Author Archives: bjoern.staerk

1950s movies marathon – part 113

Vertigo (1958, USA, Hitchcock)

Woman is an inscrutable being, mysteriously connected to all womanhood before her, and also possibly trying to use you for her own evil ends. At least the exciting Kim Novak type is. For the man who has lost all taste for adventure, there’s always the safe Barbara Bel Geddes type to fall back on. Watched it before, and again now. This movie made #1 of a recent all-time movie list. Ranking movies is an odd undertaking that has little to do with loving them, but if you have to choose a number one, it should be a movie without flaws, and with a few touches of greatness. This is that – the opening titles (above) are one of thouse touches. But nobody is ever going to truly love a movie like this. That’s reserved for movies with more greatness, and more flaws.

Aphrodite, Goddess of Love (1958, Italy)

True Italian peplum! Well, basically a Hollywood Bible epic, with the usual early Christians and the obligatory decadent banquet scenes etc. Boring. Watched: 26 minutes.

The Time Element (1958, USA)

Rod Serling! In a proto-Twilight Zone TV movie! See, there are two tracks of science fiction, one fantastical, and one idea-oriented. Ideas dominate in novels, especially in the best of the 1940s and 50s, but Serling brings that track over to television with The Twilight Zone. And this is a preview of that, a time travel story that would have made a typical short story for the time, not brilliant, but good enough. Watched it all.

1950s movies marathon – part 108

Throne of Blood (1957, Kurosawa)

The warlord’s court is full of soldiers and guards, trained to kill, and armed to the teeth, every one of them, but when they all start murdering each other for no good reason at all, sure, let’s blame it all on the one woman character in the entire movie! (Who said watching movies from a feminist perspective can’t be fun?) Watched it all. I like this better than the Scottish version.

Woman Basketball Player No 5 (1957, China)

Chinese youth are full of life and a little bit “naughty”, or at least that’s the word the subtitles use. Watched: 8 minutes. For some reason, watching late 50s Chinese movies makes me feel a little bit peckish.

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957, USA)

A small-time press agent with big ambitions sucks up to the city’s most powerful asshole columnist, because the only place to be in society for a status-starving sociopath is right at the top, baby, right at the top where you can stamp on the fingers of all the other greedy bastards. Watched it all. This is like an unclean version of All About Eve, where the glamour has gone away, and all you’re left with is a bare-knuckles street fight over status and power.

The best movies of 1957

Next up: 1958, on account of it being the year that followed 1957, with some 643 movies and clips in the queue.

1950s movies marathon – part 112

3:10 to Yuma (1957, USA)

There was a remake of this a couple of years ago. What a sad thing that is, to make a remake of a perfect movie. You don’t have the luck of the original, all those little touches that just happened to turn out right. You don’t have a boyishly evil Glenn Ford. All you have is a few scraps of plot, and a famous title. What a sad, sad thing. Watched it all.

Raznye Sudby / Different Fortunes (1957, USSR)

Forget France and Italy. Russia in the 50s is the place for young people to be in love. Even the steel plants look romantic. Watched it all. The world of the Soviet Dream is amazing, and, in this case, oddly capitalistic: Newlyweds make ends meet by taking extra jobs, and forego creative dreams by becoming workers and bureaucrats, because whatever else you can say about communism, none of the characters in these movies believe that it is magic, that it creates wealth out of thin air. (That belief is reserved for modern welfare state dependents.)

1950s movies marathon – part 111

Mito Komon (1957, Japan)

The Old Lord of Mito travels around Japan dressed as a commoner, to right wrongs, detect evil plots, and kick some ruffian ass with his mighty staff. Watched it all. Now this is the fun-loving yet stylish Japan that I love. So do the Japanese, who have been watching a television series based on this character continously for 40 years.

Nature Girl and the Slaver / Liane, die weisse sklavin (1957, West Germany)

Arab slave traders target tribes in the deepest, darkest part of modern-day Africa. Luckily there’s a German and a jungle-raised white teenage goddess around! Watched: 4 minutes.

The Tin Star (1957, USA, Mann)

As law and anarchy westerns go, this one is a bit on the preachy side, with a too-hatable racist asshole personifying anarchy, but Anthony Perkins is unforgettable as the boy-sheriff who commands so little respect that he’s more likely to be shot by his own posse than to catch any evildoers, and the “cynical” bounty hunter Henry Fonda is only moderately annoying. So I approve. Watched it all.

1950s movies marathon – part 110

The Good Soldier Svejk (1957, Chechoslovakia)

In the novel by Jaroslav Hasek, Svejk is a seemingly feeble-minded patriot who mocks Austro-Hungarian authority by complying with it. It’s not so odd that he became a national hero to 20th century Czechs. It’s a bit more surprising that the Communists allowed him to remain so, and to be filmed. Or was Svejk too big to brush off, so they thought they might as well embrace him and pretend that his subversion was only aimed at the previous tyrants? Watched it all.

Teenage Doll (1957, USA, Corman)

Girl gangs roam the streets, acting tough and speaking like the kids these days apparently speak. Watched: 6 minutes. Some of the early Roger Corman movies are quite fun, but the one way in which they all stand apart from the other movies of their time is in their title sequences. There’s nothing else like it.

Boy on a Dolphin (1957, USA)

Hugo Friedhofer was the greatest movie composer of the 1950s. Listen to this. And to this, (yes, I know the tune isn’t his, but listen!) And to this. But he usually worked on shitty movies. I have the soundtrack to Boy on a Dolphin. Listening to it starts a movie running in my head, the most beautiful movie I’ve never seen. It’s magical. This .. isn’t. Watched: 27 minutes.

Minireviews: Smil on energy, and useless letters to the climate generation

Vaclav Smil – Energy (2006)

Most of the energy we use has its origin in sun rays, which are inefficiently captured by photosynthesis, and then slowly makes its way to us through the food web, (and, more slowly, through fossils fuels), and which are also the source of wind and hydro power. History is the story of how of how one of Earth’s life forms directed an increasing amount of this energy towards its own ends, at increasing levels of efficiency, and what follows will hopefully be the story of how we move on from the temporary fossil-based bootstrapping phase to something more permanent.

Recommended: Strongly. I love these sort of condensed topical overviews. They’re like extra long encyclopedia articles.

Snu, brev til klimagenerasjonen (2012)

See, this is why I decided to get involved in the climate debate in the first place, because if I didn’t, it would be left to people like this, second-rate artists and intellectuals pushing their talents to the limit by making the profound statement that gosh, climate change is so important, and we should do, like, something, I don’t know what, but I’ll do my part by spreading awareness. Oh, you don’t see how this image of an ampersand spreads awareness about climate change? Well, it does.

Recommended: Dear God no. (Oh, and to the one or two contributors I’m friend with on Facebook, I probably didn’t mean you. But you have to admit that overall this book is fucking useless.)

1950s movies marathon – part 109

Paths of Glory (1957, USA, Kubrick)

Yes yes it ‘s a great movie. Watched it before, many times, and again now. But let’s look at it from a new perspective: Is this movie really implying that the chief problem with the armies that fought World War I was the occasional bad apples, like ambitious general or a drunken cowardly officer? Because it seems to me that even if these two people hadn’t been present in the story, the death count – hundreds in the battle scene – would be almost exactly the same. So, what, executing three extra soldiers on a phony cowardice charge, that is more unfair than what happened to all their comrades? Btw, Kirk Douglas in a uniform looks very much like Bruce Boxleitner in Babylon 5. Yay!

Bop Girl Goes Calypso (1957, USA)

There were a lot of movies in 1957 which tried to cash in on the rock’n roll craze by telling stories about washed up music executives who were trying to cash in on the rock’n roll craze, but, surprisingly, there were almost as many movies dedicated to calypso, the most annoying form of music ever stolen by the white man. If Cthulhu dreams in music, that music is calypso. Watched: Hard to say, it’s all a blur, like a nightmare you know you must not remember, or it will drive you mad.

Bjørn Lomborg (ed.) – Smart Solutions to Climate Change

Bjørn Lomborg (ed.) – Smart Solutions to Climate Change (2010)

If we pretend that it’s possible to calculate the costs of climate change, and the costs of potential climate solutions, then we can pretend to carry out a cost benefit analysis that will tell us what to do about it. Ta-da!

Recommended: No. There’s a place for cost benefit analysis. That place is after you’ve made an argument that it is the right tool for the job. I agree with Frank Ackerman that this is not the case with climate change. Dealing with climate change means staring out into the Big Unknown. You can’t pretend your way out of that. The chapter on technology-led climate policy is worth reading, though, because it puts more emphasis on actual relevant arguments than on a phony cost benefit analysis, arguing, in line with Pielke Jr, that instead of using a large CO2 tax to discourage fossil fuels, we need a small (and thereby politically feasible) CO2 tax that can be used to finance energy R&D. On the other hand, as one of the other contributors point out, this sort of program requires a high level of technological competence in government, and is vulnerable to pork barrel politics. Is it even possible for governments to make good investments in a field as open-ended and risky as alternative energies? It’s certainly nothing to be enthusiastic about – but then neither are any of the alternatives.

Roger Pielke Jr – The Climate Fix

Roger Pielke Jr – The Climate Fix (2010)

We don’t currently have the technology we need to decarbonize the world, ie to have continued economic growth for less CO2 emissions. But we do have the political will, and should stop pretending that it’s the climate skeptics that stand in the way of a solution. The real problem is the iron law of climate policy: That when people are asked to choose between preventing climate change and having economic growth, they choose growth. Ambitious CO2 targets, like the 80% by 2050 goal the UK has adopted, are irrelevant, because nobody have a practical solution to this problem. Instead of trying to price carbon out of the market, we should tax it just enough, perhaps $5 per ton CO2, to finance an investment in alternative energy technologies, so that an actual decarbonization can become easier in the future.

Recommended: Weakly. The ideas are interesting, but the book is unfocused. Pielke spends so much time on topics that by themselves could be interesting, but have little relevance to the theme, that by the time he gets around to explaining what his “climate fix” is, the book is almost over. A better title would have been “various thoughts I have that are more or less related to climate change”. Also, I disagree that we have the political will to prevent climate change. People say they want to do something, but political will is also the willingness to choose away something else. That willingness is small, hence the iron law of climate policy.

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