I’ve been helping the Convention on Modern Liberty edit some videos in support of the project. My colleague Portia made a compilation:
Please do have a gander, and pass it on to your friends.
Tag: Film (Page 8 of 11)
Reviews, comments and thoughts on films
Christian Bale on a rant. I really wish people weren’t so obnoxious to each other, life is too short for this kind of unpleasantness.
What struck me about this audio is just how muddled Bale’s accent has become. At times he comes over all South London. At other times he has an American drawl, complete with the idioms. He was probably so red faced, he couldn’t hear it properly.
I quite understand how peoples who share an language can evolve different accents over time (e.g. Antipodean, Southern African, North American, The British Isles). But I’m never quite sure how it can happen within a single person? When I lived in Scotland, it was easy to pick up the idoms (“a wee baby” &ct), but not the accent.
Other people afflicted with Muddled Trans-Atlantic Accent Syndrome include Julie Andrews, Anthony Hopkins, and Madonna. Blogger Andrew Sullivan has it too. Who is your favourite?
Clay Shirky at Demos, 14 July 2008. Photo by Lloyd Davis
A few months ago, sociologist Clay Shirky spoke at a Demos event around the launch of his book, Here Comes Everybody. Irritatingly, I missed the event, but did download the handy podcast. In a question about “how to use the web to make a documentary about the web, he had this to say:
If you’re making a web documentary about the future of the web, you can open it up for digital production. You can say, “make a video of yourself, talking about what you think the future will be like, or show me what you are doing, document this somehow, and send this to me as raw material.”
You can harness people for the outlet: “I’m doing a video documentary on the web and we’re going to launch it on One Web Day (or some such event), and we’re going to host virtual salons where people are going to get together to view this thing” and you can find the audience [via the web].
But the really interesting bit I think is this sort of ‘A&R plus Remix’, which is: how many versions of a documentary could there be? Because the choice for all of this stuff is, “here’s the main thread, right” but then there’s always going to be people who want more of X and less of Y. Is there a way to let people who are interested in, say, the change in music culture, have a documentary that, while keeping true to the through-line, has more of that aspect? And then for people form whom transformation of the political environment [is most interesting], you have more of that aspect instead.
And so that, it seems to me, is the really interesting thing – looking at essentially raw material; discovery; production; and distribution… and figuring our whether you can use the web at all of those touch-points.
I know the Convention on Modern Liberty will be extensively filmed. All the plenaries and breakouts will be recorded and podcast, and the main speeches will be streamed live. Some of the keynote speakers have already recorded their own thoughts in short pieces-to-camera, and the organisers have invited the public to post video responses.
Moreover, the range of freedoms under threat, and indeed the number of competing definitions of what “Modern Liberty” actually means, suggest to me that the Convention is a ripe subject for a Documentary-Plus-Remix, along the lines Shirky describes above.
A couple of films about magicians were released in 2006, which I’ve just got around to watching: The Prestige, staring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, and The Illusionist, with Edward Norton. Both keep you in suspense until the end, but both, to my mind, ultimately disappoint.
Why? Well, it seems to me that both violate an unspoken promise made to the viewer, about the nature of the film they are watching. In the case of The Illusionist, the magic performed by Edward Norton’s character, Eisenstein, is presented using all manner of CGI wizardry. Trees disappear, plants grow fruit before your very eyes, and ghosts walk through walls and other people. Its clear we are watching a fantasy, until the denoument, when the solution to only half the puzzle is presented in the manner of an Agatha Christie story. Its an unsatisfactory pay-off.
Meanwhile, The Prestige suffers from the opposite problem. The two rivals are very obviously of the ‘real world’ and both the magic tricks, and the wider concerns that motivate them, are grounded in reality. So, when at the very end, the unexpected payoff comes in the form of a piece of science fiction fantasy, rather than good old fashioned smoke, mirrors, and duplicity, it feels wrong. The Prestige was directed by Christopher Nolan, who also directed Bale in Batman Begins. Batman, of course, is famous for having no actual super-powers. Imagine the disappointment if he could suddenly fly like Superman.
Sometimes, breaking the rules of the story-telling process is interesting and clever, especially if you are trying to make a statement about cultural forms and norms. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet springs to mind as the obvious example of this: What starts out as some kind of teen detective caper, quickly becomes something sexually dark and disturbing. Likewise with the recent Coen Brothers offering Burn After Reading, in which a loveable character, played by a stratospherically well-know Hollywood icon, is senselessly shot in the head by accident, at an inopportune moment.
However, when the director’s intention is precisely to keep the audience guessing, I think they owe it to the audience to play by the rules of the game they have created for us.
Edgar Allan Poe outlined a formula for detective stories, which he only occasionally adhered to, but which was followed by GK Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle. Essentially, the story works best when the mystery is solved by the intellect of the detective (rather than, say, a freak occurrence befalling the criminal). The author leaves clues for the reader, so that the elements that the sleuth uses to solve the mystery are in plain sight (well, described on the page, at least) before the finale. If there is an unreliable narrator, a clue to this fact is also supplied. And crucially, although a fantastical explanation may be offered (ghosts, &ct) the actual solution is always within the laws of physics.
Movies that offer a riddle, a whodunnit or a howdunnit work best when they follow similar rules. The Inside Man (also 2006) and The Sixth Sense both leave a trail of clues for the viewer. Even though the latter is a fantasy, the ‘solution’ to the film is very much within the boundaries of what the director has constructed for us, which makes the payoff so delightful and celebrated. The Usual Suspects is exciting, but the fact that the narrator is unreliable means that we have no way of guessing the identity of Kaiser Soza before Bryan Singer tells us, which demeans the film, in my eyes. Another heist movie I saw recently, Ocean’s Twelve, is the biggest pile of steaming bullshit I’ve seen in a long while, precisely because none of the key moments, where the good guys out-smart the bad guy, appear on-screen. We’re just told at the the end, in flash-back, that they happened – the heist equivalent of Batman becoming Superman.
Update
A bit tenuous, this, but Den of Geek has a video of a Batman vs Superman advert in I Am Legend.
If, like me, you have a knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone suggests regulating the Internet, this A List Apart article on captioning/subtitling of online videos is a challenging read. Joe Clark argues that the voluntary approach to developing a good, standardized captioning system has failed, and that only governments can enforce some sort of progress:
In short, disabled people’s right to be free of discrimination trumps the belief, however fallacious, that the internet cannot or should not be regulated.
Earlier this year, the Liberal Conspiracy take on Andy Burnham’s recommendations on Internet regulation, was that it was merely a sop to the powerful music lobby and their outdated business models. Contrast this with the case of subtitling, where it is the lack of regulation which has allowed the studios and broadcasters to ignore their obligations to provide accessible content, in favour of greater profit margins.
It was the political concept of ‘accessibility’ that got me interested in web design, and fuels my current love of all things social networky. When we made The Unrecognized, I took particular pride in the subtitling, a project I worked on alone and probably took as long as the edit of the film itself. We were in a sense lucky that the film featured three languages, because it meant that a captioned video was the norm, as Joe Clark now recommends.
The internet can and should be an equalising force, yet for deaf people the online landscape is still an unwelcoming jungle.