The anaesthetisation of good taste continues

Inglourious Basterds Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

Hey, what's this? Initial reviews from Cannes were very mixed, with quite a high degree of negativity in many. But now that more critics have seen it, the positive reviews are far outnumbering the negative. Yes, once again the director who is so easy to dislike both personally (have you seen him in interviews?) and aesthetically is still selling glossy trash and violence to the critics and they are still (by and large) lapping it up. (I'm not so sure it will be a huge hit at the box office, though.)

For me, the effect of his oeuvre is like a cultural anaesthetisation of good taste and decency in cinema. A movie can have tension, wit and excitement without being graphically violent and morally vacuous, but Quentin doesn't seem to know that.

Of course, there are some critics who have come to dislike him, and the best negative review so far is from David Denby in the New Yorker:

Like all the director’s work after “Jackie Brown,” the movie is pure sensation. It’s disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness—it’s too shallow to be called nihilism—undermines even the best scenes....

Moral callousness has been part of Tarantino’s style in the past. In “Pulp Fiction,” his merry roundelay set among Los Angeles lowlifes, the aggressive acts that the characters commit against one another are so abrupt and extreme that they become funny. The movie’s outrageous panache gave the audience license to enjoy the violence as lawless entertainment. But, in “Basterds,” Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history....

Tarantino’s hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager....

The film is skillfully made, but it’s too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke. Tarantino may think that he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy (in the burning theatre, working-class Jewish boys get to pump Hitler and Göring full of lead), but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated. Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque.

I have never quite understood why the media gives such a juvenile director so much attention. For example, he gets a big spread by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic this month. (It's worth reading merely to confirm how immature Tarantino sounds.)

Goldberg seemingly enjoys the movie as showing Nazi revenge that he used to fantasise about, but later has reservations:

When I came out of the screening room the night before our interview, I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank. But when my blood cooled, I began to think about the morality of kosher porn in the context of current Middle East politics. Some of this was informed by my own experience in the Israeli army, in which I saw my fellow Jewish soldiers do moral things—such as risking their lives to prevent the murder of innocent Jews—as well as immoral things, like beating the hell out of Palestinians because they could.

When Tarantino asked me how I thought his film would be received in Israel—he’s visiting for the first time this summer, to promote the film—I told him that Israelis, who have actual experience with physical power (in a way that most Jews over the course of the past 2,000 years did not), might not take to the film in the way that many of their American cousins might. Some Israeli liberals, including the country’s many filmmakers, might not like his movie very much at all.

Well, revenge movies have never appealed to me. The only movie that I really liked that had a degree of a personal revenge as a theme was probably The Untouchables. (But even then, it was more a matter of spontaneous taking-justice-into-his-own-hands type of thing.) The whole vigilante/avenger thing with Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood never appealed.

So I am sure there will be no need for me to reconsider the value of this latest movie. As for the rest of the world: I feel confident that the intrinsic low value of Tarantino's work will be fully appreciated in retrospect.

UPDATE: a Salon blog goes at length into the Goldberg article and the question of whether this movie is "good for Jews". Certainly the comments that follow indicate that a large number of the public hate Tarantino and see through him better than your average critic. It also links to an amusingly vicious take on Tarantino and Inglorious Basterds in particular.

Power to the Moon

Technology Review: A Lunar Nuclear Reactor

Thank you for not suggesting that

I like this bit from the MSNBC story on some more recently released British Defence UFO files:

The head of the ministry's UFO desk wrote briefing notes in 1993 reporting a spate of sightings in southwest England and speculating whether they might be connected to Aurora, a secret U.S. spy plane whose existence has never been officially admitted.

Atop one of his letters, someone scrawled: "Thank you. I suggest you now drop this subject."

G&T considered

Gin and tonic: the drink that puts the fizz into Britain - Telegraph

Yes, here at Opinion Dominion we have long considered the gin and tonic the perfect pre-dinner drink.

As someone in this article notes, lime is the better citrus to use, which basically means that, unless you are in a very upmarket bar, you will make a better one at home. (Unlike beer, where the quality runs in the opposite direction.)

In fact, it was just last weekend that I was using home grown lime in my G&T, and commented to my wife how good it was instead of lemon. Cheers.

Mixed up man

Richard O’Brien: Rocky Horror? It was all about my mother - Times Online

The success of Rocky Horror, and its continual revival on stage, has always been a major puzzle to me. It has one catchy song, and is not very funny. Its point, or aim, is distinctly fuzzy. Why dedicated heterosexuals with no inclination to cross dress flock to it makes very little sense.

Last year (I think) it's writer, Englishman Richard O'Brien, appeared on ABC's amusing quiz show Spicks and Specks, and was as camp as could be. Well, I was hardly surprised.

Yet, as this interview in The Times above shows, he is even more confused and confounding than expected. (Has a son, even.)

I still don't forgive him for Rocky Horror, though, no matter how unpleasant his mother was.

Bad methane news

As Arctic Ocean warms, megatonnes of methane bubble up - Environment - New Scientist

Over 250 plumes of gas have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor to the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway. The bubbles are mostly methane, which is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Interestingly, though, the methane in this particular area is not making to the top of the ocean. Instead, it dissolves and partly contributes to ocean acidification:

None of the plumes the team saw reached the surface, so the methane was not escaping into the atmosphere and thus contributing to climate change – not in that area, at least. "Bigger bubbles of methane make it all the way to the top, but smaller ones dissolve," says Minshull.

Just because it fails to reach the surface doesn't mean the methane is harmless, though, as some of it gets converted to carbon dioxide. The CO₂ then dissolves in seawater and makes the oceans more acidic.

And it is possible that other, more vigorous plumes are releasing methane into the atmosphere. The team studied only one group of plumes, which were in a small area and were erratic.

"Almost none of the Arctic has been surveyed in a way that might detect a gas release like this," Minshull says.

I wonder, though, whether this is something that might have been going on before the waters increased in temperature by 1 degree. Maybe just no one was looking before.

Continuing the bird theme

Man v bird: the brush turkey battle

Brush turkeys are headed south, apparently. This article talks about how they live:

...with female brush turkeys laying 20 to 30 eggs a year, the population is sure to continue thriving, even though mysteriously, no-one looks after the chicks.

"These are very unusual animals. Basically, the eggs get laid into the bottom of a combust heap, they dig their way to the surface and simply no-one looks after them - absolutely no parental care," he said.

"There's no parents to teach them what a cat looks like or what food is, or anything.

We had a chick turn up in our yard earlier this year. Unfortunately, it became a victim of our dog, right in front of the kids too.

Reviewing fun

The Time Traveler's Wife. - By Dana Stevens - Slate Magazine

Eric Bana's latest movie is receiving some pretty bad reviews in the States. This is not an entirely bad thing, as it allows critics to be pretty witty. This opening paragraph from Dana Stevens, for example:

Physicist Dave Goldberg has a fascinating Slate piece this week on how The Time Traveler's Wife stacks up against other movies with a time-travel theme. In a survey of physicists' speculations on the possibility of time travel, he mentions one theory involving "gargantuan cosmic strings […] of matter of almost unimaginable density and length." That about sums up The Time Traveler's Wife, adapted from Audrey Niffenegger's best-selling novel by Bruce Joel Rubin (who also wrote Ghost, another metaphysically inflected love story). I'll take Goldberg's word that the movie obeys the laws of Einsteinian physics (no alternate universes, you can't change history, etc.), but it's in flagrant violation of the rules of narrative logic, character development, or the most basic audience satisfaction.

Surprising bird news

BBC - Earth News - Blue tits embrace 'aromatherapy'

No, it's not from the files of Benny Hill, Naturalist; it's the story of research into why blue tits like to put nice smelling herbs in their nest:

They found that aromatic plants, including lavender (Lavandula stoechas), apple mint (Mentha suaveolens), the curry plant (Helichrysum itlaicum) and Achillea ligustica significantly change the composition of bacterial communities living on blue tit nestlings.

"They reduce the number of different bacterial species, and the total number of bacteria, especially on chicks that are most vulnerable because they are both highly infested by blow fly larvae and carry great amounts of bacteria on their skin," says Mennarat.

In more local bird news, the Courier Mail last week ran this photo, apparently showing three pigeons co-operating to each get a drink and a bath.

I'm impressed.

We've had a bird bath in our back yard for about 6 months now; it's visible from the kitchen and dining room. Watching birds bathe is pleasing.

The coming disaster in Japan

Shaken and stirred in Tokyo's quakes

Here's an ABC journalist's first hand account of the recent, relatively mild, Japanese earthquakes. He notes:

But thankfully it was not the much-dreaded Great Tokai Earthquake. That is the big one, the terrible tremor which hits central Japan about every 130 years.

The problem is, it is overdue.

The last Great Tokai Earthquake was in 1854 when a massive magnitude 8.4 quake struck.

More about the coming Tokai Earthquake can be found here.

It is, of course, a typically Japanese thing that when you go to the website of the Japanese Meteorological Agency page about the Earthquake Early Warning system, they have a cute little graphic for it:

If I am not mistaken, that would be based on the underground catfish that the Japanese folklore says causes earthquakes. Cute but deadly.

UPDATE: lots of information about the history of Japanese giant-earthquake-causing-catfish lore can be found in this essay.

The ugly tourist

In Philippine town, the U.S. airmen are long gone, but the tawdry streets remain

The LA Times has a story about the prostitution that continues near the former Clark Air Force base, even though the Americans left there in 1992.

The picture painted by this article is very ugly - quite literally in the sense that it seems most of the clientele are greying sex tourists from all over the world chasing extremely young girls.

There is also mention of an Australian buying some Viagra from a street vendor. Travelling to another country for exploitative sex, but even then having to use Viagra to achieve it with girls about whom he also says:

"You can get a young girl here to do anything if you promise to marry her"

strikes me as a very special form of depravity.

Science fiction fodder

Here's a fun paper on arXiv: Are Black Hole Starships Possible? (Tentative answer: yes. However, the means of creating a useful sized black hole are somewhat far off into the future.)

Interestingly, the paper also notes that alien spaceships using such technology might be detectable by gamma ray telescope. (The suggestion is not new in regard to possible anti-matter powered ships.)

Flying books

Eerie occurrences at naval museum attract ghost hunters - Enquirer.com

A brief report on poltergeist type phenomena going on in a US Museum.

Ghosts and hauntings interest me, but I have no interest whatseover in the "ghosthunter" style TV shows with their ridiculous bunch of mediums and "sensitives" walking around with night vision cameras following them.

Which reminds me - I think I saw an ad on ABC TV a few weeks ago for a one off show that (as far as I could make out) may have been about a stone throwing poltergeist story in outback Australia. I missed it, and now am having trouble googling any details about it.

I know there have been one or two real life stories in Australia, so I would have liked to have seen it.

Does any reader know anything about it?

Strange photo from Saturn

Like the fist of an angry god | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Worth a look.

Mayhem in space planning

NASA should avoid a straight shot to Mars, panel says

There is plenty of speculation about how NASA should proceed from here: scrap Ares as a flawed design, not enough money to go to the Moon again, certainly not enough for Mars. Even "let's do other deep space stuff instead - how about an asteroid?"

But - I didn't realise this:

The budget would delay the first Ares I flight until December 2018. That is almost three years after NASA currently plans to send the International Space Station careening towards Earth to burn up in the atmosphere and plunge into the ocean. The current budget projections have also not set aside money for the space station's end-of-life plans.

Bloody hell. The thing seems barely to have been finished (in fact, is it really finished now, it's hard to keep track) and it is only supposed to last another 5 years?

The only thing it seems to have achieved is giving astronauts experience at piecing together big things in space. I guess that's something of value in itself, but all those astronauts doing it are probably at the peak of their career anyway and won't be on the next wave of exploration.

NASA had better start publicising some science done on board if it wants to maintain some credibility for its planning.

And finally - readers know I am strongly of the view that going back to the Moon is a practical, achievable thing that is relatively low risk to astronauts (compared to all the radiation exposure they will have on a trip to Mars). It's rarely spoken about, but isn't there a partial science justification in terms of good astronomy to be done from there? Perhaps radio astronomy from the dark side, or your usual astronomy from anywhere.

Would be easier to do the type of sky surveys required to spot deadly (but relatively small) asteroids that were mentioned here recently from the Moon? You at least are assured of long, clear nights!

Update: a NASA page, containing some links, that talks about lunar astronomy as a possibility. People seem to like Hubble photographs so much, I suspect they would be impressed by similar quality photos from the Moon.

If it is a good place to search for earth approaching asteroids, even better: you can sell a return to the Moon as an insurance policy for the future of civilisation.