Blessed by the Potato

Dear Michael;

I recently saw your latest movie Transformers. I was a huge Transformers fan as a kid, and remain so to this day. I was really worried before the movie that you would turn this into an absolute travesty, a cheap mockery of my childhood memories all to make a quick buck. Those worries were magnified after I watched the teaser trailer, seeing how different your vision of the Transformers was, how the blocky bits of their transformed vehicle had given way to a very busy visual design full of movement and pointy bits. The last year of my life has been filled with dread over what you might do to this franchise.

I’m happy to see that you have done right by the franchise. Yes, you made a number of changes, and it is a different version of the Transformers from what I remember, but the recognizable elements are still there, and most importantly, it was good. There were of course a number of nits I could pick (excellent job on Optimus’ voice, but Megatron could have been better and Soundwave was just… well, what were you thinking? And Soundwave didn’t really need to hump the computer system, that’s just a no. The plot was, well, not expected to be there at all, and it wasn’t bad, but I think for our current times the first season’s plot of a world in an energy crisis and the fight to steal what readily available energy can be raped from our world might have worked better) but I won’t (except parenthetically).

However, I have to ask: are you hard up for cash? Or did you get your cousin (who might be a little slow or have a bad case of the ADHD) to do the camera work? If you need a tripod, ritalin, or a steady cam Michael, I’m here for you. Because this movie was really, really hurt by the insane camera movements and cuts. I play a lot of video games, so I’m usually ok with that sort of thing, even from the Blair Witch Project, but Michael, I nearly puked from your movie. That’s no exaggeration: I had to run out of the theatre and stand in the washrooms until a wave of nausea passed by me. There’s really no exuse for that sort of thing, either. In moderation, a touch of motion blur and a few rapid cuts can confer a sense of action and dynamic intensity. But, to distract myself from the urge to throw up, I started counting how long each cut ran, and for the last 25 minutes, there wasn’t a single cut that lasted more than 5 seconds. Not one solid, stable camera position lasted for more than 3 seconds (though there was one relatively stable and relatively motion blur free dolly shot that lasted 4). Like shadows that can’t exist without the light, the sense of action from those cheap camera and editing techniques is quickly lost when there’s no stability to compare them to. Furthermore, they’re passe, Michael. Blurring your CG and cutting rapidly around the scene is an old technique used to make CG seem more real; it’s a way to hide what’s going on so people don’t see how terrible it is. In your case though, you had very good CG. There were some very good still(ish) shots of the autobots near the middle, and they looked good. Don’t hide them; let them shine.

Of course, that’s what DVD re-edits are for. Work on that for the next few months Michael. Since I suspect most of that motion blur was added in post-processing, you shouldn’t have much work to do to take it out. If you do need to do a few reshoots, I’ll loan you a tripod.

You worked hard to make a Transformers movie we die-hard, old school fans could accept. Let us see it.

Interesting read (registration probably required) by Jim Baen, from the Robert J Sawyer mailing list.

We’ve long had the arguments that evolution does not really act on anything that happens after child-bearing age. By that point, whether an organism would survive to reproduce had been determined, and no matter how severe the problems (or how impressive the survival), the genes would have already been passed on. Huntington’s disease, for example, is one of the few diseases that’s controlled by a dominant allele. That is, you only need one copy of the disease allele to get the disease, and there are no carrier. Generally, dominant genetic diseases are very rare because there’s a lot of evolutionary selection against them; but since Huntington’s doesn’t strike until after the person has had a chance to have children and pass it on, that selection pressure isn’t there. Likewise, there isn’t a lot of benefit to living for 200 years if you can only have children into your 40’s, or if you get eaten or sick so long before your parts wear out.

Of course, that’s all in the past, some say, and the future may hold nothing but longer lifespans for humans. After all, with technology we can live much longer, achieve much more, build more wealth. With our society we can improve the lives of our children and their children, or even use frozen tissue or other fertility treatments to extend our reproductive years… if only we could keep our minds intact long enough for it to matter.

The interesting question is: maybe dying has some evolutionary advantage?

Extreme polygamy = bad (essentially reducing your gene pool since only a few males mate, increasing recessive traits). Older successful males are more likely to be polygamous in culture, so it’s possibly that death acts as a mechanism to stop the unbounded accumulation of wealth and mates by any one person — and the accumulation of recessive desease genes in their offspring. Violence may also be an issue in this hypothetical model: once you get one person with such a monopoly on mates, there will be a lot of pressure for others to try to take that (whether challenging to take it wholly, or sneaking a few mates away here and there).

Also, what about the higher order effects? Shorter generation times lead to more responsive evolution (that is, better genomic response to change). Of course, for that to work really well generally requires large “litters” with a large number of acceptable losses in each generation. As mammals, we tend to follow a different strategy where we have a small number of children and nuture them to maximum fitness. Plus, as humans we use culture and technology to adapt, and genes that help us accrue more knowledge and design better tools for a longer period of our life seem like they would be beneficial. Very beneficial. On the other side of the coin though, is the saying that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” If we don’t have people getting old and dying off to change our customs and beliefs, then that sort of toolmaking culture fails us as a mechanism of adaptation.

There was an interesting idea presented in Permanence (Karl Schroeder): technological/cultural adaptation is a very expensive way for a species to live. It allows for adaptation to a lot of environments, but always sub-optimally. A crocodile in a swamp, for instance, lives its life swimming and eating. A human attempting to live in the same environment would need a spear gun or net of some kind to catch food, a boat, and to get to the bottom some scuba gear, a few swim fins, and a wetsuit to keep warm. That’s a costly way to live, and while it may perform better than the crocodile in the short term, and work great if most of your existence is spent away from the swamp and you only really vacation there, it’s not really a way to live in a swamp on the scale of thousands or millions of years. All it would take is for some of that knowledge to be lost (how to fill an air tank, or how to sharpen a spear) and the survival ability goes way down.

Look at crocodiles. Humans might move into their environment—underwater in swamps. We might devise all kinds of sophisticated devices to help us live there, or artificially keep the swamp drained. But do you really think that, over thousands or millions of years, there won’t be political uprisings? System failures? Religious wars? Mad bombers? The instant something perturbs the social systems that’s needed to support the technology, the crocodiles will take over again, because all they have to do to survive
is swim and eat.

Permanence considers the decline of the million-year civilization. The thing about civilization, mass production and technology is that we can rely on the brilliance of a few to carry the rest of us, so we lose all selection pressure for brains. Eventually, no one can repair techological devices, or improve or alter a use to meet the needs of a new situation. In a society of users, when something eventually breaks, we all go extinct. This sort of idea is also present in Idiocracy as well, where a technological society, which cushions us from the realities of natural selection, no longer selects for the intelligent people that can maintain that society. Evolution by natural selection is based on a tautology:
“that which survives, survives”, as Douglas Adams put it. But it’s a profound tautology nonetheless. If, as in Idiocracy, people who are less intelligent breed more (much more) than others, then the human race will be brought towards that, the subtype which most sucessfully takes advantage of its environment.

What we found instead was that even though a species might remain starfaring for millions of years, consciousness does not seem to be required for toolmaking. In fact, consciousness appears to be a phase… We know now that [consiousness] evolves to enable a species to deal with unforeseen situations. By definition, anything we’ve mastered becomes instinctive. Walking is not something we have to consciously think about, right? Well, what about physics, chemistry, social engineering? If we have to think about them, we haven’t mastered them—they are still troublesome to us. A species that succeeds in really mastering something like physics has no more need to be conscious of it. Quantum mechanics becomes an instinct, the way ballistics already is for us. Originally, we must have had to put a lot of thought into throwing things like rocks or spears. We eventually evolved to be able to throw without thinking—and that is a sign of things to come. Some day, we’ll become… able to maintain a technological infrastructure without needing to
think about it. Without need to think, at all…

With a longer-lived species, despite the problems discussed earlier, we might be able to avert these sorts of problems. However, we would need to be immortal to continually look after our progeny through the eons. But eventually, of course, death in one of her many guises will find you. So the answer may be picking up and moving for greener pastures, no matter how long lived the species. As long as this happened often enough, we would likely not fall towards “direct adaptation” mechanisms, but maintain a technological adaptation. It’s only through constant challenges to survive, succeed, and breed that intelligence, consciousness and cultural adaption will be preserved in the species.

In fact, we may find that selection for a longer-lived species goes hand-in-hand with selection for intelligence in a technological society: it takes so long to learn what you need to survive and thrive (I’m 27 and still in school for years to come yet!), that only long-lived (and late-breeding) members are sucessful.

On the other hand, there may be another case where shorter generations may have a (meta)evolutionary advantage. It’s only as long as we’re willing to take risks and go to test the limits of our intelligence and ability to survive that we feel any kind of selection pressure, and when the phrase “you’ve got your whole life ahead of you” means so much more, risk aversion may become the norm. Also, with intelligence and consciousness comes senescence, dementia, and insanity. It’s possible that the chances of falling prey to these increase with age (unless a stable brain is selected for and has a chance to evolve).

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,
in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

Evil Dead: The Musical is, IMHO, the best musical comedy out there. For those who don’t know, it’s a combination of the first two Evil Dead movies, with a lot of the catch phrases from the third one thrown in for good measure. Oh, and it’s also the only musical I know of where the first three rows get drenched in blood.

I saw it for the second time on Thursday, and I’ve got to say that the first show we saw (2 years ago), while the whole idea was still experimental, was more enjoyable. It’s hard to be sure after 2 years of memory fog, but some of the songs have been changed (expanded for the most part; I’m pretty sure “look who’s evil now” has a different, more up-tempo instrumental, though Wayfare thinks it’s the same). The comedic timing also seemed to be off in this one, with the dramatic pause removed from the classic “Name’s Ash [cha-chunk], Housewares” as well as a few other points. In the first version, there were a lot of squirting blood special effects, so the first few rows “may” have gotten covered in blood, but for the most part the actors managed to keep it on the stage. The current show has increased the blood volume, and now actively aims for the audience (even handing out disposable ponchos during the intermission). The new theatre space is great: there doesn’t look to be a bad seat in the house, so don’t be afraid to buy tickets in the back if you’re afraid of a little blood.

I liked the Canadian cast; Wayfare bought the CD (which is I believe recorded from the New York group), and I really think the Toronto cast is a lot better (with the possible exception of Cheryl (? — Ash’s sister)). A lot of the songs are really clever and catchy: I think “Cabin in the Woods” is going to become mandatory listening for any future cottage trips. Now, Wayfare says the singers on the CD sound better to her, sounding like “obviously trained singers” but I think that’s what I like least about the recording: they sound like they’re just belting out the lines with very little feeling or humour, and sound like they’ve been trained to project their voices (which isn’t really necessary in this day of mics and speakers).

Of course, the biggest change to the show from when we saw it first is the ending, and that I didn’t really enjoy. Wayfare had a great suggestion for that: keep the original ending, close the curtain, then use the new ending as an encore.

I saw the latest Pirates movie tonight, and quite liked it. I’ll talk about it in more detail after the spoiler warning. First I’ll talk about the theatre itself: the London Silvercity is the biggest, newest, and most conveniently located theatre around us. The movies themselves are always shown well: they don’t usually have problems with reel changeovers, scratched film, the sound is usually not too loud, yet never too quiet, and the airconditioning is usually comfortable — like many theatres it can be a touch chilly in the summer, but it’s never made me so cold I looked for my jacket before leaving (true story: one time at Empress Walk I was so chilled by the AC that, even though it was spring, I got confused and thought it was winter and spent a few minutes looking for my jacket before coming to my senses; I think this effect was helped by the fact that whatever movie I was watching was set in the wintertime).

However, the service there has always been sub-par. While the staff has never been rude, they’re very slow. The box office line can get fairly long at times, and it’s not usually because there are a ton of people, it just seems to take them a long time to move them through (perhaps this isn’t the staff’s fault though: the credit card machine could be slow, or perhaps customers are chatting them up or taking a long time to make up their minds, because we usually get our tickets in fine time once we finally get to the head of the line). The concession stand is much worse. The staff there are downright lethargic. Today, we lined up with only two people in front of us, and it took about two whole minutes to get to the front of the line. That’s with one person’s order already in before we lined up, and the next person only wanting a drink refill. Two minutes doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but for what got done in that time it was just ludicrously slow. The workers never seem to know their tills or how to count change, and are slow in all their actions to boot, as though everything behind the counter was happening in slow motion.

The staff there also have very strange habits when it comes to getting popcorn. Even if there’s a popper spewing forth fresh, hot, delicious popcorn right behind them (and when the lines are short, we’ll often pick which till to go to based on which one has fresh popcorn bubbling out), they’ll walk away, past the next popper and around out of sight (the concession is set up in the big round dish form) to get it. That, of course, adds significantly to the service time. Also, they’re really bad at popcorn management in general, often letting batches burn for a while before finally dumping them, and being downright neglectful in starting new batches during busy periods. Perhaps its because their concession has something like 6 poppers (at Cineplex we only had 3, and for all but the busiest opening weekends we would only run one or two), but they often let some run completely out before bothering to pop more — we always had to be one the ball, quite often putting in another batch as soon as the current one was dumped. In fact, it seems from casual observation as though they only have a few people “designated” to start batches. The popcorn is never very good there: quite often we get stale bags, batches without the proper amount of salt (generally not enough rather than too much), many batches with small, broken bits (which also comes from packing), batches where the taste is fine, but the texture is just completely wrong… and even when a bag of popcorn is generally good, there are always one or two pieces that are just rotten and make you go “blech!” We should probably complain to a manager at some point, but haven’t yet, although we have taken advantage of the free refills (on larges) and dumped a bad batch before. I find all of this quite bizzare, because the theatre makes most of its money off the popcorn: if it’s not constantly popping, people are less inclined to buy. If it’s not consistenly tasty, people are less inclined to buy. (We buy partly because Wayfare is a popcorn fiend, and partly because we almost always use “Night Out” passes that include a free popcorn). Even when they’re not very busy, they should consider keeping the poppers in use more, even if they have to close down part of their concession ring (we generally only go to “event” movies now, but even on weekdays they’ve got at least 3 poppers open — having just 1 or 2 open but constantly popping might work better for them), or pop half-batches so they don’t end up with too much excess. Finally, the seats there are not fantastic. They’re fairly comfortable for someone my height, but even just a little shorter (like Wayfare), and the shoulder support becomes a neck-wrenching headrest. The floors today were quite slick, and I couldn’t keep my feet in a civilized position, they kept sliding out in front of me, and I accidentally kicked the seat in front of me a few times when my foot lost traction.

Anyhow, on to Pirates:

Spoilers follow.

…

I really didn’t like the second movie — I saw it in the theatres, but even though my family has it on DVD, I’ve never watched it a second time (at least, not all the way through). A lot of the sequences were just way too ridiculous (Jack falling down the cliff while tied to the pole, the whole waterwheel 3-way swordfight), and really the whole thing was just the first act for this movie, right up to the (lack of an) ending. Plus everyone seemed to recognize the East India Trading co guy (Lord Beckette), but even checking IMDB I don’t think he’s in the first one. He has some sort of history with Sparrow, and it’s implied in this one that he betrayed Sparrow at some point (in fact, they may even have been partners in the distant past), but it’s never fully explained in this one.

This one I found a lot better: partly because it has an actual ending, partly because when the sequences get ridiculous, they’re kept shorter, and partly because Geoffrey Rush’s return brings the series up a notch. Not only does it add some more tension aboard the Pearl, he just simply looks like he’s having a blast in the role, which brings back some of the fun from the first one (the second really took itself too seriously for the amount of ridiculousness in it). This one had a few neat twists in it — I’ll give a second spoiler warning first — for instance, I never expected Will to take Davy Jones’ place, even when he was half dead. I thought Bootstrap would, especially in the seconds before it happened when he looked at his knife, or Jack, or even Elizabeth (who would follow him into death rather than waiting for him on shore for decades at a time, unaging).

I didn’t really care for the explicitness of Jack’s delusions (or the strange fascination with the peanut and licking things), especially since it was inconsistent in its lack of delusions right when Jack made his final decision not to captain the Flying Dutchman. I mean, the first one with him trying to captain the copies of himself in the Locker was ok, but I got really annoyed when he started talking to the miniature selves poking around his dreadlocks while everyone else was around.

Finally, one detail confused me at the end: Will proposed to Elizabeth during the battle, but didn’t the second movie open on their wedding being interrupted by East India/British troops?

I’ve been grinding my way through Farscape Season 2, and came across the inevitable body switching episode. I find it amusing that it’s such a common theme in sci-fi shows (and with several movies where that’s the entire premise), especially considering how it’s a pretty tough plot device to swallow for even the most fantastic of fantasy settings. Of course, it often makes for an amusing exercise where you get to watch the actors try to impersonate each other. It’s often kind of neat for that alone, though the plots of these episodes are often quite… painful.

The Farscape incarnation of this was rather neat. First off, they mixed over the voices for the teaser part to partly make it seem more like the “transferred” character’s voice, and a little more unreal. I’m sure that would have gotten old fast, but it was a little strange that they dropped the effect for the rest of the episode after the opening sequence. What was best, though, was that when the male lead character was put into the female’s body, there wasn’t this dancing around the issue awkwardness of tripping in high heels or not knowing how to put makeup on or any of the other you-have-to-experience-it-to-really-know things. No: he found a corner, unzipped the top, and bounced.

Bounced.