John is no longer publishing Slacker Online, instead he has set up shop at a new site, be sure to visit that instead.
RSS Subscribers: please subscribe to our new feed:http://jzw.vistua.com/rss there will be no more updates at this address so you can safely unsubscribe from slacker online.
Today I happened upon an interesting website regarding brand recognition. I have always suspected that peoples logo recall is not as brandmakers would hope. While hardly scientific the site seems to indicate that rather forcefully.
Premise: walk up to random people on the street and ask them to draw twelve famous logos, nine global three European (for the project was undertaken in Austria). The results were not encouraging.
Lots of people drew old logos such as the striped Apple apple and the BP badge. Others guessed the general idea, most remembered that the Peugeot logo was a lion but seemed to have no idea how it was positioned: sometimes lying sometimes standing. The Lacoste logo was remembered as vaugely reptilian, little more.
In one hilarious case the logo of a rival company was remembered, nestled among the attempts at reproducing the Coca-Cola script lay… the Pepsi orb, the old one, of course, another indication of the unwisdom of that infamous redesign.
The results should chill any executive planning to spend 1.2 billion dollars to fetch a new logo.
Scientists today discovered a new fundamental interaction. “Pepsitavity.”
Scientists working for Pepsico expended $1.2 Billion dollars to track down and harness this force of nature. Pepsitavity will power your cars, heat your homes, cook your food and induce you to drink buckets and buckets of Pepsi:
Illustration of Pepsitavity
This is one of innumerable hilarious and seemingly earnest and sincere illustrations in an internal document leaked from the Peter Arnell Agency which was commissioned to redesign the Pepsi logo and branding schemes.
Their efforts are at best amateurish, my first reaction to seeing the logo in the wild was “printing error” and if they believed one word of that document it’s not hard to see why, it starts out silly then by the fifth or sixth page enters the realm of Scott Adams and finally, by the last page has progressed into open farce.
When your ad agency confuses your company’s logo with any of…
…you are in trouble. When your ad agency confuses your logo with all of these, in one document, they’re on weed… and you’re very in trouble.
This document is easily the most screamingly, patently ludicrous thing I have ever read, worse, portions of it are positively ungrammatical. Pepsico shareholders must be screaming “You spent $1.2 Billion for THIS????”. Breathtaking arrogance and transparent cluelessness rarely go down well with your investors, particularly when you’ve just spent more than the GDP of a small country to obtain them.
What’s worse, the same agency was hired to wreck the branding for Sierra Mist, Mountain Dew and Tropicana, which it did admirably, I could recreate the Sierra Mist logo by applying a blur filter on the word “mist” in Photoshop… plus I would have charged them ten bucks.
The new Sierra Mist Logotype
The re-brands of Mountain Dew (sacrilegiously renamed “MTN DEW”) and Tropicana went over equally well. Enraged customers have forced Pepsico to abandon the new Tropicana branding and return to the venerable “orange with a straw sticking out of it”. That’s a very expensive mistake folks.
You should definitely take a look at the PDF. It’s priceless and mostly pictures so it’ll take five minutes.
The lesson to be learned from all of this is twofold. 1) Messing with the heritage of a legendary brand is a BAAAAD idea and 2) When in the market for a new branding agency, bring a drug sniffing dog.
Nowadays Slacker Online steers pretty clear of mainstream politics, but today we make an exception.
As you know, efforts are under way to pass an… ambitious and quite socialistic package of legislation euphemistically billed as an “economic stimulus” package. Obama has a divinity complex and quite clearly feels entitled to do as he wishes in the name of whatever he pleases.
The last time this happened the world was turned upside down, I am referring of course to the catastrophic (although rarely acknowledged as such) Roosevelt presidency.
Roosevelt has been posthumously elevated to the Arcane Triad of presidents who must not be questioned, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, curiously, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
I wish to emphasize that from any objective standpoint, Roosevelt was likely the worst, ever, detriment to Constitutionality in U.S. government policy. His alphabet-soup agencies were all illegal and wrecked havoc with the economy, permanently re-aligning it on the grounds of faulty Keynsian economic theories. Roosevelt kicked off the modern tax and spend and deficit state, he also usurped vast amounts of power from Congress, a trend which every president since has continued, and established the hysterical notion of the Federal Government of the U.S., in general and the Presidency in particular as the savior of the world in times of crisis.
One has only to look at the case of Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States to see the extent of FDR’s abuses, not only was the actions of the NRA, in regulating the poultry industry an illegal delegation of the Congress’s powers under the Interstate Commerce clause… but the whole idea was an abuse of the clause in the first place.
Considerable portions of FDR’s “New Deal” were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, FDR thus hit upon a plan to violate the ancient and then still widely accepted doctrine of the separation of powers.
For readers outside the U.S., the Federal Government of the U.S. is divided into the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, it is an important classical doctrine of law that these branches must not interfere with each other except to the extent permitted by The Constitution, for instance the Presidency (part of the executive branch) has limited power to veto acts of Congress (legislative), and theoretically the Congress is to supervise and oversee the actions of the Presidency. In another example: the justices (judges) of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President but must be confirmed (approved) by Congress.
Roosevelt, under the patently ludicrous pretext of “the justices are senior-citizens and therefore out of touch” sought to add new judges to the court who would be more favorable to his illegal policies. This is widely referred to as the “court packing scheme”.
The bill was a total failure, it was destroyed in committee, provoked the wrath of the public, enraged the bar, turned the Democratic Party against itself and cost Roosevelt a vast amount of political capital.
Back then, the general public practically equated the Supreme Court with the very Constitution itself, an attack on the court was unthinkable. Nearly a century of Government policy and operations that ignore, mangle and undermine the constitution, the improprieties of the Court during the sixties and seventies and ever more and more subversion of “separation of powers” have destroyed the idea of the sanctity of the Court in the public mind.
So now we have a dangerous situation. Bush already weakened the Courts considerably with his obscene extrajudicial “tribunals” and prisons for supposed “enemy combatants”. It seems to me probable that Obama will attempt even more radical assaults on the constitution and the division of powers.
There is a significant chance that some or all of the legality of the gun-the-economy package, and at least some other policies of Barack Obama will be challenged.
I suspect that Obama will take a page from FDR. The “conservative bloc” of the Court, those most likely to be disinclined to Public Policy Adventures is comparatively young. Roberts, Thomas and Alito are in their fifties and early sixties. Realistically, they are not going anywhere. It is somewhat uncommon for a justice to retire under a president who is likely to appoint a judge with a significantly different juridical outlook.
The other “conservative” justice, Scalia is in his seventies and it is also very probable that he will not go anywhere either.
It is virtually impossible to remove a U.S. Supreme Court justice, it is theoretically possible to impeach one for illegal behavior, but this only happened once, long long ago and the impeachment failed to remove him. Impeachment of a justice is generally considered an extinct idea.
It is possible, and legal, for an act of congress to reduce the number of justices on the court, but again it is impossible to remove a justice during his or her tenure and therefore the court would not contract until such a time as a justice died or retired. Besides no one could predict which justice would retire or die, the eldest judge on the court is John Paul Stevens (88), and he is considered liberal, so is the next eldest, Ruth Bader Ginsberg (75). If the court were reduced in size and one of these two vacated their seat or died, it would shift the court even further to the juridical equivalent of the right.
It is quite probable that Obama will try to increase the size of the court (currently nine) to ten or eleven under some pretext or other in an attempt to pack the courts in favor of his ambitious and improper agenda. Keep an eye out for this and oppose it at all costs.
Even if you are favourable to Obama’s agenda, it is highly important to recognize that the courts are now the last barrier to executive tyranny. The Congress has long ceased to fulfil its role in this matter. Stay tuned.
Fresh on the heels of news that two satellites have collided in outer-space, comes news that two-weeks ago a French and British nuclear submarines collided.
The submarines, which each carried dozens of nuclear warheads grazed each other while their sonars were switched off.
The press, and politicians, have had a field day, the BBC cites Liberal Democrats Shadow Defense Minister as saying “If there were ever to be a bang it would be a mighty big one”.
He is not the only person to either explicity state or imply that the collision could have resulted in a nuclear explosion. He is also wildly wrong.
It should be pointed out, forcefully, that it is physically impossible to detonate a nuclear bomb by bumping it.
Atom bombs work by a runaway nuclear chain reaction. To put it simply: neutrons emitted by the nuclear decay of atomically unstable nuclei (such as those of Plutonium and artificially enriched Uranium atoms) strike other nuclei, provoking their decay (fission) and the emission of more neutrons, ad infinitum. This process releases immense amounts of energy, hence the explosion.
(It should be noted that nuclear chain reactions in non-highly-enriched materials, such as fuel grade Uranium are cannot produce an explosion. Although a self-sustaining reaction is occurring in your local nuclear power-station’s reactors, they cannot ever explode, there simply is not enough available power*.)
To cause the explosive event, it is necessary to have a “supercritical” density of highly enriched fissile material. This can be done by ramming a smaller mass of the material into a larger mass, or by crushing the mass with shaped conventional explosives.
Fusion bombs contain atomic bombs as the trigger so the above still applies.
I repeat: bumping The Bomb won’t set it off. This is high-school physics folks.
In 1972, the U.S. Government sought to raise the sunken Soviet nuclear submarine K-129. Details of this incredible enterprise are outside the scope of this article, however in the course of this partially successful mission, K-129 broke into pieces as it neared the surface, most of it then fell back down to the ocean floor, including its nuclear missiles. No detonation took place.
The real risk is water intake resulting in sinking and loss of crew. Less probably, had a breach of the nuclear power plants on either of the vessels occurred, vast amounts of radioactive particles could have been released into the environment, devastating regional biota. A steam explosion, as cold sea-water contacted the exceedingly hot reactor core is also a possibility in that eventuality.
The likelihood of this ever happening again is almost zero, however I do not expect that will stop the anti-atom lobby from going bonkers over the incident.
*This does not mean that they cannot be exceedingly dangerous if mishandled.
Seven out of Ten stars; (See appendix for calculation.)
This article contains detailed analysis of crucial plot points and surprises. If you have not yet seen the film, but wish to do so, please stop reading right now and come back later.
What makes Bond, Bond? Why is he such a jerk, why does he do what he does, what makes him tick? This film, the first in a series to feature Daniel Craig as the lead sets out to answer this question and in the process, re-imagine the sagging franchise. This it does admirably, being an impressively realized and highly enjoyable action film to boot.
The strength of the film lies in its characters, while previous Bond films tended to gloss over such minor details in lieu of huge explosions, the current production team avoids this mistake and seeks to give definition to the characters and engineer a believable plot.
This plot, which is derived from original Ian Fleming material, revolves around a mysterious organization, which MI6 believes to be a terrorist financial network. Like any financial company it has bankers and one of these, the main villain, Le Chiffre, has gotten himself into a spot of hot water.
He assures his clients that there is no risk in the portfolio but he’s lying. Le Chiffre is a maths genius and he’s playing fast and loose with the funds, the portfolio involves short selling. He borrows securities and sells them at a high price, arranges a terrorist attack which causes the value of the securities to fall, then buys them back at a low price, reaping the difference as profit.
M says that a massive shorting of airline stocks took place around the 9/11 attacks. Someone made a fortune in the midst of the inferno. Le Chiffre plans to manufacture the destruction of a prototype air-frame, leaving its maker in bankruptcy and himself much richer. Fortunately everyone’s-favorite-international-super-spy gets in the way and less fortunately, Le Chiffre looses a huge sum.
Thus he sets up a high-stakes poker game at the titular Casino Royale, in Montenegro. M realizes that if Le Chiffre looses everything a second time, the British government can extort information from him in exchange for protection from his organization. She enrolls Bond in the game and sends Vesper Lynd to supervise the money.
FINAL WARNING – THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO STOP WITHOUT ENCOUNTERING EXPLICIT DISCLOSURES.
Le Chiffre is a clever foe and fools Bond with a bluff but in the end Bond prevails. An enraged Le Chiffre kidnaps Lynd and captures Bond, attempting to extract the account PIN from him by torture. When he declines Le Chiffre prepares to make bodily modifications to him, of a sort not fit to print, the mysterious “Mr. White” then bursts, suddenly into the room and shoots Le Chiffre proclaiming that the organization could no longer trust him. Bond then blacks out.
Afterwards, Bond emails his resignation to M and he and Vesper run off to Venice for a romantic getaway, they resolve to travel the world together and Vesper runs to the bank to get some cash. M then calls saying that the treasury has not received the winnings. Bond begins to suspect that something is wrong and rings the Casino’s banker who informs him that the funds are being withdrawn from the bank’s Venice branch just now.
Realizing what is happening Bond gives chase and Vesper and her allies flee into a floating house, a firefight ensues and the house (somewhat improbably) begins to sink after bullets pierce its pontoons. Bond kills all the other representatives of the organization but tries to save Vesper, who abruptly commits suicide. Mr White then quietly absconds with the case of money while Bond is distracted with vainly trying to resuscitate Lynd.
Bond is devastated and reverts to his killing machine persona. M telephones again, MI6 has discovered that Vesper had a boy-friend, whom she loved very much. He was kidnapped by Mr. White’s organization which used the matter for leverage, threatening to kill him. She also informs Bond that Vesper had negotiated, apparently successfully, with the organization to spare Bond’s life while being aware that she would likely loose her own. Bond is too numb to respond properly and even tries to make M disbelieve, using words that are not fit to print, that Vesper ever meant anything to him before absconding to get his revenge.
The film ends with a cliff-hanger, Mr. White is shot in the leg by an elegantly clad Bond who stands over him waving a ridiculously large gun and proclaiming for the first time: “The name’s Bond: James Bond”.
Casino Royale is the first installation in a “rebooted” James Bond franchise. “Reboot” means that the previous history and storyline continuity (such as it was) has been erased, the series starts from scratch.
This is probably a good thing, the old franchise’s history and storyline continuity (again, such as it was) had become a burden to it. The role never escaped the shadow of Sean Connery’s legendary portrayal, each subsequent actor was forced to become a caricature—or even an absolute parody—of the original, instead of striking out to become an original himself. This inexorably led to the decline of the character to the point of it becoming a sort of bad joke.
The casting of Daniel Craig caused the jiggling of much tocsin amongst fan-boys (and girls), some even threatened a boycott. The Bond role has always been played a certain way, and by a certain type of person. Craig doesn’t fit the typecast: he is blond, not tall and could scarcely be called handsome. This breaking of the mold is one of the greatest strokes of genius in the new concept. The Connery iconography is no longer relevant, the only way for the films to have a future would be to make a total break from the past.
I admit that the casting of Craig caused me some manner of misgiving, although for different reasons. I had seen him “act” before and was not impressed. Happily, his skill has either improved or he had previously been badly miscast, for his sanguinary portrayal is one of the greatest things about this film.
In addition to changing the physical appearance of the character, James Bond now has a much more interesting and complex personality. I never thought highly of the old films, and mainly because of the vapid two-dimensionality of the lead (not to mention the ludicrous plots, ridiculous villains, foolish gadgets, etc, etc, etc). Bond is, and always was, a disagreeable person. This is perfectly correct characterization, it’s one of the most important points, he must always be a jerk and the production team clearly realizes this. What came off wrong about the old portrayal is that there was never any valid explanation for why he was a jerk. That has now changed and we have some real answers, the character at last been given some verisimilitude, allowing for that vital aesthetic element: suspension of disbelief*.
Our dear old friend has a problem. He’s starting to loose track of goodness, an unavoidable consequence of his chosen lifestyle and profession. A professional killer will eventually become a brute, ipso facto. Bond doesn’t have the luxury of pushbutton war-fare; he has to look his victims in the eye and can’t hide from what he’s doing, becoming dehumanized and mechanical as a result. He comments early in the film that “[the second killing is] much easier” after assassinating his second victim and thereby “earning” the legendary “double zero” status, an interesting trope that I wish had been more fully explored.
How to cope? Later in the film, after falling in love with Vesper he decides to cope by quitting! But up until that point, and after it as well, he “copes” by embracing the evil and taking joy in it. M sharply criticizes the death and destruction he leaves in his wake, not only are most of the deaths un-necessary from any perspective—he is killing all potential leads! On the other hand, he is efficient. Bond represents a typically short-sighted functionalist approach, he only does what seems advantageous at the moment. In M’s words, he is a “blunt instrument”, certainly not someone we would ever want to meet.
Bond’s method of coping exacerbates his problem, just like an addict taking more and more heroin to stave off withdrawal, Bond begins to trap himself in a cage created of his own disaffection and mechanism. A necessary dimension is added by this—Bond is a bad person, no doubt about it, both in the sense of being an immoral person, and in the sense of being a person badly. James Bond cares nothing for ideals, and is therefore an anti-hero. I emphasize this somewhat obvious point because the film actually acknowledges this instead of trying to sanitize his actions and paint him as a bathetic paladin. This is significantly better than the usual Hollywood treatment of distasteful leads.
Editorial Note: This approach is a sharp contrast to another film reviewed here which, disastrously, endeavored to gloss over the ethical problems of its lead in order to cast him as a saint… when in fact he was a deranged monster.
Treasury agent Vesper Lynd shocks him out of this idea though. At first he is only interested in her, as she disdainfully puts it, as a “disposable pleasure”, rebuffing his libidinous overtures. Events though, conspire to force them to work together. Her anxiety about helping him to kill an attacker, her tough vulnerability and her personality finally cause Bond to soften and even question his motivations, he resolves to renounce his ways and even resigns lest his job costs him his humanity.
Sadly it doesn’t last, Eva Green’s character is a double agent and while Vesper does everything she can to shield Bond from her organization she does give the money over to them in the end, her suicide overwhelms Bond with grief and causes him to fall back into his old ways.
This is perhaps a little too convenient, it feels like an artificial cheat by the writers. A serious emotional attachment would pose a significant impediment for future guns-blazing bondian excursions; Lynd did have to be taken out of the picture but this is not the right way. In all fairness, Bond must always be a scoundrel and anything that prompts him to be just a little too virtuous would destroy the character.
From a non-diegetical standpoint, Bond’s post-Vesper depersonalization and rage against the world is a very dangerous thing as it could easily leave him without valid motivations. It remains to be seen how well the follow up films deal with this problem.
Another minor complaint is that Le Chiffre’s plan to launch a poker-game to recover his own earnings strays a little too close to the land of a farce for comfort, the development strains the narrative’s logic, just a bit. Once, though, this plot thread develops fully, one forgets all about how daft it is, but the fact is that it simply does not make terribly much sense. Lack of sharpness in the plot is a systemic problem of action films and Casino Royale, as was fully expected, did not make any major screen-writing breakthroughs in this area.
In particular, the main body of the film starts out with a long and largely irrelevant storylet involving a bomb-maker who has virtually nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. This embryonic plot is abruptly cut short, as is the bomb-maker, in favor of going off on a seeming tangent which turns out to the the main thing after-all.
There is nothing wrong with any portion of the storylet itself, in-fact it’s quite well done indeed. It feels, however, almost as if—in the editing room and some almighty clerical error—a length of film from a totally different picture became somehow mixed with footage from Casino Royale! This prologue feels horrendously “tacked on”.
Le Chiffre himself is deliciously ironic,though: the banker cum gambler. Of course, the parallels with the current economic situation are clear, and—sigh of relief—subtle enough to avoid preachment while still milking the thing for as much as its worth. The portrayal by Mads Mikkelsen is competent but nothing outstanding in itself.
All of the major characters are well drawn and interesting, but Judi Dench nearly completely steals the show as M. M is given wonderful, wonderful lines, lines matched only by Dench’s effortless delivery. This new vision of M is highly impatient with Bond’s fooleries and disregard for the rules, yet aware of his skill. She is a manager par excellence, shrewdly manipulating her impetuous agent rather than directly ordering him about.
M also fills a maternal role, trying to keep Bond under control and serving as a reference point for him. That Dench is so greatly underused is a major disappointment, it is fervently to be hoped she will play a more prominent role in future films.
There are excellent minor characters also: Obanno, the African terrorist; Matthis, Bond’s Montenegran contact; as well as several others.
Montenegro is gorgeous and photographed as such, all aspects of the direction and filming are excellent, the computerized special effects are very few and I am happy to report that they lack any appearance of unreality. Much of the effects work was in fact done “for real” as stunts, the airport chase scene is especially good.
The great thing about the direction is that we mostly do not notice it, only once or twice, for ironic effect, does it call attention to itself. The sheer visual appeal of many locales is a standout though, I already alluded to the view from Montenegro, the establishing shot of the train, the cafe, the casino itself, all is wonder and atmosphere. Montenegro has duly been added to my list of places to visit.
The tone of other areas is also good, the shabby-chic of the resort and the clinicality of MI6 HQ.
Thankfully, the picture continues the series’ tradition of excellent music, David Arnold’s score scores high in my estimation and he takes the unusual tack of eschewing the traditional James Bond leitmotif until the closing credits, using snatches of the title song instead, as a signal of the inchoancy of the character. This is one area I tend to be very picky about so the lack of any serious complaint here should be taken as the closest thing I have to a full-fledged endorsement.
There are a few other items worth mentioning: Virgin Group head Richard Branson’s cameo, being searched in the airport, was a delight, the titles are clever and innovative and I was hugely relieved by the utter absence of fool gadgets, although this came at the expense of the apparent vanishment of the entire Q branch.
Casino Royale finds the balance between action and story, allowing it to appeal to smart folks and the great unwashed (ahem) alike.
| Plot/Story | 6/10 |
| Philosophy | 4/5 |
| Acting/Characterization | 9/10 |
| Music/Sound | 4/5 |
| Direction/Photography | 6/10 |
| Special Effects | 3/5 |
| Technical/Other** | 3/5 |
| TOTAL | 34/50 points 7/10 stars |
Explanation of the rating: ** one point is awarded for the title design, one point for Richard Branson’s cameo and one point for the airport scene with the jet and the police car, which was not a special effect.
* I’m not taking any sides on the aesthetic realism debate here, mind, besides realism is hardly a relevant consideration in action films!
Currently I’m working on an exhaustive review of Casino Royale. I’ve also got a few other projects going at the same time so things are progressing rather slowly.
So here are two quick film reviews, one positive the other negative.
The Invasion
2007, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig
This film is a failed effort at a re-make and update of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Neither is needed. This film is not a success in any way. I can find no good things to say about it. Kidman and Craig don’t so much act as walk about talking and the plot is too diffuse to give us any reason to care, indeed by the end I didn’t care if the alien virus took over the world, I just wanted it to end already.
| Plot/Story* | 1/10 |
| Philosophy | 0/5 |
| Acting/Characterization | 0/10 |
| Music/Sound | 0/5 |
| Direction/Photography | 2/10 |
| Special Effects | 0/5 |
| Technical/Other | 0/5 |
| TOTAL | 3/50 points 0.5/10 stars |
Explaination of the rating: * Hey, at least it had one!
Updated 16-Feb-08 with a star rating.
The Rape of Europa
2007, Documentary
A magnificent documentary film about a little known fact of history: the astounding pan-european art-theft campaign of the Nazis. Hitler wanted to create the “culture capital” of the world in his home town, and to install in it the greatest art collection on earth. Thus a systematic and highly organized pillaging of Europe’s museums and private collections was conducted, many works that were incompatible with Nazi ideology were destroyed and while most of the stolen works were recovered, some others have simply vanished or are now in museums with no rights to them. Of course there was also an organized campaign to save and hide the artwork and the film delves into that also. Highly Recommended.
This is a non-dramatic film and is thus ineligable for a star-rating at this time.
The following numbers place telemarketing calls to your mobile phone:
+1.251.957-6108
+1.773.549-3987
+1.732.526-0150
This is illegal and is a waste of your minutes, if you ever get a call from one of these number, hit ignore.
Four½ out of Ten stars (See Appendix for calculation)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick; Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Starring: Keir Dulles (Bowman), William Sylvester (Floyd), Douglas Rain (the voice of HAL)
2001, A Space Odyssey is a legendary film, and perhaps rightly so, as we shall see. This does not, unfortunately, mean that it is a great or even a good film. It is beautiful, but it is quite empty. There is little plot and even less characterization.
The film opens with Apes wandering in the early days of the earth. They are surprised by the appearance of a very large black monolith. One ape touches it. The group shrieks at it for a bit then goes to sleep. The next day one of the apes, in a flash of apely intuition, realizes how to use a bone as a weapon and armed with this knowledge and a tibia, drives away a rival band, slaying their leader.
The rest of the film makes about as much sense.
The film has virtually no dialogue at all, what little there is is mostly of a banal nature. The humans discuss foodstuffs, gossip and call people on the phone. The characters have no motivations, no goals and no personalities. They might as well be anonymous, they are so utterly flat and insipid… Except… HAL.
HAL is a computer. Although he speaks only in a monotone mechanical voice with no variation in tonality he expresses cognizable emotions and has understandable motivations: he describes himself as being ‘afraid’ as he is being dismantled, worries about factors that could influence the success of the mission, fights to preserve his existence, plots to commit murder and finally falls into madness. The humans, on the other-hand, are cold and mechanical. Dr Floyd, David Bowman and Francis Poole are the human characters but they behave like computers. HAL behaves like a human.
The editing is poor, long segments should have been deleted entirely or reduced greatly, the tediously long scene with the apes, the extravagant docking sequence, Floyd’s endless dawdling on the space station, his overly choreographed flight to the moon, his long journey to the excavation site, Bowman’s interminable passage through deep space, the list goes on. Each of these should have been edited down to a few minutes each, instead they comprise the bulk of the running time of the film.
The tedious slowness of the pace is caused, it cannot be emphasized enough, by the irrelevance of these scenes. Certainly they are beautiful, but except the ape scene they do not advance the abstruse plot, none improve the already thin characterization and all accomplish little more than to bore the audience to sleep.
These scenes, it cannot be denied, are often extraordinarily aesthetically compelling. Kubrick had an incredible understanding of how to create visual effects and construct images. Even more impressively, the special effects have scarcely aged at all! Many an early sci-fi flick becomes a laughing stock in the decades following because the effects look ridiculous, not so 2001. Even the Monoliths are arresting.
Many of the effects used had a long-term impact on the course of cinema sci-fi. The true impressiveness of the Warp Gate sequence is lost on modern audiences because they have seen imitations of it dozens of times. The “slit-scan” tunnel has become universal film and television short-hand for hyperspace, reused and reproduced in everything from Doctor Who to Star-Gate, but the technique was quite novel at the time and must have seemed nothing short of awesome.
The physical design of the Discovery One spaceship in particular, deserves special mention, it’s shape, HAL’s omnipresent “eye”, the just-so machinery, the incredible EVA pods and, of course, HAL’s memory room.
The psychedelic closing scenes with Bowman in “France in Space” are among the most surreal and bizarre ever filmed and they are very, very effective. As the inter-title said “beyond the infinite”. The scenes powerfully imply altered states of awareness and an ineffable alien superintelligence.
Overall, the film is technically stupendous. The very lighting itself is a thing of wonder. Excepting the music, sound is used magnificently, magnificently… go back to the scenes on the Discovery One and just listen, the sound of the breathing apparatus, the silence of the EVA scenes, HAL, the sound is as vivid as the sight.
Finally, in the closing one minute of the film, the whole point of the metanarrative comes out. God is something that humans evolve into, with the help of large black slabs from outer-space. God, by the way, is also a huge glowing baby. There is no plot, only meta-narrative. What a waste.
The film grapples with massive ideas and it is at its absolute finest when grappling with the concept of intelligence, the plodding intelligence of the apes, the devious intelligence of HAL, the esoteric intelligence of the unseen beings… but these lofty ideas are not intelligible in drama form, the film fails because sheer visual might is no substitute for plot, grandness of artistic vision cannot replace characters and a slideshow is not a film.
How Rating was Calculated:
| Plot/Story | 0/10 |
| Philosophy | 1/5 |
| Acting/Characterization* | 2/10 |
| Music/Sound** | 2/5 |
| Direction/Photography | 10/10 |
| Special Effects | 5/5 |
| Technical/Other*** | 3/5 |
| TOTAL | 23/50
4.5/10 stars |
Detailed Explanation of Calculation
Rating notes: * because of the lack of characterization the acting is very hard to evaluate. The points given are one for HAL’s voice and the other for Dulle’s facial expressions as Bowman while ordering HAL to “open the pod bay doors” ** had the music been better, or even absent, this rating would have been much higher *** the lighting is worth one point in and of itself, one point is given for the attempt to accurately portray the year 2001 the other is given for the witty faux “product placement” in the space-station and Discovery One scenes (PAN-AM spaceflights, Howard Johnson, Bell System, British Broadcasting Corporation, Hilton, etc)
I have writer’s block.
Not total block, just enough to keep me from actually writing anything for a whole month.
Oh, I’ve got ideas, yes even Ideas with a capital I. Great Ideas, and not so great ones.
I’ve got no less than three feature-film reviews clunking around, waiting to be written. Four times in the past week I sat down and typed “Film Review” into the title-line and then gave up. I had no idea what to say… then the dog had to go out, again.
It’s the Holiday season. Lots of friends coming and going, one more leaving tomorrow morning. I could write about people coming and going! What a great Idea…
Well, on the other hand that wouldn’t be very original or even good come to think of it. At least twelve-hundred-sixteen other writers have written about friends, family and the holidays—it’s been done to death, as they say.
I wonder why I’ve got writer’s block? I’m not tense. I’m not any more stressed (than usual). No-one died. Hmm, strange.
Perhaps it’s the effort of writing? it’s a pain really; I have to organize my thoughts, if I didn’t I’d sound like a caller to a talk radio show: “Uh, I ..well… You know”. And it’s not just that of course, there are other difficulties. I have to strip out all misspellings, wrong words, debatable commas and so forth. If I don’t it detracts from what I’m saying. Take the last sentence but one—I started it with “and”. I’m not really supposed to do that.
Of course you noticed the errant “and” very much, you’ve already probably had to take some Midol Extended Strength® just to get over the stomach pains from the nasty bugger. Writing is the only art where this holds true. If the painter, sculptor or composer violates one of the more tiresome rules of his art, he can make a point of it and start a new artistic movement—named after himself, of course. I suspect that sort of thing happens quite a bit more than we hear about.
Because of this, I can never bear to reread anything I’ve written. After it’s published I pay less attention to the content and more to the window dressing the way textual critics do and I can only conclude I must be quite ignorant to put a semicolon in that particular place, I’m quite sure you can’t either so why should I go on? Best not to think about that.
I don’t know when my writer’s block will go away. Soon, possibly. Or tomorrow or the day after.
I know! I should write something about writer’s block!
