Transformers and Human Waste

This was originally written back in 2010, but I've updated it a little. The book I discuss in the second half I've now read at least twice, and was disconsolate for a while because I thought I'd lent it to someone and he hadn't given it back. 

If ever Transformers come knocking at your door, make sure you've got your life insurance paid up - along with every other kind of insurance. They certainly make a dent in anything they touch. And don't come back to clean up the mess. My grandson and I watched Transformers tonight; someone had recorded it onto the DVD hard drive a while back and though I'd seen some bits of it, I'd never caught up with the whole thing. Well, the beginning is definitely a lot better than the end. Shia LaBeouf has a lot of fun with his 'teenage' role, and there's plenty of comedy early on, notably from his parents. (He also has a rather kooky pal early in the piece, but he gets one or two scenes and then vanishes. Pity.)

But once all the action stuff starts, the film pretty much falls apart. It probably doesn't help watching it on a TV screen, (and not even in letter-box format), but the action scenes are so badly staged that you hardly have a clue who's doing what to whom. Early on even these aren't so bad, but the last long, long, long battle is rubbish. Megatron, the big baddie, is about as clueless a baddie as you're likely to come across. He likes smashing stuff up, but it never seems to achieve anything. Perhaps all those decades of being frozen have played havoc with his brain wiring. The CGI is of course fantastic. But, as I think I've said before in this blog, we've become so used to CGI that it no longer makes us gasp at what we're seeing. (Only Avatar, which arrived a couple of years later, was more eye-popping, and that was because it used imagination as well as CGI.) 

I keep meaning to mention a book I read a few weeks back. I was going to do a proper review, but it's now got a bit past that point. It's The Big Necessity, and it has the delightful subtitle: Adventures in the World of Human Waste. It's by journalist, Rose George. (The alternative subtitle is: The unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters.) Most people I've spoken to about it have switched off fairly quickly. As George points out, in spite of the fact that human waste is a fact of life for every single human being on the planet (and for many, other people's waste is also a fact of their daily lives), we just don't talk about it. We barely even joke about it. In Western society we're so prim and proper that our TV ads hardly point out the fact that it's poo that we're using all those chemicals to clean up: instead they focus on the bacteria. But we're also so attuned to having waste flushed away that we regard it as something quite unmentionable. 

This isn't the case with much of the world. There are still plenty of countries where poo is literally thrown around, or left lying in open areas next to villages, or indisposable in slums, or plastered all over the walls of public toilets until they become unusable. Civilisation and poo are still only just getting their act together. For most of the world they've hardly started. 

The book is full of wonderful stories, and wonderful people - and facts. For instance, 37,000 miles - yes, I said miles - of waste tunnels between London and Swindon, some of which are big enough to drive a mini around in. New York is a city that's just a couple of days away at any time from being caught up in its own waste. (In another book I discovered that the underground waters in New York have to be continually pumped out of the subway - if they were left alone for a few days, the subways would be swamped.) In Japan, for years they've been using toilets that actually clean the rear end while you're sitting there. A spray does the job, and apparently in the best of these models, does it very well. Then there's a drier to finish off the job. Many Japanese regard the idea of wiping your bottom with toilet paper as not being clean at all. 

There have been some great people working on dealing with human waste, some highly innovative and entrepreneurial people. But in India, the land where technology is rapidly outstripping anywhere else in the world, human waste is still in a Neanderthal state for great swathes of the country. There are still people, the Dalits, the lowest of the lowest castes, whose job it is to cart other people's waste away. It's almost always the women who do this work, (the men somehow escape the task by handing it over to their wives and daughters), and many of them carry the baskets of waste on their heads. However, there is one man - I can't note his name as we've recently shifted and my books aren't at present in any order - who has gradually rescued Dalits from their abysmal life, and is educating them in schools financed by the public toilets he's built (and which people pay a minimal sum to use). 

Public toilets are a rarity in many countries still, and nonexistent in others. In Rome, when my wife and I went on our honeymoon some 46 years ago, it was very hard to find a public toilet. I still have a photo of me pointing disconsolately at a disconnected toilet in the middle of a worksite. And even when we went abroad in 2007, it was still hard to find public toilets. At that time I was having some prostate problems, and at least twice we had to board a river cruise boat just so I could use the toilet on board. On another occasion I popped into a port-a-loo that was officially there for the men working on a site. 

As I said the book is eye-opening, and the stories abound. I can't say why the topic appealed to me, but I found it fascinating. Maybe I'm just a child at heart, still wanting to know what happens to the brown stuff...!

Alice in Wonderland

Before I went to see Alice in Wonderland, yesterday, a friend told me that Johnny Depp had modelled his 'look' on Elijah Wood, particuarly the eyes (in the movie, Depp seems to have these permanently wide open). If he hadn't mentioned it, I never would have given it a thought. To me, Depp just plays yet another of his eccentric characters, and whether he's based it on someone else's persona or not hardly seems to matter.

We had the pleasure of watching the movie in 3D, which certainly gave it an extra touch of extravagance. Without that, I'm not sure what I would have thought of the movie. It's overstated in a typically Tim Burton way: everything is extreme, and it's full of extraneous detail that even with 3D you don't have time to catch up with. And the characters, which start out as eccentric anyway, are heightened in this regard by all the possibility of modern CGI.

Thus Helena Bonham Carter (the Red Queen) is not only smaller than normal, but also has a larger head. Crispin Glover (who was, of course, the inept father in the Back to the Future series) here plays a full-blooded villain, whose size is just a little out of sync with the Red Queen's. Anne Hathaway is painfully beautiful, almost a mockery of herself, and yet still plays against her usual naive, sweet screen personality. Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter really is mad; but in this world that's hardly noticeable.

The film opens with Alice as a six-year-old, being assured by her father (played by New Zealander Marton Csokas, who suddenly has a bunch of movies in the pipeline after seeming to be invisible for two or three years) that she isn't mad having nightmares - the whole world is mad. Eleven years later and Alice is due to be engaged to a nauseous Lord, and is surrounded by poncy English nobility. She breaks free of this unpleasant crowd, falls down a hole and into Wonderland, where there's some dispute as to whether she really is Alice, since she doesn't seem to remember anything about the place. (Shades of Hook.)

All the old characters are there, and possibly some new ones. I'm not au fait enough with the Lewis Carroll stories to be sure whether everyone who appears here is in the books. The Jabberwocky turns up as the Red Queen's 'champion' for a major fight with Alice at the end, something that isn't strictly Carollian (an unnamed boy despatches the beast in the second Alice book), and various other liberties are taken. Of course, it is eleven years later, so no doubt things will have changed. However, looking at synopses of the original stories, it appears that Burton and his scriptwriter have pulled in characters from both the books without regard to their original places in the stories.

Mia Wasikowska doesn't make the most exciting Alice. She's a bit pale and wan, and lacking in energy somehow. Even her fight with the Jabberwocky at the end is rather tame, and it's more than a little surprising that she manages to overcome him. And when she returns to real life, much more sure about herself, she still seems as though she's missing something in the way of strength. I found her the least believable part of the movie altogether, which is rather ironic.

And CGI has come so far that we almost fail to be impressed with what happens in movies now. Avatar (which I saw in 2D) managed to impress because it viewed the world in an original way. Alice doesn't quite do that. The story is fairly tame (and there are some odd holes in it), and while the CGI really is superb, it's mostly things that we've seen before....except that it was in 3D, which made it rather more exciting. (The sense of being able to reach out and touch the butterfly that hovers in front of you right towards the end is extraordinary.)

We're becoming blase about what can be done in the movies, regrettably. I saw Fantastic Mr Fox not long ago, and it was wonderful....yet.... How can we capture that sense of freshness when we come to the movies now? We've been spoiled silly by what's possible.

The loss of storytelling

On the Insatiable Moon blog there's this comment from filmmakers Tom Burstyn and Barbara Sumner

At the Berlin festival one thing became obvious – we’re a little old to be embarking on what is a new career for us both. Young people should be making low-budget documentaries. Passion and obsession should be the preserve of those with energy to spare. We’re grandparents and we like to sleep, while we really don’t do well in the two-star accommodation kindly provided by the festival.

And yet we found ourselves repeatedly in conversations about our increasingly technical world – which is clearly the preserve of the young – and the loss of storytelling. At dinner one producer wondered if in fact we were in the grip of a cultural autism. As she saw it, the more technology (and thus budget) a film requires the more it appeals to and tunes the left-brain. And that’s perhaps what I hated most about Avatar – all that film wizardry in service of itself, instead of story.

The trick of course is to harness the fantastic benefits of the digital world to the needs of the heart to make intense, emotionally connected films. That’s certainly our goal. And one of the benefits of going to Berlin with This Way of Life was the solidifying of that purpose. Vive l’obsession!

The documentary, This Way of Life features Peter Karena, his wife Colleen, their six children and many horses who live almost wild in the stunning beauty of New Zealand's rugged Ruahine Mountains. Until, that is, Peter's escalating battle with his own father has profound consequences for the whole clan.

PS - If you want to win a piece of film history, go to the Trade Me auction featuring a vehicle used both for transport of crew and stars in the movie, The Insatiable Moon. (Pictured at left)

3 in 2

Three movies in two days. Okay, one of them was on video, but…
Firstly, caught up with Hitchcock’s Lifeboat again after about forty years, on Tuesday night. It remains a great ensemble piece, with a very good cast (only John Hodiak seems a bit of a weak link) of both American and English actors, and one Austrian – Walter Slezak, who had fled his home country as a result of Hitler’s invasions, and here, ironically, plays the conniving German. Of course, while it’s more ‘talky’ than a modern film would be, which particularly gives Tallulah Bankhead plenty of wonderful lines, there’s still plenty of tension, and some great scenes.
Secondly I went to Fantastic Mr Fox yesterday afternoon with my daughter and grandson, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s geared towards adults far more than kids, with its snappy and subtle dialogue, and overall inventiveness, but my grandson still seemed to enjoy it – at least until he accidentally pulled the top of a fingernail off on his trousers (don’t ask me!). The voices in this film are top notch; I particularly enjoyed Michael Gambon as Franklin Bean, the main baddie, who comes up with all the ideas for getting rid of Mr Fox (most of them involving wholesale destruction). The extension of the rather short book into a feature-length film has been interestingly done, though it might offend purists. I’d like to see it again to catch up with all the detail, in which there’s often easily missed humour.
And then, last night, there was Avatar, with more wholesale destruction. The storyline is the weakest element of this movie (I think it was in Titanic too, personally) with its patent baddies and heroic goodies, its indigenous people being attacked by a superior power (read the Yanks in practically any country they’ve had a go at), and the sense of oneness with nature.
But the storyline is survivable when you take the rest of the movie into account. Because we don’t have the 3D version available here we saw it in ordinary 2D, if ‘ordinary’ is the proper word. The visual element of Avatar is so stunning, so beautiful and so imaginative that it almost wouldn’t matter what story was going along with it. You watch in awe as characters ten feet tall interact with humans, as ferocious beasts out of someone’s nightmare chase and attempt to eat the hero alive, as enormous birds fly at terrific speed with people on their backs, as mountains float in mid-air – and people climb them (thousands of feet up in the sky) – as horse-like creatures are ridden (and then you realise they seem to have more than the usual number of legs), as jellyfish-like creatures float in the air and land in a sparkling array on the hero, as the night-time landscape lights up as people walk in it, and so on and so on. There are birds everywhere, endless varieties of fauna that bear similarities to those of Earth but aren’t quite the same, insects flying or crawling (and again they are close to what we know, but never quite) and much more.
And that’s only the ‘natural’ world; the military world is full of machines and robots and futuristic helicopters and planes all designed to within an inch of their being. All the time you’re asking: how did they do this? Everything is an achievement – nothing looks like CGI, even though much of it must be; nothing looks like ‘models,’ although it’s a sure thing with Weta Workshops involved that there must be models everywhere.
The actors are good overall, considering that the script doesn’t develop any of their characters in any way that’s at all unexpected. There’s no subtlety about the baddies – they’re bad from their first scene – and the goodies are all typical of basic future world comics (which the movie kept reminding me of: those near-naked heroes and heroines managing to cope with all sorts of situations in the flimsiest of costumes). Sigourney Weaver makes her role interesting by chain-smoking (more so when she’s the scientist than when she’s her avatar) and Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana are fine in the leads, considering that they’re always going to do what we expect them to do (boy meets girl, boy loses girl etc). None of the other characters have any depth, and basically are pawns of the plot. But the characters are pretty much second level, as they were in Titanic – it’s the effects that are important. And taken on that level, Cameron succeeds in every measure.

An Overgrowth of Words

I had a thought to go through this blog and check out how many words are new – or new in their current usage - and wouldn’t have been around three decades ago. Obviously the Internet is one, and email, but how many other words have arrived on the scene recently? Cellphone, the current use of ‘avatar’, the already-acceptable ‘phishing’, as well as vishing, fuzzing and a new use of zombies.
DVD is another, forum in its current use as a place for people to write on the Net. Blogs and bloggers, links, web development, and a host of other web add-ons (and add-ons itself), Wiki and Wikipedia, .com, online, video, download, software, ecommerce, connectivity, handsfree… the list goes on and on. And that’s just from a quick flick through my recent posts.

aka Alfred

The Internet use of the Indian word, Avatar is rather odd. It’s been used in its current meaning for years, apparently: as far back as 1985 according to one source. But it’s appearance on Internet forums, such as myLot, is probably more recent.
For those who haven’t come across an avatar in this style, it now usually appears in the form of a picture to the side of a post (a blog post, or forum post, rather than one on the side of the road!) and is intended to convey something of the character of the person writing – this is necessary in view of the fact that in most forums anonymity is the norm, with people’s real names hidden behind user names.
MyLot’s avatars can be one of your own pictures, and for me that’s preferable to some odd cartoon, or computer-produced job. On the other hand, on another forum where I sometimes write, Paypost, you can choose your own avatar from a fairly limited selection available. The closest picture to my way of presenting myself online was Alfred, the butler to Bruce Wayne, aka Batman. Since I tend to write what might be classed as ‘stuffy’ posts, ones that try to bring some sense to posts that consist of nothing but the ‘I hate politicians’ type of nonsense, Alfred isn’t too bad an avatar. But maybe I should fool everyone and go for Bruce Wayne instead…