Tag Archives: movies

Movies With Madness (Three Reviews) (2016Apr28)

Posted by XperDunn on

20160428XD-Nina

Thursday, April 28, 2016                                        4:11 PM

Movie Review: “Nina”

I watched “Nina” on VOD yesterday—a film about Nina Simone, the legendary blues singer (incredibly played (and sung!) by Zoe Saldana) at the end of her career, facing instability, alcoholism, and illness, with the help of a male nurse, Clifton Henderson (as played by David Oyelowo) and marking a triumphant return to the United States with a live free concert in Central Park. Oddly, historical records indicate that she performed at the New Jersey Performing Arts Centre in Newark upon her return to the US—and that it wasn’t ‘free’—but Nina Simone did perform in Central Park several times in her earlier career.

Other reviewers and critics take issue with lighter-skinned Ms. Saldana playing the very much darker High Priestess of Soul—but while I can understand a rejection of ‘blackface’ white performers playing black people—I think it’s going a bit far to complain of one African-American woman playing another. It makes more sense to complain that Zoe Saldana is too young and too thin—but this is a biopic, not a documentary, and her performance is often riveting, even if the historical accuracy of both her depiction and the story-line goes a bit by the boards. As with Jamie Foxx’s “Ray” (2004), “Nina” is as remarkable for the star’s vocal efforts as it is for the purported subject—though I wouldn’t have minded hearing the actual, recorded voice of the late Nina Simone sing a few bars at some point in the movie.

But you can just do what I did—go to YouTube afterwards and check out the real Nina Simone singing all the songs from the movie and more—that’s as much of a treat as the movie—and since the movie got me there, hooray for the movie. But see the movie first or you’ll never get over the very real difference in both appearance and vocals.

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Movie Review: “The Lady In The Van”   (2016Apr28)

I was eager to see “The Lady In The Van” because Maggie Smith gives good ‘crabby old lady’—and she certainly doesn’t disappoint in this movie that could have been written for her, if it wasn’t based on an actual woman. Still the film is based on the 1999 play—and takes place even earlier, in the seventies—so perhaps the film was only made to showcase Ms. Smith.

She plays a poor and confused woman who lives out of a van, which she parks in various places in the neighborhood until stricter parking regulations (and perhaps complaining residents) make it necessary for her to park in a driveway—that of the playwright, Allen Bennett, who forms a limited friendship with this loner who has reached the age when being a loner becomes problematic. The film is as much about the man as the lady—and both are seen by the Gloucester Crescent inhabitants as odd ducks. As with many stories about fragile, vulnerable people, the common run of humanity is portrayed as coarse and unsympathetic—from the whispering neighbors to the van-rocking toughs.

One striking element is the conflict between the personal care of Alan Bennett and the more ‘public’ care offered by the periodic appearance of a social worker—to be nice by nature is far different from being nice by the rulebook. It is especially telling when dealing with the mentally unstable, where a little patience and understanding can do so much more than the brusque attentions of a civil servant.

A few movies, like “The Lady In The Van”, are remarkable also in showing us Yankees how very different the British can be—it is so easy to assume that they are just ‘differently-American’, when they are really quite another thing altogether. This film, in showing both the similarities of such situations and their differences, informs us just how foreign England can be.

While Alex Jennings’ and Maggie Smith’s performances contain a lot of humorous touches, the overall plot is insurmountably bleak, so I wouldn’t watch it unless you’re in the mood for something good and serious.

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Movie Review: Infinitely Polar Bear (2015)

I just watched “Infinitely Polar Bear” (it just showed up on cable this weekend) written and directed by Maya Forbes, starring Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Imogene Wolodarsky, and Ashley Aufderheide. I’m a long-time fan of both principles—I could go on all day about Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana—neither one has been in a movie I didn’t like. Imogene Wolodarsky and Ashley Aufderheide did a great job being directed by Imogene’s mom, Maya.

It was my favorite kind of movie—it was so engrossing that I immediately stopped being aware of watching a movie, got sucked completely into the story, and got that heartbroken/furious-combo feeling when it ended because I wanted it to keep going so badly. Mark Ruffalo plays a bi-polar father who makes you worry for his kids—in spite of his generally appearing to be a better father than most. But the best part of the movie is when it shows the madness of sanity against the relief of his specific bi-polar symptoms—his grandmother is crazy, his neighbors are crazy, the waiter in the restaurant is crazy—but all in ‘sane’ ways that society finds acceptable. At the same time, his madness makes him a better person in many ways—even while it cripples his ability to relate to the sanely-crazy.

It also shows that sometimes the only one hurt by insanity is the person himself—or herself—that being different is its own punishment in a world full of people busily trying to fit in. We tend to have more sympathy for a hero that resists peer-pressure than for a hero who isn’t aware of it—but in both cases, the reactions of others are the others’ problems, not the hero’s. The film shows the girls being educated by their father’s disability—rather uncomfortably, but in the end, to good purpose. I found it all very uplifting—maybe I relate a little too strongly to a crazy father.

VOD Movie Reviews: “Trumbo” and “Steve Jobs”   (2016Feb18)

Posted by XperDunn on

Thursday, February 18, 2016                                           3:43 PM

I watched two movies – “Trumbo” and “Steve Jobs” –both bio-pics, obviously, but truth is stranger than fiction and Hollywood has done as much with non-fiction drama as it has with plain old movies—and I use the phrase ‘plain old movies’ advisedly, since the most impressive movies of recent days have either been historical (“Selma”, “Straight Outta Compton”) or biographical (“The Imitation Game”, “Unbroken”) or both (“Jersey Boys”, “Race”) and, since the first blush of CGI’s thrill has long since worn off, block-bluster fictional movies like “Spectre” or “The Force Awakens” (or any Marvel or DC movie) just seem that much more formulaic. Movie-making embraced childhood with its abject surrender to science fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy, and especially comic books—all the things that leant themselves to the new SFX tech’s possibilities. Now that such whiz-bang-ery is a given, these themes are poised to return to the children’s entertainment from which they came.

Don’t get me wrong—good science fiction (and yes, I’ll admit it, for Tolkien’s sake—fantasy) can still be great entertainment, suitable for grown-ups—but science fiction encompasses both sweeping visions and ‘space opera’ (i.e., soap operas with spaceships in them, like the Star Wars franchise) and for every Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” there are a thousand “Transformers”. So I’m glad that science fiction has been taken out of the kiddy-corner—now all we need is a little judicious bifurcation between age-levels, and everything will be fine.

Maybe it’s my age—or maybe it’s my lifelong interest in history—that makes me lean towards the ‘based on actual events’ movies. Or maybe I just like the challenge—everyone knows that a movie is a movie first, and a historical archive last—and my favorite thing to do is watch a historically-based movie, especially one based on a serious non-fiction book, like “Unbroken” or “The Imitation Game”, and compare in my mind what I read with what I see. I have discussions with myself about why they cut this interesting fact or added that spurious made-up scene. It’s like a review quiz for those of us who read the book first. And it’s a reminder that all history, written included, has to be taken with a grain of salt—we can never know the whole story, because even the people who lived it never know the whole story—the whole idea of ‘knowing’ history is a misunderstanding of what history’s limits are.

We see it on the news—especially now, during campaign season—the call and response ritual of two people trading ‘That’s not what I said’s back and forth—illustrating that even in a single conversation, the ‘truth’ is a combination of context, syntax, attitude, and intent—all whipped together with the vagaries of language and the pitfalls of hasty assumptions. To imagine that a student of history from a century or two back would reach any more than a vague abstraction of what really happened is, well, silly.

Those abstractions, however, are dead serious—they are the paradigms of our present. Our ideals, our ideas of what our country is, of what we are—are all bound up in the history that led to this present. Thus the desire for history to be something we can nail down and dissect—but all we can ever really do is postulate—to suggest that this is the way it might have gone. To me, this is one of the great reasons for the need for pluralism—disagreement is a given, within groups as often as between groups—and so we should see groups of any kind as a superficial distinction that is always overridden by our commonalities.

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But I was talking about movies. Okay, first off, I read “Johnny Get Your Gun”, Dalton Trumbo’s historic novel, when I was a teenager. Being a bookworm, I just came across it—no one warned me what it was about, or suggested it—I just opened to the first page and started reading. Oh my fucking God!—this book was meant to be an ‘anti-war’ novel—it starts with a disembodied person talking to himself, wondering why he’s blind, and deaf, and can’t move. It turns out, as you read along, that you are reading the thoughts of a wounded veteran who is lying in a hospital bed, covered in bandages and missing an appendage or two. I can’t remember specifics—just the horror of Trumbo’s description of what it’s like to be blind, deaf, helpless, and alone. The book turned my stomach—I recommend it to anyone who’s considering enlisting, just for a second opinion.

But I didn’t hate it—I was enthralled by what I was reading—disagreeable as it was, it pulled me in. And I think that is what made Dalton Trumbo both a martyr of the Blacklist, and its vanquisher—he not only wouldn’t look away from the unpleasant or the inconvenient, he was bound and determined to get you to look at it too—but in a way that made it impossible to look away.

As for the movie—it was great. I’m a big fan of Bryan Cranston and Diane Lane and Louis CK and John Goodman and Helen Mirren—jeez, if they’d made a bad movie, hell would’ve froze over. I watched the movie, then I hit the replay button on my remote and watched it again.

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As for “Steve Jobs”, I vaguely remember writing a blog not too long ago where I defended Aaron Sorkin from reviewers who shrugged at his latest effort—even though I hadn’t yet seen the movie. Well, I’ve seen the movie now—and I was right. It’s fantastic—it tells so many stories in the interstices between the obvious stories—to call it multi-layered is to damn it with faint praise.

Again, big fan of Fassbender, Winslet, and Rogen—and Sorkin, of course—so I expected great things. But the ‘frame’ everyone made so much of—the movie being set in the minutes before three major product launches, separated in reality over many years of actual time, is very fitting for a historical precis—each launch was a nexus of time, pulling together all that went before and all that would follow, and the combination of personal, business, and technical conflicts in the moments before—well, it gives a lot of depth and texture without trying to nail down exactly who said what when, and that sort of thing.

I said something in yesterday’s post about my favorite artists’ biographies invariably disappointing me by revealing that they had feet of clay—Jobs is certainly in that category—but every movie needs a bad guy—even if he’s the hero.

*-*-*

Okay, here are three new improvs:

 

 

 

Ta Ta For Now…

On VOD, Reviewed: Three Films (2015Nov05)

Posted by XperDunn on

Tuesday, November 03, 2015                                           12:40 PM

Pre-Reviews   (2015Nov03)

Okay, I’m an old fuddy-duddy—I added these movies to my “Cart” from the “Just In” menu of my Cable VOD listings: “Best Of Enemies”, a documentary about the 1968 debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, the then-champion intellectuals of America’s political right- and left-wings, respectively; “The End Of The Tour”, a re-enactment of Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s road-trip/interview with the late novelist David Foster Wallace during his 1996 book tour promoting his masterpiece, “Infinite Jest”; and “Inside Out”, the animated Disney feature about the inside of a young lady’s head, populated by characters that represent emotions—Joy, Anger, Fear, etc.—as she experiences the trials of childhood.

As a twelve–year-old, I remember finding the Buckley/Vidal debates excruciatingly boring—they talked of issues I knew nothing about, using words I couldn’t understand—I hope, forty-seven years later, I can understand them a bit better. I’m actually looking forward to watching “Best Of Enemies”—even though my memories of those talks are vague, I still miss their obvious insistence on clarity and correctness—something so absent from the politics of our new millennium. Ironically, it was most likely the entertainment value of their last exchanges, which devolved into anger and name-calling, which brought forth the kind of nonsense we see in modern debates.

I’m not sure whether I’ll enjoy watching “The End of The Tour”. David Foster Wallace’s writing is a beautiful stream-of-consciousness cornucopia of vocabulary and images unmatched by other living writers—but his subject matter was unfailingly dark, disgusting, and full of despair. Add to that the unpleasant highlights of his blurb-biography—and the fact that he committed suicide in 2008—and I’m left with the suspicion that I won’t have much fun watching the film, no matter how well-made. Having plowed through “The Broom Of The System” and “Infinite Jest”, and having read the first few stories of “Oblivion: Stories”, I’m afraid to read any more of his stuff, especially now that he’s killed himself—I have my own struggles with depression and I don’t need my leisure pursuits to reinforce my worst impulses. I think I want to watch the movie just to get close to his beautiful mind again, without having to actually join him there by reading his works.

“Inside Out” should be fun for me—as a kid, I used to run cross-country—and I’d pretend my body was a mechanism, and I was a controller sitting inside my brain, behind my eyes, ‘flying’ myself around the track, or through the paths in the woods behind our school. Besides, I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow Disney animated films—they’re the best—and if the reviews and box-office are anything to go by, this is one of their better efforts.

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Wednesday, November 04, 2015                                              9:51 AM

Post Review   (2015Nov04)

“Best Of Enemies”  is an enjoyable documentary and I found it especially so because it gives impressions of the two-party mind-set just as that paradigm was coming to the surface. Prior to World War II, social friction was between Rich and Poor—easy-peasy, simple as that. During that War, America put on its best overalls and pretended we were ‘all in this together’. Immediately post-war we busied ourselves fighting against ‘Red propaganda’, touting liberty, democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. Having gone from competing armies to competing ideologies, America’s entitled found themselves in a quandary—many of the free world’s ‘good features’ were populist and inclusive. Unions were acceptable, racial integration had begun in the military, and women were fresh from the workforce—pushed out by returning servicemen and the closing of war factories, but still cognizant of what they had achieved during those years spent in so-called ‘men’s jobs’.

To me, religion is the most elusive aspect of those times—we were claiming that religious freedom was a touchstone of modern civilization, but there were many Americans who assumed that Protestant Christianity was the default American faith. This allowed the establishment (an old term for the rich and powerful) to take exception to some freedoms as ‘sinful’—particularly when talking about women’s roles and rights. As we had seen during the war, women were legally accepted as equal—able to work in factories, offices—even serve in the military as ‘support’—but the Bible gave chauvinists the ammunition to reverse that acceptance. The invention of the Pill brought birth control into the equation—and we were off to the races. Women’s equality saw such a backlash that it would be the 1970s before any pushback from women was heard. Still, theocratic mores had permanently embedded themselves into the toolkit of the rich and powerful.

Law and order was another meme adopted by the establishment—but it was used as code for white supremacy. Any public outcry or demonstration in favor of racial justice was characterized as lawlessness—urban rioting was blamed on the rioters, not on the issues that got them rioting. This double-talk would appear legitimate until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were adopted—afterward it became increasingly difficult to characterize social progress as ‘troublemaking’. And to this day, police brutality is rationalized by the rich and powerful as ‘maintaining the peace’.

Our half-century of ‘war on drugs’ was also a thinly-veiled attempt to persecute African-Americans. The criminalization of marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the CIA’s involvement in flooding American cities with crack cocaine, our present-day swollen prison population—mostly non-violent drug offenders—are all examples of how drugs (which are a legal, billion-dollar industry) are still being used to persecute minorities. The establishment remains rabidly anti-drug, in spite of evidence that the War on Drugs created an underworld market—a subculture that makes it easier for their own children to get ensnared by addictive drugs than if they were legally sold over the counter, like cigarettes or booze.

Post-war Americans retained many wartime attitudes—‘get it done, no matter what’ was a common phrase while fighting to save the world from Fascism—but after the war, we still felt that a good person would just ‘get it done’. Those who couldn’t ‘get it done’ were useless, rather than helpless—they deserved our derision, not our sympathy. The old, the sick, the poor, the unemployed—these people were useless—they didn’t deserve help—that was the establishment line. Buckley habitually described the poor as ‘lazy’—as if poverty was a choice.

So we see the kernel of modern conservatism in Buckley’s battle of wits with Gore Vidal—biblical fundamentalism, thinly-disguised racism and sexism, and blaming the victims in lieu of social support programs. Buckley’s early work in stymying social progress and maintaining white male supremacy can seem silly to us today—but his fatuous reasonings were acceptable to the staid, close-minded majority of Americans of his time. Today’s conservatism has become far more sophisticated—it has had to, since the majority of Americans today see things more from Vidal’s point of view. We are, by and large, far more open-minded and inclusive about race, sex, and sexuality—and we have documentation proving that social support programs help the whole society, not just those who need them. Yet the philosophical battle rages on—proof, to my mind, that it is what it has always been—rich versus poor, those in power versus those without a voice.

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Thursday, November 05, 2015                                         7:39 AM

Post-Review   (2015Nov05)

“The End of The Tour” is well-acted, beautifully photographed, mysterious, engrossing—a surprisingly powerful movie, given the scope of the action—and most importantly, it is not a documentary. We aren’t led through a delving into the details of David Foster Wallace’s life and work—in fact, much of the dialogue displays Wallace’s fear of being detailed and analyzed.

David Lipsky, author and journalist, had just published his own novel when Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” exploded onto the cultural scene—and we see that he is appalled by the rave reviews for Wallace, and then more appalled by reading “Infinite Jest”. I can attest to the impression made by that experience—Wallace’s writing is unbelievably good and can’t help but evince a touch of despair in anyone with pretensions of writing. Rather than being repulsed by such overbearing competition, Lipsky becomes fascinated and cajoles his Rolling Stone editor into letting him interview Wallace as he completes his book tour.

Thus begins a short road trip, an awkward bro-mance between two equally neurotic intellectuals who couldn’t be more different. Lipsky is torn between admiration and envy. Wallace is torn by his sudden celebrity, which represents a sort of pinnacle of all the failings of American culture so deftly deconstructed and demonized in his writing. Few films make such an open-and-shut case for the theory that all great art is the product of suffering—or the irony that subsequent success only adds to the suffering.

Adapted from David Lipsky’s “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself : A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace”, a book which expands on the original magazine article, this film has a quiet beauty that belies the ugly struggle of creative expression and its practical side-effects. It has a camaraderie that belies the intense rivalry endemic to artists—and it has a peacefulness that belies the internal struggles of extreme, self-conscious intellectualism. For a film that is the opposite of an ‘action’ movie, it is a terribly exciting adventure.

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Thursday, November 05, 2015                                         2:29 PM

Post-Review   (2015Nov05)

“Inside Out” is excellent family fare, as we’ve come to expect from Disney/Pixar. It is packed with humor yet isn’t a comedy—a special formula that had served Disney well for decades. Drama, with all the fear and confusion that is the subtext of childhood, is what elevates their product above the pabulum Hollywood often offers to children. I’m reminded of my own childhood reaction to Mary Poppins—which, for the 1960s, was pretty mature fare for a family film—there is no greater satisfaction for a kid than to be entertained without being condescended to.

The story has complexities that one usually associates with adult drama—there is an interior story—the characters inside the girl, Riley’s, mind—and an exterior story—Riley’s family moves to California. The interior story involves anthropomorphized emotions and other details of the mind’s inner workings that are simplified, but correct, as evidenced by the credit roll’s expression of gratitude to the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute of Columbia University. One learns through the course of the film some fascinating elements of brain function and memory.

As a story, the most telling effects are the back and forth between the inner emotions of Riley and her exterior words and actions—the two stories are not overwhelming in themselves, but the interplay of the two brings a richness to the vicarious environment. There are also hints at the same ‘committee of feelings’ inside the mind of Riley’s mother—and indeed, by the movie’s end, we get a peek inside all the characters’ minds.

As a story-telling ‘frame’ it is a rich vein of original situations that bodes well for an ongoing franchise of ‘Inside Out’ sequels. However, this first movie’s central theme—the necessity, in maturing children, for their joy to accommodate their sadness—will be hard to replace with an equally stout tent-pole in subsequent stories. Still, this cleverly wrought mechanism of interior dialogues will add spice to any tale—and I’ll probably watch as many sequels as they can produce.

If the movie has a valuable message for young viewers, I’d say it was the distinction made between disaffection, or the loss of joy—and sadness, a necessary emotion in life. One hopes that children will see this film and have a better sense of their own emotional states—and be better able to withstand the pot-holes of bad days and rough times. Let’s hope so.

Well, that’s it—three films in three days cost me $16, over and above our monthly cable fee—so don’t expect regular installments of movie reviews—I ain’t got that kinda cash. I admit, though, that if next week’s New Listings on VOD has three equally attractive titles, I’ll probably do it again—it’s not like I’m a Zen-master of self-control or anything.

TV, Then and Now   (2015Aug16)

Posted by XperDunn on

Saturday, August 15, 2015                                       2:38 PM

Technology makes some things ridiculous. Where television programming once seemed an ever-shifting gem flashing first this rainbow facet then that, prisms and beams, swells and clarions of relentlessly changing light and sound, it is now listed on a menu. As of three years ago, iMDB listed over a quarter of a million films—268,000 since 1888. There have been 364 TV programs of 150-300 episodes each, 167 of 300-550 episodes each, 87 of 550-1,000 episodes each, 124 of 1,000-2,500 episodes each, 51 of 2,500-5,000 episodes each, 35 of 5,000-10,000 episodes each and 8 TV programs of over 10,000 episodes each (that’s roughly 101,426 episodes just from the top eight programs). Granted, only the majority of these programs are from the USA and Great Britain—(TV is alive and well the world over and they’re not just streaming the feed from the Great Satan). But that’s still more than a lifetime’s worth of original programming available to the English-speaking audience.

So, proved: there are more TV shows and movies than a single individual could ever watch in a hundred years—why then, in the summer, on the weekend, in the middle of the day, is there absolutely nothing on TV that I haven’t seen a billion times? I would make a federal case out of this—but then I stop and realize that for the younger folks (like our kids) TV is no longer something you let schedule your life—you schedule it. Between On-Demand and Hulu and HBO-Go and who knows what-all else, everything is watchable when you want to watch it—worrying about when something is ‘on the air’ is something only old fogeys like myself are still doing.

Even PBS, which hasn’t the need or the capacity to follow all the latest forms of commercialization, like On Demand, has to make all of its content available on its website—just to make sure it gets seen by anyone under the age of fifty. But then, why shouldn’t they? I myself post whatever my videocamera records, to YouTube, almost daily—doesn’t cost a dime.

In addition to TV programming’s detachment from real-time, there’s the addition of all the ‘unfiltered’ content to be found on YouTube, podcasts, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Commercial interruption is no longer a given. Networks no longer work to give us an overview of our choices—they still push their own stuff during commercial breaks, but now that’s only a fraction of what’s out there. TV Guide, once a weekly magazine found in every household, is online—and even online, TV Guide still harks back to the 90s paradigm of broadcast-plus-cable—it’s impossible to list everything that’s available on every platform. It is easy today to miss out on a great new program, just because there’s no central entity that has an interest in guiding our viewing choices—no one central corporation, or group of corporations, gets a monetary return from driving our preferences or piquing our interest in new shows.

And even if there were such an entity, who would watch their commercials? Between muting them in real time, fast-forwarding past them on ‘On Demand’, and their relative non-existence on digital delivery platforms, commercials have also ceased to be the staple of entertainment they once were. Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ has been decentralized and demonetized. It’s a free-for-all out there.

I do miss the old ‘water-cooler’ atmosphere of the twentieth century—everybody had something to say about last night’s Carson monologue, or SNL skit, or Seinfeld episode. Everybody saw (and more importantly, discussed amongst themselves) Roots, Ken Burn’s Civil War, and other legendary programs that became cultural events simply by existing in the tiny, communal feed that once was shared by every living room screen, like a village bonfire we all virtually sat around. Stranger still, new offerings with the same potential impact are now being produced rather frequently—but their influence is diluted by the fact that they appear in little corners of our modern media landscape—seen by only a sliver of a demographic—rather than being spotlighted by a major network’s primetime.

Complexity, too, dilutes the impact of today’s ‘exposés’—where once we had an annual Jerry Lewis telethon for Muscular Dystrophy, we now have a panoply of documentaries about MS, ALS, AIDS, HPV, HCV, etc. In recent months I have seen a dozen different programs regarding new cures for cancer—genetically tailored, site-specific, cannabis-based, modified viruses—apparently, there will be no ‘cure’ for cancer, but a whole new industry, a whole new category of science, of cancer cures.

And diseases are only one aspect of public interest—racism has come from pure bigotry to the specifics of police brutality, job openings, educational barriers, the culture of ingrained poverty, drug criminalization, and on and on—and that’s just racism as it pertains to one minority. Sexism ranges from equal pay to electing our first female president. Education issues turn from funding to tenure to technique to classroom size, just to name a few of the countless issues. The Middle East has gone from basically the survival of Israel to a pack of different problems being faced by thirty different countries, several religious sects, and the international implications of each Middle East nation’s ties to developed countries either allied with or opposed to the USA. If that’s not complex enough, just add in the global thirst for Middle East petroleum resources.

TV becomes complex at the same time that the world explodes in complexity. None of the people my age or older would have predicted that the average person would be helpless in their daily activities without typing skills—but a keyboard is a far more consistent part of our daily lives than pen and paper ever were. Even space, which used to be a matter of getting to the Moon and safely back again (and maybe Mars) is now a matter of all nine planets and their many moons, the Kuiper belt, geosynchronous surveillance satellites, radio astronomy, space telescopes, space stations, commercial space flight, the search for habitable worlds in far-off solar systems, and more.

Science Fiction has been hit the hardest—what was once good science fiction is now a matter of everyday life—writing that goes beyond the sci-fi-ness of our present reality can result in ‘hard’ sci-fi novels that are so ‘hard’, many readers will complain that they read like physics textbooks. Today’s emphasis is on near-future sci-fi, since it has long become impossible to imagine what our civilization will look like in fifty or a hundred years—just looking at the changes of our last fifty years of reality is enough to send us reeling. Some of William Gibson’s novels don’t necessarily require any future at all, except for a detail here and there—mostly it’s just extrapolations of our present tech, with just a soupçon of accrued infrastructure.

Now, given that, it is especially upsetting to see a group like the Tea Party, or their present incarnation, Trump supporters, being taken seriously. ‘Childish’ is the only word that comes to my mind. These folks want all the advantages of new media, new science, and new technology—but they want all of that to leave their older memes untouched. By rights, they should be called the ‘cognitive dissonance’ party—they want to uphold the myths, morals, and mores of the mid-twentieth century while living in the twenty-first. It’s like an Amish person wanting to drive a Lamborghini—it’s understandable—everyone wants to drive a Lamborghini —but you can’t have it both ways.

The strangest thing about these overgrown children is that they have enough awareness of their basic wrongness that they speak in euphemisms. They know that their beliefs, plainly expressed, would be roundly condemned by the vast majority—but they don’t see that as any indication of wrong thinking. They continue to search for new ways to ‘teach the controversy’ (doubletalk-speak for ‘supporting the ludicrous’) by reacting against seemingly unassailable progressivism.

Take for instance the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign. Any idiot will understand that this phrase is shorthand for “Black lives should matter as much as anyone else’s”. Their pretense of being blockheaded enough to misunderstand the phrase as ‘black lives matter more’ is so transparent that it becomes one of those things that make it hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. And that is their most popular weapon nowadays—to leave us so breathless at the profound stupidity of their words that we don’t know where to begin with our rebuttals!

ShotByJessy – Director of Cinematography   (2015Jul15)

Posted by XperDunn on

Wednesday, July 15, 2015                                                6:23 PM

I was watching the credits roll up at the end of a movie and I heard a very simple piano theme being played—I thought, “Hey, I could do that.” And I did. Since it was a soundtrack kind of improv I figured it needed a movie, so I made a slideshow of photos taken by my daughter during the holidays six years ago, in 2009. Her nom de business is ShotByJessy—if you’re looking for a great photographer online—just BTW.

For the record, I’m not copying the theme of the movie I watched—I just improvised using a very simple melodic figure accompanied by an arpeggiated baseline, is all. It’s still copying, stylistically, but it’s not technically plagiarism. I’m usually trying for something a bit more sophisticated when I play improvs, but it’s good to fall back into simplicity now and then—in music, simple can be very evocative.

Due to my illness, my driver’s license lapsed over two years ago. Bear and I spent two hours in the DMV today—I was able to prove who I was thanks to my birth certificate, marriage license, life insurance policy, valid debit card, voided personalized check, and my original Social Security card. I also passed the written drivers test. But at the last minute, a search produced an unpaid speeding ticket outstanding in the state of Maine. It was from our honeymoon, thirty five years ago—we went through a speed trap where they were stopping anyone with out-of-state plates—I was going 63 MPH.

I called the Maine township that issued the summons. They couldn’t find the records in their archives—so they told me they’d call me back. It seems they are more concerned with screwing me on the national database than with keeping any record of such an old outstanding warrant. So we gave up for today—another trip to the DMV is in our future. And I still don’t have a valid ID. Nothing’s easy.

Piano Covers from the Movies   (2015Apr15)

Posted by XperDunn on

Wednesday, April 15, 2015                                    4:18 PM

Herman Hupfeld , in his beautiful lyric to “As Time Goes By”, wrote:

“This day and age we’re living in / Gives cause for apprehension

With speed and new invention / And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary / With Mr. Einstein’s theory.

So we must get down to earth at times / Relax relieve the tension

And no matter what the progress / Or what may yet be proved

The simple facts of life are such / They cannot be removed.

You must remember this….”

We’re pretty familiar with the rest—there are few people who have neither heard this song nor watched the movie, “Casablanca”. But like the vast majority of standards, the ‘intro’ is usually overlooked—if not left out altogether. In the case of many songs, the ‘intro’ is no great loss. Some are outright drivel, or the worst sort of doggerel, and the fame of such songs indicates that some smart performer realized he or she had better get right to the ‘burthen’, without any preamble, or they’d lose their audience. And, surely, this also accounts for the fact that most classic songs are considered as having been properly performed whether they include the official ‘intro’ verses or not.

However, in some cases lyricists positively shine so much in their wit and wordplay that it’s a shame to leave the ‘intro’ unrecognized—particularly with the great lyricists. Nothing upsets me more than a songbook that decides not to print the ‘intro’—taking the choice out of my hands for the sake of volume, I suppose.

“As Time Goes By” has a fascinating introductive verse, as seen above. Hupfeld bewails the hectic pace of modern life, it’s constant changes and new information. He gets “a trifle weary of Mr. Einstein’s theory” and wants to get away from all that. He seeks out bedrock principles on which to rest, safe from the shifting sands of cultural distraction. And, of course, he finds them in Love, that favorite of all bedrock principles.

How surprised Mr. Hupfeld would be to learn that his theory of days-gone-by would see eternal popularity in spite of such enormous changes in women’s roles and in relationships generally. A kiss is still a kiss—except when it’s a workplace harassment lawsuit or a charge of improper touching of a minor or the gift of herpes. And in a way, a kiss is now more than a kiss, assuming that Hupfeld wasn’t imagining two men or two women kissing.

Worse yet, we are no longer allowed to ‘weary of Einstein’s theory’—we have to remember our PIN numbers, our passwords, the usual computer Control-codes, game-controller button-sequences, et. al. We have to worry about our AC’s BTUs, our car’s MPG, separating our recyclables, our FICA, our prescriptions deductible, and whether we have time to find out what ‘streaming’ is, or should we just keep trying to program our VCRs. Neither Hepfeld nor Bogie could have envisioned a culture where everyone had to learn to type—and only with their thumbs.

Still, the most luxuriously nostalgic aspect of these lyrics is that they still hung on to the dismissive subtext of that word ‘theory’. Today, when we mention Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, whether Special or General, we hear the word ‘theory’ in its historical sense, not in the sense that no one yet accepts the truth of it—much like the ‘theory of evolution’. Only the fringe-dwellers in today’s society place any emphasis on the word ‘theory’ in these phrases. Back in the early nineteen-forties, though, Einstein’s theories could still be confined to cocktail-party gabbing—Hiroshima and Nagasaki were yet to come, as were nuclear power plants, nuclear subs, nuclear aircraft carriers, or nuclear-powered space probes.

Today we take Relativity for granted, just as we accept quantum physics, or the big-bang theory. Now string theory, dark matter, black holes, and the Higgs-Boson particle have come to be commonplace concepts among physicists and cosmologists—even discussed on popular science programs for the layperson. On top of that, we are in the midst a digital-technology revolution, an upheaval so great that it threatens the stability of global civilization with its sheer speed, while we try to adapt from the ‘generational’ pace-of-change enjoyed for all prior history, to change that now happens on a monthly basis.

What wouldn’t we give to ‘sit under the apple tree’ of the 1940’s whenever we got weary of all that? Oh, for the days when the ‘facts of life’ were not only simple, but they couldn’t be removed! Here’s me taking a stab at the old classic, followed by two more piano covers from my piano songbook, “AFI’s 100 Greatest Movie Songs”. (I also recorded “Evergreen” but left it out in the end—I’m sure I can do it better some day soon.) I left out all the video effects today—sometimes less is more….

More TV Movies   (2015Apr01)

Posted by XperDunn on

Wednesday, April 01, 2015                                                1:09 PM

I love Tuesdays—that’s when Optimum adds newly released movies to their VOD menu. Yesterday was “The Imitation Game” and “Interstellar”. Both were excellent movies, although back-to-back blockbusters can be a strain on these old bones—and what a headache, too, after staring at my big screen for almost six hours straight. Were I a more considered sort of guy, I would have spaced them out and waited another day to watch one of them.

“The Imitation Game” was an excellent movie. I want to say that right at the beginning, because I have some caveats that have nothing to do with cinema, but I don’t want that to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy myself.

imitation-game

This movie is a perfect example of why it is so important to read the book before watching a movie based on a book. One can read a book afterwards, but it’s rather like smoking a cigarette before having sex—it puts the cart before the horse. A two-hour movie cannot possibly cover the amount of information to be found in an almost-eight-hundred page, carefully-researched biography—nor should it even try. “Alan Turing—The Enigma” covers Alan Turing’s childhood, his academic career, his social and family life, his sexuality, and his multi-faceted, almost unbelievable career.

turing-centenary

Turing wrote “Computable Numbers”, which introduced the concept of using symbols for both numbers and characters, amounts and instructions—and for many years, only a handful of people could understand what he wrote. Even fewer saw the grand implications of the “Turing Machine”. He then used those ideas to help England puzzle out the Nazi’s enigma code-machine, which shortened, perhaps even won, the war and saved millions of lives. But he (and everyone else involved) was sworn to secrecy about both his scientific achievements and his heroic contribution to the war effort.

After the war, he began to work on a universal machine—a machine that would not only do a specific job of controlled calculation, as at Bletchley Park, but would be capable of doing any such job, whether it be the calculation of orbits in space, the half-lives of radioactive materials, or the guidance of a rocket-propelled missile. The strangest thing about the early history of computers is that very few people saw the point. But, once they got on board, his government took the work out of Turing’s hands. So he started working on the chemical processes of morphogenesis—the mechanism by which cells create articulated creatures, rather than a featureless sludge.

turing-machine

Everything he turned his mind and hand to, every idea he highlighted for the rest of us—was amazing, unbelievable, mind-blowing. Think about it. First he said, ‘In algebra, we use letters to represent numbers—why can’t we use numbers to represent letters?’ Then he said, ‘I can break the unbreakable Nazi code and win WWII.’ Then he said, ’War’s over—I’m going to build a machine that can think.’ Then he said,’Now I have a computer—I’m going to figure out how life began.’ Then he turned forty. Then, at forty-one, he ate a poisoned apple and killed himself.

The film says nothing of all this. The film doesn’t even mention his mother, who was a big influence on his life in the book. It says nothing of his visits to America, before and during the war. It reduces the crowds of people he interacted with to a handful of on-screen characters—and it makes far too much of his relationship with Joan, simply because movies have to have that sort of thing in them, even when the leading man is a recognized homosexual.

Movies have had a lot of practice at this. There’s nothing terribly untrue about what was in the movie—it is simply missing so much that it tells a story quite different from the story told in the book. I don’t blame the movie-makers—this is in the nature of filmmaking, particularly adaptations from books. It is an accepted fact that the reactions of a movie audience are more important than the details of the story being told. This gives books a tremendous advantage. However, as I said, it was an excellent film.

Interstellar

“Interstellar” was likewise excellent, but equally limited by virtue of its being a movie. The physics of space-time are conveniently ignored or, more likely, misrepresented by beautiful CGI effects. In a movie so focused on the scientific aspects of modern life, it is notable for its lack of realism and its tendency to resemble a dream-state more than scientific research.

pulp-amazing-stories

But science fiction has always tread carefully on the borderline between fact and fantasy, using the suggestion of science to make an allegory about the human condition—quite similar to fantasy, which explains why the two are usually considered a single genre, sci-fi/fantasy. “Interstellar”, with its spaceships, scientists, and robots, presents itself as hard science fiction, a sub-genre that usually treats with sub-atomic physics or cosmology in a futuristic setting. But the story being told is one of wish-fulfillment and easy shortcuts—the opposite of hard science fiction.

pulp_sci_fi

We get only the most fundamental features of science fiction in this sort of story—we get to be awed by the vastness of space, by the mystery of time, by the power and reach of technology, and by the inexorable terror of Mother Nature. But we don’t learn any actual science, as we would when reading Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov.

Asimov is a telling figure in the world of science fiction—one of the most popular and prolific writers in the genre, but where are his movies? There’s “I, Robot” and “Bicentennial Man” –but both of those are very loosely based on the original short stories, retaining little of Asimov’s genius beyond the “Three Laws of Robotics”. What about the Foundation Series novels, or the Robot Detective Series novels? Movies, while lots of fun, are simply too stupid to encompass an Asimov story—he deals in ideas, not images. He is trapped in literature.

asimov-nine-tomorrows

Or look at Clarke’s works—one movie, and that one movie is based on one of his short stories, “The Sentinel”. Stanley Kubrick, possibly the greatest movie director that ever lived, spent more than two hours on screen with “2001: A Space Odyssey” trying to tell one short story from a hard sci-fi author. Where is “Rendezvous with Rama”, or “The Fountains of Paradise”, or “The Lion of Camarre”? Hence the glut of comic-book adaptations—only science fiction intended for children is easily adapted to the screen.

clarke-childhoods-end

But the relationship between science fiction and childhood rates a closer look, as well. Early science-fiction in the pulps was considered childish reading matter—strictly for kids. It wasn’t until we landed on the moon in reality that science fiction was able to show its face among adults. But I don’t believe this was due to children being the only ones stupid enough to be interested—it was due to children being the only ones open-minded enough to see the value of it.

jetsons

Even today, the value of science fiction is considered mostly monetary—between Star Trek and Star Wars, sci-fi has become big business. But the real good stuff remains locked away in books, too concerned with science and ideas to be adaptable into stories and images. Still, “Interstellar” was fun to watch, and it had a happy ending. I do love a happy ending. And I’d rather watch Matthew McConaughey drive a spaceship than a Lincoln….

The Hook (2014Nov15)

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Hallmark-AllIWantforChristmasDVD2

Saturday, November 15, 2014                       1:02 PM

 

Everything today is about the hook. I saw an online ad for Star-Trek spaceships (“Enterprises”, that is) for a low, low price—plus plenty of free extras—the only catch was that it was a subscription, and they would be sending me different spaceships, once a month, forever—and billing me for them, of course. I saw a newly released movie on my VOD menu. It was about a boy and girl who were far distant from each other but could see what each other thought and hear what each other said—it was a romance. I’ve seen the same premise, but only seeing through the other person’s eyes—it was a horror movie about a serial killer. Communication is so important.

The king of the hooks would have to be ‘The Heart Of Joy”, AKA the Hallmark Channel. Every year about this time (just before Thanksgiving) their schedule becomes one long expanse of Christmas-themed movies, most of them produced by Hallmark itself. I am shamelessly addicted—it’s worse than Law & Order re-runs. I just saw one where the young lady protagonist, who just happens to be named Krissy Kringle and just happens to live on Candy Cane Lane, receives a lot of mistakenly-delivered letters to Santa. One little girl sends a book, explaining that Santa had accidentally left his “Naughty or Nice List” when he visited her in the hospital.

Hallmark-Princess4Xmas

Hijinks ensue, of course, and of a very Christmassy flavor. In the end, people are healed, lessons are learned, and Santa gets his book back. It’s like heroin—I can marathon this stuff for days at a time. But it got me thinking. Hallmark is like the Manhattan Project of sentiment—all things treacly are massaged to a fair-thee-well and dutifully squished out like Play-Doh from a Play-Doh factory. Is it evil? It’s difficult to say with the rubber hose between my teeth, probing for a vein—but I have my suspicions. I mean, it makes perfect sense—here are these actors—and actors are paid to pretend—so they pretend that they, and basically all people, are earnest, conscience-stricken, and well-fed.

It’s the season, so it’s no fair calling them out on the ugly truths of domestic poverty, bad parenting, etc., etc.—thus the problems are manageable in these movies, unlike the real problems we face in the real world. But then they have to add in ‘the real Mrs. Claus’ masquerading as a nanny for a troubled single-parent family or an Elf who wants to see what’s outside of Santa’s Workshop (and in a masterpiece of fiction, doesn’t go sprinting back home in screaming hysterics) or an old homeless man who turns out to be someone’s long-lost father, just waiting for love to make him whole again.

Hallmark-FirCrazy

If, like me, you’ve seen news stories about some of the nightmares that pose as nannies for unsuspecting families—or rape statistics for elfin-shaped young ladies just moved to the big city—or the mental health obstacles that are so much of the problem when trying to undo homelessness, then you may find yourself strongly attracted to the Heroin, I mean Hallmark Channel. But is it healthy? I guess what I’m really wondering is—is it merely escapism, or is it as delusion-inducing as the Southboro Baptist Church? If we whip ourselves into a frenzy of Christmas-time love and faith, we may find ourselves hating The Un-Christmassy enough to kill somebody. It wouldn’t be the first time someone got upset about someone else killing the mood.

And what of the crash? When I switch off the TV and walk into the kitchen, I may find it difficult to handle the newspapers, visitors, and telephone calls I find there. Those other people may not have watched the same movie as me. They might not be quite brimming with the same surplus love of their fellow man—and punch me right in the nose, figuratively or literally. Watching the Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie Marathon may make it impossible for me to survive, away from my hi-def flat-screen.

Hallmark-DXmasOrnament

However, there are commercials. The TV commercials, even Hallmark’s own, have a different texture from the movies—the treacle is still there, but the main motif is altered to ‘you need this thing to be happy’ followed by ‘buy this thing’. And even a Hallmark movie can’t completely obliterate such unadulterated huckstering. So, to be fully dosed with Christmas syrup, I always make sure I have a book to read. Yes, a book! You wouldn’t believe how long the commercial breaks in these movies are. One can easily read three or four pages before the movie comes back on—and, of course, I’m a virtuoso of the mute button—so I go from movie to book and back to movie quite seamlessly. The tone of the book can be problematical—the otherwise phenomenal Stephen King, for instance, is not recommended for this particular purpose. But I find that science-fiction novels can be a wonderful counter to Hallmark, as they both believe in wild optimism—even wishful thinking—but in two very different settings. My current commercial-break reading material is “The Peripheral” by William Gibson. It’s excellent, so far (as Gibson always is) if you’re looking.

But let’s return to the movies. By the end of New Year’s, I’m actually relieved to turn to that channel and find “Little House” re-runs, or something equally repulsive. I turn to the more reality-based programming of the other channels and Christmas is over for me. So what is this extended trance that takes me hostage each year? Perhaps, for me, it supercharges the ambient ‘Christmas cheer’ that naturally occurs in our lives. Or perhaps it makes more visible the falseness of the Season, a specific time in which we are obligated to be better people, to think kinder thoughts. Is it the human condition that caring must have a start and end point, like a race? Maybe we have the Holiday Season because humanity cannot bear very much reality—and the reality of kindness and caring is just too much of an effort to be part of our ongoing, normal lives.

It could be that the season of giving, rather than being a false pretense of our ‘better selves’, is really just the best we can do—one month a year, we try to be good. We don’t necessarily succeed—but we try—and that’s more than we can be bothered to do the other eleven months of the year.

Hallmark-Variety

Be Careful What You Wish

Posted by XperDunn on

When I was a kid I wanted much more science-fiction movies! How should I know? I just watched “Oblivion”, with Tom Cruise as ‘Jack’. It was a so-so sci-fi short-short story, rendered visually with painstaking ‘realism’ by use of CGI, Green-screen, and whatever else those people do out there in Hollywood. Add to that (no small budget item, itself) the enormous additional cost of casting Tom and Morgan Freeman, et al. and shooting an ‘actual’ movie to splice into the CGI, or vice versa—however it goes.

And I appreciated the effort. Cinematically, it was sophisticated, fast-paced, and suspenseful—everything you want in a great movie. But I never got past this feeling I had while watching—I felt like I was being read to. To read this story in print would be a brief experience—probably less time than it took to watch the film.

But I would have supplied my own imagining of what the drones looked like, what the bubbleship looked like, and how they each sounded. The author would use words like gleaming, razor-edged, ‘a soft chime’, status: ‘green’, and so on—nothing like those full-spread-masterpieces of today’s leading graphics artists that one sees on the screen—more like suggestions. The words would hint at a form and my mind would imagine what that would look like—whether it was a character’s face, or a killer robot, or a moon-sized space station parked next to the remains of our Moon.

And, no, perhaps I wouldn’t have imagined anything quite so cool as the movie’s designers’ vision. But it would have existed in the center of my brain, where I can really feel it. You see, the trouble with movies is that we see and hear them—they’re all ‘front-loaded’—and watching them is a very conscious experience—even a social occasion. We read books when we are alone and relaxed—we use them to take us away from the moment, to enjoy a vicarious experience, to past the time quickly. We watch today’s movies as witnesses—yes, albeit a fictional sort, we are witnessing, watching and hearing, we stake out our audio and video monitoring surveillance sensors and we consume the movie.

We control the movie. We pause the DVD so that we can hit the head without missing the cool part. We adjust the volume. Even pinned to our seats by the sensory overload of a 3-D IMAX screening, we will have been previously encamped with a small, portable den’s-worth of provisions, settled in and waiting for previews to start. But a book—a book controls you. You don’t hear. You don’t see. You don’t notice the passing of time. You are inside the book, enchanted into a scene of which you are one of the players. They are two totally different experiences—as different in their effects as they are in their media.

And here’s the bad news—reading a book has not gone away. You will still need to read—and to understand as much as you possibly can about what you read. There are reasons why ‘dead’ languages haven’t died. There are reasons for teaching the ‘arts and letters’ that are just as important as the reasons to learn math and science. The reasons for the Arts are harder to explain because they are subtle—and being subtle is one of the very important things one learns by the studying of our arts as well as of our sciences. The ancients once saw science and art as part of a whole—they called it the search for understanding (‘philosophy’). And the only reason science and art seem so divided from one another, to us, is that we have distorted our natural world and have gone from trying to understand the world and our place in it, to trying to control the world and make ourselves ‘the deciders’ of whatever happens on it.

It’s a simple premise—business-people are developing every square inch of land, digging down miles and miles into the Earth, fishing the oceans until there are no fish left, cutting down most, but not all, of the trees. And their favorite industries involve a panoply of chemical toxins they blithely dump in the Hudson, or the local water supply near you, and onto the land. Did you know that many water sources in Iraq are contaminated by radiation from the spent-uranium-shells the US Army used? O yes—and will stay so for a century, at least.

You won’t see any businessperson start up a company that detects, collects, and disposes of all those spent-uranium-shell fragments scattered around their top-soil. You won’t see that because that business wouldn’t make any money. But I’ll bet, market forces allowing, that there’s still plenty of money to be made manufacturing more of those spent-uranium-shells. Get the picture?

The obvious solution is that we ignore all this karmic payback until the poop really hits fan—then we’ll find new ways to survive on our spoiled planet. We will probably get right back on that bicycle, too. Rich, powerful people telling everyone else to shut up and keep working. I think Edison and Einstein would be proud, don’t you? I mean, how else do you see this thing working out?

Do you really believe we can just ignore our problems until one day someone says, “O, it’s all over. It’s okay, we fixed it—all seven (maybe eight, by then) billion of us will be fine from now on”? …And we live happily ever after—just like Jon Lovitz (as ‘Tommy Flanagan’) used to say on SNL, “Oh, yeah? I wrote a book about rock and roll. Yeah, it was about the guy who invented rock and roll. Yeah, that’s it! In fact, it was.. it was an autobiography! Yeah!”

Sure, it could happen. But something has changed in my appreciation of Sci-Fi—it’s the ‘Neo’ meme—‘we only think we control our world and ourselves—but it’s really aliens plugging into our brains and making us live in a dream.’ Sci-Fi purists would probably call it the “Puppet Masters” meme, since Robert Heinlein’s Novel, “The Puppet Masters” (1951) pre-dates “The Body Snatchers” (1955), a novel by Jack Finney. So the ‘Neo’ meme is older than I am (born in ’56)—sorry, Keanu fans.

But the change is this—the more post-modern the Sci-Fi gets, the less upset I get about the idea of aliens taking over our planet or our lives—it’s kind of, like, ‘How much worse could they do?’, You know?

There is a small body of work, most notably Clarke’s “Childhood’s End”, which posits a forcefully beneficial type of alien that just overwhelms our tech and mandates a more communal, more cooperative, or more conservative culture over the entire globe. Some of those are fun to think about. My favorite, and I wish I could cite the book and author, is one story where suddenly, everyone on earth feels what they do to others. So, every time someone took a sock at a guy’s face, that attacker’s teeth would come flying out of his mouth. Of course, such a state would make surgery very difficult, but nothing’s perfect, right?

Three (3) Songs from the Movies (2013Mar02)

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XperDunn plays Piano
March 2nd, 2013

Three (3) Movie Songs:

{ “Let The River Run” from ‘Working Girl’, “Moon River” from ‘Breakfast At Tiffanys’, & “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” from ‘Shall We Dance’ (1937)}

Category Entertainment
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