This is pretty funny.
Here's an excerpt:
The Lord of the Rings: A Source-Criticism Analysis
Experts in source-criticism now know that The Lord of the Rings is a redaction of sources ranging from the Red Book of Westmarch (W) to Elvish Chronicles (E) to Gondorian records (G) to orally transmitted tales of the Rohirrim (R). The conflicting ethnic, social and religious groups which preserved these stories all had their own agendas, as did the "Tolkien" (T) and "Peter Jackson" (PJ) redactors, who are often in conflict with each other as well but whose conflicting accounts of the same events reveals a great deal about the political and religious situations which helped to form our popular notions about Middle Earth and the so-called "War of the Ring."
Well, I saw two more films at the Sarasota Film Festival, the Danish film Stealing Rembrandt which had it's US premiere Saturday, and Bedwin Hacker from Tunisia. It's kind of cool to be able to go see movies that almost no one has seen yet, in a movie snob sort of way. Yesterday when I went with my brother to see Stealing Rembrandt, he thought it was pretty funny because everybody who was waiting in line was clearly wealthy, retiree, artsy snob type who were all dressed up, probably just because it was a film festival that they were at. We were both a good thirty years younger than anybody else there. Any time I've gone to a movie around here that's artsy or foreign, my siblings and I are always the youngest people, by far, in the theater.
Bedwin Hacker is the first movie I've seen where computers and hacking were involved that I didn't sit there the whole time thinking how ridiculous the movie is. The film centers around a woman in Tunisia who is hacking into satellite transmissions to send what were basically Tunisian nationalist messages over the French airwaves (I didn't realize this was possible, but apparently, it's happened before). Not knowing enough about Tunisian history and Tunisian/French relations, the motivations for hacking didn't entirely make sense, though it seemed to be partly motivated by French crackdown on illegal Tunisian immigration, and partly a way of encouraging Tunisian's living in France to embrace their national and ethnic pride. As Kalt, the hacker, is wreaking havoc (and becoming a Kevin Mitnick style folk hero), the French police are trying to figure out who is doing it, and to track her down. One interesting thing about the movie is that all of the computer-savvy people are women--Kalt, her 10 yr old niece who is also involved in hacking the satellite systems, and the French intelligence agent who's trying to catch them. In America, the stereotype is of the teenage pizza-eating male hacker, but here you have a movie from Tunisia, of all places, where you find female geeks. If Bedwin Hacker makes it into any theaters or on video in the US (I don't think it has a US distributor yet), I would recommend watching it.
Stealing Rembrandt is inspired by a real-life heist of two paintings from an art museum in Denmark. The erstwhile thieves didn't realize that one of those paintings was in fact the only Rembrandt in Denmark. Stealing Rembrandt takes that story, and turns it into a tale of four small time thieves who acidentally steal the wrong painting when the father and his partner in crime go to lift another painting in a robbery planned by the son and his roommate. It's not so easy to get rid of a Rembrandt when the entire country, the Danish police, Interpol, and crime figures are all trying to find it. It's a very funny movie, though there are also moving dramatic elements mixed in. Judging from the response at the film festival, it might actually have a chance to get picked up by a US distributor, which would be great. If it does make it to theaters, I highly recommend going to see it.
The Sarasota Film Festival (motto: we're not Sundance or Toronto, but wait ten years) started this week, which is kind of cool because it offers the chance to see films that the average person probably wouldn't normally get too see. Considering that the first full fleged festival was only in 2000, it's not on the level of any of the really prestigous film festivals yet (though they are trying to get there), although it has increased it's stature a lot in the last four years--Jennifer Love Hewitt's attempt at being seen as a serious actress premiered here yesterday. Anyway, enough of that, the point of this blog entry is to write about the documentary I saw this morning, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine about Garry Kasparov's 1997 chess match against IBM's Deep Blue.
On a technical note, I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but the camera man couldn't seem to keep the camera in focus, and the lighting was bad for a lot of the interviews, which was kind of distracting. I was a bit worried when the trailer for the film, which was shown first, said that it was from the producers of the docu-fiction known as Bowling for Columbine, and as I get into below, it was rather more biased than a documentary should be.
What Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine does best is to delve into Garry Kasparov's psyche during the 1997 competition against IBM's Deep Blue. You see him becoming more and more paranoid, and increasingly unravelled, all because in the second game, Deep Blue made a move that seemed too human for his preconceived notion of chess computers. Kasparov thought then, and still does, that IBM cheated.
Game Over tries to seem unbiased, but it is clear that the director thinks that IBM cheated. However, they give no real evidence to support the cheating claim, only intimations that IBM's security surrounding the computer room was because IBM really had grandmasters hidden in there overriding the computer on certain key occasions, and Kasparov's assertion that the computer didn't play like a computer usually does at one point in game two. In game two, Kasparov played a game that was designed to trick the computer, attempting to sacrifice a pawn in a situation where previous computer chess programs would have taken the pawn, leading to the computer's eventual loss. Deep Blue didn't take the bait, and Kasparov was so rattled because the computer seemed to play like a human that he didn't even see that he could have played Deep Blue to a draw and ended up resigning. That game psyched him out so much that he was unable to recover, and after playing games 3,4, and 5 to draws, lost game 6 horribly.
The question of whether IBM cheated all comes down to that single move in game two, where the Deep Blue made the move that any human would make but that had, up to that point, tripped up computers. Joel Benjamin, a chess grandmaster on IBM's programming team explained in the documentary that they knew that chess computers always got tripped up in that situation, and consequently spent a lot of time and effort programming Deep Blue so that it wouldn't make the mistake that other computers do. If you believe Benjamin's assertion, then the case is clear, IBM did not cheat. Unfortunately, the director quickly moved on and never mentioned IBM's explanation for the rest of the movie, preferring to cut between shots of the chess playing hoax of the 19th century, The Turk, and shots of Deep Blue, hinting that Deep Blue was really controlled by a human as well. As someone who has an understanding of programming, the explanation by IBM makes perfect sense--if you knew what you were doing, it would not be terribly difficult to put something in the code so that, if thus and so conditions are reached, then do thus and so--in other words, tell the computer what to do if a situation like the one that Kasparov created in game 2 ever happened. This isn't cheating, it's doing a good job of programming a chess computer.
In the end, it's eminently clear that the director thinks that IBM cheated, and the repeated comments about IBM's stock rising 15% the day that Deep Blue won suggest the idea that IBM cheated to pump its stock price (Kasparov even compares IBM and Deep Blue to Enron). However, there is plenty of outside opinion, within both the chess and computer science communities, that Deep Blue won fair and square and that Kasparov lost because he simply couldn't get past his view of computers as "dumb machines" and got psyched out by a machine that didn't seem so dumb after all. I just wish that the director had let us see the alternative opinion.
If you were watching Tuesday's American Idol, you might remember a girl named Kristen Powell who performed a rendition of a song from Flashdance that was so awful that Simon made her swear on her life that it was serious. She left the audition crying, and her friend made a scene with the camera men following them.
Well, it wasn't serious. Kristen and the friend are both interns with the MJ Morning Show on 93.3 WFLZ in Tampa. The show sent someone last year, but that person wasn't good enough or awful enough to make it through to Simon and Co. so this year they found someone who was really terrible and she got on. Obviously, if you want to get on TV, you have to either actually be good, or else be utterly abysmal.
I've said for a while that instead of putting the movie piracy guilt trip on paying movie patrons with those ads that the MPAA has been running before movies that the MPAA should be putting the blame where it belongs--on insiders. Several months back, MIT released a study that concluded that the majority of pirated movies available for download had to be industry insider leaks. The MPAA, of course, denied that they had any problems with insider piracy and kept insisting that the main problem was camera-in-the-theater piracy. If it wasn't obvious already that insider piracy was a problem, it should have been once the Academy screener for Something's Gotta Give showed up on the internet. It has reached the point where the MPAA better wake up and smell the coffee, now that an Academy member has been found to have passed on Academy Awards screeners to a man who then pirated them, and has been doing so for the last three years. The man who was doing the copying, one Russell W. Sprague age 51, has been arrested, but the Academy member Carmine Caridi, age 69, has not.
Both the MPAA and the RIAA have a problem with insider leaks that needs to be dealt with. There is no way that so many movies and albums could have shown up online before their release date without insider cooperation. Even radio stations have gotten into the act--93.3 WFLZ out of Tampa aired a bootleg copy of The Eminem Show, in it's entirety, weeks before it was released (yet, this afternoon, their morning DJ, who moonlights as a political talk radio host was saying on his afternoon talk show that music pirates should have the book thrown at them. Go figure). Until the MPAA and RIAA come to grips with the insider piracy, they're never going to be able to stop piracy and downloading.
UPN has decided to run a reality show where they will send Amish teens to California where we are supposed to be entertained by their culture shock. Now, besides the fact that pretty much anyone from rural America is going to feel out of place walking down Rodeo Drive, why exactly do they assume that Amish people never go to big cities or that they would "be freaked out by what they see"? Come on, it sounds like Les Moonves and the folks at UPN thought the joke about the Amish guy and the elevator was real.
Ryan posted in the comments of my last entry that he wants me to lay off the Eagles. I thought this deserved more than just an answer in the comments. I'm not going to lay off the Eagles and here's why.
1. The Fans. Last year, before they played the Bucs, the fans were making jokes about Joe Jurevicius and his sick newborn--how perverted is that? This year, they were making jokes about Brett Favre's father dying. Any fans that make fun of people's grief and heartache in their family don't deserve anything but having their team ripped.
2. The Media. Philly media is the worst anywhere. The Daily News was even making fun of Brett Favre's father's death, and insulting his father, who's dead and can't even defend himself. You can read the article here. It also rips on his family, his wife, etc.
This is football we're talking about, not the future of the free world or anything important, and when even the media starts taking pot shots at player's personal tragedies, well, that's a line that shouldn't be crossed. I don't even like the Packers, and usually root against them, but I'd never ever say the kinds of things about Favre that were said in Philly.
Oh yeah, and the Eagles didn't win that game yesterday, the Packer's giftwrapped it and handed it to them. The Eagles aren't good enough to win it on their own, they needed blown coverage on 4th and 26, and they needed Brett Favre to hand over the ball in an ill-timed lapse of judgement.
I really, really, really abhor the Philadelphia Eagles. I can't stand anything about them or their obnoxious fans. And what I really can't believe is that the Packers let McNabb convert on 4th and 26, and that Brett Favre threw such a boneheaded interception on the Packers first play in overtime. Not that I actually like the Packers very much, but I just can't stand the Eagles. Oh well, now they have the chance to blow it again in the NFC Championship.
I didn't really expect the Packers to win though. A little known bit of trivia is that Green Bay has never won a Super Bowl without a graduate of Manatee High School in Bradenton, Florida on the roster, and since Tyrone Williams is now a Falcon, they didn't have a chance. Yes, I know that it's probably a meaningless bit of useless trivia that had no impact on anything, but still...
Well, the Bucs are back to being the Yuckaneers, rooting for a good football team was fun while it lasted. Shoulda known that it wouldn't last long with the Bucs, it never does. I'm following the playoffs, but there isn't really anybody that I care enough about to root for, though I will be rooting against the Eagles.
Oh well, at least I can still root for the Tampa Bay Lightning, who are actually really good when they want to be. It's kind of weird to go to hockey games and be surrounded by people in shorts and sandals. Guess that's what you get when you play a sport like hockey in Florida. Speaking of hockey in Florida, we're probably going to get a minor league hockey team--some developer is going to build an arena out in the eastern part of the county. It's a great deal though, come to Florida, play hockey and hang out at the beach on your off days--a lot better than spending your off days shoveling snow off of your driveway.
So Hillary Clinton tries to make a joke about Gandhi by saying "He ran a gas station down in St. Louis," a joke that is on the same level of ethnic stereotyping as fried chicken and watermellon jokes about African Americans, and she expects us all to forgive her because she 'truly regrets' the joke. If a Trent Lott or another Republican had said it, people would be calling for that person to be strung up by their ears, but unless the story gets legs, Hillary's remarks are not getting nearly the criticism that they deserve.
She expects people to overlook her racially stereotyped joke because she has "admired the work and life of Mahatma Gandhi and have spoken publicly about that many times." If some Republican had made a fried chicken and watermellon joke in reference to Dr. King, we all know full well that no matter how many times that person had spoken admiringly of Dr. King, they would be strung up as a racist. Hillary Clinton made a racist joke about Mahatma Gandhi, and no amount of sugar coating can change that.
Maybe it's because I just don't exactly like Julia Roberts movies, but I did not like Mona Lisa Smile. Instead of the touching moving story that it presented itself as, it was little more than an overly caricatured pseudo-feminist fluff piece masquerading as something of substance.
For those who haven't seen the movie, the brief synopsis is that Julia Roberts plays a first year art history professor who's trying to get through to her over-acheieving Wellsley students in the early 1950s. We, the audience, are expected to be appalled at how backward they were in the '50s, and to applaud good ol' Julia's attempts to get everyone to get with the program.
Therein lies the problem. Rather than bothering to even acknowledge the complexities of the time period or even attempting to understand the historical and cultural forces that were shaping the era, the film simply sets up a caricature of the 1950s, and creates cardboard cutout stereotypes of the people living in that time. Into the stereotyped scene with the cookie cutter characters steps Julia Roberts, who tries to enlighten her students by introducing them to modern art and making them question who decides what is and isn't art, and somehow questioning the nature of art is all supposed to be magically freeing or something so that they are able to break out of their Wellsley-finishing-school-mold.
The movie is supposed to warm our feminist hearts, but by the end of the movie, I was questioning whether it was promoting a feminist message or if it was really a veiled attempt at an anti-feminist message. Despite purporting to be about breaking out of the conventional stereotypes of women, in the end, all it did was continue a bunch of stereotypes. At a particularly dramatic moment, Julia Robert's character shows her class several advertisements which she was arguing were telling women that they had to dress and act a certain way. One advertisement was telling women that wearing that particular brand of girdle was "freeing," a sentiment that we were supposed to be appalled by. This coming in a speech giving by an actress who has had plastic surgery to make her lips fuller. Not only that, the movie perpetuates the lookist stereotypes because the one slightly plump character has a hard time finding boyfriends, while all the beautiful characters have guys aplenty. No, women don't wear girdles today, we are told that we should just go and have plastic surgery to conform to the ideal woman as described by Hollywood. Julia Robert's character goes around telling her students that they can have both family and career, but by the end of the movie, the director has made it clear that said claim is impossible, as Julia Robert's character doesn't ever get beyond the committmentless hookup, and it's made pretty clear that she can't have both relationships or work, and conversely, the character played by Julia Stiles chooses marriage over law school, telling Julia Roberts that she knows what she wants, and what she wants isn't to be a lawyer it's to get married and have a family and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
In the end, Mona Lisa Smile never got past the stereotypes to give a movie with real heart and feeling. Not only that, I left the theater thinking "if that's feminism, I want absolutely nothing to do with it."
...and while I was taking a break from blogging, lots of wacky things have happened.
Brittney Spears got married for the grand total of 55 hours. What the heck she and the guy were thinking is beyond me.
USC and LSU are both the college football national champion, further proving the point that the BCS just doesn't work.
Pete Rose finally admits he bet on baseball, still gambles, but only on legal things like horse racing, and blames it, at least partly, on ADHD. But, there have been claims that he is lying about never betting in the clubhouse, and I saw Fay Vincent on Sports Center saying that he had sources that told him that Rose was betting as a player as well, something he still denies. All I can say is, the guy's a liar and should never be put in a position where he could influence the outcome of games.
Oh yeah, and I'm still mad at the Bucs for self destructing and missing the playoffs. They had the talent, but their was way too much selfishness and players who forgot that they won it all last year because they were a team. Not that guys like Warren Sapp know anything about team spirit--he was too busy comparing himself to slaves and the league to slavemasters.
And, lest we forget, Mad Cow has found it's way to the US of A.
It's going to be a wonderful 2004.