3D or not to D

I saw “Gravity” in 3D on Saturday night with one of my BFFs, having just seen it the night before with my son. How that came about was my perfectly boneheaded move after a long day’s work, click-buying too fast without reading the small print, aided by some less than stellar user navigation by Moviefone.com, but Spencer and I found ourselves headed to the 2D version of Alfonso Cuarón’s space opera, “Gravity” on Friday instead of the 3D version we really wanted to see.

Once I realized that the tickets were non-refundable, we each made our own flavor of lemonade if you catch the drift. Spencer, who is prone to vertigo, thought the 2D version might be safer and I told myself that this would be the perfect acid test of whether the film was worth seeing twice, simply to resolve whether Real 3D is integral to the storyline or just a gimmick.

To be sure, the film is stunning in standard format 2D. We thoroughly enjoyed it. But by the end of my viewing, I had no doubt I needed to see it again to test the question. When I asked my 13 year old if he felt the same way, he said he did, but I could tell from the lack of commitment in his voice that he didn’t really share the same zeal I did.

The Dark Night of The Dark Knight

In answering critics who say that dark movies cause dark acts, movie industry apologists sound eerily similar to NRA apologists ....
by Rick Weiss (c) 2012 Trident Productions

As horrific as it is, the “The Dark Knight Rises” premiere massacre in Colorado is already fading from our “news-stream” mentality. Before it completely washes downstream, let’s throw a little keylight on two troubling, if related connections and see what we can learn from them, if anything.

We know from “Inception” that Chris Nolan can bend space and time and keep 4 or 5 different realities going simultaneously, but “The Dark Knight Rises” is even more ponderous, a kinda a big goofy allegorical soufflé. It rises, but falls flat soon after leaving the oven. Good girls and bad girls trade places with reality-defying aplomb. Batman is masked. Unmasked. Masked again. He needs to conquer his fear. He needs to learn to fear again. He's rich. He's poor. He's rich again. He's dead. Alive. Dead again, then alive again. The Scarecrow sits in judgment on the rich. The film’s best line is left to Catwoman:

"There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne," she purrs. "You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could ever live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

In defense of the (revised) liberal education

"This is a tough time to graduate from college. While unemployment is high across the board, recent grads face a brutal 9.3% unemployment rate -- the highest that statistic has been for them since the Great Recession began. Worse yet, studies have shown that fewer than half of recent college students are finding jobs that relate to their majors, and just more than half felt their jobs made use of what they learned as undergrads."

I came across this article by DailyFinance.com's Bruce Watson, thanks to an FBF and it made me think about how much things have changed since I was a starry-eyed student.

The old saw when we didn't have gray hair was that college was less valuable for what you learned and more valuable that you "learned how to learn." As a grad of communications, back further than I care to say, the attrition rate was appallingly high. Maybe 1 in 10 still working in the field. The one thing I got right back in my youth was that "you really have to want it" and I did. And I do. So here I am, still working in a field that is every bit as tough as it was when I got out of school, if not tougher.

Naked Scarlett Johansson Pictures

This isn't about one middle-aged man's hopeless infatuation with the sexy Scarlett starlet. It's something scarier that you and the pretty and pretty smart young actress probably don't think about enough. Ms. Johannson sent some nudies to her then husband. In her own words, "Nothing wrong with that."

Despite about a billion drooling fanboys craving a better look, any look, she hasn't willingly shared all of her voluptuous curves with the global filmgoing public. Good for her. It should (have been) her decision to do it or not. She obviously has strong personal or business reasons for keeping the full-frontal stuff private. When you get to Ms. J's place in the world, your body is a commodity. Still, you're a person and you deserve to have your wishes respected. Or so you'd think..

And that's where she and you, if you feel the same way, are in error.
Some geek, with shockingly little effort got her password and is off to the races. Now, he's going to spend a lot of time in jail doing a less senstive version of the shower scene from "Midnight Express." Maybe that is some consolation to Ms. J and her well-wishers. But to me, it's a sad case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, run down the road and been sold to the glue factory by your evil neighbor.

I am not a network expert. But I know (and you know) that everything you see, send and do on the Internet is available if somebody is smart enough, motivated enough and puerile enough to make hacking you their business, be they government, divorce lawyer or pathetic fanboy.

People use their damned smartphones as cameras. People think of email the same way they thought of private letters. What Scarlett and the rest of the world seem to forget with shocking regularity is that every sext, every candid, every incriminating thing you write and send resides somewhere on some server that even the strongest password is only a pathetic bandaid on.

So what should Scarlett or you do if you want to share something sexy, provocative or incriminating with your paramour or fellow conspirator? Use a non-internet connected camera. Save the sexy private stuff for face-to-face. Keep in mind that the more public you are, the less private you are. And Scarlett, love, you are a smart, sexy and very talented woman. I respect you. But if and when you do decide to bare all for the camera, I'll be right in line with all the other pathetic fanboys. I don't care if you are reading a phone book.

OMG, did I really just put that out on the Net?

Wise words from the director of "Biutiful"

"We can't understand what is happening to something if we aren't looking. But nothing is going to happen to that something if we don't look deeply. That's why so many things with incredible potential go unnoticed, because nobody bothers to look.

Like Schrödinger says, what you see in the world is what you get and that determines your destiny. Vitality or mortality is determined by what we choose to see in the other."



"The truth is that many events that shape our lives and our judgment come to us in the form of books or movies and television, and not from reality. Younger generations prefer to have reality reinterpreted for them, edited instead of facing an unpredictable and sometimes boring reality. When I am filming and setting up a camera maybe I am separating myself, and intellectualizing the moment but I keep it and that is the trade off. We are conscious that now we are observing ourselves observe. We document but we don’t participate in the reality."

Alejandro González Iñárritu from the DVD Special Features section of "Biutiful."

This film and its director do look deeply. If one of the duties of great filmmakers is to place us in a world outside of our range of experiences and make us live in it for awhile, then this director and his star have succeeded admirably. This world is incredibly hard to look at, at times, yet it is lyrical and heartfelt. Unlike previous Iñárritu films, all of which are good, it stays true to itself from start to finish. There are no false notes or easy outs. There's never a moment when you feel you are watching "Bardem the actor" instead of Uxbal the man. The rest of the cast are unknowns or amateurs who actually have lived the lives they are portraying. This is Iñárritu's and Bardem's masterwork and the only truly sad thing about it is how quickly it passed from notice.

Rent "Biutiful" and definitely check out the featurettes that accompany the DVD. I defy you not to be deeply moved.

Stiegless in Seattle, Stockholm, Philadelphia and Everywhere

At the end of last week, I finished reading "The Girl that Kicked the Hornet's Nest," the third book in Stieg Larsson's startling trilogy. I'd first heard about Larsson in 2008 on NPR in one of Martha Corrigan's erudite but effortlessly seductive book reviews. Corrigan, a writer, lecturer at Georgetown, is one of NPR's jewels, the type you sit in the car with the engine off, just to hear the end of her latest installment. Don't know if it’s the timbre of the voice or the whip smart things it says, but I remember exactly where I was, when I first learned about Stieg, Blomkvist and Salander, (heading north on 11th, turning on Arch Street. I remember exactly what I thought, (that though I'm not much of one for mystery novels, this sounds just off-kilter enough for my tastes).

Perhaps, I was more receptive because I'd just finished reading Eliot Patttison's brilliant Skull Mantra, itself an offbeat murder mystery set in post-occupation Tibet. So okay, okay, I've found my "MM niche." Give me a tale of culture totally alien to mine own, kill off some characters in a grizzly fashion and let me follow the trail of a whip-smart investigator and I will read and read …

"Heirlooming" and the Family Network

Looking into the Future

A friend of mine in the biz sent the above link to a very interesting article by David Pogue, tech maven of The Times on the perils of "data rot" as they pertain, here to family videos.

Pogue writes:

As you may be aware, we're about to enter a whole new era of data rot, one of the biggest and most personal of all: consumer videotape is going away. At the Consumer Electronics Show last month, I was astounded to see that Canon, for example, has only one MiniDV (tape) camcorder model left—which hasn't been updated for several years. The other companies are following suit. It's all about built-in hard drives or memory cards now. That development hit me especially hard, because I've always loved documenting my family.

It got me thinking about the work I've done to establish our own clan's Family Media Network but as you can see, I take a different tack than Pogue. I've read his column and don’t always know what to make of him. If he’s such a tech maven, why should he be stymied by, or even surprised with the phasing out of tape as a storage medium? Tape? Take it from somebody who used to thread portapaks and 1” Ampex machines by hand with it. I won’t miss it!!!! No siree.

Wanna talk about classical media formats? Okay. I collected all my Dad’s super 8 films and Mom’s Bell and Howell projector to transfer my family’s heirlooms to Digital 8 and then from there, straight to the family network drive. Probably the same cheap 2Tb one that Pogue picked up. Last year, I picked up a BVU-800 for a $125 (on Ebay) last year to transfer the handful of ¾” projects I want to keep. I have a handful of portapak tapes, but most of those I’m sure I transferred to ¾” back in the 80’s. Mom just gave me 4 milkcrates with of 78’s from the 20's-40’s. Big Band and lots of RCA Victor classical pressings. Most of them pristine. Haven’t quite figured what I’m going to do with them yet, but my turntable is up and operating again after a 10 year hiatus. I've never had it on the '78 setting before, but it might be fun to rip some of that old wax to mp3.

Bennett interviewed my Dad about his mother over the phone for a school project. I have about 15 minutes of Dad reminiscing about his mother's anti-child labor marching days. This gem will be easy to deal with. I don't have to do anything. It's already an MP3 file.

God's Scariest Little Army

B and I watched the movie Jesus Camp last Friday. He wanted me to record (ahem, I mean “time shift") it so that we could watch it again but I’d already returned it. So I put it in my Netflix queue and browsed some of the 624 flixters reviews of the movie. Yes, 624. It has to be a record. Obviously this doc really hit a legion of hot-buttons and one or two of my own, so it is the subject of today’s cultural vulturalism.

I found the reviews by the people who claim to be Fundamentalist or Evangelical Christians the most interesting and even unpredictable. One cautioned against letting children watch such potent material. I believe that this is a film parents should watch with kids and be prepared to spend hours discussing. Mine was vocally angry through most of it; his outrage at both the arrogance and manipulation of the budding televangelists were dead on.

He saved particular scorn for the poodle-coiffed, pied piper Becky Fisher and his BS detector pegged each time he recognized the way she used accusation, guilt and catharsis as tactics to break down her impressionable charges or her fast, easy dismissal of young people’s diversity and freedom of thought. I watched, without further comment, because I wanted to hear my son's perceptions uncolored by my own. I only broke my silence twice. The first time to answer his question, “Who are these enemies she’s talking about? I responded, me, you—anybody who doesn’t believe as they do.


I also felt inclined to point out Ted Haggard's sordid history/future after this film was edited. In light of his scandalous "fall from grace" the haggard one’s smarmy on-camera muggings and fatuous protest to the filmmakers seem particularly camp and grotesque, yet strangely reassuring. The dude was high on more than Jesus. Ted was the only person who appeared in the doc whose comportment and convictions seemed insincere from the first note. Gosh, how surprising. The other subjects, scary as we found them, do seem to be without artifice, while Mr. Walk Both Ways Haggard clearly loved his closeup above all.
Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18

Most gratifying for a parent, was my son's shrewd connection of all the military paraphenalia so rapturously embraced by these little soldiers of Christ and how their brand of fundamentalism was as raw and intolerant as anything coming out of the madrases of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These little crusaders, who are no doubt well-coached to say so, claim that they are spiritual warriors, but in their combat fatigues, fascist-stiff-armed salutes, camouflage war paint and martial kick/punch dancing, seemed less about the beatitudes and more ready to strap on explosives and meet Jesus head on. Body language speaks volumes. So do words.

“There are two types of people – those who love Jesus and those who don’t."

Why would anybody want to make that distinction? Am I reading too much into this to believe that this is exactly the sort of stark duality that sets up two classes of people? Jews. Aryans. Heteros. Homos. Believers. Infidels. Intolerance is always served up two scoops at a time.

Equally chilling was the little girl who approached a couple of African American gentlemen and asked one of them, with barely a how’d do, if he thought he was going to heaven. When the puzzled man answered in the affirmative, she shot back quizzically, “Are you sure?”

Afterwards, she remarked to a friend, “I think he was a Muslim.”

As I said earlier, I was most interested in the responses from the Christian reviewers who expressed ‘that these people are not like us.’ It gives me some comfort to take them at their word, but I would caution them, as I do my moderate Muslim and Jewish friends, that the radical proselytizers and zealots have so thoroughly stolen their show that perhaps they bear some responsibility for rebalancing the scales. Jesus Camp shows just how far all moderates have to go to rebalance the equation of democracy and civil discourse in this country. B made the connection between this film and Stanley Kramer’s glorious Judgment at Nuremberg, which we watched about a month ago. I offered that both films showed that while philosophies of intolerance may begin with monsters, they can only be perpetuated by the bourgeois, respectable, ordinary folks.

As the credits rolled, I turned to my son and quoted Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." He asked me to explain and I told him that this was his generation, that it's clear that the bright, articulate young people he saw in this film are not going to be satisfied preaching on street corners and megachurches, but will march their self-righteous intolerance into the halls of government and when they gain power, will trample on your civil liberties in the name of salvation and persecute anybody they believe to be ungodly. Though people of my generation have created these little mullahs, it will be people of his generation that would have to confront them.

Some of these sparkly eyed little charmers will grow haggard on pharmaceuticals and the temptations of alternative lifestyles. Some of the brightest will succumb to the relentlessly moderating influence of education. But enough will get through the grid that you better be ready, I advised, with activism, knowledge, arguments and convictions just as compelling as theirs. If your generation isn’t up to it, you might end up living in a red white and blue Iranish theocracy and watching your own children say the Christian Pledge of Allegiance in compulsory Jesus Camps. We grew up checking for Reds under our beds. I’m nostalgic for them. Ms. Fisher’s little morality squad is much scarier.

Not that I wasn’t raised with some pretty traditional values--particularly regarding pledging allegiance. The nuns at St. Ursula told us that for an American to pledge allegiance to any but the American flag is treason. Simplistic, but the lesson stuck.

We’re renting Jesus Camp again, for more family viewing and discussion and I would encourage parents of all faiths to not to try to protect their children from such controversial viewing, but encourage it, the better to help their kids become critical thinkers.

The documentary style is as clean and unbiased as anything I’ve ever seen or studied and I thought the choice of Mike Papantonio to provide commentary and counterpoint was particularly well made. Jesus Camp opens a window on a world that people of moderate leanings would rather disavow. People of faith, be they Christians, Muslims or Jews, hurry to distance themselves from such zealotry, but if Jesus Camp teaches anything, it is that silent complicity in such radicalism is like ink in water. It spreads so quickly that before we know it, we’re all stained. The Net says that Jesus Camp has been shut down by its founder in the interest of protecting her young charges. I say this is a hydra, with more heads than you can possibly imagine.

Keep the faith.

-@V@-

Late to the gate?

A Trident Production

Day 1. Take 2. I blog, therefore I am. After casting about for a more lightweight, contemporary version of my dormant digital zine, the blogging craze finally connected with the simian steno pool at Trident Central. From the beginning, I struggled with the layout, time and list management demands of the monthly newsletter model which ceased to make sense long ago even though friends and colleagues know I've always had plenty to write about life as a conspicuous consumer and producer of big and small M media.

Well c.010101 is back and marches right into the fray of politicos, eroticos, scribes and pharisees who blog away at the drop of whatever they're droppin'. I like the spontaneity, interactivity and sense of community the better blogs cultivate. Heck, in some countries, you can get five years in jail for doing this. There must be something to it. I promised many moons ago, with c.010101's maiden issue, never to bore faithful readers, a promise reiterated here, to those who reward this post with a click. To paraphrase a more self-important media outlet's tagline, (I don't have voiceclips so you'll have to imagine the velvet JE Jones VO here) -- you give me a handful of minutes and I'll give you the world. Or at least a piece of it that we both care about.

yours in the faith,
-@v@- rick