/dev/mull

and it was great! i plunked down a pile of money to see it in IMAX, and it was certainly worth it. villeneuva really grasps the scale of things in dune, and IMAX made them look suitably awe-inspiring.

as a simple measure of how much i liked the movie, i bought some fizzy sugar water, as it came with a straw, so i could drink it without taking my mask off. it wasn't until the movie was almost over that i realized i hadn't drunk any.

( spoilery visions of dune's future )

the first half-hour of won't you be my neighbor is glacially slow and dull. i usually give documentaries a half-hour to settle into some kind of groove; it seems some simply need the long wind-up.

i was all ready to stop WYBMN at the half-hour mark and declare that it was nominated for an oscar because it's a feel-good documentary and it didn't win because it's nothing beyond that. but the movie suddenly found its voice and its pace, and it turned into a real gem; parts of it were surprisingly affecting.

the rest did what documentaries strive for: provide a lot of information about some subject while telling a good story. WYBMN nailed that: i was kinda young when i watched the show, and had no idea how groundbreaking it was, nor how cleverly put together. nor any idea of its incredible influence on american culture, nor how much of that was simply fred rogers' honesty, intelligence, and persistence. if we had secular saints, he'd deserve to be on the short list for canonization.

so, yeah, go watch this one. i'll probably watch it again, just to see what i missed during the first go-round.

growing up, growing old, and dying. really cheerful, right?

i wandered over to my local arthouse theater to watch this year's collection of short animated films up for some increasingly irrelevant award from some increasingly dysfunctional film society. the movies are all good storytelling, but man! are they depressing!

three of the five nominees (bao, one small step, late afternoon) have growing up, growing old, and dying as either the theme or major story driver. one of the two stuck on to bring the collection to a feature length, tweet, tweet, does too.

i'm not sure if this said something about the people who made the movies or the members of academy of dysfunctional filmmaking who chose them, but somebody is facing up to their (parents') mortality. which is all fine and good, but couldn't we get a less depressing theme next year? of this year's collection, only one of the tacked-on movies is at all upbeat (wish box).

i recently watched the eagle huntress, a documentary about a girl in mongolia who wanted to be the first woman to hunt with golden eagles. it's a pretty good movie, especially if you like rugged scenery, large raptors, and/or people living under what urban sissies like me regard as insane conditions. not as insane as the people in happy people, nor as anywhere as self-reliant as them -- the girl's family's ger has a solar panel, and some of the semi-nomads do ride motorcycles into town rather than horses. (the nearest city is ulgii, variously anglicized in the movie. they have an eagle hunting festival. it's apparently a stop on the exotic-places tour, since the only people in the movie with cameras were white tourists taking pictures of the contest. even i do a little better in interesting places.)

the movie's one weakness is that the director seems to be trying too hard to find villains for the plot. while there's a series of talking-head interviews with four old get-off-my-steppe guys who are absolutely against women learning the manly art of eagle hunting, by and large, everybody in the movie shrugs and says, "let her try".

still, i recommend it, but i like rugged scenery, large raptors, and insane living conditions.

on the other hand, i bravely read scale: the universal laws of wide-eyed, self-deluded social-science types, that angels feared to read. it could have been worse.

the author may be on to something -- as opposed to just on something -- but it's impossible to tell from the evidence. too much of it looks cherry-picked, some of it has problems with the curve fitting -- today's $64 word is heteroscedasicity: uneven or systematic variation in the scatter of data -- and the rest may be explained by hypotheses other than the author's pet one. for example, he has a nice set of graphs showing that the number of gas stations in european cities grows with population with a particular set of exponential laws. he attributes the sub-linear scaling to the physical efficiency of large cities, but it could also be explained by bigger cities being more likely to have public transit, and simply needing less gas per person.

but! he does correctly use metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for talking about US cities. yay! too much stuff i've read on the wonders of cities uses only figures for the cities proper, not their vast suburbs/conurbs. that renders the results nearly worthless, because the economic effects of modern¹ cities no longer conveniently stop at their borders.

more importantly, this implies there's data on MSAs, and i now know how to find it, so i can poke at the wonders of cities myself. while it's clear that (for example) average salary grows quickly in population, i wonder about median salary... or total compensation. latte-sipping city boosters seem to like to forget that their easy lifestyles are supported by legions of poorly-paid people, many of whom have been pushed out of their now-gentrified lifestyle-enabling areas.

so, while the book may be a loss, it's not a total loss, and i don't discount the possibility that the universal scaling laws the author wants exists. but i'd like some reputable data to support it.

1: modern being since the 19th century development of streetcars, subways, and elevated trains, which allowed cities to grow far beyond their previous sizes.

last week we went to two "classical" concerts, chamber music and orchestral music. bliss. dïe überblønde felt that was too much culture for one week, but she's a bit overwhelmed these days.

the chamber concert started with haydn's fire symphony, though i was disappointed to discover that it contained only artificial fire. it is very pretty tho, and we're going to get a copy. assuming we don't already have one; always a problem for people with lots of music.

we're also going to get a copy of larson's concertino for trombone and strings (opus 45), but we know we don't have that, since we'd never heard of him before. also, natalie mannix, the local principal trombonist, can play a mean trombone, and she has a few albums of her own. we may get those.

i wasn't feeling well, so we bailed at halftime. one of the other regular concert-goers did catch us on friday and say we missed a good performance of schubert's fifth symphony. fortunately, we do have a copy of that. not as good as live, but it'll do.

friday's orchestral music started with elgar's serenade in e-minor for string orchestra; that's another one to buy. that was followed by one of da falla's ballet suites, without the dancing, but with denyce graves singing mezzo-soprano. she's apparently famous with opera types, but i can't distinguish good opera singing from great opera singing. i don't have much desire to learn how, either.

the star of the show was beethoven's 7th symphony, which is just so damn upbeat and perky. it's like somebody slipped ol' ludwig some really good weed; his music is usually much more serious. maybe he was still on a popular music kick after the pastoral symphony. i gave the performance a standing ovation. the DSO is rarely that sharp, so i was pleased.

---

last week i saw logan. i agree with most of the common assessments: patrick stewart's acting is excellent, hugh jackman's isn't bad, and overall, the movie is the best x-men movie since one of the first two, way back when. (i tend to put deadpool in its own category, even tho it is technically an x-men movie.)

( as for the plot... (total spoilers for logan) )

the movie did meet the minimal ebert criterion and then some, but saying "best x-men movie since either the original or the first sequel" isn't much of a recommendation. see it if you're a wolverine fan, or a supers completist.

my usual every-other-year economic analysis thanksgiving dinner attendance has been derailed. as a result of the improving economy and/or my own lateness, we couldn't get reservations to the fancy buffet we've been going to for many years.

we did get a regular sit-down dinner at the same place (for a vastly higher price) and the buffet seemed pretty busy when we walked past. our dinner seemed pretty well attended as well.

---

we saw arrival, an OK first-contact movie. it's adapted from ted chiang's "the story of your life", which we both reread after seeing the movie. arrival is an adaptation of "the story of your life" (tSoYL) in about the same way blade runner is an adaptation of do androids dream of electric sheep is: there's clear similarities between the two -- and even a couple of things that are identical -- but the stories aren't entirely the same.

it's not an adaptation the same way that 2001 is an adaptation of "the sentinel". the problem is that it seems to want to be.

tSoYL is a gadget story. there's a mcguffin -- an unusual one, an alien language -- and its effects on the human condition -- or one human's condition -- are explored. it's a pretty good story. not one of my favorites, but it's an ok tale pretty well told.

arrival takes that straightforward gadget story and pastes on a lot of plot complications in order to make a feature-length movie. the plot complications don't quite work; in one scene, the plot is hurried along in a ham-handed way very much like one character asking "why do we need to hurry?" and another character handing them a plot coupon offering a buy-one get-one-for-free deal on crises.

tSoYL has only two characters: Our Heroine, a linguist, and her interlocutor, a physicist. his job is pretty simple: hand her domain knowledge that explains parts of the story and give her somebody to talk to. arrival struggles with the first part. it seems the writers really didn't know how to write science, even though a key scientific point in tSoYL is really easy to present. so, he seems to be reduced to the love interest.

( but they did do some things right (moderate spoilers) )

on balance, i don't think arrival is worth the price of admission, even for a cheap show. it's probably worth seeing on DVD/streaming tho. or you may like reading tSoYL better. i'm going to oppose the consensus opinion on them and say read tSoYL first. it's a novella, so it's a quick read. if you like it, rent some visuals to go with it.

while the rest of the country is glued to their screens, frantically refreshing their favorite news sources to find out the score in today's election, we're gonna be at the movies. not because we're apathetic about the election. quite the contrary: we'd otherwise be among the most obsessive of the news-site refreshers.

we're going to see doctor strange. not because it's a great movie -- though the SF/X are supposed to be suitably trippy and cumberbatch is supposed to play a fine doctor strange -- but because it's an adequate movie. it'll do for something which isn't breathless ward by ward reporting of the election results.

charismatic fauna:



courtesy UPI.

ok, you probably saw that already. fine. i like it.

---

ars technica reports couple of small victories for privacy, one of which allows gügle to be sued for scanning all email sent to gmail, even by people who haven't agreed to their 'privacy' policy. excellent! i await my pile of money; or more likely i'll have to opt out of the lawyer-enriching bogus settlement and pursue my own case. that's fine; the class action suit will do most of the work for me.

---

i watched particle fever last night. it's an ok documentary about the large hadron collider and the race for the higgs boson, but not a great one. the introduction is very slow, since the movie spends a lot of time introducing some LHC scientists and the science. yup, scientists often aren't motivated by the same things as non-scientists. thanks, i knew that. perhaps a non-scientist would like the beginning more than i do.

the movie starts to get going after one spoiler and really gets its act together after the other spoiler. after that, it's a great documentary. shame about the first two-thirds, though.

( spoilers )

i'm not sure if i can recommend particle fever. maybe non-scientists will like it from beginning to end. people who know science stuff should probably watch the first little bit to learn who the players are, then keep an itchy fast-forward finger to skip forward until they reach the start of the good part. i think it's obvious. or, y'all could just skip the whole movie. hard to say.

that is, last year's superhero turkey. i think it descends into being so bad it's good: wooden acting, trite dialogue, predictable plot... and eminently worth a laugh because of it. if you're into wretched movies and have some time to kill, it's probably worth seeing.


ex machina, however, is just bad. i may have come into it with a bad approach, since i kept wondering if it would add anything to cinema beyond what blade runner already did. spoiler: it doesn't. that wouldn't be so awful if it wasn't trying to, but the movie kept wanting to.

the result, IMAO, is that it keeps calling blade runner to mind, holding itself up for comparison, and being found wanting. perhaps it wouldn't be so bad for a viewer who'd never seen blade runner... but in that case, i'd recommending seeing that and skipping
ex machina.


ant man is harmless. it's a superhero origin story movie, a sub-subgenre i find tiring. others may not care so much about that. otherwise, it's not noteworthy: it's a workmanlike example of a supers movie. see it if you're interested in the character, or are a marvel supers completist. otherwise, well, expect to see more of ant man in future marvel movies.

this past weekend, i saw the martian and in the shadow of the moon. both are quite good, since they have excellent source material to work with. they made an interesting study in contrasts.

( spoilers for both movies )

both are recommended. the martian is still in theaters, and is worth seeing there, but i have no idea if the 3-d version is worth it.