Django Unchained

I saw Django Unchained on Sunday. It averages out to a mediocrity. It's part good, part bad, part ugly, part boring.


The leads are good. Colonel Landa (Christoph Walz) is his old self as Dr. King (get it?) Schultz, a bounty hunter with an unexplained past as a dentist. His uncanny marksmanship demanded a change of vocation. Without the "dead" part of "dead or alive," he'd still be a dentist. Jamie Foxx is Django. This being Tarantino, there is a comic book aspect to the characters and the story, and Foxx plays Django's transformation from slave on a chain gang to avenging, sharp-shooting, superhero lover with all of the style the outrageous plot demands.

This is a movie that cannot be spoiled if you have seen Glorious Basterds. If you're a purist when it comes to such things, stop now. Its good moments are few enough that I rather hate to serve them to you here. Its ending in a display of pyrotechnic vengeance was foreshadowed by Basterds.

Basterds and Django reinvent classic forms: the war movie and the Western. It's high time they did, and you'd think Tarantino is just the man to do it. He is, but must he luxuriate in every shot of a man walking? Must we see Django, the instant marksman, shooting a snowman repeatedly? Tarantino's dialog is losing its touch. "The D is silent," Django says. That made it into a trailer because it's one of the better lines of the film. When the writing drives the action, as when Leonardo Di Caprio is talking about his "property," Tarantino's touch is as sure as ever. But in the interminable scenes between the ones where stuff is happening, it's just workmanlike. The best scene in the movie, for me, is the introductory scene between Dr. King (Schultz) and Django, with King quizzing Django a bit about what it's like to be a slave, and at the same time telling him how the next couple of weeks will go down. He owns Django, after all. "I feel guilty," he explains. The retelling of the South and the Western begins here. If any slave girl should get slapped by a white woman in this movie... well, let's just say this movie isn't going to end with a soliloquy by a white woman, and leave it at that.

It's not a Western. It's a Southern. The time is 1858. The story does not move out of the slaveholding South. It starts in Texas, and instead of staying in the West, Mississippi is its first destination. Enormous letters spell it out. This genre tends to start somewhere godforsaken and move to someplace cursed. By sending the Western to Mississippi, Tarantino wrenches the wheel and points the story in his new direction. Everything follows from this early indicator. It's going to be all damnation, all the time.

A plantation owner is explaining to a slave that Django is a free man. He is Dr. King (Schultz)'s valet, and he's not to be treated like a slave. "Am I supposed to treat him like he's white?" "No." They settle on treating him like the idiot in town.

Monsieur Candie (who doesn't speak French, but prefers to be addressed that way), played by a Leonardo DiCaprio, slams his hand on the table and cuts himself. The scene is a tour de force-- Tarantino at his best-- with characters locked in verbal and mortal combat simultaneously. Through it all, Candie, growing more and more outraged, literally has blood on his hands.

Django Unchained is more tension-filled than Inglourious Basterds. Django is an avenging hero in the middle of slavery. Basterds was about genocide, and had a couple of scenes with individual Jews threatened by the Nazis, but the tension in Django is better. Slaves are abused in escalating fashion throughout the movie, and as the crimes mount, the clarion call of this The Wind Done Gone, this opposite of Birth of a Nation reaches its crescendo when Candie brags, "This is my property, to do with as I choose." That theme-- property, and ownership-- is woven through Django Unchained and ties it to a frame that is cast into fire.

Wow, it's long, though. And not just the running time. Scene after scene is indulgently long. One of the most dramatic scenes opens with a shot of impressively spurred boots walking across a floor. You can picture it already, and hear those spurs jangling, see the boots carry their owner arrogantly into the scene. You become aware, watching it, that you're watching this guy's boots. By far it is not the only time that you get tired of somebody walking through a scene, or looking at something, or talking. Talking slowly. Killing slowly. It's like watching the Yankees play the Red Sox. (If you're a baseball fan, you know what I'm talking about). Sure, it's dramatic, but must it be dragged out like this?

Implausibility in a story like this should further the myth. But Django gives us too long to consider that this pair strike down a remarkable number of men with only wanted posters by way of authorization. The story reminds me of the role playing games I played as a teenager, where the heroes are created out of thin air in a hostile territory and move about, dispatching baddies, without organized consequences. In other words, it's not just a movie, and it's not just a comic book: It's juvenile. And it's repetitive. How many times can you wave a wanted poster at an angry mob to keep them from hanging you? A lot of times, apparently.

Be prepared for naked racism. Obviously. This story will not be sanitized into a story about any white nobility. Don't get your hopes up for any redemption, although there is some drama along those lines. This is the movie to make you think about how much you loved Gone With the Wind. You're going to see people treated like property. You're going to see them bristle. You're going to see them submit. You're going to see movie vengeance.

Mars is in my dreams

I can't help but speculate on the Mars news. I'm tremendously excited, more than I should be.  I'm betting on organics which could have a non-biological origin. In other words, Mars will remain both dead and tantalizingly alive in our imaginations. I'm looking forward to the announcement, but answers may not come quickly.

Speculation now rampant and completely untrustworthy seems to be leaning toward methane compounds correlated to archaea.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2012/11/23/mars-curiosity-may-have-found-something-earth-shattering/

I didn't know what archaea are until this weekend. Back in 2002, the BBC ran this story about archaea living in a Mars-like environment buried beneath Idaho.

The microbes were found living in a hot spring, 200 metres (660 feet) beneath the US state of Idaho. They get their energy not from the Sun or from consuming other organic matter, but by combining hydrogen from rocks with carbon dioxide.

Because similar sunlight and oxygen-free environments are thought to exist on the Red Planet, and even on Jupiter's moon Europa, such organisms could provide clues about searching for life on other worlds.

"It's possible this type of metabolism was the very first metabolism that evolved on the early Earth," Dr Francis Chapelle, of the US Geological Survey (USGS), told the BBC. "Because hydrogen and carbon dioxide are present on Mars and other places in the Solar System, that kind of life may in fact be what's up there."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1764716.stm

Has Curiosity found methane? There are a number of non-biological sources, so it would be exciting, but not too exciting. According to this article, methane on Mars would likely be of recent origin.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/02/mars-methan-nasa-curiosity-rover_n_2066796.html


Remember this? Maybe we already found life on Mars in 1996.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/marslife.html

A group of scientists led by David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center published an article in the 16 August 1996 issue of Science magazine announcing the discovery of evidence for primitive bacterial life on Mars. An examination of a meteorite found in Antarctica and believed to be from Mars shows: 1) hydrocarbons which are the same as breakdown products of dead micro-organisms on Earth, 2) mineral phases consistent with by-products of bacterial activity, and 3) tiny carbonate globules which may be microfossils of the primitive bacteria, all within a few hundred-thousandths of an inch of each other...

But let's not get too excited:

Chris McKay of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, is a leading researcher on the possibility of life on Mars, and he, too, urges caution. "This is probably not as exciting as the internet rumors suggest," he says – as someone who is privy to what Curiosity has found.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22532-curiosity-result-could-confirm-mars-life-says-levin.html

Or may be Viking found it in 1976.

http://www.examiner.com/article/1976-life-on-mars-controversy-resurrected-new-scientific-report

A team of scientists and mathematicians analyzing data from the 1976 Viking Mission have concluded that life on Mars was detected in one of the four experiments conducted by the two robotic landers.

The abstract of the paper, published earlier this year:

Abstract : The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. In this experiment 14C radiolabeled nutrient was added to the Mars soil samples. Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release. The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases. We have applied complexity analysis to the Viking LR data. Measures of mathematical complexity permit deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs.negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder etc. We have employed seven complexity variables, all derived from LR data, to show that Viking LR active responses can be distinguished from controls via cluster analysis and other multivariate techniques. Furthermore, Martian LR active response data cluster with known biological time series while the control data cluster with purely physical measures. We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

http://ijass.org/PublishedPaper/topic_abstract.asp?idx=132

I don't expect we are going to have proof of life on Mars. What I can hope for with a reasonable expectation is that we will have a degree of confidence that life once existed on Mars, and a plausible story about how it exists even today. But that sort of informed speculation is a long way away (in distance and years) from proof.

Think about it, boys and girls. In our lifetimes we could see the sequencing of the human genome and the discovery of life on Mars. Wouldn't that be grand?

In closing, keep your hopes down:

http://www.space.com/18626-nasa-mars-rover-secret-discovery-speculation.html

Most scientists contacted by SPACE.com believe that Curiosity's SAM has detected organic chemical compounds. Still, some experts caution that the rover's finding may be overhyped.


"This is going to be a disappointment," said Chris McKay, a NASA space scientist at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "The press description of the


SAM results as 'earthshaking' is, in my view, an unfortunate exaggeration. We have not (yet) found anything in SAM that was not already known from previous missions: Phoenix and Viking."


But James Garvin, chief scientistat NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and a member of Curiosity's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) science team, had a different take.


"What John Grotzinger was saying as our very capable project scientist on MSL is exactly the case," Garvin said. "The analytical payload on MSL —in particular, SAM as a suite —has been making unprecedented measurements of solid material samples with incredible implications about Mars, but which require, as in all science, demonstration of reproducibility and adequacy of calibration/validation."

How Many Americans are Young Earth Creationists?

As near as I can tell (by reading the StraightDope website), Gallup polling from 1982 to 2006 puts 44% to 47% of Americans as Young Earth Creationists, the number that choose this answer to a question about human origins:

"God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

It's likely that this question inflates the number of people who would, in an essay, let's say (I'll make the joke about whether half of Americans know what one is or could write the essay, please, and we'll move on), describe human origins in this way. I'm not a pollster, but I think that is a leading question, and inflates the Young Earth respondents. Nevertheless, that's still a higher figure than I would have expected. I'd have thought that almost nobody outside of fundamentalist Christian denominations would answer that question that way, and that a good percentage of fundamentalists would answer it differently. I expected a figure of about ten percent, inflated by leading polling to perhaps twenty percent. It looks like I was wrong.

Do Creationists Make Good Science Teachers?

A recent conversation with friend Alex Bertland, a Philosophy prof at Niagara University, converged nicely with some surfing I was doing regarding young earth creationism. By chance, I found a doctoral dissertation by one David Van Dyke, which Google returned under the heading "Do Creationists make good science teachers?" Mr. Van Dyke performed his research at Andrews University, a Seventh-Day Adventist school in Michigan that I attended myself during my freshman year. Van Dyke, apparently not a Creationist, exchanged views with readers of Roger Ebert's review of the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," and as a result of the exchange, Ebert invited Van Dyke to introduce his dissertation on his blog site.

Van Dyke's result? Children taught Creationism turn into perfectly fine doctors, musicians, architects, and even teachers and scientists. They're wrong about origins, but so what? The encroachment of Creationism into public schools gives rise to vitriolic arguments about science and religion, and church and state. Questions of public schooling aside (if the local school board elects to teach Creationism, the effect that has on families who do not believe in Creationism), the teaching of Creationism to children simply isn't a big deal.

Footnote

I saw Footnote, written and directed by Joseph Cedar, yesterday at the discount theater here in Buffalo. It's well worth tracking down. 

In thirty years of disciplined study, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) demonstrated that there is a missing version of the Talmud from the Middle Ages. He proved that the old commentaries are based on an unknown version. As his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) states, probably only four or five people on earth understand his work. It is the height of philologic achievement. In the month before he publishes, another researcher stumbles upon this missing Talmud in an Italian library, and by the time Eliezer can publish, his story is old news.

Eliezer languishes in academic obscurity for another 20 years, at least. His son Uriel, meanwhile, becomes a famous professor, the author of popular books. Father and son have almost nothing to do with each other. They are two men locked in ego-bruising battles with each other, and with the world. Glimpses into their marriages show us that each is some piece of work. Eliezer is cold, perhaps mean, and Uriel could be called charming, but preening and needy might be more accurate.

Finally, and totally unexpectedly, Eliezer is recognized. Not just recognized: he is awarded the Israel Prize! At his moment of triumph after being ignored for so long, Eliezer is anything but magnanimous. Interviewed upon the news of his Prize, he seethes with resentment. He lectures. He is probably right. The academic world has abandoned the lonely pursuit of disciplines like philology for the rock star treatment it gets from writing books about the history of marital relations and other "folklore." Eliezer instructs: on one side is a man studying potsherds-- measuring them, cataloging them, dating them; on the other, a man who sees the potsherds are all roughly the same color, and declares them a pot. The reporter asks for clarification, and Eliezer says, to be perfectly clear, and to ensure his contempt is understood, "The pot is a fiction."

The cinematic technique is refreshing. The story revolves around two scholars, and the cut techniques mimic switching between images on microfilm on a library projector, and the film is divided into titled sections something like chapters. Minor details, but they contribute to the movie by marking it as a movie, rather than as a play. The plot is stagey, which can be a weakness in this type of story. Footnote benefits from these and other movie touches, like the soundtrack and certain closeups. The locations are also good, with outdoors shooting that always adds to the appeal of movies, but is often left out when sets alone will suffice.

Something happens. Uriel looks for his father. Eliezer is having a drink with a few of his closest friends, fellow denizens of the library, with such a look of pride that we can be sure he didn't intend to be seen by his son, with whom he certainly does not share such moments. The only hint I will give is that the characters stay true to themselves. I asked myself as I watched, what that would mean, and I found the movie's answering ending extraordinary. Footnote leaves us with some questions we answer for ourselves, including the best one, 'And then what happened?' There is a woman, for example, who is never identified. Yet we know who she is. The characters in Footnote are people-- as near as possible to living, breathing men and women. It gives us a plot involving complex motives and unexplained acts, and it leaves us to form our own opinions about the characters-- a seldom-used technique, you must admit. It starts with all of the conventions of a feel good father son reunion movie, and ends with something different, with a father and son who do not transform, as the convention demands, although something happens between them.

Hugo's History Lesson

I wasn't sure how well I'd like Hugo, Martin Scorsese's 3D film about a boy living in a Paris train station. Hugo is an orphan, and he lives alone in a workspace within the station, but so long as he keeps the clocks running, no one will check in on the clock man, and Hugo's secret is safe. Boy Hugo's story is maudlin. The real story in Hugo is movie history, which comes alive. This surprised me, because other than comedies, I find early movies farcically boring. But Scorsese mixes compelling story-telling techniques deftly into this two hour visual wonder.



Theme and foreshadowing are expertly woven into the story. The early Lumiere brothers' pioneering film of a train arriving at a station is retold, at first matter of factly: When audiences saw it, they ducked as the train moved toward them. Later, that audience experience is shown to us. Still later, a dream has a train arriving to a stop, coming in fast. One of the final scenes involves a train arrival. A famous photo is animated, of the Granville-Paris Express wreck of 1895. And finally, the story takes place in a train station, against a backdrop of clock works enormous and tiny, functional and whimsical.

There is a lot of nonsense in the film. Why can a child master of clocks and locks not start an automaton without a simple heart shaped key. Why is Melies depressed? (Wikipedia is more helpful in this regard than the film. It involves money and probably rivalry, hardly the avuncular image presented in Hugo.) How can a child live unobserved in a train station, with no one ever checking in on the clocks or the clock keeper?

Surprisingly, the film is not well acted. Asa Butterfield is totally unconvincing as Hugo. None of the leads are more than effective. I give Kingsley a pass, because with his simple expressions he gives life to an otherwise dull man. He doesn't have a lot to work with, plot-wise. Sacha Baron Cohen, as the station's police inspector, rescues what he can of the larger plot with some comedy. Hugo is a film about film, and one of the subtle and charming aspects of Cohen's performance is how his stern inspector tries to smile and become at ease, something early directors and actors had to learn.

Scorsese's triumph is not the story of Hugo, but that of filmmaking. The movie opens with a long tracking shot over Paris, zooming in on a Montparnasse-inspired station. The 3D effects give the scenes within the large clocks the clever wonder of a child's pop up book. The movie has almost an animated feel from the layers of detail. Later, those layers show up again, in Melies' studio, with sets brought into the new medium from stage shows. Melies was making movies in 1896. Birth of a Nation and The Tramp didn't come until 1915. Harold Lloyd started acting in movies in 1914; Buster Keaton in 1917. I've never experienced very early films with the same wonder I felt seeing them remade in Hugo.

A Trip to the Moon, by Melies, complete with spaceship landing in the eye of the man on the moon:

More on Yang

I found this wonderful blog post by Kevin Lee on Edward Yang, director of Yi Yi, who died in 2007 at the age of 59 after a long battle with colon cancer. (Photo of Yang below from JonathonRosenbaum.com.)

Yi Yi, written and directed by Edward Yang (2000).

“We live three times as long since man invented movies. We get twice in movies what we get from life.” --Fatty (Pang Chan Yu), in Yi Yi.

This is a movie to behold. It is a movie to look at. Should I judge it by its presumed aims, Yi Yi is a mixed success, but defining its aims is no sure thing. At just under three hours, it's too long, but it's too long in the way War & Peace is too long: you might not feel interested in everything being said to you as it veers away from the expected narrative, but you pay attention anyway, allowing the storyteller to meander, and it's worth your time to be pulled along in this way. What's deeply interesting is that something is happening within the characters, and you can see it on the screen.

It is shot with great care for how windows and doors frame the screen. Many movies show you spaces and places. This one shows them and frames them. People interact with one another from adjoining rooms. The main character, N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu), is taciturn. He lives in adjoining metaphorical space. Visually, he appears through a doorway or gazing out of a window. Constitutionally, he is inert. Private thoughts circulate beneath his visage on the screen, and in the silences within the dialog. He is eminently watchable, while he does nothing. His face is thoughtful and intelligent, but it offers few clues to what's inside. I found myself identifying with him, and rooting for him to make a great change, to break the bonds of his business and marriage. I was equally concerned with the wreck that could follow, because N.J.'s life feels more real than most movie lives, and bold changes in real life do some damage. Suffering awaits him no matter what he chooses. N.J. is on a knife's edge, as you sense while he watches his partners or his wife from a distance just far enough to be reserved, close enough to share intimate space, a small man, elegant in his slightly large suit.

One scene stood out to me. N.J.'s wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin) needs a break. She can't stand the banality of her daily existence. As she thinks this through, she stands in a darkened conference room, and we see her from the outside, through a window. The city is reflected in the window, divided into quadrants of activity, traffic in one, other offices in another. Behind her, colleagues cluster under florescent lights. The world buzzes around her in its normal courses while she stands in shadow and decides on a change. It's a wonderfully crafted take. Your eye travels everywhere over the screen, pulling in each of the scenes layered on top of one another through tricks of outside glass and a partially backlit room.

Another slow scene consists only of shots of the city from a moving train. Travelling, we take an interest in the non-travellers around us. We are transitioning through space. They belong here. They are doing something. Their lights are on. They are working, or watching television. They are with loved ones. As N.J. travels to his crisis, we watch the rest of the world doing their rest of the world thing. This is the conceit of movement and change: we imagine ourselves moving and changing while nothing else does. In the end, these characters change less than was hinted at, a serious flaw in fiction, but not necessarily in life.

This is one of my favorite photos of Ginger. The entire shot is her idea, except that I posed her in that spot.