.  The next they’ve wholeheartedly embraced the preachy anti-racist message movie.  Is there no middle ground?  Watched: 20 minutes.  But it’s interesting to see Sidney Poitier in his first big role.