John August

Rant

The wall of newspaper clippings

Rant, Words on the page

newspaper clippings

Gary Whitta wrote in with his proposed moratorium: the wall of expository newspaper clippings. They’re a movie staple, but I’ve never seen one of these in real life.

However, I have in fact seen parents’ shrines to their children’s accomplishments, which is why I’m (barely) able to give myself a pass for this moment at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

charlie clippings

Part of the difference may literally be the framing. Newspaper clippings pinned to the wall reads as crazy/obsessive. Clippings nicely mounted and hung reads simply as pride.

Please take your finger out of your ear

Rant, Television

Along the lines of my gripes with cinematic cell phone troubles and air ducts, Lou Lesko takes issue with another movie cliché:

The high technology wireless radio devices that are concealed in the ear canals of the good guys for surreptitious communication work just fine without sticking your finger in your ear. And yet on NCIS Los Angeles last week –- in a pivotal scene where a guy is being shadowed -– there were all the protagonists, obvious as could be, looking like they forgot to take a Q-Tip to their ears for the last month.

For once, writers are off the hook. Nowhere in the scene description do we tell actors to poke their fingers in their ear canals.

Rather, it’s directors who are likely propping up this cliché, worried that the audience — particularly a CBS audience — won’t understand why characters are talking to invisible people.

Why do the machines need humans?

Geek Alert, Rant

Wired’s Matt Blum asks geeky questions about popular sci-fi movies, including one that’s always bugged me:

8. The Matrix: Why do the machines need humans?

The intelligent machines have all humans hooked up to elaborate devices to harvest their body heat and chemicals, right? But they also have sophisticated fusion reactors. The energy production of fusion reactors compared to that of humans (with all the maintenance required, including The Matrix itself) is so much more efficient it’s just ridiculous -— and we’re supposed to believe that intelligent machines, which would presumably operate logically, would keep the humans around anyway? It’s obviously necessary for the plot, but it just makes no sense.

But what would make sense is if humans were used not as batteries, but rather as organic CPUs.

For all its processing power, perhaps the Matrix can’t do something that human brains can. So they use the connected humans as a fleshy cloud computer to keep the Matrix running.

As a viewer, I’d be willing to accept an incredibly simple answer here. On page 50, instead of…

MORPHEUS

The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,00 B.T.U.’s of body heat.

…how about…

MORPHEUS

The human brain is slow and imperfect, but it can do things silicon can’t. It can imagine, create. It can stitch together ideas to form something new. That’s why they need us -- so they can evolve.

Show your work, pt. 2

Follow Up, Geek Alert, Rant

geek alertFollowing up on last night’s post, it occurs to me that designing and programming for the web also has an aspect of showing your work. Nearly every browser lets you “View Source,” showing how the page was constructed…up to a point.

For example, if you View Source on the new Answer Finder I built, you can see the JavaScript (and jQuery) that drives the menu and shows/hides the various sections.

What you can’t see is the PHP on the server that generated those sections. In my case, this is a good thing, because the PHP is so awful and kludgy that I can’t explain or defend why it works.

So to make that one page, I’m relying on a bunch of technologies with vastly different levels of transparency.

transparencyThe “transparent” technologies are available for anyone interested in looking. And that’s mostly good: Peeking beneath the hood is a great way to learn how a technology works. I often find myself opening the CSS for sites I like to see how they’re constructed. ((Keep in mind that you can learn bad habits this way.))

I’m classifying HTML as semi-transparent because so much of the HTML you see when you “View Source” for a site is generated by scripts running on the server, and it’s not automatically clear how or why. WordPress, for example, mixes in at least four parts (Header, Content, Footer and Sidebar) to make any given page. Someone familiar with WordPress might be able to deduce a basic structure, and figure out which parts were generated by The Loop. But in some cases it’s arbitrary. For example, the category links at the bottom of most pages on this site could be hard-coded or generated on the fly, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.

While you can find a lot of information about the images used on a site, including where they’re stored, you don’t necessarily know how they were generated. The chart above, for example, is a .png made from a snapshot of a Numbers document.

In the fully-opaque category are PHP and MySQL, who do most of the heavy lifting for the site but are completely insulated from the user.

Traditionally, programmers have been able to disappear behind the opacity of a compiler. Designers could hide behind the printing or manufacturing process. With the web, the process behind the product is much more visible.

(End of Geek Alert)

The same thing is happening to movies. Not too long ago, a movie came into existence in popular culture just shortly before its release, when the first ads and trailers started running. I didn’t know anything about Die Hard before I saw a trailer. I saw The Blair Witch Project without any idea who made it or how.

Now, long before the marketing begins — before production even begins — details of projects spill across the internet for consumption and criticism. Scripts leak. Photographers sneak pictures of the set, or the costumes. The omission of a giant squid becomes the focal point of conversation for a movie that doesn’t yet exist.

For movies and television, I’m not sure we’re better off “showing the work” in advance.

I appreciate reading American Cinematographer to see how Robert Elswit lights There Will Be Blood, but I don’t read those articles before seeing the movie, lest I get too distracted by those details when I watch it. Likewise, I wish I didn’t know what I know about Terminator: Salvation or Dollhouse. It’s not insider knowledge, but rather the media reporting on the media.

This isn’t transparency, an invitation to come look inside. It’s forced exposure. It’s uncomfortable, and by nature we try to avoid uncomfortable things.