Number of black soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima: 900.
Number of black soldiers in Clint Eastwood’s film version: 0.
(Guardian)
Number of racist murders in Britain, 1995-2004: 58.
Number where the victim was white: 24.
(Guardian)
Pay increase limit imposed on UK nurses: 1.5%.
This year’s pay rise for Cabinet Ministers: 2.8%.
Idiocracy is Mike Judge’s new live action movie. Well, I say “new”; I gather it was pretty much finished in 2004, and since then he has been battling with 20th Century Fox to get it released. Right now, it’s showing in a handful of cities, probably a contractual obligation release before it gets shuffled off to DVD or buried outright. One of the cities is Austin, so we went to see it last night.
The premise of the story is the observation that smart people pretty much aren’t having children, while mouth-breathing idiots can’t seem to stop doing so. A supremely average guy from the army is chosen to be the subject of a suspended animation experiment in 2005. Unfortunately, after he is put into the suspension chamber the military end up forgetting about it, and our hero wakes up in the year 2505—and discovers that the world has gotten so dumb that he’s now the smartest person on the planet.
So we get to see a future where the cities are like giant trailer parks, the only clothing that exists is sports gear festooned with dozens of corporate logos, and nobody can even comprehend the idea of drinking water without coloring, sugar and flavoring added. Language has devolved into strings of rap clichés, disconnected phrases, and grunts, and the President is a pro wrestler.
I laughed more than I have in months. The pace starts to flag after about two thirds of the movie, but it’s still pretty damn entertaining if you like satire. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who thinks monster truck rallies are legitimate entertainment, then you’re probably not going to appreciate having so many barbs fired in your direction.
Celebrity-obsessed entertainment publications like JAM! Showbiz and Entertainment Weekly have panned the movie, all too aware that it sets out to mock their readers. It rips into Hollywood too, and has made a few corporations unhappy. Starbucks seem to have taken the jokes in their stride, like they did with Austin Powers, but Pepsico have clearly forbidden any of their trademarked logos from being shown in the movie. As such, the Negativland Dispepsi approach is followed, with significantly disguised parody logos being used and the real product name referred to only verbally. I daresay a good few jokes were removed or muted by the corporate censors too.
Still, probably worth going to see, and definitely worth renting on DVD.
Sentiment: sorrow
SF savant Stanisław
so sadly silent
An experiment in cloning goes awry: director Kurt Wimmer attempts to clone The Matrix and inject it with Brave New World DNA, and ends up with a truly ghastly piece of derivative sci-fi that takes a noble premise and turns it into exploitative cartoon violence. What plot twists exist are telegraphed so far off you’d need to be heavily sedated to miss them.
Like the uneven but popular movie it slavishly copies, it can’t decide whether it wants to be intelligent and philosophical, or to just revel in pointless unrealistic violence; and whereas the original at least had a plot device to explain the unreality, the cheap knock-off has no such excuse. Netflix thought I’d rate it 4/5, but adequate acting and special effects can’t drag it above a 2.
I find myself wondering whether Roger Ebert actually watched it before giving it 3 out of 4 stars, especially as he mentions a memorable scene of the protagonist listening to jazz. In the scene in question, the music played is Beethoven, the guy even mispronounces “Ludvig Van Beet-hoven” before putting the record on.
If James Brown is the hardest working man in showbiz, Richard H. Kirk must surely be the hardest working man in electronica. He seems to be able to effortlessly drop an album or two every year without the quality suffering. I noticed the other day that most of his back catalog is now available from the iTunes music store, generally priced way below what you can find the limited release CDs for.
Meanwhile, Leningrad Cowboys Go America is finally available on DVD…in Finland. Or from an online store in Denmark, which wants $32 plus shipping. Ouch.
TELEX have a new album out later this month, How Do You Dance? (answer: badly). No sign of it appearing in the US. There’s also a single and a video, can’t find any trace of those either. $19 for the CD, plus shipping from France, equals ouch again.
I suppose I should be grateful that Kraftwerk’s complete remastered box set hasn’t appeared yet.
In a word, avoid. Unfortunately it’s a competently executed movie, at least as far as acting and cinematography—so sadly, I must break with etiquette and provide a synopsis. It’s the only way to explain how truly bad the movie is.
I just got a phone call from one of the lawyers involved in the Netflix class action lawsuit I wrote about a while back. Apparently my letter had caught his attention, and he wanted to discuss my objections to the proposed settlement in more detail. It turned out to be quite an interesting conversation.
I explained that the first issue was that I felt the proposed settlement gave far too much benefit to the legal firm, rather than the allegedly wronged customers of Netflix. I said that I understood that law firms took class action cases on a speculative basis, and that fines had to be large enough to hurt the companies sued, but that it seemed excessive for the wronged customers to get 1 month of better service that they would then have to cancel to avoid paying more, while the law firm got over $2 million cash.
He said that the settlement was the product of compromise, and that having to opt out of the increased service after a month was the way Netflix wanted it. I said that I didn’t doubt that, but that in the past Netflix had sent me a bonus DVD one month, as a reward or compensation for something I forget. So clearly there were other ways to compensate customers.
He said that yes, Netflix had done that, but that it had resulted in so many customer service queries from people not reading the accompanying explanation, and presumably worried that they had been silently upgraded, that Netflix had vowed never to do anything that way again. I conceded that it seemed entirely plausible to me that I was just atypical of the average Netflix consumer, in that I’m not easily confused by a bonus disc and I hate opt-out arrangements.
He mentioned that he’s had the same objections from many people writing to opt out. I’m guessing they’ve been surprised by the level of response. Maybe they’re calling partly to check up that the people opting out really do understand what they’re opting out of, and haven’t been suckered by a chain e-mail or something.
We also talked about the fundamental issue of why the lawsuit had been brought in the first place. I explained that I felt it was fairly frivolous to start with: in the real world, reasonable people understand that when something is advertised as ‘unlimited’, there are in fact usually some limits. The example I picked was an ‘all you can eat’ restaurant—when you pay for ‘all you can eat’, and the restaurant closes while you’re still eating, that’s not a reason to sue. “All you can eat” is not necessarily meant in a pedantic literal sense, and neither is “Unlimited DVD rentals”.
The counter-argument put to me was that the real issue wasn’t the lack of unlimitedness, but the alleged unfairness. It wasn’t that Netflix couldn’t actually deliver unlimited DVDs, it was that after a certain point, customers who had had fewer rentals that month got sent to the front of the queue—and the heavy customers had the sending of their next discs delayed as a result.
The lawyer said that to use my analogy, it was like the restaurant allowing the people who had had two slices of pizza to cut in line in front of me when I was going to get my seventh or eighth slice.
The thing is, I don’t think that would be particularly unfair. I might not be happy about it if someone grabbed the last slice of vegetarian pizza and I had to wait for a fresh one to be cooked, but I wouldn’t sue them over it. Growing up, at mealtimes the kid who had only had one serving was always given precedence of choice over the one who was on his third helpings.
I mentioned having heard about Netflix giving preferential treatment to low-volume customers ages ago. Again, from my point of view—which admittedly, may be biased by my being a low-volume customer—it seems to make good sense. If John is only getting 1 DVD this month, it’s pretty damn important to make sure he gets the one he wants, quickly. More important, I think, than making sure that Mike’s 8th DVD arrives just as quickly as his 1st.
I also mentioned the allegations a while back about Amazon offering worse prices to people who were regular customers, and similar cases of shops offering preferential treatment to customers who they believe are the most profitable for them. The lawyer talked about how those cases were different; he seemed to be trying to draw a clear distinction but I couldn’t quite grasp his reasoning. Maybe it was some subtle legal point, or maybe he was bluffing.
Anyway, it was all very amiable. I said I would be interested to see the outcome of the lawsuit, and that if it succeeded it would be interesting to see if companies would have to start putting disclaimers up saying something along the lines of “Your price may be worse than the price we’re offering other people, because we don’t think you make us enough money as a customer.”
(Oh, I don’t remember the guy’s name I’m afraid. I’m terrible with names, he said it once at the start and I completely forgot what it was by the end of the discussion.)
I’m a happy NetFlix customer. I have been since either 1999 or early 2000, I forget exactly. It’s a good service—you queue up a list of DVDs, you keep a number of discs at home, and each time you mail one back they mail you the next one from the list.
A while ago some guy named Frank Chavez took exception to Netflix’s advertising. Their ads were offering “unlimited” rentals, and Chavez discovered that they actually deliver DVDs to you more slowly once you hit more than 12 rentals in a month. Chavez reasoned that this put a definite upper limit on the number you could rent, over and above the limit resulting from postal delays. Hence Netflix weren’t really letting you rent an unlimited number of discs; you’d probably only be able to rent a movie every other day. Cue the very small violin.
So, Chavez filed a lawsuit for a few hundred bucks. Lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safire took on the case on his behalf. And now, there’s a proposed class action settlement.
Under the terms of the settlement, the customers of Netflix will get a free upgrade to a higher tier of service, with an extra rental allowed—for one month. After that they’ll either have to pay more to keep the improved service, or request their original deal again.
If that doesn’t sound like a very good deal, well, as you might expect Mr Chavez did a little better. He’ll apparently get $2000 in damages.
But what of that crack team of two lawyers? What do they get as meager compensation for the hours they spent on this deeply worthwhile lawsuit? It turns out that under the proposed settlement, they’ll rake in a cool $2,528,000 to split between them. That’s about half of Netflix’s quarterly profits.
Let’s just run those numbers again: You get one month of improved service, worth a couple of bucks—and if you’re careful, it doesn’t cost you anything. Netflix most likely make more money from people forgetting to cancel the upgraded service; if they don’t, they probably jack up the membership fees to cover the cost of the settlement. Chavez gets two grand. And the lawyers get a million bucks each plus change.
If you think there’s something a little skewed about the terms of that settlement, you might like to head over to netflixsettlementsucks.com. It turns out that if 5% of the people eligible to take part in the settlement write in and say they want no part of it, the whole thing is invalidated and the lawyers get nothing. Personally, I’d love to see that.
The opt-out instructions are on the site, and geektronica has Microsoft Word and PDF templates for the lazy.
Snakes On A Plane. You can just imagine the pitch meeting.
Turner: I have got this killer idea for an action horror movie.
Ellis: Sure, hit me.
Turner: OK, here’s the setup…there are a bunch of people on a plane. And the plane is carrying a load of, like, poisonous snakes. And the snakes are accidentally let out.
Ellis: Are you drunk?
Turner: No, listen, there’s more. Samuel L. Jackson is on the plane. He, like, kicks the snakes’ asses.
Ellis: I’m not sure snakes have asses.
Turner: Tails, then. But you get the idea…Samuel L. Jackson. In a plane. And the plane is full of snakes.
Ellis: So what’s it called?
Turner: Snakes On A Plane.
Ellis: I knew it, you’re baked.
Turner: No, it’s marketing genius. Nobody reads what it says on posters, we don’t need reviews, we don’t even need trailers—it’s, like, all there in the title. Snakes…On A Plane, man!
Ellis: Wow. It’s almost Zen-like in its minimalism. So outline the plot for me.
Turner: You’re still not getting it. I just did! It’s snakes…on a plane. Obviously I’ll get a few of my friends to help pad it out to an hour and a half, but it’ll practically write itself.
Ellis: OK, sounds good, get me a draft. Anything else?
Turner: Sure, and you’re going to love this. One word: sequels.
Ellis: Oh, yeah, I’m liking that.
Turner: There’s no telling where this baby could go. Snakes On A Boat. Snakes On A Train. Snakes On A Bus. Snakes In A Restaurant. Snakes In A Goddamn Movie Theater, and we drop rubber snakes on the audience half way through! It’s fuckin’ genius, man!
Ellis: Oh, yeah. I think I just creamed my pants. I’m taking this to New Line, Emmerich will green light this faster than Terry Gilliam can blow a budget. Let’s do lunch next week.
Let’s predict a few key bits of plot:
.
My Netflix queue contains over a hundred items. As a result, it’s often the case that by the time a movie appears in my mailbox, I’ve completely forgotten why I wanted to watch it in the first place, or even what it’s about.
This was definitely the case for Timeline. I can’t think why I would have put it in the queue; I’m not a big fan of anything mediaeval, I’m not wild about director Richard Donner’s previous movies, and Michael Crichton has written some pretty cheesy SF.
I certainly didn’t pick it based on reviews. The movie got a complete critical savaging; you’d think it was Battlefield Earth 2 from some of the comments:
“No film in recent memory has cried out this much to be mocked.”
“Timeline may not be the dumbest movie to be released this year. But it’s certainly not for lack of trying.”
I find it interesting that there’s a massive disparity between the critics’ reviews, and the average rating given to the movie by ordinary people. I think the critics are way out of line on this one. If you want to see a really excruciatingly bad SF movie, one that’s so wildly implausible it makes Timeline look like an episode of Scientific American Frontiers, consider The Core. That stinking piece of cinematic excrement got way better reviews from the pro critics than Timeline, which tells me that there’s something seriously wrong with the critics’ sense of judgement.
[Spoilers follow, if a movie as badly reviewed as this can be spoiled.]
There’s one criticism that leaps out as wildly inappropriate:
“It looks like cheesy ’60s television, with paper-thin characters and crummy special effects that wouldn’t even have made it in the last season of Star Trek.”
—Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER
Since I’ve had the benefit of watching the documentary extras on the DVD, I can reveal that there really weren’t any special effects in the movie. They got the special effect of medieval trebuchets launching projectiles by actually building a bunch of full-size trebuchets and having them launch flaming projectiles. They got that unconvincing effect of a castle blowing up by actually building a full-size castle and blowing it up. The people fighting in a burning smoke-filled courtyard? Well, they set the courtyard on fire, then had a bunch of people fight. The metal swords? Yes, they were made of aluminium, but they were still actual metal swords. And so on.
Make no mistake, there are a lot of grounds for criticizing this movie; but physical verisimilitude isn’t one of them. Still, let’s get a few of the valid criticisms out of the way.
First the plot. It’s easy to say that the foreshadowing is heavy-handed and the outcome predictable, so let’s put some numbers to it: I worked out the major plot twist and knew the basic outline of what was going to happen 12 minutes into the movie. (I jotted a note of the time.) Really, as far as the story goes there’s nothing you haven’t seen in dozens of episodes of Star Trek—right down to the two red-shirted security officers who get killed almost immediately, and the anachronistic object found on an archeological dig. (At least this time it’s not someone’s head.)
Then there’s the medicine. My history teacher (yes, the one who’s now in jail) always used to say that if you did travel back in time, the first thing you’d notice would be the stench. Yet somehow, disease is never a factor in this story—the peasants all look clean and healthy, and today’s bacteria and viruses, with their 600 years of evolutionary head start, fail to impact the people of the past in any way.
Then there’s the language issue. The heroes take back a French guy to help them talk to the locals. The trouble is, we’re heading to the 1300s, when English looked like this:
Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan,
Than may be yeve of any erthely man.
And therfore positif lawe and swich decree
Is broken al day for love in ech degree.
A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed,
He may nat fleen it, thogh he sholde be deed,
Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf.
And eek it is nat likly, al thy lyf,
To stonden in hir grace, namoore shal I,
For wel thou woost thyselven, verraily,
That thou and I be dampned to prisoun
Perpetuelly, us gayneth no raunsoun.
I’ll let you extrapolate to French. Maybe you can piece together what most of the above is saying—but speak it? With passably correct pronounciation, good enough to fool knights on the lookout for foreign spies? I don’t think so. Yet nobody in this movie, whether English, French, Scottish or (god help us) American, has any significant trouble understanding anyone else’s accent or vocabulary. Which is a pity, because the situation could have been so much more tense and menacing if they had. I mean, why use authentic medieval costumes of sackcloth and leather, and get genuine heraldry from England, if you’re going to have medieval French people speak modern English with a modern French accent?
Finally, there’s the essential countdown to doom caused by technological limitation. You’ve seen it in countless Bond movies (and movies based on Michael Crichton stories), but let’s overlook the cliché. Instead, let’s think about the fact that a team of half a dozen engineers somehow manage to rebuild a destroyed multi-million dollar computer-controlled time machine, one which it took years of research to construct. And they do it in under 5 hours. In reality, they’d still be installing Windows XP Service Packs by the time everyone got permanently stranded in the past.
Then there’s the acting. Yes, some of it is pretty bad, but what do you expect? It’s a Hollywood action movie. Trying to believe that Paul Walker is Billy Connolly’s son is like trying to believe that Keanu Reeves is the spawn of Sean Connery, but we can probably write off that lousy piece of casting as a market-driven attempt to appeal to the teen and early 20s audience who liked 2 Fast 2 Furious.
More troubling is the complete inability of the cast to make us believe they have a convincing enough motivation to step into an experimental time machine and go through a wormhole in space that they’ve been warned will rip them into electrons so that for a moment they won’t even exist. In the documentary, Richard Donner mentions that in Crichton’s book the technological detail and the characters arguing over what to do ran to around 100 pages, but that they managed to condense it down to 5 pages of movie script. Well, yes, I guess technically all the essential plot points were left intact, but…
Enough negativity! Because if you can somehow look past all that, it’s really not that bad a movie. The medieval detail is well done, and there’s something about real buildings and tunnels and mud and thatch, something about real explosions and smoke, that computer graphics still can’t duplicate. The pacing is evenly fast, so you don’t get bored, and there are some satisfying moments.
So in summary: it’s some painstaking attention to detail that really belonged in a better movie. Sadly, it was stuck into this overgrown B-movie instead. It’s an enjoyable but mindless couple of hours, basically a mid-point between The Messenger and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And I promise you, it’s better than The Core.