Monthly Archives: September 2013

Computers/Electronics

The History of #- and 6 Other Symbols that Rule Twitter (and the Web)

Fascinating list from Kieth Huston at (or should I say @?) Time magazine concerning the above, a short history of six of the symbols now very commonly used in Twitter and around the web…and how they came to be:

http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/23/the-history-of-and-6-other-symbols-that-rule-twitter-and-the-web/

Not to sound too terribly nerdy, but I especially enjoyed item number 4, the slash (or / ) and what its significance is.

No, I’m not kidding.

If you’re too lazy to click on the link above, here’s the bit I found so intriguing:

In 1996, when Tim Berners-Lee was laying down the ground rules for his new computer network, he declared that website addresses should begin after a double slash, thus: “http://”. He explained that the double slash represented a sort of “root” for all addresses; google.com and time.com are top-level children of that root address, with other levels below them separated by single slashes (“http://time.com/us”). Taking his concept one step further, Berners-Lee gave the example of an imagined interplanetary telephone network—if all Earthly telephone numbers began with a double slash, he said, interplanetary numbers would begin with a triple slash, with the dialing code for Earth or Mars placed between “///” and “//”.

Movies

The Mark of Zorro (1940) a (incredibly) belated review

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Saw this film a very long time ago, when I was a child.  Didn’t remember all that much about it, other than perhaps the famous climactic sword fight between Tyrone Power’s Don Diego Vega (aka The Zorro) and Basil Rathbone’s Captain Pasquale, still considered by many the best sword fight ever put to film.

But considering the 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro (itself a “modernization” or remake/reworking of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks film of the same name, which was a big inspiration for the creation of Batman) is among the earlier examples of “super hero” movies, I was interested in giving it another try…

So, how did this 70 plus year old film fare?

Pretty well indeed.

Most people, I suspect, are at least somewhat familiar with the story of Zorro, even if it may be through parallels with the character of Batman, which we’ll get to momentarily.  The setting is early, Spanish controlled California.  Young Don Diego Vega is in a Spanish school and returns to California to find that his father has been dumped from his Mayoral job and replaced with a man of considerably less virtue.  The Mayor and his right hand man, Captain Pasquale, are heavily taxing the poor citizens and generally running roughshod over the entire county.

Don Diego Vega quickly realizes he needs to do something to rid the territory of these evil characters.  To that end, he sets a plan in motion.  Because few remember him from before he left to Spain, he acts to all those around like a -let’s be blunt here- fey/homosexual pretty boy (though no one comes right out and says he’s “gay”, it is heavily implied!).  But by night, of course, Diego dons his Zorro disguise and mounts his trusty black Stallion and is off fighting the corrupt forces behind power, his ultimate goal to restore the town to its previous ways.

The above paragraph gives you the parallels between Zorro and Batman.  Bruce Wayne is presented not unlike Don Diego Vega, though the heavily implied homosexuality present in the movie isn’t quite as present in the comic book (though you can find it hinted at in some of the very early stories).  Nonetheless, both display the “spoiled party boy” elements.  Moving on, the mask and flowing capes are very similar and the black steed could easily be a proto-Batmobile.  Both characters share a desire to fight corruption as well, although the Zorro’s focus is government corruption versus Batman’s more “street” level crime fighting.

Getting back to the movie, it moves along at a breakneck pace, setting up each situation quickly while presenting the audience with new information.  Don Diego Vega’s decision to a) act fey and b) become the Zorro is never really dealt with in anything approaching a deeper psychological way…he does what he does because that’s what he does.  This is not a “heavy” film in any way, it is quick moving popcorn entertainment.  This extends, it would appear, to the Zorro’s costume as well.  There are a few sequences where Zorro wears his standard mask, one that covers the upper half of his head…while there are also a couple of sequences where he wears a mask that covers the lower half of his head!

 versus 

Why?  Who knows.  The mask inconsistency, like the decision to act fey, is never really addressed in the movie itself.

Regardless, the different masks do not in any way mean the film is a sloppy work.  You get plenty of well created action, adventure, and, the cherry on top of the pie, romance.  Don Diego’s attraction to the lovely Lolita Quintero (Linda Darnell) provides that extra spice to an already great film, as does his relationship with the character’s more wicked aunt (and wife of the corrupt Mayor), Inez Quintero (Gale Sondergaard).

If the film has one fault, it is that the excellent duel between Don Diego Vega and Pasquale, a duel audiences were waiting for from the moment the two characters first laid eyes on each other, happens a little too early into the film.  In fact, it occurs just before the movie’s actual climax, which is a curious and somewhat disappointing choice.  Perhaps Pasquale and Vega should have had two duels, the first before the climax (with Vega in disguise as Zorro) and the second when his identity is exposed.

Ah well, its a small complaint.  Despite its age, The Mark of Zorro is a fun action/adventure film that is well worthy of your time.  Recommended.

Movies

Oblivion (2013) a (mildly) belated review

The ever energetic (39 actor credits since 1981, many if not most of them starring roles…does the guy ever rest!?) Tom Cruise is Jack Harper in the sci-fi action adventure/mindbender Oblivion.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy fame, a film that despite some beautiful visuals, I didn’t like.  Oblivion, in my opinion, features both better visuals and a far, far better story than Tron: Legacy.  But are both elements enough to recommend the film itself?

…yeah…with some reservations.

For much of the first half, Oblivion is a two person drama.  Jack and his companion Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the last two humans on Earth.  Sixty years before, we are told by Jack in the opening narration, the Earth faced alien invaders that, in the ensuing war, destroyed the Moon before being defeated.  Because of this destruction and subsequent radical change in gravity, Earth’s environment was wrecked and the planet rendered uninhabitable.  The human survivors moved on to a Moon in Saturn and it is Jack and Victoria’s job to watch over massive machines left behind sucking all the water from the planet to make energy to take to those off-world survivors.

With me so far?

Ok, so Jack and Victoria live on this isolated and very elegant “home” and Jack goes out now and again in a cool aircraft to check up on the machines and fix whatever is broken while avoiding the “scabs” left over planet side, apparently alien machines still fighting the war that ended so many years before.

During this section of the film we are also informed that Jack and Victoria have received “memory wipes”, though it is never made clear why this was deemed necessary (one of the film’s many small writing glitches, IMHO).  Nonetheless, Jack starts having vague memories of being with a woman (Olga Kurylenko) in pre-apocalypse New York and on top of the Empire State Building.

How are these memories possible if Earth was destroyed over sixty years before?

As far as the story description, and for the sake of not getting into any spoilers, I’ll stop there.  Suffice it to say, the mystery of Jack’s memory as well as that of the scabs serve to propel the film’s plot along.  The trailer, presented below, does spoil more than a little of these mysteries so if you know nothing at all about the film and want to be surprised, you may want to avoid it.

Having said that, Oblivion starts off and moves along quite well for this first half and a little beyond…well into many of its subsequent revelations.  However, there does come a point where all this plot and information -and mild to large improbabilities- threaten to derail the film.

Without giving too much away these are some of the things that bothered me:  Why is it so difficult for Jack to talk -to actually have a conversation- with Victoria?  Why is she so different from him, memory-wise (Wouldn’t it have been intriguing if she, like him, had some odd memories popping up in her head)?  Why were Jack and Victoria -two people!- even necessary on the planet, given the ultimate revelations?  Toward the film’s climax and conclusion, why was it necessary, other than to create some suspense for the viewers, for Jack to place person X into a cryogenic chamber before flying off?

These are just off the top of my head.  And while there is some damage to the overall film, it isn’t bad enough to invalidate and destroy it.  I do wish the movie could have been simplified rather than made progressively more and more complicated.  At one point, it felt like I was watching a season’s worth of a sci-fi series rather than a movie.

Despite this, I recommend Oblivion.  Just be aware that sometimes less is more.

TV

Lessons of “The X-Files”

Author Alec Nevala-Lee for Salon magazine offers a fascinating article regarding TV shows with long, overarching “stories”…and the perils inherent in doing this:

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/17/lessons_of_the_x_files_the_one_show_every-tv_exec_should_be_watching/

What I found the most interesting about the article can be found in the first few lines:

A television series is a shapeshifter. At birth, it looks fully formed, but its bones and vital organs are dangerously undeveloped, and it’s forced to compete immediately with countless other shows ravening to take its place. To stay alive, it evolves from one week to the next, sometimes radically, but also blindly, so it won’t know for months whether its latest adaptation is a brilliant strategy or a fatal mistake.

Love the above lines and found a lot of truth in them.  Further, it got me thinking about some recent shows with longer story arcs and a term that has been used to disparage such shows when said story arc suffers:  “They’re making it up as they go along.”

Such a term, unfortunately, really did apply to the revamped Battlestar Galactica series and was driven home at the start of each episode, when the title sequence announced that the dreaded Cylons had a “plan”.  Unfortunately by the end of the second season it didn’t appear there was any plan at all.

However, with regard to the notion that “they’re making it up as they go along,” ALL stories are “made up” and fixed and poured over as the many authors involved in them go along.  In the case of TV shows, its silly to think that what is set out by the writers before a single scene is filmed will be an immovable or unchangeable Bible when the time comes to actually film the show.

Star Trek, the original series, began as a pilot that featured only one character who would return to the second pilot and subsequent series, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock…though the Spock of the first pilot episode was considerably more emotional.

Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov -every one of them!- were later additions, some not appearing until well into the series.  As for William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, his first appearance was in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.

One of my favorite TV shows, The Wild Wild West, similarly, featured more and more interplay between the main characters and more and more outlandish, pulp inspired action as it went along, versus the far more “straight” pilot episode.

The second season of Lost, perhaps my least favorite season (except for a few interesting episodes here and there), made the bad decision (in my mind) to focus waaaay too much on the survivors of the rear of the fallen aircraft.  By this point, I as a viewer wasn’t interested in following a whole new cast of characters…I wanted to see what was happening to the characters we had grown to love in the first season.  Clearly the writers were trying out different things but even they appeared to realize the whole “tail section survivors” subplot was going nowhere and, by the end of the second season, essentially did away with the entire subplot (not to mention many of the characters!).

In the case of these and almost all other shows, the talent behind and in front of the cameras over time experimented with story lines and realized what worked and, assuming they had success with the series, what didn’t.  Over this same period of time adjustments were made, often on the fly.  In two sections of the article, the author notes the problem and, ironically enough, the resultant success of searching for a way to create a winning formula in The X-Files:

When I first encountered (The X-Files), part of me was irked by its narrative amnesia, in which each case’s incredible events were forgotten by the following week, but it didn’t have much of a choice. Each episode had to stand on its own; the show, always seemingly on the verge of cancellation, had to keep moving or die.

What strikes me now about the first season of “The X-Files” is how relentlessly it kept reinventing itself, and how willing it seemed to try anything that worked.

Again, The X-Files is hardly the first show that has had to creatively tap dance while looking for the ingredients to make the whole thing work and, even more importantly, succeed in an unforgiving marketplace where cancellation lurks behind every corner.

As I said, a fascinating article.  Give it a read when you get a chance!

Movies

The Numbers Station (2013) a (mildly) belated review

I like actor John Cusack.  He’s been in a number of very good films but even when the film isn’t all that good -given the amount of movies he’s been involved in during his very long career, there were bound to be clunkers here and there- he always seems to rise above and rarely fails to give an engaging performance.

So when I spotted The Numbers Station, a 2013 film starring Mr. Cusack on instant view on Netflix, I decided to give it a whirl.  I knew little about the film other than it never reached theaters and, because of this, I didn’t expect all that much.  Was I in for some major disappointment?

Not really.

To begin with, The Numbers Station is a very low budget thriller.  There are maybe fifteen people in total during the film’s runtime that appear on screen.  Other than a single exploding car, there are no other “big” special effects.

The movie’s premise is that in this age of easy access to computer data, top secret black ops units employ short radio bursts composed of nothing more than a series of numbers (the codes) to get their next assignments.

These assignments are, it is implied, “dirty” works that usually involve assassination.

At the start of the film we meet Emerson Kent (John Cusack) and Grey (Liam Cunningham).  They sit in a car talking to each other when a coded message arrives.  After deciphering it, Kent temporarily leaves his partner (and getaway driver) and walks into a sparsely populated bar.  He chats with the bartender, who we find once worked for the agency but ran away from it several months before.  Kent allows the man to have one last drink before killing him.  Kent then takes out the two bouncers/bodyguards but cannot kill the fourth man in the bar.  This man manages to get away, but Kent has the license plate numbers of his car.

Thanks to this information, Kent and Grey locate the man’s home.  Kent goes into the house and kills the man.  He is then surprised when his teenage daughter appears.  Kent cannot get himself to kill her and his partner Grey winds up doing this.  Thanks to this “botched” job, Kent is no longer viewed as having the “right stuff” for his special ops unit.

Fast forward a few months and we find Grey has moved up in the agency while Kent is on the outside trying to get back in.  Thanks to Grey, he is given a second chance, only Instead of being offered his old assassination job, he’s assigned to watch over the other end of the numbers operation.  He is to be the security guard to Katherine (Malin Akerman), one of the agency’s code readers.  Katherine makes and sends out the numbers from a secure bunker while Kent guards her.  When their shift is over, another duo (also woman and man) replacements them.  It is clear this duo is a couple and equally clear Katherine is trying to socialize with Kent, though he wants nothing to do with this.

The second day of their shift all appears normal, but they soon find that the bunker has been breached and there are signs that the duo that preceded them may have met a grisly end.  Trapped inside the bunker, they have to find a way out while determining if a phony assassination order was sent by their predecessors.

Ok, so there you have the setup and, yes, once again we’re dealing with a “siege” type film.  There are other interesting elements thrown in but before you get your hopes up too high, let me say this:  The Numbers Station is hardly a “must see” film.  What it is is a modest thriller that painlessly killed a couple of hours without making you feel like you completely wasted your time.

There are two things that work against the film and, of those, the low budget is the biggest and worst element.  Without giving too much away, we have our two leads being held in the bunker by a decidedly small –very small- force on the outside.  It’s hard to get worried about their prospects of survival when facing such an ultimately insignificant force.  The second thing working against the film is that Katherine is a really underwritten character.  While Malin Ackerman does a decent job playing the character, there is very little to her other than a damsel in distress.

Still, if you’re like me and have a bit of time to kill, you could do worse than catch The Numbers Station.

 

General

Four dollar gold coin to auction…

The one time coin collector in me loves stories like this one:

Never before heard of the 1880 $4 Coiled Hair Stella, but given its rarity -and the fact that this particular example looks to be absolutely mint- it doesn’t surprise me its value is estimated as high as it is.

Not that I’d ever entertain buying such a luxury item! 😉

More information about this can be found here, if you’re curious:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/14/rare-4-gold-coin-coiled-hair-stella_n_3926894.html

Movies

Trance (2013) a (mildly) belated review

I’m always curious to see works by director Danny Boyle.

When at his best, Mr. Boyle creates films that are solid entertainment and well worth watching, such as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later.  His latest works, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, were received well received by critics and did well at the box office.  Mr. Boyle would follow those two films with the head-scratching Hitchcock wannabe Trance.

Did he go three for three?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.  However, that doesn’t meant there aren’t some things in Trance worth seeing.  The acting by most of the principals is good.  The direction is interesting and there are scenes that really grip you.  The movie’s biggest problem is the story, which unfortunately veers between being unbelievable, silly, confusing, and just plain odd.

Simon (James McAvoy) works at an auction house that sells very high end expensive paintings.  During one of the auctions, there is a violent robbery and Simon follows his trained routine to pull the most prized painting to a “safe” area for storage.  Once he reaches the safe are drop off, the chief of the thieves Franck (Vincent Cassel) appears and, after knocking Simon out with the butt of his shotgun, runs away with the container he thinks houses the painting.

The thieves get away and meet in their hideout.  Upon opening the contain with the stolen painting they find all they have is an empty frame.  Naturally they are furious, and it is then revealed Simon was in on the theft all along and the trio of thieves naturally believe he has double crossed them.

The robbery, however, has left Simon with a brain injury.  After leaving the hospital, the trio of thieves get Simon and ask him where the painting is.  He tells them he can’t remember and they brutally torture him.  They soon realize he is telling the truth: He cannot remember what, if anything, he did with the painting.  The desperate thieves realize they have to use other means to get him to remember what he did.

To that end, they allow Simon to randomly -or so it appears- choose a hypnotherapist to get to the lost memory.  Enter Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), hypnotherapist and, we quickly realize, mystery woman who appears to know far more about what is going on than she lets on..

What follows are a lot of mind games between Elizabeth and the thieves and the quest for the missing painting.

Trance features many moving parts, but the central premise, that these street-toughs would willingly allow this hypnotherapist in their midst so willingly is awfully –awfully– far fetched.

I can’t help but suspect that Mr. Boyle was hoping to create a mind-bender of a movie along the lines of Vertigo.  But, again, the premise proves too hard to believe to begin with and many of the subsequent revelations -some of which are hallucinations- create difficulties for the viewers to follow.

Is Simon ultimately a pawn (note the character’s name…Simon says?).  What is the real relationship between Elizabeth and he?  And what is the relationship between Elizabeth and Franck?  I understand the use of cues and suggestion but given that some of the sequences we see are nothing more than hallucinations we are sometimes left putting too many pieces together on our own.  Note that I haven’t even broached the subject of Elizabeth’s…uh…shaving preferences.

In the end, I have to give Trance a pass.  There’s plenty of energy and skill both before and behind the cameras, but the story needed much more work.

Movies

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) a (mildly) belated review

One day history will look back at the past couple of years and note a curious little trend:  Using historical figures and/or classic literature and injecting horror tropes upon them.

The first (and largest) wave of these works would appear in such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Jayne Slayre or Alice in Zombieland.  But one of the biggest successes would be the novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

So successful was this novel that it was made into a film in 2012.  The film, however, didn’t exactly set the box office on fire and while the book was considered a well thought out lark, critics scorned and audiences ultimately ignored it.

Did they make the right choice?

In a word: Yes.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is, if nothing else, a handsome looking film with some pretty good CGI effects mixed in with some not-so-very-good CGI effects in the telling of the “real” story of Abraham Lincoln”s (Benjamin Walker) life and how it secretly tied in with his near life-long struggle against vampires.

Having not read the book and going into the film cold, I figured the movie’s makers must be playing this for laughs.  I mean, come on…Abraham Lincoln and vampires?  There has to be a chuckle or three here, right?  Right?

Nope.

The film plays out like a Cliff’s Notes (for the younger among you, Sparkle Notes) version of Abraham Lincoln’s life.  We see his early childhood (and first exposure to vampires), we see him as a young man (who happens to be on the prowl for these vampires and is ultimately recruited to be just that), we see him a little later working and studying to become a lawyer while courting Mary Todd (while secretly ridding the town he’s in of vampires), we see his rise in politics (while continuing his fight against vampires), and, finally, we see him as President and discover the “real” reasons behind the Emancipation Proclamation and the “real” reason the United States became embroiled in the Civil War.

And while most of the film was muddled without building much (if any) momentum, it was this concluding segment and climax of the film that really lost me.  For in linking such sober -and very tragic- issues as slavery, the massive loss of lives during the Civil War, and even Abraham Lincoln’s loss of his son (to vampires, natch), I developed an acute distaste for what I was seeing.

Perhaps the issues of slavery and the massive losses of life during the Civil War are simply too sensitive a subject to me to be played for such cheesy cinematic camp.  Yes, I’ve seen plenty of movies that dealt with tragedies both large and small.  However, to link these tragedies with something, frankly, as goofy as vampires felt more than a little distasteful.

Add this to the fact that the film suffers from a lack of any sort of momentum and you have nearly two hours of, frankly, not all that much at all.

A pass.

TV

10 Greatest TV Pilots ever…

…at least according to Gary Sussman at Time magazine:

http://entertainment.time.com/2013/09/09/10-greatest-tv-pilot-episodes/

As with many such lists, it is one person’s opinion and I’m certain there will be those who debate the merits (or lack thereof) of the choices.  After seeing this list I thought hard about which TV show pilots really gripped me from the very beginning and had me totally sold on the show itself and had me watching until the end.

Lost certainly did this -at least for me- perhaps better than any pilot ever and therefore its inclusion on the list is quite appropriate.  Mind you, I’m not saying the rest of the series delivered on that white knuckle thriller of a pilot.  If memory serves, the second season in particular -the one that focused entirely too many episodes on the survivors of the rear of the aircraft- was for me a classic case of the sophomore blues and almost had me leaving the show.  The final season I didn’t view quite as dimly as others, though I did feel there were more than a few episodes in it that appeared to be there for little more than to string out time.

Still, I was amazed by the pilot of Lost and was stunned that two hours had passed so quickly (the pilot was presented in two parts and aired consecutively on one night).

Three other pilots that had me right off the bat:

The X-Files.  The pilot episode of the well regarded series worked so very well because right from the start the rapport/chemistry between David Duchovny’s Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s Scully was there in full force.  Granted, the storylines were eerie and quirky and helped sell this particular ride, but it was the interaction between Mulder and Scully, their clear liking for each other even though their views were sometimes very far off, that worked so well.

Miami Vice.  Granted we are talking about an older series set in a certain MTV inspired time frame yet it was one that blazed a trail many other shows would follow and improve upon.  Regardless, if you were around in 1984 when the pilot episode of Miami Vice aired you saw something radically different from your standard TV fare.  Again, the chemistry between Don Johnson’s Crockett and Phillip Michael Thomas’ Tubbs (not to slight the other cast, including Edward James Olmos as Castillo, who would arrive afterwards) proved a draw along with the flashy visuals and action.  But what really made this series a head turner at the time was its use of music to accentuate moods, something that so many other shows have mined afterwards but was really used to great effect the first time there…

Finally, the pilot for the 2004 Battlestar Galactica was, to me, a great success.  Given the fact that they were up against re-imagining a somewhat nostalgically beloved series and were already aware of (gasp!) switching character sexes and races, there was a very real possibility going into seeing the pilot that things could fall apart quickly.  Some say it did in toward the show’s end and I can’t convincingly argue against them…the final minutes of the final episode on primitive Earth and then seeing the “spirits” of two of the characters in modern times was odd and didn’t work as well as I suspect the writers hoped it would.  Regardless of how it ended, the show began with a mighty interesting (pilot) bang.