Monthly Archives: January 2011

1950s movies marathon – part 11

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, UK, Crichton)

In jolly England, crime is a game for poor, but enterprising gentlemen.  Even your local safe cracker is a decent chap, all in all, and any gentleman can become a bank robber, if they put their mind to it.  Watched it all.  Alec Guinness can add or remove 20 years with a twitch of a facial muscle.  What an actor.  Come to think of it, yes, it is a bit unfair that he will go down in movie history as “that old guy in Star Wars”.

Double Dynamite (1951, USA)

Please stop putting Marx brothers in movies now.  It’s embarassing to watch, and must have been even more embarassing for them.  Watched: 3 minutes, then fast-forwarded to see if Groucho has any funny lines.  He doesn’t.

Fourteen Hours (1951, USA, Hathaway)

The way I do this marathon, I’m naturally biased in favor of movies with great openings.  This is one of them, (above).  The quiet streets, no words, and then, suddenly – the man on the ledger, ready to jump.  And the rest follows from there, intense and compressed like a filmed play.  Sometimes that doesn’t work, but I love it when it does.  Watched it all.

The Red Badge of Courage (1951, USA, Huston)

I don’t necessarily approve of long movies, but even I understand you can’t do an American Civil War epic in 70 minutes.  Watched: 5 minutes, then fast-forwarded to see the final battle scene, which looks amazing.

Niall Ferguson – The War of the World

When he isn’t making headlines by dabbling with astrology, Niall Ferguson is actually a really interesting historian. He’s definitely ambitious: His goal in The War of the World is to adjust the great narrative of the entire 20th century.  Instead of a story of Western triumph, it was a story of Western decline, and the driving force behind its conflicts was not ideology, but ethnic hatred in troubled empires.

He sums up these ideas in this Fora.tv video. You should watch it.

The history books I read these days are nearly always about the 20th century somehow, (because, hey, what a century), but I usually avoid World War 2.  There seems to be an army of desperate historians out there looking for new stories that haven’t been told yet, but all the stories have been told, so we end up with books about Hitler’s dog, Churchill’s cousin’s brother, and how awful it was in that one particular battle somewhere.  And they’re all about the World War 2 the readers already know, the one their grandparents told them about.

The War of the World is a fine (although speculative) antidote to all that.  Ferguson doesn’t use the word “eurocentric”, but I will.  To appreciate 20th century history you have to see all of it as a whole, not just the bits that happened near the place you were born in.  Ferguson seems on board with that, and while I’m sure his conclusions are debatable, I absolutely love his approach.

When the app store is your newsstand, you’re in competition with everyone

If the iPad successfully convinces people to start paying for digital news, on tablet devices and smart phones, that actually introduces a new challenge for the news media:

When the Apple App Store or the Android Market is your newsstand, you’re in competition with everyone.

You can no longer rely on it being harder for readers to get hold of newspapers from outside the area or country they live in.  They’re all there, right next to each other: Almost every newspaper in the world.  Local news still hold the advantage of being more relevant, and there’s still a language barrier, but for readers who are interested in non-local news, there are a lot more sources to choose from.  Good sources.  The best.

Didn’t the web already do this?  Yes and no.  The web places everyone in competition with everyone, but it never replaced the newspaper habit.  It introduced a new habit of its own, a new and more casual way of reading news.  It replaced some of the time people spent on reading newspapers, but not the habit itself, the daily ritual of “sitting down to read today’s newspapers”.  Which is what the news media now hopes to do through apps.

And if they succeed, the world’s newspaper editors had better hope they’re all making a really fine newspaper, a newspaper people genuinely want to read, and that they haven’t survived this far merely on inertia, prestige, and state subsidies.  Most of Norway’s newspapers, at least, start with a handicap in this respect.

The iPad as a news platform: First impressions

The first law of technological change is that nobody knows what is possible or profitable, so you can either get right in there and experiment, or wait a few years and emulate the winners.  Now that the first generation of newspapers and magazines for the iPad have been released, the backseat drivers are emerging, saying that it won’t work, it won’t pay, and why is everyone so obsessed with this overhyped iPad thing anyway?

Are they right?  I have no idea.  Nobody does, and it’s a bit pointless to speculate.  Media companies must choose: Experiment, or wait.  High risk, high reward, or low risk, low reward.  Whatever their choice is, it’s too soon to tell.  What matters right now is your subjective feelings as a user.

Now that I’ve tried it, I see why media companies are excited about the iPad.  I wouldn’t mind paying for news content in this form.  But I also realize that this isn’t about the iPad as a revolutionary media device.  It’s about the iPad as a wedge, that can introduce the habit of paying for digital news.  First on tablets, then on smart phones, and finally on the web itself.

Some say that they would never pay for digital news.  I think they’re lying.  Or if not, they’re morally wrong.  It offends me, this idea that good writing isn’t worth paying for.  I don’t know what will work, (and neither do you), but I root for anyone who tries. And the iPad is an interesting place to try it.