Why Dont You Blog?

Now if it had been a Christian, I could understand it. Some seem very unwilling to learn about anything which happened before their Saviour came to Earth and to them the Old Testament is a bit harsh and cruel. Oddly this is a Rabbi showing little real understanding of historical events. On MSNBC there is an article by Rabbi Marc Gellman (hat tip - Pharyngula) titled “In God’s Image” with a tagline of “The death of Captain America and the movie ‘300’ raise questions about the duty of the truly religious to protect freedom—even with their lives.“

Blimey. Talk about reaching out for straws…

After an intro about the enlightenment and the problems with fascism, communism and jihadism, the Rabbi writes:

This same conflict lies behind the comic-book death of Captain America and the cinematic death of Leonides in the movie “300.” The Spartan Greeks, led by Leonides, could have chosen to live under the rule of Xerxes and the Persian Empire. They could have traded their imperiled freedom for a secure life of slavery. The choice of Leonides and the 300 Spartans to die in a doomed but heroic battle is the clear choice of those who believe that nothing—no faith, no material wealth, nothing—justifies the surrender of freedom to tyranny.

Strangely, I agree with his last sentence. Nothing, especially no faith, justifies the surrender of freedom to tyranny. I suspect the Rabbi and I have a different idea of how that is interpreted in the real world though but that is a whole different matter…

Often ignored is that, in addition to the 300 Spartans (Leonidas’ royal guards) there were 700 Thespians (from Thespiae) at the final battle. I am sure, as they were largely a “subject” city at the time, their freedom didn’t matter much though… Further on, the article continues:

Neither Leonides nor Captain America were religious, but both of them stood for that part of the religious world that believes in a God who fights for freedom.

Wow. While I can not comment on Captain America (he is a comic book character and not a real person!), I think it is reasonable to assume Leonidas was a very religious person. Maybe the fact it wasn’t Judeo-Christianity so it doesn’t count? Spartans always sought guidance from their Gods before pretty much anything (sports, war, trade etc) and part of the problem at Thermopylae was “ill omens” from the High Priests. However the nonsense, continues:

They both stood for the proposition that freedom is the foundation of all meaningful life. Religiously speaking, this is the belief that God gave freedom to all people made in His image, and that those who oppose freedom must be prepared to fight God.

Wow (again). The Spartans (remember Captain America is not real) were certainly NOT supporters of freedom - even by their contemporary standards. They were a military dictatorship in almost every sense. All citizens were geared for war and this was built on a bedrock of slave labour. Even the other Greek states (with their own slaves) thought the Spartans were oppressive. One of the reasons the Persian kept attacking Greece was the poor Greeks spent most of their time trying to stop the Spartans enslaving them.

The piece closes with:

Embracing the need to spiritually justify the fight for world freedom carries its own perils. Chief among these dangers is what we now see in the world of Islamic fascism: the use of religion to extol death and tyranny. The biblical name for this is idolatry, and the seductions of idolatry are hard for some to resist. In the end, though, the spiritual truth of freedom’s cause is eventually clear to all.

Leonides and Captain America were heroes not because they entered the field of battle with a shield of Vibranium or were in possession of abs of steel, but because they entered battle with a spiritually authentic idea: that God is free and we are made in God’s image to be free as well. We were not placed on planet earth to avoid death. We were placed here so that we could avoid surrendering our God-given freedom to tyrants.

Well again we hit an little dichotomy. Generally when people say things like “it is clear to all” or “every one can see” and my favourite “it is obvious”, the point being made is nonsense. Here, I think this is still valid. While I strongly agree the we should never surrender our Freedom to Tyrants (nothing to do with who gave us our freedom - that in itself implies tyranny but this is a whole new post..), I think the rest of it is nonsense. Leonidas was not a hero, and Captain America is not a real person so cant really be heroic.

The tyranny of religion is not limited to Islamic fascism - although that is the most overt form. Read the blogosphere about how gay people should be punished for an example of how otherwise moderate people are happy to subject others to religious tyranny. But I suppose that is ok though, cos it is a “good” religion…

(p.s. It is interesting how many sites / blogs (rightwingers) seem to see Thermopylae as a parallel to the west vs Iran/Iraq type thing. Dangerous comparison to be making… Why do the religious RIGHT get so confused when it comes to the media - remember March of the Penguins? Can’t they just accept a film is a film. It is there for entertainment. Study the reality if you want to draw cultural parallels…)

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

The 300 is visually stunning and more than well worth watching.

I’ve got that out of the way. Now I’ll make a few random points, some of which conspired to distract me:

• McNulty from the Wire is in it. I read in the Guardian on Saturday that he’s really English, otherwise this would have been even more of a shock.
  I’ve always thought he was the worst actor in the Wire. Now I can see he was labouring under the impediment of having to produce a Baltimore Irish accent, so I ve got more respect for his Wire performance. However, this doesn’t spill over to seeing him as a Spartan, so it’s hard not to keep expecting his chubbier well-dressed partner from Series one to pop up.
• Similarly, the actor whose name I have no idea of but who so exemplifies the dorkish English lad in Mike Leigh movies that he’s in a good few is in there as well. Bringing to mind a few Mike Leigh movies.
• The abs are uniformly amazing. OK, all the actors (male or female, leads or extras) are uniformly so perfectly muscled that I began to look for evidence of them wearing muscle suits. Then i realised that maybe they were digitally enhanced…. (well, d’uh)
  Cos I can’t conceive of any other form of enhancement that would achieve this level of perfection.
  I am pretty sure I saw McNulty with his shirt off in the Wire at some point and I don’t remember him having a chest that knocked your eyes out. (Human superficiality being so deep in me, I would probably have given more mental leeway to his acting shortcomings.) Has the new James Bond raised the bar so high? These people are physically utterly stunning.
• I hope nobody does a Braveheart on this and takes it as a true version of history, despite it starting off as a comic.. The Spartans were bastards. Their whole society was so ultra-fascist that a fascist would have cavilled at it.
• It’s filled with extreme comic-book violence, so stylised it looks pretty. The graphics are truly superb. The film uses the washed-out-with-one-dominant colour style - which is red in battles, unsurprisingly - pretty well throughout, I reallly like that. (If you are already bored with that style, then you may get rather annoyed. )
• It has war elephants. They are great
• It has mass battle scenes, mass court scenes, They are all great
  The music is great. - Think Black Hawk Down meets that bit in the Fifth Elemnent with the opera singer. Well, without the opera singing, then but you subliminally hear it. Bah, I guess that’s just me then
• The characters are coompletely and utterly unengaging. These are comic book characters of course, so you can’t expect any different. I’m not saying it’s a fault, it isn’t. I’m just saying.
• I couldn’t tell one superbly muscled actor from another - unless I recognised them from an old Mike Leigh film or the Wire - so I wasn’t always sure who was saying what to whom or why. Unfortuantely, I am very often incommoded in movie-watching by not being able to tell the actors apart, or follow the plots, so this is no insult to the movie either. Though, in theory knowing something of the tale, as most of us do, I should have made a better stab at understanding it
• Obviously Film Studies 101 would suggest that Xerxes represents Bin Laden, and so on. (OK, he’s not Iranian, but the Persians in the movie aren’t very convincing Iranians. And how many people can tell the difference between Iran and any other middle-eastern country?) I suspect this is a spurious argument. I mean, what sane person would want to identify their country with Sparta?
• Lastly, does there always have to be an evil woman to blame for everything? In Sparta, ffs? Sparta-wise, any woman would seem to have been really lucky to have avoided being left on the hillside to die for being a girl.

Oh blimey, these impressions are totally half-arsed.

Sorry, I’ve only watched it once and lost the thread a bit.

I’ll watch it again in a few days and you might get a coherent blog. (What are the odds of that, you say? Alright, slim.) It really is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen.
Go to see it, if you can.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

The good (in an odd way) funny Korean monster movie, “The Host,” sparked this post. The villains in this movie are all Americans. (I did say it was Korean, didn’t I?)

It’s certainly not a political movie, but it has an occasional wry political subtext. Part of which is that the villains - the pathologist who dumps the chemicals that create the monster; the doctor who lobotomises the ineffectual and narcoleptic hero Gang-du; and the military team who dump “Agent Yellow” on the monster and on the demonstrating students - are all Americans.

You don’t need a degree in Media Studies to work out that there’s something being communicated here.
Obviously, the Koreans have a long history of US involvement that’s left at best some ambivalence. You might expect them to cast American actors as villains. But it got me wondering why the villains in US TV and movies are always English men. It may be that the US public expects the Queen’s redcoats to turn up at any moment and demand all that unpaid tea tax plus interest. (After all, they have laws allowing each citizen the right to bear arms, on the off-chance that the UK will suddenly remember it used to be our most lucrative colony.)

Far from posing a threat, England has been uniquely co-operative - some would say slavish at points - to the US for well over 200 years. So why do they hate us so much that any male actor with an RSC-style delivery will never be out of work if he moves across the Atlantic? There is such a thing as bearing a grudge too long, surely.

Ah ha! They don’t hate us. They hate Europe. And we’re the only Europeans who speak a language they can understand.

Europe is big. It’s rich. If it stopped its internal squabbling long enough to look out for its continental interests, it would be the global superpower. Obviously, the European continent is, and has always been, a squabbling mass of tribes. We hate each other much more than the Americans hate us and we’ve had LOADS of practice.

Europe doesn’t act as a global ruler, so other countries don’t hate us much any more. In fact, we can project a sort of cuddly moral high ground image as the continent that has the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross and the International war crimes courts.
Other continents usually don’t speak English and would provide villains that might really feed on the anger of Americans. If every villain were Chinese or African or South American or Indian, there would be some reasonable questions raised about stirring up a nationalist frenzy. Europeans are OK because they aren’t going to war with us any time in the foreseeable future. That was “with” as in “against,” of course.

Aside: Why use British actors, at all? We all know that the average American 10- year-old can out act almost any British Shakespearean actor. In fact, our current TV and movie productions are generally so teeth-grindingly poor that we couldn’t compete against an evening’s HBO schedule with the best from a year’s worth of UK output. (You may be arguing “What about Mike Leigh or Ken Loach or the Office or whoever?” I said “generally.” ) Our films are so bad that we even infected Samuel L Jackson. He usually has the capacity to make even movie excreta watchable (e.g The Man) Put him and Robbie Carlyle (also a pretty good actor) together in a British movie and you have The 51st State. Need I say more? (OK, if I must then, Brad Pitt in some execrable London gangster movie where he was a gypsy bare-knuckle fighter) Point taken, I think.
Why do they hate us and yet let us humiliate their best actors? That will have to be another blog.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

Well, as my recent interest in digital photography has taken off lately I have found myself reading some of the “idiots” guides available on the net.

While, generally, these have been helpful - before reading them I had no idea what the different f-stop values meant and the like - there are some odd misconceptions being bandied around.

I really get the feeling that these books are written by people who are actually wetfilm enthusiasts but are trying to convert themselves at the same time.

The main thing which interests me are when they have a list of “pros and cons” comparing digital with wetfilm. l love these! You almost always see some reasonable examples mixed in with what is (in my opinion of course) the nonsense.

Things like being able to take a bazillion photographs (effectively unlimited storage, you can just copy them off whatever memory card you are using and use it again) are a massive pro on digital cameras. Compare the utility of going out for the day with a roll of 36 exposure film compared to a 1Gb SD-Ram card!

Also, with digital cameras you get the chance to review your photos there and then. So when you take that memorable photograph you don’t have to wait until you get home to realise you had your thumb half over the lens and the image is lost for ever - you can check and reshoot as often as you want.

The pro of digital cameras which really gets me is the storage. Often books and articles will be filled with the benefits of using digital media to store pictures. They will go on about how the picture will never fade, you can make unlimited copies and all will be identical and how the digital copy will remain intact, with no loss of quality for ever.

This is nonsense. While it may well be technically true, it hides an underlying falsehood. In work, on the wall, is a picture taken in 1898. This picture is 108 years old. It is black and white, and a bit faded around the edges but I can look at it. Anyone who walks past it can look at it. I could copy it if I wanted, although the bright light may further degrade it. This is the wonder of wetfilm pictures.

Now take a digital picture. Imagine for the sake of argument I had a digital picture that was a mere ten years old (one tenth of the age of the photo on the wall). It is in the JPEG format which is good because we can still read JPGs but it was archived onto a 5.25″ floppy disk. Well that’s that then. I have nothing which can extract data from a floppy disk like that any more. No one I know has anything which will do it. I could take it to a specialist retailer and have it done for me - but what specialist equipment is needed to look at the hundred year old photograph.

Now moving close to the modern day, I have a digital picture which is only three years old. It is JPEG, which is good but for archiving purposes it (and some others) were zipped onto five floppy disks. Again this is a big problem for me as my PC has no floppy drive. My laptop doesn’t either - and my mobile phone certainly doesn’t. Once more I have no method of accessing this image - which is only one twentieth of the age of the one at work, without purchasing more, specialised, equipment.

This problem continues on many levels. For example, JPEG photographs are a “lossy” format so some picture quality is lost no matter how hard you try. As a result of this, some camera manufacturers allow you to take RAW pictures, but this adds a new problem. You then need specialist software to view the pictures (and convert them to JPG etc), which kind of defeats the point. Also, not all camera manufacturers have compatible RAW formats so there is little reason to be confident that the RAW data you have today will be viewable next week.

In addition to this, online storage services aren’t much better. You may think uploading all your date to Flickr/Google/Whoever is great and solves all your backup issues but it doesn’t. What happens if you lose your account details? What happens if your host decides to charge (or charge more) for its services? What happens if they fold and get rid of all the data? However you look at it, its gone.

In all, while there is good reason to think digital has advantages - I am not convinced long term storage is really one of them.

(note: The pictures here are just nice ones I found on Flickr - I did not take them myself)

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Popularity: 18% [?]