'Til All Are One

“Free­dom is the right of all sen­tient beings.” — Optimus Prime

This one throwaway line in the new Trans­formers film is in fact homage to the ori­ginal Trans­formers series. As obser­v­ant read­ers of this blog may have noticed, I am quite a fan of the Trans­formers mul­ti­verse, par­tic­u­larly of the 1986 anim­ated film (amongst other things, it has an awe­some soundtrack and some great vocal work). Optimus Prime was a child­hood hero of mine, so this motto has always struck a chord with me.

It also makes me won­der, if the Auto­bots are such strong advoc­ates of free­dom, are they them­selves pro­grammed with Free Soft­ware? Con­versely, are the Decep­ticons proprietary?

LotD:  The 10 Real Reas­ons Why Geeks Make Bet­ter Lovers

What do you do when you’re in the city and need to kill some time? Watch­ing a film soun­ded like a fair option to me. The cine­matic mas­ter­piece (!), ‘Epic Movie’, caught my eye. I wasn’t expect­ing much from it at all, so I placed myself into Low Expect­a­tions Mode™, grit­ted my teeth, and went in. It went accord­ing to plan, with the LEM buf­fer­ing me some­what from almost-​​certain disappointment.

One thing struck me, how­ever. I was sit­ting through the clos­ing cred­its, and I noticed an attri­bu­tion to a char­ac­ter named ‘Steve Irwin’. That’s strange, I thought. I didn’t remem­ber a Steve Irwin char­ac­ter. The clos­ing cred­its were punc­tu­ated by short video clips, each fol­lowed by a change in music as the stand­ard cred­its scrolling returned. A minute later, the screen flickered for a split-​​second, the cred­its returned, and the music sud­denly changed. Did they cut some­thing out? At the end, there was still no sign of Steve.

Was the Steve Irwin scene removed some­where between the film stu­dio and Hoyts? It could not have been done by the stu­dio — the cut was far too ama­teur­ish for that (although I might be giv­ing them too much credit, given the mediocre qual­ity of the film). While I under­stand that Steve Irwin died not too long ago, in my opin­ion that is no excuse for any­one to tell me what I can and can­not watch. The cinema prob­ably cal­cu­lated that the risk of pub­lic back­lash from main­tain­ing the scene would be greater than the oppos­i­tion to cen­sor­ship. If so, they were prob­ably right. That still doesn’t change the fact that I paid money to view a title that has been rendered incom­plete at the (likely per­ceived) behest of extremists.

Cen­sor­ship has its place in soci­ety, but this is going too far. Within reason, a free and open flow of inform­a­tion is the hall­mark of a healthy demo­cracy. Of course, the per­cep­tions of what exactly ‘reason’ is is debat­able, and that’s what lies at the heart of such debates. I prefer to err on the side of open­ness, in the same vein as ‘inno­cent until proven guilty’. I don’t like being told what to think, and what I can view. If I wanted that, I’d be using Win­dows Vista with all of its Digital Restric­tions Man­age­ment nonsense.

There’s always the chance that I’m com­pletely off the mark with my accus­a­tions. I’d appre­ci­ate it if someone could verify/​dispel my claims.

Are you aware of the con­di­tion known as Ser­vice Sup­port Ter­min­a­tion Trauma (SSTT)? View this Nov­ell Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ment to find out more.

Kle­pas poin­ted us on IRC to a brilliantly-​​done film explain­ing the concept of Trust­worthy Com­put­ing. It con­cisely and clearly demon­strates why so many of us in the FLOSS world prefer to call it Treach­er­ous Com­put­ing.

Unfor­tu­nately, the pro­du­cers decided to make the film avail­able as a Sorenson-​​encoded Quick­time file. I find it amus­ing that people who oppose digital restric­tions are using such a highly-​​proprietary video format. For­tu­nately for us, there is a DivX/​MP3 ver­sion (still not as good as The­ora or even XviD, but it’ll do) avail­able at Google Video.

Once you have fin­ished view­ing it, head on over to Against-​​TCPA for more information.

A must-​​see film for any­one who grew up in the ‘80s. 

More info here. It’s a shame that the offi­cial site requires Flash 8 to run. That locks us GNU/​Linux users out

Whenever most people go ice skat­ing, they usu­ally begin by cling­ing onto the bar­rier going around the edge of the rink. I am no excep­tion, but con­sid­er­ing that I hadn’t skated in close to ten years, I was pleas­antly sur­prised that I was able to skate away from the bar­rier after only about ten minutes on the edge. I was able to build up some reas­on­able speed, and I didn’t even fall over once.

Des­pite the cold, I worked up a sweat, and I must have had a con­sid­er­able workout since my ham­strings felt tender for the next couple of days.

After that, we went to see Super­man Returns. The intro had me wrapped: it was essen­tially an updated ver­sion of the intro in the first movie. Unfor­tu­nately, I feel they bor­rowed too much from the ori­ginal four films. Unlike Bat­man Begins (which I loved), Super­man Returns, as its name implies, is a con­tinu­ation and not a reboot. Lex Luthor was darker, but still felt like a bum­bling buf­foon sur­roun­ded by even greater buf­foons. He played a min­imal role in the film, with a large chunk of time going to Lois Lane. Lois, I feel, was very poorly writ­ten for and cas­ted. What happened to the sassy reporter that off­set the goody-​​goody Clark Kent so well? This Lois was like a wet blanket on the whole plot.

Super­man him­self was pretty darn good. The prob­lem with Super­man, though, is that he’s too darn power­ful. Lex Luthor is a power­ful adversary with his evil genius, but if you want a char­ac­ter to match Super­man in raw power you’d have to look towards the likes of Dark­seid or Dooms­day. For the movie fran­chise to sur­vive, I think they will have to branch away from Luthor, but hope­fully not as badly as was done in Super­man III.

I must nom­in­ate Hotel Rwanda as my Movie of the Year. I know that it was offi­cially released last year, but it only came to Aus­tralia this year. I rank it right up there with two of my other favour­ite movies, The Killing Fields and Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fire­flies).

These movies deal with incred­ibly dis­turb­ing sub­ject mat­ter: the effects of war on a civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Each movie took its own approach to the topic, but they all mas­ter­fully cap­tured the des­pair and suf­fer­ing that people go through. What I also like about these films is that they have dealt with incid­ents which were either ignored or for­got­ten by people in other coun­tries. Hotel Rwanda cov­ers the Rwandan gen­o­cide of 1994, The Killing Fields is set in the Khmer Rouge dom­in­ated Cam­bodia of the 1970s, and Grave of the Fire­flies is about Japan dur­ing World War II.

Hotel Rwanda and The Killing Fields both deal with civil war. Who cares about that? After all, it’s not in my back­yard. Most of the coun­tries in Africa are in some sort of war, yet the West cur­rently seems more con­cerned with Pope John Paul II’s funeral or Prince Charles’s wed­ding. In the case of Cam­bodia, Viet­nam (with dip­lo­matic sup­port from the USSR) turned out to be the Good Guys (fun­nily enough), invad­ing the coun­try and depos­ing the Khmer Rouge with pop­u­lar sup­port (des­pite their mis­giv­ings about the Viet­namese). The USA, Thai­l­and and China act­ively worked to sup­port the Khmer Rouge. Did we hear about any of this on tele­vi­sion? Is it in any school his­tory books? Nope, it’s as (self) cen­sored as the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion of Korea is in Japan.

The Rwandan gen­o­cide was yet another shame­ful event in world his­tory. The United Nations and eco­nom­ic­ally developed coun­tries had the power to inter­vene and halt the blood­shed, yet they didn’t. The US had been in Somalia only a couple of years prior, but I guess Rwanda wasn’t import­ant since it it didn’t lie on any major ship­ping lanes. The UN itself, France and other coun­tries also deserve much of the blame.

Grave of the Fire­flies is some­what dif­fer­ent, yet the same. Firstly, it is anim­ated. This is no children’s movie, how­ever, even if the two prot­ag­on­ists are chil­dren. I don’t think more impact could have been achieved if it were a live action film. Grave of the Fire­flies cov­ers yet another ignored event in world his­tory: the effects of World War II on the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion. It is nat­ural to ignore the aggressors (or even applaud their suf­fer­ing), par­tic­u­larly ones as bru­tal as the Japan­ese in WWII, but it is import­ant to remem­ber that they are just as human as every­one else. Many Ger­mans con­sider the Allied fire­bomb­ing of Dresden as a war crime, but did you know that the fire­bomb­ing of Tokyo caused more dam­age and loss of life than the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Naga­saki (which BTW were dropped on non-​​industrial res­id­en­tial areas)? I won’t get into the debate over whether such attacks were truly neces­sary (it was a war, after all), but we shouldn’t for­get the human suf­fer­ing which took place as a res­ult, regard­less of whom it is.

2011-​​02-​​02 update: Updated link. Thanks to Jack Moore.

Yes­ter­day I watched the new Kino ver­sion of Met­ro­polis. No, I’m not talk­ing about the animé (which I must see some­time since I’m a huge animé fan), but the 1927 Fritz Lang cine­matic mas­ter­piece. The movie is silent and in black and white, and for the time it was very cutting-​​edge in terms of tech­no­logy, plot, budget and over­all size. Unfor­tu­nately, the ori­ginal 1927 ver­sion no longer exists, but this Kino ver­sion is the most com­plete to date, includ­ing the excel­lent Gottfried Hup­pertz orches­tral score (re-​​recorded to make it sound bet­ter). The score was clearly writ­ten for the movie; orches­tral sounds sub­sti­tute very well for the lack of speech and sound effects.

The last time I had seen Met­ro­polis was when I was a child. Although I didn’t under­stand much, I was freaked out by the plot and the silent nature of the movie. I recall hav­ing a few night­mares about robots and I could not even look at the video cover (which fea­tured a pic­ture of the Machine-​​Man robot) after that.

The plot itself was very inter­est­ing. It’s amaz­ing what can be done without any speech (there was some ‘speech’, but it was just text on the screen). Hav­ing been released dur­ing the height of the capitalist/​communist struggle for polit­ical suprem­acy in Europe, this movie was uni­ver­sally panned by both sides for sup­posedly sup­port­ing one side or the other.

The main theme of the movie is a single phrase: “The medi­ator between head and hands is the heart.” You’ll need to see the movie in its entirety to under­stand what that means. It is a very power­ful theme, as is the imagery employed: mech­an­ical machinery; a small army of uni­formed, undif­fer­en­ti­ated work­ers; clocks and watches; and many others.

All-​​in-​​all, I loved this movie. It’s a shame that the ori­ginal no longer exists, but Kino expertly craf­ted the most ‘com­plete’ ver­sion they could. Miss­ing scenes were sum­mar­ised on the screen in text.

I saw X-​​Men 2 a few weeks ago. I’ve always been a fan of the com­ics, so I am rather sens­it­ive to any ‘changes’ that are made just for the movie. How­ever, I do real­ise that it is near-​​impossible to squeeze the entire X-​​Men uni­verse into a 2-​​hour movie. I must con­clude that they did an excel­lent job here. As in the first movie, the ‘changes’ were done very well.

There were a few little easter eggs hid­den in there as well. In the first movie, you get a quick glimpse of Jubilee (the comic book char­ac­ter whom Rogue replaced in the movie), and just like in Spider Man (another fant­astic movie) there is a short cameo by Stan Lee (This man is a GOD! If you don’t know who he is, stop read­ing right now for you have offen­ded me.). In the second movie you hear Jubilee being called by name (by Storm), and on a tele­vi­sion set you see a man with the cap­tion “Dr Henry McCoy” beneath his face. The man appears as a nor­mal (non-​​mutant) human being, but this man later becomes Beast. I think there were a few other easter eggs, but I don’t remem­ber them.

Speak­ing of The X-​​Men, I found a great fan-​​comic, The Uncanny X-​​Sprites. Quite funny. I also stumbled across Wolverine’s real name. It’s not Logan, it’s James How­lett. It’s all explained in Marvel’s Ori­gin series, which was released last year. There was also a Para­dise X series which con­tra­dicts some of the fun­da­mental aspects of Ori­gin, but I wouldn’t take it ser­i­ously. Both of these (among oth­ers) are explained in vivid detail (beau­ti­fully illus­trated, too!) at the Lost Soul Wol­ver­ine site. I spent hours read­ing all the stuff there; I was so riveted.

Last Sunday I saw The Mat­rix Reloaded. I am not going to com­pare it to X-​​Men 2, but I will say that this is another excel­lent film. The CGI was amaz­ing. There were a few little flaws, but with all the action going on they were easy to over­look. I love Hong Kong mar­tial arts movies (Jackie Chan and Jet Li are DEITIES!), and this movie sat­isifed my desire for some well-​​choreographed fight scenes. On the neg­at­ive side, there is less con­tinu­ity between the plot and the fights when com­pared to the ori­ginal movie. Also, some parts were slow and unne­ces­sary. I don’t want to see a bunch of Zion­ists (I assume that’s what the inhab­it­ants of Zion call them­selves?) dan­cing, and I don’t want to see Neo mak­ing love to Trin­ity. There’s enough pr0n on the Inter­net, thank-​​you-​​very-​​much.

Like the first movie (and the third, which arrives in Novem­ber), The Mat­rix Reloaded was mostly filmed in my home town of Sydney. It’s weird to watch scenes from a movie and think, “hey, I was at that place only yes­ter­day!” It also makes me won­der if I really am in the Mat­rix. Kooky.

The abso­lute coolest thing, how­ever, was Trinity’s crack­ing of the elec­tri­city grid. She uses Nmap to scan for open ports and finds that port 22 is open. Port 22 is typ­ic­ally used by SSH, and sure enough Trin­ity uses a known SSH v. 1 exploit to gain access to the server! As her root pass­word, she uses Z1ON1010. Not only does this make her 1337, it is also another easter egg — 1010 is the num­ber 5 in bin­ary (or so I’m told), and if you’ve seen the movie (spoiler alert) you know that Zion in the movie is in its fifth incarn­a­tion. More on this at The Register and Slash­dot, and there’s a nice screen­shot at Insec​ure​.org, the home of Nmap.

Of course, what’s a movie these days without mer­chand­ising? Sam­sung has a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’ ver­sion of one of the phones used in the movie. To me it looks like a for­got­ten prop from Star Trek: The Ori­ginal Series. It looks hideous, the ergo­nom­ics are all wrong, and the screen is too small to do any­thing use­ful. That won’t stop Sam­sung from char­ging a premium for it, or people from buy­ing it. I feel sorry for those people. They obvi­ously have some sort of psy­cho­lo­gical prob­lem that has them con­vinced that they will only have friends if they have the latest mobile tele­phone. If it’s movie-​​themed and a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’, even bet­ter. They may even pur­chase a black trench­coat to go with it. That will alle­vi­ate the symp­tioms of their inferi­or­ity com­plex for a little while, after which they will feel com­pelled to jump onto the next fad. Over-​​consumerism should be treated as a men­tal illness.