News You Can Bruise for 2019 December

Sun Dec 08 2019 21:09 November Film Roundup:

• Torn Curtain (1966): A fun late Hitchcock except I expected an extra double-cross that never came. This is a pattern for me, and I think I'm just used to post-Hitchcock movies where there's one more twist. Our two main characters are engaged, and the POV doesn't strongly stick with one or the other—each has scenes where the other isn't present—which limits the possibilities for double-crossing. It's a shame as an extra twist could have taken it into North by Northwest territory for me.

  Weird detail probably caused by incoherent 1960s sexism: Julie Andrews's character is some kind of space scientist, like her fiancé, but she's treated like his secretary, down to the level of how much she's expected to know about his project: not nothing, as would happen if she worked on a different project altogether, but not so much that the East Germans can get the information from her instead of Paul Newman's character.

  I originally wrote the two main characters are "married", because the film starts with them in bed together, but that's Alfie, always pushing the boundaries of film. Whether it's flushing a toilet or implying that people who are almost married are having sex, he's giving a big "shove off, mate" to the squares!

• Bamboozled (2000): This is the most difficult-to-watch movie I've ever seen. I don't value "difficult to watch" per se so this isn't going on my best-of list, but I will put it next to Face/Off on the "so bad it's good" shelf: Bamboozled is bad and good simultaneously and for the same reasons.

  A while back I said that you can't make social change by making a movie, but Bamboozled seems to show it's possible, if the society you're trying to change is Hollywood. The same crossed wire that leads filmmakers to romanticize 'the movies' makes them susceptible to arguments delivered via movie—arguments that will not affect the moviegoing public as a whole. Bamboozled is pointing out a lot of problems with Hollywood, most of which are structural, but there is one simple thing that even a lowly bring-me-coffee screenwriter can take to heart: blackface gags are evil and you need to stop it.

  Roger Ebert's review of Bamboozled notices the film's systemic critique but says the blackface bit is so offensive as to obscure it. I agree with this, but in 2000, mainstream Hollywood movies were still doing actual blackface gags! A year ago I was shocked to see one in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I admit the first time I saw that film, it didn't register, just like it it didn't seem to with Ebert.

  After seeing Bamboozled I went looking on IMDB, as well as Screen It ("Movie Reviews for Parents"), and it looks like after an O Brother-esque bit in Zoolander (2001), Hollywood blackface gags died out. This surely would have happened eventually, but I'm gonna argue that Bamboozled is the reason they stopped when they did. Movies with systemic critiques are not uncommon: Bamboozled is unusual in that it got some results.

  Of course, artists are always pushing the boundaries, and the easiest way to address a topic that becomes taboo is to slather on a layer of indirection or irony. So we do see Jack Black play a character who angers his neighbors with a blackface act in Be Kind, Rewind (2008). We see Robert Downey Jr. play a character who goes way too deep into Method acting in Tropic Thunder (also 2008) and apparently some damn thing or other is going on in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassas (2009). But that seems to be about it.

  In these post-Bamboozled cases, real people are making a movie in which a fictional character makes the bad decision to wear blackface. (That's the joke.) Then the real people are saying "That wasn't me, it was the dummy!" to soften the blow.

  Pre-Bamboozled, the blackface itself was generally not the joke. It was a way of creating a fictional construct, a kind of ventriloquist dummy, that could be used in other jokes. See Silver Streak in last month's Roundup for an example. Bamboozled is saying, over and over with no subtlety, that it is an act of real-world evil to create that ventriloquist dummy, and that any jokes you might have it tell are drawing from a well of evil, not from your comedic genius. So just don't build the evil ventriloquist dummy.

  This is why I'm saying so-bad-it's good. To succeed artistically, Bamboozled has to be a bad movie. If it was somehow good, it would enact the nightmare scenario it depicts. As it is, I think there were a bunch of scripts in the early 2000s where a white producer read a draft and said "uh, hey, did you see Bamboozled (2000)?" and long story short, there was a rewrite. Around 2008, Hollywood figured out a workaround: have a fictional character build the evil ventriloquist dummy, just one of many bad decisions a fictional character might take. But it didn't get a lot of traction.

• Ocean's Eleven (1960): Watched as a fluffy palate cleanser after Bamboozled but of course there had to be an O Brother, Where Art Thou? style blackface gag in this movie. Ugggh! Otherwise it was okay. Cesar Romero was a nice surprise. I expected everything would be super stylish, but it's more like the ambient stylishness of 1960 was higher. Frank and Sammy look cool even when they're just hanging out in the rec room.

  However, why not watch a stylish 1960 movie that's also really funny, like The Apartment? Oh, look, there's Shirley Maclaine, showing up for a cameo in this movie while filming The Apartment. I'm not saying people should always watch The Apartment instead of watching this, because you gotta have variety, but... maybe the Soderbergh remake is better.

• The Whole Town's Talking (1935): Previously seen in 2012 with a big theater crowd, now seen in the living room with Sumana. There were some great bits but the big, nearly continuous laughs I had in 2012 weren't there. What's the difference? On top of obvious stuff like "laughter is contagious", I think a big part of it is Edward G. Robinson using his face and body language to do the type of physical comedy that's funnier on the big screen: rapid switches between menacing and milquetoast.
• Working Girl (1988): A 1980s corporate comedy a la Big Business, but less purely comedic and with an interesting, realistic business plot. Big recommendation.

  Every major character in this movie has a big beefcake/cheesecake scene. Sometimes it's played for laughs: Harrison Ford's changing shirts in his office and all the Wall Street secretaries are looking through the plate glass window like "aww yeah." The public demands tasteful skin!

• Monsieur Verdoux (1947): I'm not a huge fan of Chaplin's films mainly because they're so sentimental, so I figured I'd like his oddball serial killer comedy. And it's pretty good! Except, stop me if you've heard this one, after a crashingly cynical final scene it goes on for like five more minutes and gets a little sentimental for my taste. Overall, a good mixture of tension and comedy that put me in mind of all those Ealing movies where Alec Guinness plays a genteel criminal.
• We went to a Sesame Street Lost and Found event at the museum, but we were sworn to secrecy about the forbidden clips that were screened at the event, which saves me the trouble of having to write it up.
• Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019): Incredible documentary about a person who seems really difficult to be close to, told mainly by her surviving staff—sort of like Filmworker. Soon to be supplemented by the amazing collection of data Marion Stokes spent so much of her life on. I know the feeling: sometimes you get an idea and you gotta run with it and it consumes your whole life.

  Content warning: this film includes harrowing recorded-live TV footage of 9/11, which is how I ended up seeing the second plane hit the tower after 18 years of successfully not seeing that footage.

• Kung Fu League (2018): This had some really good comic bits, especially the Batman '66-style relationship between Huo Yuanjia and Chen Zhen. It was also really refreshing how quickly the members of the titular Kung Fu League figured out they'd been transported into the 21st century, and accepted it, allowing the movie to continue.

  Unfortunately, nearly every character not in the League was tiresome. If they'd spent ten more minutes running around the movie set (great Blazing Saddles bit here) or figuring out how McDonalds works, that would have been ten fewer minutes spent with the tiresome characters.

  While doing research for this post I discovered a big conceptual problem with the nerd wish-fulfillment in this movie. While watching the movie I saw the formation of the League as a magical time-travel thing that brought real historical figures forward in time. But when writing this Roundup I learned that Chen Zhen is a fictional character. I'd assumed that Kwok-Kwan Chan in Kung Fu League was playing Chen Zhen as a parody of Bruce Lee's Chen Zhen from Fist of Fury, but he's playing the fictional character Chen Zhen come to life.

  Huo Yuanjia was a real historical figure, but within Kung Fu League he's the Batman to the fictional Chen Zhen's Robin: another Fist of Fury reference. And he and Wong Fei-hung (real person) are rivals for the heart of Thirteenth Aunt (fictional character from Once Upon a Time In China). So I give up on the time travel idea, and figure the magical event at the center of this movie actually calls forth Last Action Hero-style versions of these fictional/fictionalized legends from the Shared Cinematic Universe they all inhabit.

  Except a) the nerd in this movie is a comics artist, not a filmmaker, b) at the end of the movie the Kung Fu League "goes back" to... being fictional? and c) there's a joke I don't get about Ip Man which is probably really funny but which seems to make it impossible to formulate any coherent explanation at all. Which, I must admit, good job leaving it all on the field, comedically speaking.

(1) Wed Dec 18 2019 11:45 Only g62 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments: Doing a little year-end cleanup in preparation for a big announcement. Back in February I sold a flash piece to Daily Science Fiction: "Only g62 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments". I think it's pretty good. Don't like it? All I have to say is: "OK, g61er."

Fri Dec 20 2019 21:58 Openly Public Domain: I was showing Secretly Public Domain to my brother-in-law and noticed that Hathi Trust has marked a lot of the books as public domain! In Hathi parlance, Books that used to be "Limited (search only)" have been made "Full view" (though this is geofenced within the US). You can read the whole book, download a PDF, etc.

This is probably the visible result of the work described in "It's No Secret - Millions of Books Are Openly in the Public Domain", the first known blog post to cast shade on one of my bots with its title. I knew Hathi had done a few books as a test, and now it's really ramped up!

Now we're at the point where thirteen of the last twenty books my bot posted are already "Full view". And notably, the computer-history book I mentioned in the Vice story, The compatible time-sharing system: a programmer's guide., is also "Full view"! Way to go.

Mon Dec 23 2019 17:04 Cassini metadata: This year I spent some time doing the pleasant part of botmaking (ideation, data gathering) without the boring part (handling dozens of edge cases, signing up for accounts). One of the bots I never completed was "Cassini GIFs".

All the photos taken by the Cassini probe are online, and each photo has associated metadata. By looking for photos taken by the same instrument at evenly spaced times, you can find frames that would look good as an animation. Here's a nice example: a "movie" of Saturn's moon Dione taken on November 1, 2011:

It was really fun to make these animations that probably only a few people before me had seen. And the fun doesn't need to stop at Saturn: the SETI Project's OPUS3 has aggregated imagery from across NASA's outer planet missions.

The bad news for anyone else who wants to try this out is that the Cassini data is huge. You can download individual frames pretty easily, but the metadata is bundled in enormous tarballs and stored in an ad hoc 1990s file format. To provide a booster seat for the future, I converted the metadata into NDJSON format and put it up as cassini-metadata. Here's one more GIF to whet your interest: Saturn's rings on July 15, 2014:

Mon Dec 30 2019 12:43 Olipy3: Right under my self-imposed deadline I've reached my 2019 goal of porting olipy and botfriend to Python 3. Enjoy it! I sure am.