Drum Roll, please...

So, Brad and I, with the profound help and prompting of fellow traveler on the Road of Dorkness, Darren, are getting ready to go all multimedia on you're buttocks.  Coming soon... In the Mouth of Dorkness: The Podcast (!!!).  That's right.  If reading a blog filled with our sometimes outlandish opinions isn't enough for you, you'll be able to hear us in the surround-o-scape of digital audio beamed into your house/car by the magic of wave motion technology (all the way from the future!). 

I totally know how technology works.  And Brad is a wiz with machines.

The files are in the computer?!

Thank goodness for Darren.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (4/6/14-4/12/14)

    Mostly just movies this week, but good times, none the less.  I love living in the greater DC area.  The options for seeing movies, movies you just don’t get to see on the big screen elsewhere…It’s the berries.

The Raid 2: Berandal:  The Raid was a pretty intense, violent, and action packed little movie.  It has, essentially, the same story as Dredd, but set in Indonesia instead of MegaCity 1 (pick your urban hellscape).  With the sequel, the world is greatly expanded, with several factions of organized crime, corrupt cops, various heavies, and all kinds of horrible places to die.  As far as the plot goes, there’s nothing to write home about.  It’s the usual "cop goes undercover to infiltrate organized crime, using the headstrong, screw-up scion of a major crime family" story you’ve seen dozens of times.  But the cast and the action are what make the film stand on its own.  This is, straight up, one of the most violent films I’ve ever seen, and almost certainly the most violent film I’ve seen that somehow managed to get an R rating from the MPAA.  Of course, we know, you can show almost all the violence you want, so long as you don’t talk realistically about sex (or show a penis).  But even so, I’m shocked this was able to get an R.  If anything I’ve seen warrants and NC-17, it’s this film.  The action and violence are extremely well done, and in spite of a lot of handheld work, I never got frustrated and annoyed by it like I do in most of our modern ‘shaky-cam’ action scenes.  The meat-hook brutality of the combat is at times grueling.  But for action/martial arts fans, this one is well worth seeing.  So.  Dang.  Violent.  Probably the biggest surprise is that the extremely cliché character of the head-strong son of the mob boss isn’t horribly annoying.  I actually like him and his Asian Bruce Campbell cool.

12 Years a Slave:  “I don’t want to survive.  I want to live.”  I know the basics of the history.  I know how economic and religious ideas came together (with a dash of scientific quackery) in a horrible partnership that created the national shame that was the enslavement of large numbers of Africans in the early Americas through the 1800s (let’s skip the post Civil War awfulness for the sake of this discussion).  I’ve read the books and I’ve seen the movies.  But I don’t get it.  I don’t understand how it could be so widely practiced and accepted.  I know that it was.  And I know that similar things go on today, be it genital mutilation and enshrouding of women or colossal oppression of a people by their government, or whatever.  I know that it happens.  I see it.  But I don’t get it.  How did it take so long to stop what was so obviously a horrible and disgusting practice?  I don’t know.  That’s what I kept thinking through watching this movie.  How did so many people let it happen, keep it going, revel in it?  The movie itself is beautifully immersive, capturing the beauty of the land, while not shying away from the horrors visited brother against brother, sister against sister.  The story is compelling and the acting fantastic.  There’s good reason this was up for all the awards.  But it is a brutal viewing, no doubt about it.  If I have one critique of the film, it’s that I never got the sense of passing time.  I feel like part of the horror of Solomon Northup’s journey was how much of his life was lost.  But the movie felt like it took place over a matter of weeks or months.  Still, it’s a heck of a powerful movie.  Thinking about it over the course of the week, what made this movie more effective for me than some others on the same subject may be that Solomon Northup started the film as a free man, minding his own business, who gets kidnapped and taken to a hostile land.  I can relate to that more than the usual story of a person who grew up under the boot heal of slavery.  It makes things less abstract.

Particle Fever:  This movie made me want to go out and do Science! for a living.  I know that’s not in the cards.  I’m too old, and I suck at math.  But for an hour and a half, I felt like I could be part of all this wonder and the expansion of Human understanding.  Through the eyes of a handful of interesting physicists, we see the final stages of the construction and early tests of the Large Hadron Collider, a machine designed to smash particles together and see what comes out.  Some of these people had theories that were decades old, with no ability to test them until this massive machine was built.  The movie does an excellent job of showing what life on the inside of this particular fishbowl was like, while showing the passions of the people involved.  I also like that it prominently and positively featured women in science without being about women in science.  Typically with a movie like this, if they were going to have one of the key protagonists be a woman, they’d spend 10 or 15 minutes talking about the challenge of being a woman in a male dominated field.  Something that would almost certainly be off-putting for young women looking to get into that field.  Instead, we see women working right alongside men in the office, in the classrooms, and in the construction of the machine, and running the overall project, just as it should be.  No, it’s not like it was a 50/50 split.  But the mix is a heck of a lot better than a couple decades ago.  And if we stop scaring our daughters off of male dominated fields by driving home how challenging they’ll be, maybe that split will decrease more in the coming years.  A movie like this is going to be a heck of a lot more inspirational than one that focuses on the negative.  And inspirational is how I’d describe it.  I’ll admit, there were several times, when the music swelled, the camera moved  over the machine, or we watched one of these scientists’ dawning awareness of new revelations, that I got a bit misty.  Watching the work of so many people come together.  Watching the power of the Human mind to unlock the secrets of the universe, even if only in a small way.  And of course, knowing that science transcends culture and border, becoming the collective effort of our whole species to better know the nature of reality, without the weight of our hatreds and fears.  Is uplifting.

Alexandria The Greatest City:  Over the last decade or so, I’ve become quite the fan of Bettany Hughes and her passion for history.  This exploration of Alexandria is cursory, but interesting.  It makes a good deal of use of clips from the Alexandria set film Agora.  There’s not a lot to this one, but Hughes always makes it interesting, and makes me want to read more.

Lizzie Borden Took an Ax:  No, no, no.  I didn’t think this was going to be what we might traditionally think of as ‘good.’  But as soon as it started, I had that Quantum Leap ‘Oh, boy’ moment.  It’s shot like crappy TV.  It’s written like crappy TV.  It’s crappy TV.  Everyone in this should know better.  I don’t know what the idea was in using modern Black Keys wannabe music for the soundtrack.  But it was bad.  A bad idea.  On a purely shallow note, Christina Ricci did look extremely cute in the period costumes.  I wish she could have stepped out of this movie and into a good Western or whatever.

Battle of the Darned:  Dolph Lundgren teams up with killer robots to fight zombies?  Sold!  Actually, this movie is better than I expected, but that might be to its detriment.  If it was worse, it might have been more fun.  It’s not good enough to recommend.  It’s OK.  The kind of thing that if you find playing while you’re flipping channels, you could do much worse.  The camera shakes way to much (it is an action movie made after the Bourne franchise) and the CG on the robots is wonky in places.  But it’s OK.  I liked the scenes with Dolph and the robots back to back.  I’d have liked more of that.

Engineering Ancient Egypt:  Another documentary presented by Bettany Hughes, this time on two of Egypt’s most successful pharaohs, Khufu and Ramses II.  By examining the whys and wherefores of building the pyramids first, and the temple at Abu Simbel, she gets into the belief systems and key historic events that shaped the two men and their times.  As often happens, taking the time to look into history produces information that doesn’t jive with generally held beliefs.  One of the primary things I grew up with, that has been rather soundly trounced is the idea that slaves (generally thought to have been Hebrew slaves) built the pyramids.  Hughes’s documentaries are always entertaining and informative, though frequently only introductory.  They’re good starts for further research.

    On Thursday night Brad and I, and a couple others from our graphic novel group, all headed out to the Alamo to watch a VHS projection of that classic, 3 Dev Adam, one of the best Captain America films ever made.  Awesome.

3 Dev Adam (aka Turkish Captain America):  What can one say about this film?  The plot is totally unintelligible, and I don’t know if that’s because of the subtitles or the editing.  The villains have a plan, I guess.  The heroes have a plan, too.  Or something.  They fight sometimes.  In the middle of fight scenes, they often cut to people walking.  Throughout most of the film, it sounds like there are nervous horses on cobblestones, which I think is supposed to be the sounds of footsteps.  I’ve got no idea.  But it was all awesome.  A film to share with friends, for sure.  Plus, who doesn’t love an awkward puppet moment during sexual coupling?

A Touch of Sin:  I went into this film knowing nothing about it at all, beyond the poster image of the guy sitting on his motorcycle in front of a crashed fruit truck.  I recommend going into it the same way.  I won’t give away story or character.  But I’ll say this about the film; it’s beautifully shot and well acted.  It has a slow pace, but isn’t ever dull.  There are some gorgeous images of China, even when they’re of various ugly things or environments you’d never want to live in or possibly even go to.  The film feels extremely contemporary, and not just because it features a lot of people staring at their cell phones.  And if I was left with any message, it’s ‘don’t go to China.’  Very worth seeking out, though.  Know in advance that there is some rather graphic violence.

The Raid:  Having watched The Raid 2 a few days back, I decided to revisit the first one.  It’s a heck of a violent movie.  Not much in the way of plot, but that would have gotten in the way of the horrible, bone-cracking action.  Anyone into brutal action movies needs to see this one.  Good camera work, nasty violence, and excellent gun and hand to hand choreography.

Nova: The Vikings:  This documentary from 2000 does a pretty good job of reintroducing the Vikings, putting the sword to some commonly held misconceptions.  I’m always fascinated by our evolving understanding of those who came before.  This is a very cursory examination of the subject, but still managed to have some interesting bits for me to look into, especially with the Vikings in Russia.

Ninotchka:  When three bumbling Soviets in Paris screw up a deal for the Reds back home, Moscow sends along a hard-line agent to kick things into shape, in the shapely Greta Garbo.  French playboy Melvyn Douglas sets his sights on melting her heart, unleashing the charming woman hiding beneath the utilitarian comrade.  Ernst Lubitsch crafts another supremely funny, cheeky, and surprisingly sexy comedy.  It’s funny how timeless the issues of the film, then quite topical, remain.

Orca: The Killer Whale:  Obviously made to capitalize on the huge success of Jaws, this Ahab Vs. Killer Whale film looks pretty good, but is mostly just silly.  I love the cast and Michael Anderson knows how to make a good looking film.  But it’s so hackneyed.

I just wanna watch the world burn!

    I’ve been doing a bunch of reading, but from a bunch of different books, none of which I’m all that close to finishing.  Dang, Lord of Light is a dense read.

-Matt

Book Review: Hedy’s Folly

    Fans of Hollywood’s Golden Age will be familiar with Hedy Lamarr.  I first saw her opposite Charles Boyer in Algiers, and like most men do upon encountering her, fell in love.  Sadly, I was too young (10?), and she had long since retired (and was about 70).  It would never have worked.  As the years went on, I remained vaguely aware of her, seeing her in films too rarely as I built up my experience in classic cinema.  But I did note her passing with a bit of appropriate regret.  I knew, in the vaguest way, that she’d done some interesting stuff outside of acting.  I knew there was some WWII espionage or something, but I didn’t know the details.  And in spite of my love of orchestral music, I will admit, I had never heard of George Antheil.  Not once.  So this book, chronicling the unlikely meeting and collaboration of one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the silver screen, and the self proclaimed Bad Boy of Music, was enlightening, to say the very least.  It's a celebration of two wild lives and their world changing collaboration.

    This is not a biography of Lamarr or Antheil, though it does provide a good deal of biographical information for context.  Author Richard Rhodes jumps between two very different lives that almost seemed destined to cross paths, showing how each person grew, gaining knowledge and experience that would be invaluable when combined.  Lamarr grew up in Austria, the child of a well off family, in the years after the Great War.  Antheil traveled to Europe, part of that post War Paris community of American artists.  He had dreams of grandiosity, of changing the way music was made.  She had her eyes on the theater.  And all the while, War was brewing again.

    Though not written as a novel, one could very easily see this being turned into a film.  The backdrop of Europe in those heady days between wars, two charismatic young people, danger and secrets.  Fascinating stuff.  Hedy’s first marriage, to an arms manufacturer, exposes her to some interesting technologies.  And her technical inclinations are awakened.  Antheil marries, too, but faces money woes.  The two almost meet, even know some of the same people.  But it wasn’t to be, yet.  Of course, they do eventually meet, Antheil ‘selling out’ by doing movie scores, Lamarr hitting it big in Hollywood.  And together they would invent a technology that would go on, eventually, to shape the modern world.

    The book is an entertaining and informative read, but at the end, I was left a bit disappointed.  I think what it functions best as is a jumping off point for finding out more about the two central figures.  Hedy Lamarr remains a largely mysterious figure, with specific events being delineated, while little of her heart makes it onto the pages.  Perhaps the recent biography from Stephen Michael Shearer will accomplish that.  Whereas Antheil comes off as kind of a buffoon.  Throughout the book, it felt like the author was trying to cover for a friend; like he knew Antheil kind of a jackass, but he wanted us to focus on his good traits.  However, he dropped enough information about his bad behavior that the attempts to gloss over them ring false.  It does make me want to read Antheil’s own words, his biography Bad Boy of Music (yeah, seriously).  And reading this book prompted me to pick up a CD of his work, which I’ve enjoyed thoroughly.

    I think that both George Antheil and Hedy Lamarr are far more interesting characters than this book manages to capture.  However the story of their invention is presented well.  It’s a quick read, too.  Rhodes doesn’t mess about.  And as I said, it’s a good starting point for further reading.  More on Paris in the between war years, more on Hollywood’s Golden Age, more on Antheil’s futurist music, more on the technological advancements of World War II.  The best books make you want to read more, to learn more.  With that in mind, Hedy’s Folly gets my recommendation.

Hedy’s Folly
Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0-385-53438-3

-Matthew J. Constantine

Matt’s Week in Dork! (11/24/13-11/30/13)

    While it certainly had nothing on the previous week’s Fantastic Fest, this Week in Dork was still nice.  I read a full book and finally finished another I’d been nearly done with for weeks, got out to see a film, and cranked out a few more Criterions.  Not bad.

Speedway:  Fairly standard Elvis picture.  It’s not bad, and has some good bits.  But it’s not especially memorable.  The songs aren’t great, and the plot feels like it’s already been done in another Elvis movie or two.  There are much better Elvis movies.

Marketa Lazarova:  This movie looks fantastic, and it feels pretty darned medieval.  The people are rough and toothless, brutal monsters suffering by firelight in the bitter cold of snowy darkness.  I had a problem following all the various relationships between characters.  I know there was some kind of pattern in the dealings.  Some folk wanted revenge or something, some people wanted money or crops or whatever.  There was an angry lord.  But who was working for whom, and why, and what they were all doing…I don’t know.  There’s stuff about paganism and Christianity, and the general brutality of men.  But I don’t know what the heck was going on most of the time.  The sound design is extremely weird, and makes the film feel very unreal.  It’s not even ADR, it’s like dialog for a separate film was recorded in an echoing church. (edit: What this review doesn't get across is that I couldn't get the movie out of my head for days, and in the end, I think it was kind of amazing; and I know I'll be watching it again).

Nebraska:  I grew up in ‘small town America.’  With apologies to my friends and family that still live there, it frickin’ sucked.  And this movie captures the awful, petty, depression of the whole thing.  There are scenes I swear I lived through.  I think I knew half these people.  The cast does a fine job, and everyone feels totally right for this sort of thing.  Bruce Dern is excellent, and Will Forte is surprisingly good.  I laughed quite a bit, but admittedly, some of that laughter was from horror.

The Silence:  Hey, do you like feeling good about life?  Well then, don’t watch this.  The third in Ingmar Bergman’s ‘trilogy of faith,’ this haunting story of a couple sisters (…really?) and one’s child staying in a hotel is aesthetically beautiful, and psychologically ugly.  The film cooks with uncomfortable erotisism.  And there are a lot of awkward questions you’ll find yourself asking about who these people are and what their past was like.  And what’s up with the kindly old waiter?  He’s awesome, right?

Design for Living:  A wonderfully kinky comedy from the Good ‘ol Days before the Good ‘ol Days everyone’s always talking about.  This isn’t the chaste, clean-cut comedy of the 40s and 50s, this is sex-charged, full of dry wit and ribaldry.  I sometimes wonder what movies would be like if there hadn’t been the prudish backlash of the 30s through the 50s (and again, if to a lesser degree, in the late 80s through the early 00’s).  Though I would argue that the Hayes Codes forced writers to become much more clever in their dialog, with innuendo and double meanings, movies like this are a reminder that writers were already quite clever before necessity mothered invention.  This film is an absolute must.

Peter Ibbetson:  A weird little kid grows up to be a contrary architect.  He’s stuck on a girl from his youth, and gets into all sorts of trouble over her.  It’s all fairly forgettable melodrama.  Certainly not a movie I need to see again, it’s mostly noteworthy for having Gary Cooper and a young Ida Lupino.  But it’s nothing to work hard at finding.  It’s no classic.

    I finished reading Alan Dean Foster’s Icerigger, which was a very cool classic space opera.  I’ve got to get back into reading more sci-fi.  There are so many books I want to read.

The Blood of a Poet:  OK.  I’ll admit it.  I just didn’t understand this film.  It’s somewhat surreal.  It’s poetic.  But I’ve never been much for poetry.  There’s a lot of stuff that symbolizes …stuff.  I don’t know.  Some of the imagery is cool.  A few sequences are quite nice.  Overall, I’ve got no bloody clue what anything meant.

Resident Evil: Retribution:  Yeah, this is a bad film.  Bad acting, bad dialog, bad effects.  But it’s also a great deal of silly fun.  The series gets more and more odd and convoluted as time goes one.  Elements are written in, then written out with little head for logic or consistency.  But whatever.  Lots of stuff blows up, lots of kicks happen in slow-mo.  It’s great.  And stupid.  And great.

The Time Machine:  “Which three books would you have taken?”  Through random happenstance, I saw this favorite again.  Man, I love this movie.  I remember being somewhat disappointed the first time I saw it, because it missed so much of the book, but getting over myself, I realized it’s a masterpiece.  Awesome lead performance from Rod Taylor, great sets, wildly weird music, and a darned fine story.  And the Morlocks are so creepy and nasty.  So cool.

A Canterbury Tale:  “Facts are always important.”  While the War wears on, some city folk take refuge in a country town and meet the strange folk who live there.  Looking back to the classic literary work, the region around Canterbury becomes a strange sort of Eden where they try to remain sane and safe.  I’m fairly certain I didn’t understand a lot of the WWII related, UK related references.  But the characters are interesting to watch.  The young American soldier reminds me a great deal of David Lynch, with his slightly over-loud mid-westerner voice and ‘aw, shucks’ attitude.  One thing is sure, the film looks beautiful.

Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer:  An interesting documentary about writer/director Preston Sturges, it reminds me once again that the behind the scenes world is and was often as crazy, wild, and character-filled as anything to hit the screens.

    Late Saturday night, I finished a terrifying book, Our Final Invention.  I should have finished it a while back, but I got sidetracked with only like 50 pages left.  Again, it’s really good.  I just got distracted by shiny lights.

-Matt

Book Review: Our Final Invention

    I have found the true heir to H.P. Lovecraft, and it is documentary filmmaker turned herald of the AI apocalypse, James Barrat.  No, his book is not a tale of a tortured artist who learns too many of the secrets of the universe and is driven mad by it.  Or is it?  Whatever the case, he presents a vision of the world so soul searingly, existentially terrifying that it belongs on the shelf with the master of cosmic horror.  This is a sobering look at the very real, very possible ending to all of us, building right below our very noses, and under our typing fingertips.  For a pro-tech, futurist like myself, this book is a grim dark side for my usual upbeat visions of a world without want.

One of the less grim scenarios...

    Barrat looks into the building wave of artificial intelligence, the possibilities of human level (and more, superior to human) intelligence, and does not doubt that it’s on the way.  What he doubts, is that it will be a good thing.  I believe…well, I want to believe…that we’re moving in the right direction (overall), and that the future is bright.  I also have an instant mistrust of folks who preach fear of advancements and refuse to look on the bright side of technology.  I’ve also never much bought into the idea that superiority equals maliciousness, which is all part of the slave mentality that infects us as a species.  That said, I can’t find fault in Barrat’s argument.  He makes an excellent case for the terrifying dangers the creation of a human level (or higher) computer mind.  The profound alien nature of a computer mind is where the key trouble lies.  And this, is where I first connected Barrat with Lovecraft.  Both envision something so far beyond our ability to comprehend or control that we would stand no chance against it.  The concept I found most chilling is summed up in the quote from Eliezer Yudkowsky.  “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”  It isn’t that Barrat believes a human or more level intelligence would want to kill us.  It’s that it won’t share our interests or values, and we might not be able to even understand what its interests or values are.  We may quickly find that we are little more than ants before its unknowing, uncaring feet.

    My hope is that we as a people can shift our thinking and action in the direction of safety.  I have hope.  I do.  But I have a profound worry, because I can’t pretend I don’t see the opposite every day.  With people steadfastly ignoring scientific findings all the time, from climate change to the benefits of genetically modified foods, and with so many willing to step over their mother for a chance at a few extra bucks, I have worries.  And thanks to this book, I find that I have a fear I never knew about.  I don’t want to die by incineration from the waste heat of trillions of nanobots assembling each other.  That may have just surpassed tidal wave on my list of things I most want to avoid getting killed by.

    This book should be read.  Futurists and optimists like myself need a dose of reasoned descent on occasion.  I think many of us become so inured to the fear mongering, backward looking anti-science of Hollywood movies and uninformed man-on-the-streets, that we build up a wall around our optimism.  This wall blocks our view of the very real threats that are out there.  With so many people crying wolf constantly, the real problems can easily be ignored.  And I think that James Barrat has produced a well thought out and sobering call to action.  He doesn’t preach a halt to progress or a return to ‘simpler times.’  He suggests a safe and cautious handling of a potentially cataclysmic technology that would make the atom bomb seem like kids play.  He’s not talking about a danger to a city or a country.  He’s not even talking about danger to our planet.  The kind of scenarios Barrat suggests are existence erasing, galaxy polluting disasters.  I do believe that our future will be tied with artificial intelligence, and that future could be amazing on a level beyond the wildest science fiction stories.  But the danger must be understood, and we must protect ourselves and our future.

Our Final Invention
Author: James Barrat
Publisher: Thomas Dunn Books
ISBN: 978-0-312-62237-4

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: I Wonder

    As I don’t have kids, and probably never will, I don’t focus a great deal of my time on kids books (Philip Reeve’s work being the usual exception).  However, I thought this one warranted some attention, because it’s such an uncommon thing.  Annaka Harris has written a book about the joy of realizing you don’t know something.  No, it’s not a book that celebrates ignorance.  It celebrates recognizing the ends of your knowledge and the beginnings of your quest to learn.  It’s a book that lets a child (and adult) know that it’s OK to say, “I don’t know;” to wonder.  Wonder is how it all begins.

    The art by John Rowe is gorgeous, and intensely colorful.  It’s somehow impressionist, but with a photographic quality, and is really something to look at.  It features the kind of images I’d have been absolutely lost in as a child.  This is the sort of visually striking thing I always craved, and rarely found.  The stuff that propelled me in to wanting to read more, to learn more, and to create more.  Pictures like these were inspirational when it came to early attempts at writing and at art.

    For parents who want to encourage their children to learn, to quest for knowledge, to admit they don’t know the right answer (and to try to find out what is the right answer), this is a great pick.  And honestly, how many kids books have a recommendation from a physics & astronomy professor on the back?

I Wonder
Author: Annaka Harris
Art: John Rowe
Publisher: Four Elephants Press
ISBN: 978-1-940051-04-8

-Matt