culture: high, low, and in motion
May. 26th, 2014 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleveni decided that i'd spend the holiday in movie theaters. there were two movies i wanted to see, x-men: reboots of future past and locke... and locke is closing this week at the one art house theater that has it. there's also the inevitable spoilerizing revealopathy that goes with blockbusters, so i figured that if i was going to see it, it might as well be soon. i saw x-m: rofp this morning, and dïe überblönde and i saw locke this afternoon.
locke is a straightforward movie: ivan locke (tom hardy) has screwed up his life, and he spends the movie trying to unscrew it. the entire movie consists of him driving his car, talking on his hands-free phone as he does so. that's it. but it's a compelling performance; despite the setting, we believe there really was a rest of the world out there that locke was talking about on the phone.
the best demonstration of that is that on our way home from from the theater, i asked dïe überblönde: "on a scale of 0-100, where 0 is 'locke's life is utterly ruined, and he'd be justified in offing himself' and 100 is a saccharine disney cartoon ending with lots of 'happily ever after', how good or bad is locke's life at the end?" and dïe überblönde said what i was thinking, "do you mean right at the end of the film or the next morning?". yup: we'd nailed our disbeliefs so thoroughly to the ceiling that we're willing to believe that certain events set in motion in the film will play out after its ending. that's good storytelling.
dïe überblönde believes that the answers are 10-20 at the end of the film and maybe as high as 30 by the next day, or an unhappy ending of some sort. i'm a little more optimistic: i said 30ish at the end of the film, but perhaps has high as the low 60s by the morning. maybe his life works out for the better.
i'd recommend people see locke in the theater if they can; i think that even with large, modern TVs/computer screens, it will seem cramped otherwise. but it's a small release, in just over a hundred theaters, so you might not be able to.
x-m: rofp got surprisingly good reviews, so i decided to see it, though the trailers left me with very low expectations. it's nowhere near as bad as i'd feared, but i don't think it's as good as the reviewers thought.
i saw some comparisons to the avengers; it's not that. the avengers is an ensemble movie; x-m: rofp is a bit more than a hugh jackman vehicle with a large supporting cast.¹ the avengers had a stronger cast, better writing, and better directing: the avengers were people, these x-men are movie superheroes.
1: there's really only one other significant character: jennifer lawrence's mystique. she gives a stronger performance than jackman does.
that said, x-m: rofp is not x-men: bulk rate. most of the leaden dialogue is gone, though oddly what's left of it is concentrated in the trailers. the actors are allowed to act: fassbender gets to do more than raise his arms in a way suggesting he's unleashing vast CGI power, and mcavoy gets to do more than press his fingers to his temple while grimacing in a way suggesting he needs something stronger than NSAIDs for his headache. fassbender and mcavoy actually get to play young chuckie x and young magneto, though neither gets to rise as high as they're capable of.
the movie's plot is direct enough: Our Heroes -- or rather, what's left of them after a genocidal war -- send wolverine's consciousness back in time to prevent the event that Dooms the Earth. they're fixing a mistake. i think that's also really why the movie was made, and that's why it doesn't really work for me.
i think fox realized after x-men: bulk rate that they'd made a mess of their supers franchise: they'd changed actors for most of the characters, but frankly, the fans liked the originals much better. worse, they'd already FUBARed the original actors (and movie timeline) by running with the "dark phoenix" plot arc in y-men and z-men. so: they'd burned the popular bridge and ripped up the road leading away from it, and then left themselves with a "new past" that nobody cared about. they probably got avengers envy about the time they realized that.
the correction was a time-travel plot that would allow fox to return to the original characters and cast -- who get cameoes at the end of the movie -- with a slightly different and more open-ended story to work with than the end of the original x-men (magneto is running loose and mystique is off on her own). it's a patch, a kludge, a bit of gum and bailing wire to splice together two frayed ends of a cable into something that kinda-sorta connects.
or in more typical movie jargon, it's a middle movie. it doesn't stand on its own, since it has neither proper beginning nor end. oh, from a story-telling perspective, it does have both: a conflict -- several actually -- and its resolution. but the conflict is provided by the previous movie, and the consequences of the resolution -- the denouement -- won't happen until the inevitable sequel.
hence my new subtitle, reboots of future past: they're frobbing the reset switch again in the hope the money-making machine comes up in a better state this time. they do that about as well as it can be done, but well, that's not the recipe for a great movie.
supers fans should see it in the theater, but cheaply. the same applies if you're looking for brain candy. everybody else? wait until the sequel comes out, and then see this one on netflix to explain parts of the sequel's setting.
i don't think works of non-fiction usually get spoiler warnings, but i'm gonna cut my review of jarrett walker's human transit, a book on mass transit. the problem is that it's really two books, both good, but not good together.
walker introduces himself as a "plumber": he's just there to explain technical choices that you, the reader, can make when thinking about mass transit for your area. "look", he says, "you've hired me to fix your toilet, but there are two ways you can fix it, and they have different consequences, so just saying 'fix it!' probably won't make you happy." fair enough; that's a well-established role for scientists and other domain specialists: lay out a bunch of choices for the policy-makers to choose between.
but walker isn't a plumber. he's a real estate agent. he's gonna use the pretense of being invited in to fix your toilet to point out that fixing it isn't gonna matter, because your plumbing is just too fucked up to be worth fixing that one thing. and y'know, the electrical and gas lines aren't any better.
"oh, sure, all that could be fixed", he goes on, "but you're gonna have to tear open all these walls, and maybe we'll need to replace some of the load bearing elements to put in the new infrastructure properly. that's pretty expensive, but if you really want... and now that i think of it, these rooms are just not stylish anymore; they're all just so 1950's. you'll be happier with a complete renovation. that would cost more than a new house, but don't worry, i just happen to have this sales contract on me for a great place that'll be just perfect for you. sign here, please..."
right: the book isn't just an even-handed presentation of choices and trade-offs, it's a work of advocacy. walker's pushing a particular kind of gentrified high-density urban lifestyle.
now, i have nothing against books of advocacy; i have several. one of the other transportation-planning books i have is by a couple of reason's editors: they just come out and say that government is the problem and the free market is the solution. fair enough. but i spot-checked a few of the papers they cited -- they did say what they said they would -- but i kept wondering what they're not citing. same with walker: once i realized he had an axe to grind, it cast everything he'd written before that in doubt. what's missing? what's being deliberately framed out of the arguements he's presenting? (he goes on at some length about being a writer and knowing the importance of language. if he's gonna tell me he's choosing his rhetoric with care, i'm gonna call him on it.)
but there's a further problem: the even-handed presentation of choices is really good. incomplete and biased, perhaps, but still very good. and he's got a detailed, clarifying mental model for thinking about the problem (i may post more about that later). it's just marred by having the gospel of yuppie living according to walker slapped on the end. well, that and one long, spittle-spewing paragraph in chapter 12 about how suburban living is going to destroy human civilization, sterilize the earth, and unleash hellfire et cetera. (but he does manage to pull himself together, wipe the foam from his lips, and not only finish out that chapter, but even make it through another before he starts preaching again.)
so, the right way to read human transit is like this. (bibliophiles avert your eyes.) buy a soft-cover edition, and use a razor blade to cut the spine in two at the beginning of chapter 14. mark the section starting there something like the gospel of yuppie living according to walker. (bibliophiles, you may look back now.)
read the first 13 chapters now, despite them stopping rather than ending. you'll have to roll your eyes at one point in chapter 12, but just pretend that the author has issues. then read a couple of other books on transportation design and planning. or even just transportation fandom books, like why the pennsy was cool and why amtrak sucks balls, despite amtrak running similar trains over part of the pennsy's old lines; anything to give other viewpoints. then, and only then, read the tGoYLatW, knowing full well that it's a sales pitch. it's a good sales pitch, and if i didn't detest what he's selling, i'd probably have higher praise for it. (why yes, i have a bias about the subject -- several, actually -- but i'm not pretending this is anything but my opinion. the sales pitch is the shorter section of the book, but boy does it grate in context.)
i don't think there's any way of making the two sections of human transit work as a single volume. walker's presentation of them that way is profoundly intellectually dishonest.² however, as stand-alone works, they're both worth reading, and i recommend you do so... my way.
2: having a hidden agenda is unfortunately typical for authors writing popular introductions to technical fields; i've seen it before, too many times to count. it's avoidable, but avoiding it requires an iron will, since the temptation is just so much fun. the best authors do what i prefer: come out and say they have a bias (or several) and then launch into their introduction with their readers informed about what's going on behind the scenes.
last stop, spoilerville! spoilerville! end of the line! everybody off!
locke is a straightforward movie: ivan locke (tom hardy) has screwed up his life, and he spends the movie trying to unscrew it. the entire movie consists of him driving his car, talking on his hands-free phone as he does so. that's it. but it's a compelling performance; despite the setting, we believe there really was a rest of the world out there that locke was talking about on the phone.
the best demonstration of that is that on our way home from from the theater, i asked dïe überblönde: "on a scale of 0-100, where 0 is 'locke's life is utterly ruined, and he'd be justified in offing himself' and 100 is a saccharine disney cartoon ending with lots of 'happily ever after', how good or bad is locke's life at the end?" and dïe überblönde said what i was thinking, "do you mean right at the end of the film or the next morning?". yup: we'd nailed our disbeliefs so thoroughly to the ceiling that we're willing to believe that certain events set in motion in the film will play out after its ending. that's good storytelling.
dïe überblönde believes that the answers are 10-20 at the end of the film and maybe as high as 30 by the next day, or an unhappy ending of some sort. i'm a little more optimistic: i said 30ish at the end of the film, but perhaps has high as the low 60s by the morning. maybe his life works out for the better.
i'd recommend people see locke in the theater if they can; i think that even with large, modern TVs/computer screens, it will seem cramped otherwise. but it's a small release, in just over a hundred theaters, so you might not be able to.
x-m: rofp got surprisingly good reviews, so i decided to see it, though the trailers left me with very low expectations. it's nowhere near as bad as i'd feared, but i don't think it's as good as the reviewers thought.
i saw some comparisons to the avengers; it's not that. the avengers is an ensemble movie; x-m: rofp is a bit more than a hugh jackman vehicle with a large supporting cast.¹ the avengers had a stronger cast, better writing, and better directing: the avengers were people, these x-men are movie superheroes.
1: there's really only one other significant character: jennifer lawrence's mystique. she gives a stronger performance than jackman does.
that said, x-m: rofp is not x-men: bulk rate. most of the leaden dialogue is gone, though oddly what's left of it is concentrated in the trailers. the actors are allowed to act: fassbender gets to do more than raise his arms in a way suggesting he's unleashing vast CGI power, and mcavoy gets to do more than press his fingers to his temple while grimacing in a way suggesting he needs something stronger than NSAIDs for his headache. fassbender and mcavoy actually get to play young chuckie x and young magneto, though neither gets to rise as high as they're capable of.
the movie's plot is direct enough: Our Heroes -- or rather, what's left of them after a genocidal war -- send wolverine's consciousness back in time to prevent the event that Dooms the Earth. they're fixing a mistake. i think that's also really why the movie was made, and that's why it doesn't really work for me.
i think fox realized after x-men: bulk rate that they'd made a mess of their supers franchise: they'd changed actors for most of the characters, but frankly, the fans liked the originals much better. worse, they'd already FUBARed the original actors (and movie timeline) by running with the "dark phoenix" plot arc in y-men and z-men. so: they'd burned the popular bridge and ripped up the road leading away from it, and then left themselves with a "new past" that nobody cared about. they probably got avengers envy about the time they realized that.
the correction was a time-travel plot that would allow fox to return to the original characters and cast -- who get cameoes at the end of the movie -- with a slightly different and more open-ended story to work with than the end of the original x-men (magneto is running loose and mystique is off on her own). it's a patch, a kludge, a bit of gum and bailing wire to splice together two frayed ends of a cable into something that kinda-sorta connects.
or in more typical movie jargon, it's a middle movie. it doesn't stand on its own, since it has neither proper beginning nor end. oh, from a story-telling perspective, it does have both: a conflict -- several actually -- and its resolution. but the conflict is provided by the previous movie, and the consequences of the resolution -- the denouement -- won't happen until the inevitable sequel.
hence my new subtitle, reboots of future past: they're frobbing the reset switch again in the hope the money-making machine comes up in a better state this time. they do that about as well as it can be done, but well, that's not the recipe for a great movie.
supers fans should see it in the theater, but cheaply. the same applies if you're looking for brain candy. everybody else? wait until the sequel comes out, and then see this one on netflix to explain parts of the sequel's setting.
i don't think works of non-fiction usually get spoiler warnings, but i'm gonna cut my review of jarrett walker's human transit, a book on mass transit. the problem is that it's really two books, both good, but not good together.
walker introduces himself as a "plumber": he's just there to explain technical choices that you, the reader, can make when thinking about mass transit for your area. "look", he says, "you've hired me to fix your toilet, but there are two ways you can fix it, and they have different consequences, so just saying 'fix it!' probably won't make you happy." fair enough; that's a well-established role for scientists and other domain specialists: lay out a bunch of choices for the policy-makers to choose between.
but walker isn't a plumber. he's a real estate agent. he's gonna use the pretense of being invited in to fix your toilet to point out that fixing it isn't gonna matter, because your plumbing is just too fucked up to be worth fixing that one thing. and y'know, the electrical and gas lines aren't any better.
"oh, sure, all that could be fixed", he goes on, "but you're gonna have to tear open all these walls, and maybe we'll need to replace some of the load bearing elements to put in the new infrastructure properly. that's pretty expensive, but if you really want... and now that i think of it, these rooms are just not stylish anymore; they're all just so 1950's. you'll be happier with a complete renovation. that would cost more than a new house, but don't worry, i just happen to have this sales contract on me for a great place that'll be just perfect for you. sign here, please..."
right: the book isn't just an even-handed presentation of choices and trade-offs, it's a work of advocacy. walker's pushing a particular kind of gentrified high-density urban lifestyle.
now, i have nothing against books of advocacy; i have several. one of the other transportation-planning books i have is by a couple of reason's editors: they just come out and say that government is the problem and the free market is the solution. fair enough. but i spot-checked a few of the papers they cited -- they did say what they said they would -- but i kept wondering what they're not citing. same with walker: once i realized he had an axe to grind, it cast everything he'd written before that in doubt. what's missing? what's being deliberately framed out of the arguements he's presenting? (he goes on at some length about being a writer and knowing the importance of language. if he's gonna tell me he's choosing his rhetoric with care, i'm gonna call him on it.)
but there's a further problem: the even-handed presentation of choices is really good. incomplete and biased, perhaps, but still very good. and he's got a detailed, clarifying mental model for thinking about the problem (i may post more about that later). it's just marred by having the gospel of yuppie living according to walker slapped on the end. well, that and one long, spittle-spewing paragraph in chapter 12 about how suburban living is going to destroy human civilization, sterilize the earth, and unleash hellfire et cetera. (but he does manage to pull himself together, wipe the foam from his lips, and not only finish out that chapter, but even make it through another before he starts preaching again.)
so, the right way to read human transit is like this. (bibliophiles avert your eyes.) buy a soft-cover edition, and use a razor blade to cut the spine in two at the beginning of chapter 14. mark the section starting there something like the gospel of yuppie living according to walker. (bibliophiles, you may look back now.)
read the first 13 chapters now, despite them stopping rather than ending. you'll have to roll your eyes at one point in chapter 12, but just pretend that the author has issues. then read a couple of other books on transportation design and planning. or even just transportation fandom books, like why the pennsy was cool and why amtrak sucks balls, despite amtrak running similar trains over part of the pennsy's old lines; anything to give other viewpoints. then, and only then, read the tGoYLatW, knowing full well that it's a sales pitch. it's a good sales pitch, and if i didn't detest what he's selling, i'd probably have higher praise for it. (why yes, i have a bias about the subject -- several, actually -- but i'm not pretending this is anything but my opinion. the sales pitch is the shorter section of the book, but boy does it grate in context.)
i don't think there's any way of making the two sections of human transit work as a single volume. walker's presentation of them that way is profoundly intellectually dishonest.² however, as stand-alone works, they're both worth reading, and i recommend you do so... my way.
2: having a hidden agenda is unfortunately typical for authors writing popular introductions to technical fields; i've seen it before, too many times to count. it's avoidable, but avoiding it requires an iron will, since the temptation is just so much fun. the best authors do what i prefer: come out and say they have a bias (or several) and then launch into their introduction with their readers informed about what's going on behind the scenes.
last stop, spoilerville! spoilerville! end of the line! everybody off!