ToxicVirus

Having seen the new Batman movie I feel compelled to offer my own less-than-stellar comments against the flood of glowing reviews on teh interwebs.

SPOILER ALERT:  Actually, I don’t think there are any specific spoilers here, but, you’ve been warned anyway.

This was a fairly good movie.  Not great, just good.  And by good, I mean it was worth about half the price of a 10 dollar ticket and I’d give it a 6 out of 10 on IMDB.com, where the movie currently ranks the highest ever.  As of this writing, it’s #1 on the IMDB’s top 250, scoring a 9.6 out of 10 with 70,000 votes.  That means that the people who vote on IMDB ranked this movie higher than The Godfather Part II, Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, or, well, anything else.  Why? I have no idea.  My guess would be the average IMDB voter hasn’t seen that many movies.

I was really looking forward to Dark Knight, along with everyone else, but having seen it I can only say that the only two things I liked about the movie were that they spent a lot of money making it, a Batman movie, and I like Batman- and Heath Ledger did an interesting Joker.  As for what I didn’t like, or just didn’t feel lived up to expectations (as if anything could):

1.) Gotham City didn’t look, act, or feel like Gotham City.   It didn’t even look like the Gotham City of the first film.  Batman Begins really gave Gotham its proper due, with its monolithic art deco buildings and 1930’s agitprop feel.  Dark Knight’s Gotham looked like generic big-budget movie city #5.  And its citizens, it turns out, hardly need a Dark Knight (or a Harvey Dent).

2.) It wasn’t really that dark.  No more so than the average action movie, anyhow.  How dark can it be with a PG-13 rating?  Today’s audiences are fed candy as Hollywood fears to make R rated movies anymore.  Tim Burton’s Batman had the guts to pioneer a new “12″ rating in the UK- this Batman played it strictly safe.  Not that ratings necessarily judge a movie’s “darkness,” but I’m not sure where I was supposed to look for the psychological upset I was led to expect from this film.  Was it from Bale’s amplified growling voice when he dons the Batman mask?

I couldn’t help but feel that Batman was becoming James Bond.  Gone is the World’s Greatest Detective, a self-made brooder with a dark side terminally infecting his playboy persona.  In its place is a billion-dollar technological arsenal and support staff fronted by an unflappable Bruce Wayne whose only nod to the Batman is donning a mask, speaking in a menacing growl, and occasionally being rude to his guests.

I think the problem is that the movie tried to provide a more realistic and less comic-book rendering of its characters, but couldn’t escape the fact that it was still a summer popcorn comic-book blockbuster.  Batman Begins did an excellent job of “humanizing” the Batman, IMO.  In this movie, Batman was about as human as cardboard and all the efforts at humanizing the characters apparently went into the villains.

Ledger’s Joker had his moments although for what it may be worth I didn’t feel it was the Oscar material the newsfeeds are buzzing about.  It seems to me that his Joker- or at least, the movie’s Joker, since I do not know how much of this is Nolan’s conception- tries to both personify the “wild card” symbol of his name while humanizing that symbol.  As someone with a high tolerance for abstraction in the cinema (and comicbooks), this dual-effort seemed to me to contradict itself at times, supplying an implicitly mundane human backstory to the villain while explicitly “telling” (rather than showing) the audience that this is “The Joker” - The Wildcard, The Senseless Criminal, etc.  While this type of juxtaposition might work, in this particular instance it seemed as though the very elements Nolan chose to de-emphasize as unnessecary backstory were the same sorts of elements which worked so well at humanizing (and making more realistic) the Batman in Batman Begins.  Perhaps Ledger’s genius lay in doing such a good job at intimating the Joker’s “humanity” in spite of this.

With Harvey Dent, we are presumably supposed to be disturbed by his moral decline, but this seemed rendered moot by the apparent moral superiority displayed by Gotham’s citizenry at the end of the movie… in itself deserving of a WTF?

The people clearly don’t need Dent as a shining beacon and Batman and Gordon may as well pack up and go home in this new City of Light that is Gotham.  In Burton’s Gotham the citizens scrambled over each other to pick up the Joker’s dollar bills.  In the Dark Knight, the Joker doesn’t need dollar bills (as he makes abundantly clear) and they probably wouldn’t do him any good anyhow.  Instead of a criminal mastermind, the Clown Prince of Crime, he is the next step in the evolution of Gotham’s criminal psyche, a surfer on a wave of sociological turmoil.   His henchmen are motivated not by money or fear or greed but by a primal awe and respect.  Yet his progression is not linear, he is not merely the most evolved of the criminals, nor merely a psychopath, but a psychopath and criminal, combining to form something new to both these classes, presumably, in Gotham.  Which sort of negates the premise of a city which required a Dark Knight to begin with, one which prior to the Joker contained moral citizens and orderly, predictable criminals.

Nolan seems to have separated Gotham from context in his Batman universe, to the point where, in the Dark Knight, Gotham itself is thrown away, ignored like a piece of ligament cut from meat.   This is a character-driven Batman world with no room, it seems, for the atmosphere so richly captured by recent previous incarnations. The main characters arise in a generic every-city which provides nothing unavailable outside the Gotham of legend, and the viewer can only identify the characters inasmuch as they reflect off of each other.

Whether this “works” is up to the viewer, but personally, again, I like a bit of symbolism (that’s why I like Batman) and I have no problems seeing the old-school Gotham City as a close reflection of the world I live in- and as a result kind of miss the atmosphere evoked in previous movies by its Gothamized depiction.  (Maybe it helps I live in NYC.  One can’t help but feel that this movie may have been an attempt in some ways to “globalize” the franchise…)

I suppose what I would have liked to have seen, if we’re making a truly “dark,” “human” Batman is a Gotham more closely resembling Frank Miller’s comic book Dark Knight version- after all, like the darker Batman in the Miller version, in Nolan’s Dark Knight Batman “sees what he must become” and even uses guns with little second thought, so we’ve got the character already… and yet Nolan places him in a world which resembles neither Gotham past or future, but a bland version of the exotic locales and corporate big city vistas of any Tomb Raider, James Bond, or Jason Bourne flick (or at best, something out of Heat or Dog Day Afternoon).  Instead of seeing the Batman’s character “darken,” we are presented with politically timestamped allegory- the helpless citizens of Gotham are saved from a new and senseless enemy by the operator of the worlds largest wiretapping system.

And (because it bears repeating), the inhabitants of this Nolan-world don’t seem to provide much contrast for the likes of Commissioner Gordon.  We don’t have to squint to see their value, their innate goodness, their deserving of a hero, the one or two good men in a sea of evil and apathy, because it’s made plain for us to see with the happy Rachel Dawes, the noble (initially) Harvey Dent, Batman’s coterie of helpers, and of course, the final “social experiment.

To make the Dark Knight dark, more is required than just brightening his surroundings.  Batman should cloak himself in the darkness so deeply he terrifies everything else in it, yet here he is surrounded by the good and virtuous at all turns. His world should reflect our own as through a mirror, darkly… but what we have here is, in some ways, a more sappy reflection of our own world than those in the Golden Age comics.   Hope as a motif for a Batman movie just doesn’t feel right.

On the other hand, chaos versus order is good and fitting stuff for the Dark Knight.  I feel I need to re-view the movie, solely to further examine Ledger’s Joker.  I may be missing something, confusing a contradiction with a contrast or not getting the “point” (or rather, pointlessness) of his crimes…. This is definitely to Ledger’s credit, that his character was so complex, and his performance was the hilight of the film.  But its also because I grew pretty bored of the confusing and lacklustre action sequences which took up so much space between Joker appearances and as a result wasn’t paying as close attention as I should have been each time there was some Joker or Joker-related dialogue.

So, perhaps some of Ledger’s moments aside, there was only one really, truly dark thing about the film and that was the cinematography, which made fight scenes look blurry and hard to follow, and seemed like a cheap way of “rectifying” problem number 1, above, by providing some kind of presumably “gothic” look to the city (at least during night-time.)

All in all, 2 hours of generic action fare which failed to live up to either the movie’s hype or its predecessor, interspersed with about half an hour’s worth of a decent and worthy performance by one actor.

And also, the Watchmen preview.

Above, you can see a very well appointed containment device for a mere seeding of the carnivorus muscipula - a carnivorous plant that in its immature form can subsist on soil nutrients.  With a near-vacuum created within the system, and a self-contained nutrient cycle, the sample could be assured of many years of study and conversation topic star status.  This particular containment device comes with illustrations and notes about the plant, and some wag has decided to nickname this specimen “Chompy”.

Brass Goggles - Victorian Exobotanical Containment Device 

For the dopest techno-industrial beats, ToxicVirus recommends Graver Live.

Tune in direct.

Garfield is actually funnier without Garfield… this may come as little surprise, but I didn’t realize just how side-splittingly funny it could be. Click the strip below to go to “Garfield minus Garfield,” and enjoy some hilarity…

Alejandro Jodorowsky conceptualizing on Dune…

“I do not want that the man conquers space
In the ships of NASA
These concentration camps of the spirit
These gigantic freezers vomiting the imperialism
These slaughters of plundering and plunder
This arrogance of bronze and thirst
This eunuchoid science
Not the dribble of transistorised and riveted hulks
The divine one
The delirious one
The superb one
CHAOS
UNIVERSAL
I want magical entities, vibrating vehicles
To prolong to be to it abyss
Like fish of a timeless ocean. I want
Jewels, mechanics as perfect as the heart
Womb-ships anterooms
Rebirth into other dimensions
I want whore-ships driven
By the sperm of passionate ejaculations
In an engine of flesh
I want rockets complex and secret,
Humming-bird ornithopters,
Sipping the thousand-year-old nectar of dwarf stars… “

OK, I’m sick of the word “whore” being used in non-poets’ poetical waxings too, but this isn’t really poetry, you see, so it’s forgivable. Also, it does kind of work here, conveying the viscerality of… etc etc. It’s just a pretty cool riff of a concept pitch, so it can be forgiven for sounding like something taken from the pages of Heavy Metal. Also, it was taken from the article “Dune: The Film You Will Never See,”by Jodorowsky himself, from the pages of Heavy Metal. It details his unmade Dune film for which much conceptual work was completed. Artists H.R. Giger, Chris Foss and Moebius were lined up to work on this unrealized production and most amazingly (for me): Pink Floyd had actually agreed to score the entire film. How cool would that have been?  But wait, there’s more-

Salvador Dali agreed (and was contracted) to perform in the movie as the Emperor, something he only agreed to so long as he was paid 100,000USD per hour (in 1970’s money) and could be seen urinating and defecating on screen. Dan O’Bannon, eventual screenwriter of Alien, was institutionalized for a time following and resulting from his work on the Jodorowsky Dune. Orson Welles was even rumoured to play the role of the Baron Harkonnen.

Ah well. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics there is a library in the realm of dreams which contains all the works of art never actually written. I suppose this would make a worthy addition to such a place. And the David Lynch/”Alan Smithee” version was pretty freakin’ awesome as it was, so one can’t complain too much.

Here’s a poster of what never was:

I’m the most useless personality type ever. I have big dreams but am hated by employers everywhere. (Koji Kabuto is not my real name.)

I came across a post from the Federation of American Scientist’s Strategic Security Blog on the recent US ASAT test announcement which shows some independent thought on the issue (for a change). Nothing earthshatteringly insightful, but just something that sums up my own thoughts on the issue.

This test is clearly, IMO, a response a to China’s recent ASAT test and an excuse to test US anti-satellite weaponry- but the media fawns over the supposed concern of the pentagon to prevent a 40 square inch tank of what is essentially no more toxic than ordinary gasoline from covering a small patch of ground. Not likely. (One ESA analyst has even noted that the presence of the larger-than-normal quantity of hydrazine if anything makes it more likely that the satellite would burn up harmlessly on reentry.)

At a secondary level we get a lot of bloggers suggesting that some sort of classified material is due to be destroyed. I have my doubts about this explanation also. Spy satellites almost by definition contain classified material of the highest order, and there are a lot of spy satellites in orbit. The standard for preventing them from falling into unfriendly hands has long been to let them burn-up on reentry (with a few exceptions where shuttle crews would manually retrieve them). All of a sudden having to shoot one down now of all times- just a year after the fuss about China’s test- seems very convenient (keep in mind that over half of all space shuttle missions are classified DOD missions, or in other words, missions to put in orbit or to maintain classified satellites.) What Bob Ross would call a “happy accident.”

Anyway, here’s some of the blog post. I recommend just clicking on the link below and reading the whole thing. So do that now.

And if the [target satellite’s hydrazine fuel] tank makes it to the surface? Well, we are told it might cover an area the size of two football fields with hydrazine and if someone remained in the area they could get a fatal dose. (If I were outside and a large tank of strange material fell from outer space, I confess, it would never occur to me to leave the area.) Well, if “two football fields” is as large at 100 meters by 100 meters, that is 10,000 square meters or just less than one ten billionth of the surface of the Earth. That makes winning the lottery seem like very good odds, indeed.

…

So what is going on? When control of the satellite was first lost, the risk from the satellite was dismissed as trivial, not worth any real concern. Now we need to “shoot it down.” I cannot attribute motives without being able to read minds but a normally skeptical person could be forgiven for at least suspecting that this satellite is offering a chance for the Navy to test its missiles in an anti-satellite mode for the first time since the end of the Cold War. I have seen virtually no discussion of the arms control implications of this. Are we fueling an anti-satellite arms race? Who knows, but I don’t think anyone in this administration cares.

Source: U.S. Plans Test of Anti-Satellite Interceptor Against Failed Intelligence Satellite

The following is a snapshot of the Internet Traffic Report status which has been recently used in a slashdot posting as support for the statement “it looks like Iran has completely lost internet connectivity.” This is in relation to the recent and as-yet unexplained cutting of several undersea fiber-optic cables. Usenet and the blogosphere are currently awash in theories that Iran was the actual target of these cable cuts (the more interesting theories note the scheduled opening of Iran’s oil bourse and Iran’s first space shot, both having occured at roughly the same time.)

Click for large version.

But… something is very wrong with these rumours. They rest on a false supposition- that Iran actually has lost internet access. As this article suggests, it hasn’t.

The image first appeared in slashdot and has since trickled into mainstream media as proof of an entire nation’s lack of internet access (apparently no one thought to make a phone call to Iran).

Let’s step back and contemplate the very worrying shortsightedness of certain quarters of the internet and even the larger “reporting” community. My first thoughts when looking at this internet traffic report were that we can see that it shows an absolute ‘0′ figure for a single server. Without even knowing what site this is coming from (or that internet traffic analyses are pretty unreliable), this is most likely to mean that the particular server that ip address routes to is either offline or the port has been switched (something very common in highly net-monitored countries, in singapore we’d always be switching our ports around to get outside access from the best servers) than that an entire country has no internet access.

Let’s go further and apply a simple test here- the router the Internet Traffic Report uses for Iran is router1.iust.ac.ir. This router is, as of right now (11:00AM EST, Feb 05, 2008) still reported as traffic free and essentially dead by the Internet Traffic Report. Yet the “lie” that Iran is cut off from the outside world is shown by simply testing the higher domain iust.ac.ir - which quickly and flawlessly resolves to the website of the Iran University of Science & Technology. (”This is Crystal Palace and we’re still here!”) To account for the possibility I was viewing a cached page, I also pinged the site. As said, the most likely explanation is that the folks at IUST decided to fiddle around with Router1, taking it offline or changing its ports or otherwise having it no longer cooperate with the Internet Traffic Report. (If we again take the Internet Traffic Report as indicative of a country or region’s internet status we find that all of Florida was cut off from the internet at the same time as Iran.)

This relates to something I’ve seen in a lot of the geekier fora which are now punching way above their weight in subjects like international affairs these days (a topic which they- group of overspecialized technologists they represent- really shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near). For example, Slashdot, where this meme originated. Wired magazine is another example. (I love both slashdot and Wired, make no mistake- but I’m also very aware of their respective limitations.)

One problem with these fora is that people using them live in a virtual world where they send emails back and forth to each other but don’t collate the data from outside, non-virtual sources, things like print media or actual contacts in other countries. Consider wikipedia- a whole subculture of self-proclaimed encyclopedists exists there, virtually all of whom believe that for information to be valid it has to be capable of being hyperlinked to- ie, it has to exist on the web. Anything outside the web is not valid information. (The original Rollerball - the one with James Caan - had some brilliant, ahead-of-its-time commentary on this phenomenon.)

A related issue would be that many modern and otherwise respectable analysts and journalists and such aren’t willing or aren’t capable of distinguishing between an internet source and a “real world” source. Perhaps the more stodgy journalists and other types of analyst aren’t willing to challenge certain geek claims (such as the “claim” that the image above represents proof that Iran has been cut off from the net), fearing their ability to understand the concepts involved- so when some random and misinformed geek makes such a posting on Slashdot, his supposition propagates on the blogosphere until it reaches critical mass and finally appears in the IHT or USA Today or Time magazine.

I could ruminate on the emergent tragedy inherent when journo-autism meets geek-autism for some time, time which I currently don’t have. To sign off I’ll just say it’s a subset IMO of the overspecialized society we’ve become, and the problem of the death of the generalist.

And beautiful. The (now technically illegal) Grid Wars 2. Can still be found floating out there, on teh internets.

A nice polemic for the videogame by “World of Stewart” with Grid Wars 2 as its medium begins thusly:

We need a new word for videogames. The term was coined back in the 1970s to describe something that at the time was a completely new and revolutionary artform (it must be barely conceivable to today’s gamers that there was a time in living memory when such things as games played on a TV screen simply didn’t exist), and the image it conjured up was a straightforward one of Asteroids, Pac-Man and Space Invaders - that is, an abstract, magical and ultra-modern type of entertainment, born in technology and totally unrelated to any kind of leisure pursuit that had ever gone before it. The very word “videogame” inherently depicted something exciting, glamorous and - because most games were located in arcades, places where under-18s weren’t allowed - slightly forbidden and dangerous too.

For want of anyone bothering to come up with a better replacement in the last 30 years, “videogames” is still the umbrella term we use for all forms of interactive electronic entertainment displayed on a screen, and as a result the clarity and purity of its meaning has been debased and corrupted. Now, “videogame” encompasses everything from gruelling work simulators like Gran Turismo 4 or America’s Army to the town-hall nerd-conventions of online role-playing fantasy communities like World Of Warcraft, or the semi-interactive fiction of point-and-click adventures and single-player RPGs, or even TV quiz shows like Buzz. There’s nothing actually wrong with any of those things (well, for the purposes of this particular argument there isn’t, anyway), but they’re not videogames.

And continues here.

For like an hour or two.

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