Pretentious, Self-Righteous Essays

“There are two women in Bingham’s life. Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) is also a road warrior, and for some time they’ve been meeting in dreary “Suite” hotels in East Moses, Nowhere — having meals, making love, play-acting at being the happy couple neither one will commit to. Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) is a bright, ambitious new graduate who has taken a job with Bingham’s company because it’s near her boyfriend. Bingham takes her on the road to teach her the ropes. Alex is him now, Natalie is him then.”

This being the case, then there were some great conversations that he had with himself.  Like when he and Alex were consoling Natalie after she had been dumped in a text message.  Natalie enumerated each item on her long list of all of the qualities that her dream man would have, and Alex followed up with her list: a nondescript gentleman who had no particular features besides having a good family and a nice smile.  She said that at her age, that’s what really mattered.  Natalie expressed her disapproval, and Alex replied with “Don’t worry, by the time someone is right for you, it won’t feel like settling… And the only person left to judge you will be the twenty four year old girl with a target on your back.”

These words made the conversations between Natalie, Ryan, and Alex throughout the rest of the movie very telling.

In a cardboard-cutout picture-taking session by the dock with Ryan, Natalie refers to Alex as “the only person to have survived his gauntlet and come out smiling”.  And then after Ryan discovers Alex’ “real life”, she asks him what he wanted.

What did Ryan want, or even think he wanted? He loved his life.  He was married to his job.  And there’s irony in the fact that the only person who could make him believe that he wanted a normal domesticated life was someone just like himself: someone whose heart was elsewhere.

Insightful movie.  Depressing, but insightful.  I loved it.

I feel I should preface each of my movie comments with a note that it will be just that – a comment – and not a review.  My aim is to remember what I think of the dozens of movies that I watch.

Anyway, I enjoyed watching this movie.  There’s really only one thing [sadly] that I’d want to remember about it years from now: Holmes’ plans of attack.  He provided an explanation for each hit, block, and even cited the recovery period.  It prevented each fight scene from becoming a mess of action that was difficult to follow.

Nothing still quite comes close to Pandora.  I still remember the day I tried to login, and all I got was a message saying that it was no longer available to non-U.S. residents.  Anyway, there have been others, such as Grooveshark, but none of them are able to recommend artists and songs based on more than just genre.  Pandora looked at vocal styles, lyrical content, instrumentation… Every recommendation was surprisingly good.  (The key word here is “surprising”.)

Anyway, Youtube has just launched “Disco”.  It doesn’t quite list all of musical elements of each song the way Pandora did, but it does let you do things that others didn’t:

1. Watch the music videos.

2. Replay any song any number of times, as desired.

For these two reasons alone, so far, it wins.

To quote myself, as I am wont to do, stories can be epic or empty depending on how they are told. So, as much I wanted to start this post with the following question, I couldn’t because I already knew my answer:

I don’t know what made this movie so bad: the incompetency that led to the failed coup or the movie itself.

I am presuming, of course, that the events *could* have been painted in a different light.  I’m not saying I’m blind to the message that they were trying to send (i.e. that there was integrity in the effort).  I just think that the poor decisions leading to the failure of the plan could have been made to feel less reflective of their folly.  I feel like the movie made the conspirators look like idiots trying to execute a plan that was way over their heads.  Was that necessary?  I don’t think so.

I still remember first hearing Wavin’ Flag on CHUM FM last fall, falling in love with it as it played, and dying to hear the artist’s name at the end so I could look him up.  It was certainly not a voice I had ever heard before.  I guess they announced it before the song and I missed it because I distinctly remember having to go to CHUM FM’s website to get the song info.

Anyway, much reading and listening later, I now dub him as one of my favourites.  Rolling Stone describes him as someone who thinks like Bob Marley, flows like Eminem and mixes African music with conscious hip-hop, unabashed pop and even metal.

The insight into the culture that he grew up in, the catchy hooks, and his vocal style – for me – are what sets him apart from the rest.

Current favourite songs off his Troubadour include:

If Rap Gets Jealous

People Like Me

Take a Minute

and

Wavin’ Flag

Please join me in praising him.

Michael Cera steps outside the box with alter ego Francois Dillinger, whose blue eyes, scruffy face, and stylish apparel make him actually seem like a different person.

Dialog-wise, this movie was filled with tons of little gems.  But what else can be expected of a movie that gives 16-year-olds the ability to articulate like an English major in his/her senior year?  It was reminiscent of Dawson’s Creek, but so much better because their aim was to be funny, and not serious.

I think what I liked best about this movie was its commentary on the portrayal of love in the movies.  Michael Cera had a line in the beginning that went something like In the movies, the nice guys get the girl, but in real life it’s usually the prick. I felt like this was to foreshadow the end that I didn’t expect: that the girl of his dreams would still want him after all of his deviousness and scheming.  Sadly, this is a more accurate depiction of real life women and their emotions than what I expected.  i.e. that she’d stand up for herself and ‘what’s right’, and vow to never speak to him again.  Sigh.

As put by Ebert, “at the end [he] throws in several WTF! Moments, which are a bonus. They make everything in the entire movie impossible and incomprehensible — but, hey, WTF.” Was it pro-Christianity?  pro-atheism?  pro-faith-based religions?  None of the above?  Was Eli’s trek “miraculous”?  Was it just luck?  These are the fun questions you ask when you walk away from this movie.  In spite of Carnegie’s dialog and the final scene with all of the sacred religious texts, I say it was pro-Christianity (and not even just pro-faith-based-religions, in general), but what do I know?

“Eli has been walking west across the devastated landscape of America for 30 years, on his way to the sea. I haven’t walked it myself, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take that long.”

This was lost on me, but apparently noticeable to many others.

“a catastrophe has wiped out most of the Earth’s population and left ruin and desolation behind, the remaining humans are victimized by roaming motorcycle gangs of hijackers and thieves.”

I appreciated that they didn’t actually elaborate on the destruction caused by the catastrophe (which was referred to as “The Flash”).  They left it to the audience’s imagination to explain the inconsistencies in the post-”Flash” world.

My thoughts:

1.  I want the soundtrack.  It was awesome.

2.  A lot of Solara’s dialog and action was unnecessary and took away from the film.  At the end, when she said that she was headed home, I turned and looked at my date and said “I give her a day.”

3.  I’ve never seen Denzel be so bad-ass.  I loved it.

4.  So much was cliche, but humourous because of it.

5.  When the Alcatraz printing press started pushing out copies of The King James’ Bible, all I could think about were Dawkins’ Memes, the analogy to a virus that was almost extinct, and how close they were to a world without it.  (So close,  so close.)

Marie Boas Hall’s The Scientific Renaissance 1450-1630 is one volume of the series entitled The Rise of Modern Science.  This book serves as an excellent book of reference for this period, tying the scientific activities during this time together with a theme – “First came uncritical acceptance of new or at least unhackneyed texts; then critical appraisal; finally emancipation and originality.”[1] Boas exploits this recurrent theme as it appeared with the dawn of the humanist movement to the trials against Galileo in 1633.  Humanism plays an integral part of her argument, and she has defined it as such:

“The term humanism is ambiguous; it meant in its own day both a concern with the classics of antiquity and a preoccupation with man in relation to human society rather than to God.”[2]

Her examination takes us thoroughly through the effects on science of the humanist movement as it was paradoxically pitted against the desire for novelty, the rejection of Medieval Scholasticism, the dismissal of the mystical/occult within scientific practice, and the attack on the Ancients which set the stage for genuine novelty.  Most importantly, she discusses the then-current state and development of the numerous sciences – old and new – within this framework, the printing press as a means of dispersion of ideas and record of popularity, the trend towards the mathematization of the sciences, and the elevation of status of the sciences within academia.

M. Boas attacks the subject matter with impartiality, and has strived and succeeded in ascertaining that there exists such a connection among scientific practices, illustrating these trends as they affected particular sciences throughout this period.  She did this by taking us through the older sciences of astronomy, medicine, and navigation, and newer sciences such as chemistry.  By “older”, she determines the science as having (1) a place in academia from the Middle Ages, and (2) Ancient counterparts.  By “newer”, she describes sciences that didn’t have such historical counterparts.  She illustrates, in the case of astronomy, the prevailing medieval conception as that which was put forward by Ptolemy, with reference to what was being taught in schools at this time.  The humanist-scientist, in this case Copernicus, who found fault with this model after having looked at the basis of Eudoxos’ model, considered Plato’s perfection of the celestial realm, and looking at the teachings of the Pythagoreans was illustrated with reference to his own texts.  Similarly, she describes Copernicus’ neo-Pythagorean model, and discusses the design inherent in his work as proof of his desire to exceed the work of Ptolemy’s.  She discussed the controversy that lent itself to the contradictory notion of searching for new ideas in ancient texts – a theme that she drew from each of the sciences.  She discussed the rebellion on formerly held hypotheses (such as the notion of circular orbits), and how this paved the way to a genuinely novel cosmology culminating in the work of Kepler and Galileo.  Finally, she represented the dispersion of knowledge by describing the move away from Latin texts towards texts in the vernacular, and by describing the statistics in publications (i.e. that the number of books published on this subject grew increasingly).  She went on to examine each of the sciences in a similar fashion.

As regards the mathematization of the sciences, Boas uses the spread of mathematics and mathematical tools as proof.  She could have drawn stronger emphasis on the growing interest in making each of the sciences into ‘exact sciences’.  Boas alludes to this with references to the introduction of “error” in measurement by Tycho Brahe, as well as with the quantization of forces in Galileo’s 2 New Sciences.  Instead, she points to the development of technologies in navigation, and geometrical application in the arts as support for the spread of mathematics.  She does refer to the appearance of Chairs in Mathematics popping up in small and large universities, but this served also as proof of the status and elevation of sciences and rationalism within the learned world during this period, as they grew increasingly separate from pure philosophy.

Regarding recurrent themes in the sciences during this time, there was a general trend towards the mechanical philosophy which was not fully exploited in this book.  The chapter entitled Circles Appear on Physiology touched on this subject.  However, Boas focused more on how this trend in physiology fit into her representation of science at this time, and discussed only the significance of the introduction of circles to physiology as another symbol of the primacy of circles and the heart as taken from Ancient science.  Thus, she utilizes the circles that appear in physiology solely as support for the humanist movement and its effects on the sciences.  The mechanization of nature would have been an interesting theme to have interwoven.

This was an excellent book.  Boas presented an unbiased representation of the sciences from the Renaissance period, and did well to unify a vast range of material that ranged from sources and development of ideas, to descriptions of the intellectual back-drop within which these scientific ideas were cultivated, including even succinct biographies on each writer whom she referenced.  She took the time to address issues as they arose, and explained thoroughly her reasons for making any assumptions.  One example of this is in her decision to focus solely on European science when discussing scientific practice during the Renaissance.  She utilized a wide variety of sources appropriately, including original publications texts to ascertain the opinions, ideas and motives of the writers, statistics on publications to illustrate the popularity and spread of opinions, quotations from popular literature of the times indicating the attitude towards the developments in science that were taking place by the public without taking any wildly bold and unfounded steps.

Bibliography

Boas Hull, Marie, The Scientific Renaissance 1450-1630, New York, 1962.

[2] Ibid., p.18