DVD Review: Om Shanti Om November 3, 2009
Posted by Matt in DVD, Film, reviews.Tags: bollywood, DVD, Film, om shanti om, review
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I have been planning to review this film for about two years, but have only finally gotten around to it. This was the very first Bollywood film I ever saw. I’m not sure why – but one Monday night I got out of work early and found out that a local cinema was showing a Bollywood film called Om Shanti Om. I didn’t know too much about it, but at 2 hrs 50 mins (plus interval), it seemed like I’d get my money’s worth.
Never having seen a Bollywood, I knew roughly that I could expect it to be long and have lots of musical numbers in the middle of it. I’d also heard they were somewhat over the top.
Actually, the correct phrase is: It’s utter cheese from beginning to end.
However, I’m not adverse to cheese on occasions, and let me tell you – this is some of the most sincere, enthusiastic cheese I’ve seen in ages.
When the Americans make a big-budget film with lots of craziness and a paper-thin plot, everyone’s a bit embarrassed and self-conscious that they’re making a dumb movie. (Just watch all the big-name actors when they had to do a special effects blockbuster.)
But not so the Indians. The main lead, Shah Ruhk Khan (the Brad Pitt of Bollywood) chews up the screen in a performance that is so badly over-acted that you can’t help but getting sucked into it.
Meanwhile, his female lead, Deepika Padukone, was actually making her first film, but you wouldn’t really have been able to tell.
The story – such as I can tell you without spoiling the wondrous cheesiness of it all – starts in the 70s, when Om (Shah Rukh Khan), a poverty-stricken “junior artiste” – we’d call him an extra – is working on crowd scenes for big Bollywood films and dreams of becoming a big star, so that he can romance the girl of his dreams – Shantipriya, the actress (played by Padukone).
For the first hour of this film, assuming you hadn’t read the back of the box, any description online or almost any other print media that is put out around this film that shamefacedly gives away everything, you might just be surprised by a twist that occurs that takes the film in very different directions.
By the end of three hours, you’ve had absolutely everything – romance, songs, dancing, action scenes, death, comedy, and fighting with huge stuffed animals and cameos by nearly all the major actors/actresses working in Bollywood today.
And let me tell you – it works – almost. Like a huge over-the-top Broadway musical, it just keeps delivering crowd-pleasing melodrama and comedy all the way through. The cinematography especially is stunning and the colour scheme is beautiful. The only fatal flaw in all of this is that the romance, which was so beautifully built up in the first hour never really pays off in the end. In fact, it’s almost forgotten. This might not be a problem for an Indian audience, but considering that it’s the engine that drives the rest of the film, it’s almost unforgivable for Western audiences. Especially since, with a couple of extra scenes, you could have delivered the payoff that we want.
Oh well – if I were a Broadway producer with a few million under my belt, I think this could be turned into a really good stage production.
If you were going to try Bollywood, this would be the film to try. Leave all your expectations at the door, and expect it to be over-the-top, and you just might find it an enjoyable evening out.
As a little sneak peak, let me show you the scene that (I think) sells the whole thing. Early on in the film, young Om is madly in love with Shantipriya the actress – who of course doesn’t know he exists. His good friend manages to get him tickets to the premiere of her latest film and the two of them show up in outrageously bad clothes to stand beside the red carpet.
For luck, Om’s long-suffering mother gave him a piece of string or a bracelet (it’s been a while so I’ve forgotten) which she wrapped around his string for good luck. At the red carpet, in a scene which is done entirely without dialogue (except for a particularly evocative song called “Ajab Si”), that little red piece of string turns out to be the thing that gives him his first encouter with Shanti…
It’s so unutterably mushy – even a Hollywood romantic comedy wouldn’t include a scene like this – that it works. Either that or you’ll think my movie standards have dropped to an all-time low – in which case, don’t watch this film.
4 1/2 out of 5.
Further on Productivity: How I Let Pomodoros Into My Life and Almost Ruined My Productivity (But Then Got It Back Again) November 1, 2009
Posted by Matt in Productivity.Tags: iphone, pomodoro, Productivity, time management
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Continuing on from the last post about productivity and timesheets, as promised, I wanted to talk a bit about the famous Pomodoro Technique.
I got put onto this while hunting around for timers to do my 15-minute timesheet program.
I’d never heard about the Pomodoro Technique – but it’s certainly novel enough, that I think it deserves to become as famous as GTD. You can find all about it for free, just by going to www.pomodorotechnique.com and downloading the free ebook, but I’ll give you the brief version here.
This system was designed by an Italian guy who had trouble focusing when he was in university. So he got himself a kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato (“pomodoro” is Italian for tomato, thus the name) and used to see if he could concentrate till the timer went off.
Over the years, he eventually perfected it to a system that (in its simplest form) works like this:
1. You write a to-do list.
2. You start a timer for 25 minutes. During that time, you work on the top item on your list to the exclusion of anything else till the timer stops.
3. If you get distracted (either by you thinking of something or someone disturbing you), quickly write down whatever other task you have to do coming out of that down on your to-do list and keep working on your item.
4. When the timer goes, you must take a 3-5 minute break from what you’re doing. This is to clear your head and give you more energy. You’ve then completed one Pomodoro (or unit of time).
5. Every four Pomodoros, you can take a longer break (like 15 minutes).
This is pretty similar to my own system, except it has two advantages:
a) The built-in breaks are actually really good. You might not think so, but once you try it, by 25 minutes (as opposed to 15), you’re well and truly on a roll, and being told to wait 5 minutes actually makes you really keen to jump back into the next block of time. As long as you’re strict about keeping the break to five minutes, you’re not really going to lose much momentum, because that’s really only enough time to check a couple of emails, get a drink of water, go to the bathroom or something like that. If you actually knock over four of these things, you will have worked so solidly, that a 15 minute break will do you good.
b) The other advantage was that I wish I’d thought of the distractions notation. His simple system (which you can read about in the e-book) of noting down your distractions so that you can think about them later is brilliant. By far, the biggest distraction for me is that I’m mid-way through a job and I think of another one. By noting the job down (either urgent to be done that day or on a master job list to be done at some other time), you assure yourself that you are thinking about it, but you’re not going to work on it right now. After a little while of doing this, I discovered that most times I thought of jobs, it was mainly because I was procrastinating on the job I was doing, so now I find I don’t think of so many jobs to do in the middle of the one I’m working on now.
So those two aspects of the Pomodoro technique are great.
However, I decided to give the system a workout for a week instead of my usual timesheet system. I pretty much halved my productivity.
You know why?
I didn’t want to start the timer. I knew, after I’d written out the to-do list, that it’d be a bit of a nasty job, that first one, so I thought I’d just check one more email, or maybe get a cup of tea, or stop to talk to someone, etc. etc.
Once the Pomodoros were started, they were fine. But I could sometimes delay on starting the timer for a good couple of hours.
After trying to work out what went wrong, I have now adapted the system as follows:
1. Instead of my 15 minute intervals that I talked about in my last post, I now like to use Pomodoros (if I can) as a measure of time. If you count a Pomodoro as 25 mins work and 5 mins break, that gives you 30 minute blocks.
2. I now divide the day up into 30 minute breaks, plus a couple of 15 minute “tea breaks”. So a typical day might look something like this:
9am – 11am [Pomodoros 1-4]
11am – 11.15am [15 minute break]
11.15am – 12.45pm [Pomodoros 5-7]
12.45pm – 1.45pm [Lunch]
1.45pm – 3.45pm [Pomodoros 8-11]
3.45pm – 4.00pm [15 minute break]
4.00pm – 5.30pm [Pomodoros 12-14]
Now I’m not saying the day runs as smoothly as this – it rarely does. And obviously if you’re in a meeting, you just have to count how many Pomodoros roughly you’re spending during that time.
But the important thing with the above plan is it gives me a time when I need to start the timer. So at 9am, I start the first timer – while it’s ticking, I find the guilt of knowing that it’s running and I’m not doing anything inevitably makes me starting using that first one to work out my to-do list for the day and what’s most important. By the time I hit the end of the first one, take 5 minutes, it’s 9.30 and I straight away start the next one and jump in.
As long as I’m reasonably awake when I come into the office – and even often when I’m feeling tired – it really does work to get the day off to a good start.
So, yeah, I love the Pomodoros – I like the rhythm it gets you into – but I’d highly recommend starting your first Pomodoro at a set time on the clock, so you avoid pre-Pomodoro procrastination.
This is not quite the official system, because the guy who created the system believes that you start the timer when you start working. I believe start the timer, and you’ll more than likely start working.
After all, if the timer is running and you know that you can mark off that you did a solid half hour of work – and I think 25 mins of solid work plus 5 mins downtime is easily worth 30 mins of distractable work time where you’re checking emails, replying to everyone who talks to you, etc. – then you tend to not want to put down that you spent the entire time shuffling papers and doing nothing much. So you start working.
I also agree with what the Pomodoro guy (sorry, he does have a name – Francesco Cirillo) says at the end of his book – that if you stop using the timers, you lose your productivity. It’s a funny little quirk of nature, but unless you’re particularly driven to start with – in which case stopping every 25 minutes will probably irritate you no end – if you take away the timers, your productivity drops. The timers aren’t a tool to train you how to work productively – they’re what makes you work productively.
Maybe it looks a bit goofy to have numbers ticking down in the top right-hand corner of your screen when you’re working. Could be. But it’s a lot better going home knowing you did a solid day’s work. And could any worker ask for more satisfaction? I don’t think so.
Final link for the day is this timer which I found as a nice alternative to the AleJanJes Timer, albeit that it only works for the Pomodoro Technique. Called Focus Booster, this is another timer, that can be downsized to a small block that sits in your top right-hand corner (where I like to put my timers) and it’s set to count down 25 minutes, followed by 5 minutes. The only catch is that you have to remember to start it again as soon as the 5 minutes are up, but that’s not the worst thing in the world, and helpful for the longer breaks.
I have tried a couple of the Pomodoro apps on the iPhone, my favourite being Pomodoro Time Management (by rapidrabbit), which for some reason is no longer available in the Australian iTunes store. However, they don’t let you play music while you listen to them, and the problem with an iPhone app of course is that it doesn’t run if you use another application on the phone, making it annoying if you need to use something else on the phone while you’re using it (and it won’t even let you listen to music on the iPod while it’s running, which is particularly cruel . . .)
Anyway, whatever you use (and I’m aware not everybody is going to be as Draconian to themselves as I am), I hope you all manage to get to the stage where you can feel proud of how much work you do, and know that you’re being productive.
How I Became Ruthlessly Productive At Work (After Years Of Struggling With Procrastination & Distraction) October 24, 2009
Posted by Matt in Productivity.Tags: Productivity, time management
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Every good blog has to have a time management article at some stage – this can be mine. Whether that makes it a good blog is up to you, gentle reader.
All right – time management.
I’ve always struggled with procrastination. It’s not quite as bad “My name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic” but I’m pretty sure “My name is Matt and I procrastinate on work” is not too far behind. I’ve done it as long as I can’t remember.
You know those people who like to burn through their homework so they can play outside? I’m the guy stuck inside doing it up to dinner time and beyond because I just can’t get myself to concentrate on my work . . .
I struggled with it through five years at my first full-time job, and I’ve struggled at my current one. I’ve tried different things.
I loved the Getting Things Done system. In fact, I read it in the week before I moved to Sydney to start my first full-time job. And it has certainly been a system I’ve come to rely on for how to get organised and keep your mind clear. However, for me, the GTD system didn’t help with the crucial problem I faced – procrastination.
See, by the time I’ve emptied my head, made all my lists, and done all that great GTD stuff, there’s the issue that that work has to be done. I read a variety of books that talked about different things like how to prioritise tasks, how to work out psychologically why you’re procrastinating (e.g. fear of failure). And I’d get some short-term changes out of these systems.
But for the most part, I’d keep falling off the wagon. And sometimes the advice you’d get from time management books would cancel each other out. Some books tell you that just actually doing the jobs that are there (rather than thinking about them) is a good way to go. Well, this is true, and there is something to be gained by just doing something now rather than endlessly scheduling it around. However, if you do everything that’s in front of you now, you’ll find that you answer a lot of emails, run a lot of errands for people who drop things on your desk – but the big picture jobs (most likely the ones you’re actually being paid to do) aren’t getting done.
I never knew how to get myself out of this dilemma. The other problem is, I’ve worked out that I’m a dreadful people-pleaser. It can be almost anyone in the company, but if they ask me to do something for them – whether it be shifting boxes or proofreading things or whatever – I’ll drop anything to help out.
And if I go to team meetings – aarggh!! – it gets even worse, because I’ll say “yes” to everything I’m asked to do, even if I’m not sure how on earth I can manage it all. Even though I inevitably get myself in trouble later on for not delivering everything I said I’d do, I still can’t help myself.
Oddly enough, it was this tendency of myself that led to an interesting breakthrough that I made.
The background was that at the beginning of this year, I had three roles at work. I was supposed to spend 2 1/2 days a week on one, and 1 1/2 days on the second and 1 day on the third.
On paper.
In reality, I’d just work on whichever one screamed the loudest. And I was having trouble doing any of them well.
And I was starting to get asked these questions, “How much time are you spending on each job area?” And you know what? I had no idea.
So I decided to start tracking my time. I know there are time management books out there that talk about doing a time log for a few days – some of you may even have tried that. However, that kind of thing is more about working out how many times you get phone calls during the day, how many times you distract yourself, etc.
But this time – what I wanted to do was actually track my time as if I was a consultant. So I signed up for a free internet-based timesheet called actiTIME. The main attraction with actiTIME was that it’s completely free if you just want a timesheet to log times into. (You can buy versions if you want to have more than 10 people using it and you want to access more complex management and accounting processes – but the free version suited me fine because I just wanted a sheet that I could log times in.)
The major tweak I made to it was that actiTIME comes with three main categories – Customers (it’s assuming you’re a contractor), then Projects which filter under Customers and then particular Tasks under that.
I changed Customers to Job Roles (one for each of my three roles) and kept the Projects and Tasks. (Actually, it was a nice feature that I could rename these levels to be in keeping with what I wanted.)
The other key that I decided to do was record my time in 15 minute increments, which seemed like a standard way of tracking these things. I’m not sure how contractors keep track of these things, or whether they guess at the end of the day, but I decided that I’d use a little countdown timer program that I had downloaded a long time ago (the sadly no-longer-available AleJanJes Timer, which I can’t link to because the page is no longer there). I’d set the timer for 15 minutes, and I’d run it pretty much every 1/4 of an hour (unless I wasn’t at my desk). I’d try to keep it as close I could to the hour, quarter past, half past and quarter to (e.g. 9.00, 9.15, 9.30, 9.45) so that it had a certain regularity to it.
Every time the Timer stopped, I’d flick over to my actiTIME sheet, which was sitting open in a browser on my computer all day. I’d then add 15 minutes to the total of whatever task I was working on.
At this stage, I wasn’t attempting to prioritise my work or anything like that – and I still tended to work on whatever was screaming the loudest – but the idea was just to track it to give me an idea of what was taking up my time.
But what I didn’t expect was the amazing secondary benefit of this tracking – I finally discovered the anti-procrastination holy grail I’d been looking for!
Quite simply, knowing that every15 minutes I had to account for what I’d been doing made me work more solidly. Originally, this might have been because I had some thought that I was going to show the timesheet to my managers. That never eventuated – and I don’t think I’ll ever show anyone those reports – but after three weeks of tracking every 15 minutes, the habit was well and truly entrenched.
I’m not saying I didn’t waste time sometimes. There were times when I was tired, when I didn’t want to start a particular job. When I’d go make a cup of tea or coffee just to avoid starting the next time. (For the record, I’d count cups of tea as part of whatever job I was working on for 15 minutes, but if I had a real waste-of-time 15 minutes doing something like surfing the net or a long conversation with someone, I wouldn’t claim the time.) The idea was that I was trying to make sure I could account for all the 7 1/2 hours during the day that I’m paid for. And for the most part, I’ve been able to. There have been some days where I hit the end of the day and realise that I’ve only done about 7 hours work (despite the fact that I was in the office for a full day), but those days are becoming rarer.
I never would have picked it as being a winning system – running a timer and logging my work in a timesheet – but it has me able to do a full day’s worth of work, knowing that I didn’t spend a third or more of it mucking around and doing stuff I shouldn’t have been doing.
This system worked rather well for quite a while. Until I discovered the Pomodoro Technique, and decided to try that instead of my existing system.
That led to interesting results. . . and a new generation of time management for me. But I’ll save that for another blog.
In the meantime, I would challenge any of you die-hard procrastinators out there to give actiTIME a whirl, with a timer. (Hmm . . . maybe actiTIME could add a timer to the page?) Seeing as it’s no longer available, I thought I’d set the AleJanJes Time up on Media Fire for you to download. It was always intended to be freeware, so I don’t think I’m doing any wrong here. The guy who originally made it put it there so his kids wouldn’t fight over the computer.
I like this particular timer because it’s small and you can put it in the top right-hand corner of your screen where it will remind you quite obviously that your time is soon up. You right click on it to change the settings.
Have fun! I’ll talk more about Pomodoros another time.
Film Review: The Box October 22, 2009
Posted by Matt in Film, reviews.Tags: Film, reviews
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I always enjoy Q&A screenings of films – you tend to pay a bit more attention to the film knowing that you can grill the director at the end of the film. (Especially when said director is going to be woken up at 3am and grilled over the phone.)
I wasn’t among the diehard fans who’d seen Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales last year, but I had seen both versions of Donnie Darko at the theatres. I wasn’t as big a fan of DD as other people – mainly because I think it’s just an excuse to encourage depressive people to kill themselves because the world would be a better place without them in it.
But I digress from The Box.
This movie was apparently based on a short story by Richard Matheson, which got made into a Twilight Zone episode, and that’s what makes this movie so enjoyable. It’s a complete throwback to the days of The Twilight Zone. It’s set in 1976 in Richmond, Virginia, and it’s awesome in so many ways. First of all, it looks 70s all the way – cars, costumes, everything. Secondly, which probably only matters to me because I’ve been there at that time of year – it looks like Virginia in the winter time. I love the trees, the houses. It adds a whole hauntingly beautiful aspect to the whole thing. And then there’s the music – it took a bit of getting used to, but the score was deliberately written in the style of Bernard Herrman, who used to write the scores for some of the early TZ episodes.
So the reason I’m telling you all this is that I want to make clear – the atmosphere of the whole thing was terrific. There wasn’t a dull frame anywhere in the film.
The problem really came from the story itself. As I understand it, Matheson’s original concept was the one that opens the film – a box gets delivered to a couple with a big red button in it. The couple are offered a choice: If they push the button, someone “who they do not know” will die but they will get $1,000,000. Or they can pass on the button and the money.
This concept is really good – and obviously enough to get me in the cinema. The problem was that it was only the beginning. The film then branched off into a second story which was related but felt completely different from the first one. I loved the second one even more, but then there was the third act of the film which tried to tie the whole thing together, but really seemed to just completely undo the reason for the middle part of the film. In fact, without too much trouble, you could have jumped from the first third of the film to the last third without too much trouble.
So my thinking is that it feels like two different stories trying to be written together because on their own, neither of them would pad out a feature-length film. So ultimately, while I loved the ideas he was playing with, I felt a bit let down at the end. Still, it looks and sounds so different from other films operating at the time, that I’d recommend having a watch of it anyway. Also, it’s deliberately been kept reasonably clean, both in terms of language, violence, etc. That’s not to say it’s not suspenseful (if not downright unsettling) in some parts, but it’s not a horror film, either.
4 out of 5.
Review: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari October 10, 2009
Posted by Matt in Film.Tags: Film, horror
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No 6 on the 1001 Films to Watch Before You Die. Now it’s over to Germany in 1919 for the rather bizarre experience of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
The storyline is pretty simple – a young man tells a tale of terrible occurrences in his village. A carnival comes to town and a mysterious Dr Caligari demonstrates a somnambulist – a young man in a coffin-like box who never wakes from his slumber – except at the command of the sleepwalker. Then people start getting murdered at night. Can you tell where this is going? Well, it does kind of go there but also has a twist or two along the way.
But the real point of watching this film is its example of what’s known as German Expressionism. Unlike the Americans, who were aiming for realism in their film (e.g. if you watch D W Griffiths at this time, he would often insert small children and animals in lots of scenes because, by nature of the fact that they can’t really act, give an added level of realism to the scenes). But not here. The sets are all clearly painted, and designed to look over the top and surreal. Doorways and buildings are set at lurching angles. Everything looks out of place and sinister.
I watched this online at the following link, and considering it’s got a relentlessly atmospheric string quartet soundtrack, it was rather effective on the whole. Worth seeing as a predecessor to some of the famous horror films that were to come.
3 1/2 out of 5.
DVD Review: Intolerance October 5, 2009
Posted by Matt in DVD, Film.Tags: DVD, Film, reviews
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This is no 5 on the 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die, which just gives you an idea of how fast I’m going, seeing as I got the book a year ago . . . but look, even if I go no further in the book, I’ve seen an absolute masterpiece in this film.
But I’ve known that since I was 16. I first heard about Intolerance in some review somewhere in a newsletter by a Christian historian that my Dad subscribed to and I remember being intrigued by the concept. At the time, however, I thought that I’d never see the film, because where are you going to find a film like that in Brisbane?
The answer turned out to be, to my surprise, at my local library. I was hunting for something on the catalogue one day and discovered that I could order the VHS (this was definitely pre-DVD) in from another library. So I went ahead and ordered it in and got hold of the Hollywood House VHS version of Intolerance.
Now, a word about Hollywood House. Those of you who were collectors of videos back in the 80s may remember that, in Australia, Hollywood House was a video distributor that specialised in releasing cheap and nasty versions of old classic films that had found themselves in the public domain. And a film from 1916 fitted into that category.
VHS was never all that good for film presentation (as we discovered when we switched to DVD), but most videos looked like DVD compared to the picture quality rolled off by Hollywood House. It was horrendous. Image brightness flickered from frame to frame. The frame would wobble. I’m not sure what they did (or didn’t do) to get that, but it was rubbish.
Then there was the music. Obviously, there print of Intolerance didn’t ship with a score, so they’d made one up by randomly playing movements of classical works throughout the film. It was a complete and utter mishmash, including one 40 minute stretch where they just put on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade and let it run. And, to this day, I still consider the 2nd movement of Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony to be the theme from Intolerance.
But despite all this, I fell in love with the film. For those who haven’t seen or heard of it, the director’s idea was to tell four tales of Intolerance – but simultaneously. So, like a piece of music with various themes, the film crosscuts between four stories: a “modern” (1916!) tale of a young couple being persecuted by unjust social workers and big business owners, the fall of Babylon to the Persians, the St Bartholomew Days’ Massacre in France in the 1600s where the French Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered by the Catholics and, finally, the life of Jesus Christ.
Not equal screen time is given to each stories. The modern tale gets the most airtime, closely followed by the Babylon story. The French story has characters, but they serve more to drive the plot along rather than to have any chance to breathe. And the story of Christ serves more as a chance to insert iconic Christian images in the midst of the other stories to add gravitas to the whole proceedings.
In some ways, this film is mad. The philosophy of the director seems a bit crazy – on the one hand, it seems like a Christian film, because of all the Christ references and Bible verses – but on the other hand, it portrays the fall of Babylon (an event described in the Bible as the catalyst for the exiled Israelites being able to return to their homelands after 70 years in captivity) as being a total tragedy. So it’s a bizarre mixture of sacred and profane.
And it’s really old-fashioned. Someone called it a “cinema sermon against bigotry” and it is. The closest modern equivalent to this type of director would be Oliver Stone.
And yet – despite all that – it works. I think the secret of it is fourfold:
1) Crosscutting storylines actually works better for modern audiences than ever before. We’re a generation that likes to multitask. We switch channels while watching TV, we tweet while answering emails. So to watch four stories at once like this is really engaging. As soon as one gets boring, the film switches to another one.
2) It shows the power of editing. If you were to watch the four stories linearly (ie one after another), you might be interested, but it would get a bit tedious after a while. But when you’re watching all four at once, especially towards the end when all four stories climax at the same time, it’s unbelievably powerful cinema. Intolerance takes its time to get going (it’s over 3 hours long) but when it hits its stride, its an unstoppable visual force.
3) Silent filmmakers understood the importance of visceral images. When you don’t have sound, you can’t effectively make a talking film with lots of captions. Instead, you have to create images that will grab people, regardless of whether they know what people are saying. And Intolerance delivers that in spades. There are women being threatened, crowds being shot at, babies being snatched from their mother’s arms. You see images like this, under any circumstances, and it puts fire in your blood. (Which is exactly what the film was designed to do.)
4) Finally, it has something for everyone. There’s stuff in there for historians, people who love spectacular visual spectacles, drama/romance buffs who want some melodrama, war fans who want epic battle scenes, and action buffs who want car chases.
It got a mixed reception when it was released in America, but in Russia, it was very popular, because it showed that there was a way to make cinema preach a message, and it inspired a generation of filmmakers there.
The only problem with seeing it nowadays is that of all the DVDs that are available, none of them really has a soundtrack that does this film justice. Despite my gentle knocking of Hollywood House video above, with its random jukebox of classical music, they did actually succeed in giving the film a big sweeping orchestral score – so despite the occasional mismatching of classics, on the whole, the effect was to give the film an epic grand feel.
On DVD, the film has been cleaned up rather well (especially if you get the American Kino edition pictured here, which is the best print of the lot of them), but the soundtrack options are rather poor. There is a version of this DVD from the UK by Eureka (that used to be available in Australia, but not any more, from what I see) and it had a Wurlitzer organ soundtrack for three hours which was pretty tough going (apologies to Wurlitzer fans). The Kino video has a mock-orchestral soundtrack played entirely on (cheap) synthesiser and keyboard. It’s a bit more action-specific than the organ, but even then it’s not all that crash hot.
I never got a chance to see it, but apparently in the early 90s, Carl Davis did some orchestral scores for old silent films (Intolerance) included, and I think that would be an interesting watch. Sadly, that’s been unavailable for years.
Anyway, due to its now being out of copyright, you can find this film readily available on the net. This link will take you to a complete version of the film (warning: it’s a bit of an ordinary print) that you watch or download. I’d recommend getting three hours worth of rousing music and watching it with your own soundtrack.
Everyone should see this film at least once.
5 out of 5.
Non-Spoiler Review of Lost Seasons 1-4 September 27, 2009
Posted by Matt in DVD, TV.Tags: DVD, lost, TV
6 comments
This post is, of course, rather redundant to true fans of the TV show Lost because Season 5 has been completely aired, and most people are getting excited about what’s coming in Season 6.
So maybe this can be a little note for those who’ve never watched any Lost and are wondering if it’s really as good as it’s cracked up to be.
Well, I suppose first of all – what Lost is not: it’s not a subtle character drama, in the vein of Sopranos or any similar HBO series. It’s designed for America’s ABC channel, so all content is kept at a reasonably mild level, and all characterisations are the larger-than-life type that you find in a typical disaster film. The heroic doctor, the heroic girl, the loudmouth, etc. etc.
However, where this show has won over the hearts and minds of viewers is largely in two areas: a) its originality and b) it’s cleverness. And for me, I’d add c) it’s brilliant use of the 45-minute TV episode as a storytelling medium.
A little on all three.
a) I read an article once, which I now can’t remember where, which described two guys who have developed working out movie popularity down to almost a mathematical formula. They can read a script, and based on the script, work out how popular the film is going to be. And one of the things that really makes a film or show take off is actually not the big stars – but the location.
And that has well and truly been proved with Lost. We’re so used to seeing either big American cities (in the law/medical/police dramas) or small country towns or whatever in TV shows, that a show set almost exclusively on a tropical island is quite a novelty. Just watch a couple of episodes of Lost with its lush greenery and sparkling sands, and it just doesn’t look like any show you’ve ever seen before. And because it’s a different location, different stuff happens. People run through trees being chased by things. People hide in the jungle. People discover things hidden in the jungle. (It’s just like playing those adventures games we used to play on computers in the 80s/90s all over again.)
2) The cleverness. When Lost first took off, in nearly every single episode of its 25-episode first season, it raised new questions. Just when we wanted to know more about what was going on – a new episode came out that raised completely different questions. By the end of the first season, there were so many questions that were up in the air, that the word on the street was that the guys behind the show were just making it up as they went along.
As it turns out, we were quite wrong. Slowly, bit by bit, every question is being answered. There are certainly more arising, but those who have continued to follow the show (there have been drop-offs along the way) have been rewarded with bigger and bigger answers.
3) But for me, it’s not just the cleverness of the plot that I like – it’s the structural beauty of the show. Like all good shows that we love, it has created a formula. For instance, those of us that follow House M.D. are familiar with the formula. Someone mysteriously gets sick, House solves the case over the next 45 minutes. Show over.
And Lost too developed a unique style. In any given 45-minute episode, it would pick one character, and during the episode, we would see flashbacks of a past time in that person’s life. Simple concept, but it worked beautifully.
First of all, it gave us a structure to follow and really worked to mix things up and keep it interesting. (After all, all those trees and jungle could get a bit boring.) But most importantly it worked because while the present-day island parts were raising questions in our minds, the flashbacks were answering questions. So by taking from us with one hand and feeding us with the other, the creators of the show were able to lull us into a sense of trust – trust that they would explain all the mysteries to us.
Where this worked exceptionally well is in Season 1 – probably still my favourite, even though I’m aware the action really hotted up in Season 4.
But Season 1 worked well because in the opening minutes we were simply dropped into the middle of a unique situation. A man in a business suit wakes up on his back in the jungle, looking dazed and confused. He looks around and sees a white dog. That makes him even more confused. Then he hears a noise, runs through the trees and out onto a deserted beach.
Then we see it . . . a burning wrecked plane and people scrambling around trying to escape. As the man in the suit runs around rescuing people, we find out that there are about 14 speaking parts (plus lots and lots of extras that never say a word).
At first, because we don’t know these people, we can only judge on first appearances. The guy in the suit is Jack, a doctor. He seems to be quite a hero. Then there’s the nice girl, Kate, that he meets. There’s Hurley, a larger overweight Spanish-American. There’s Michael, an African-American guy trying to connect with his young son. There’s Locke, the bald guy who carries hunting knives with him.
And at first we make snap judgements – “I like her. He’s nice. That guy’s a creep.”
But then, over the season, we start seeing flashbacks of these people’s lives. And then, one by one, we start to realise that there are reasons these people act the way they do. And so the first great mysteries of Lost that get explained are the back stories for these characters. And so every episode, we found out something new about someone which made us feel like we knew a little bit more – which temporarily made us forget that we had no idea where they were, why there was a killer monster in the forest, and polar bears running around.
And thus the saga went. This simple formula, though, had a cumulative effect. Every episode was perfectly balanced between present-day and flashback and would carry forward an episode arc. But then every episode was carrying the arc of the season forward. And every season is carrying forward the overall story arc.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not all perfect. There are some episodes (especially in Season 2) that were redundant. It was like they had 18 episodes worth of ideas and they had to make 24. So you sometimes got some episodes that didn’t really carry the overall story forward or provide any memorable back story information about the characters.
But those were well and truly made up for by the episodes that did. What’s more – come the third season – the pattern that we were used to became like a piece of classical music – if you were creative enough, varying the pattern could become a memorable experience in itself. So there are some episodes that are legendary in their effect on first-time viewers, because the creators of the show played games with our perspective of what we expected to see. This is especially apparent in the opening minutes of the new seasons. The filmmakers excelled at making people wonder if they were really watching the same show they were viewing last season.
Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. I’m working my way through Season 5, and I’ll be hoping to catch up with all the internet hype I’ve missed for Season 6. The one thing about being slow is that I miss the community that has grown up around Lost as fans have swapped theories and tried to work out what is going on. So I’ve deliberately tried to avoid as much reading about Lost online as I can to preserve the delight of seeing each episode unfold without knowing what’s happening next.
To sum up – when the whole thing is finished, unless the creators well and truly run out of steam and stuff the whole thing up – it will be one of the most satisfying, and epic tales that have ever been told. It will be one of the greatest examples of serialisation ever created. The creators have used the limitations of the 45 minute TV episode and the 22 (give or take)-episode season to craft a new type of storytelling. It’s like a master novel-writer was told that they had to write a novel that could be released in a set number of small books of 15,000 words each.
What they’ve achieved is amazing. But don’t just take my word for it. I’d try it for yourself. If you can get hold of Disc 1 of the first season, watch the first four episodes. I’m especially keen to see what you think of Episode 4 (Walkabout). That was the episode that sold me on this series and, for me, is probably the defining episode of the whole series. If it sells you on it too, then you’re going to have great fun with the rest of this series.
If it’s not your thing, at least you found out early.
And Then There Were None – Letter in a Bottle September 27, 2009
Posted by Matt in Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, Books, Novels, Reading.3 comments
“…I determined to commit not one murder, but murder on a grand scale…”
Well, there we go – the explanation of the whole thing. I thought it very neatly tied the whole thing together. I remember the first time I read the first page or so of this letter – especially since Wargrave’s name doesn’t appear till the last page – thinking, “Hang on . . . this sounds like Wargrave. But he’s dead, isn’t it?”
Once I’d got that settled in my head that maybe he wasn’t, then the whole explanation made sense. Part of the fun of this denouement is just the grand style in which Wargrave unveils his plot. (A grand unraveling is usually a trademark of Agatha Christie’s book, but normally it’s done by this detective. Here we have it unveiled by the murdered.)
I haven’t watched it yet (but it’s on my shelf ready to go), but I understand that Agatha Christie’s stage adaptation of this novel, and subsequent film versions have a slightly different ending. (I’m not sure, but I think it goes something like Vera shoots Lombard, walks back in the house, Wargrave comes out, and then in another twist Lombard shows up to her rescue, because they’d planned together that he should pretend to be dead.) While this allows for a nice ending, for me, the true effect needs to be the chilling realisation that the Judge killed everyone and then killed himself. A far more effective ending, and certainly the one I’d use if I was making a film of it today.
So there you have it – And Then There Were None. I still think it’s the original and best of these type of stories.
We’ve mentioned some of the spin-offs from this story. Obviously, any story where there’s a bunch of people being picked off one by one owes a debt to this story.
Harper’s Island, the recent TV series, mercilessly ripped off the concept, only to stuff it up horrendously. Identity (which Dave worried was the same twist) clearly owes a debt to this story. If you haven’t seen it, and you have the stomach for it, Identity is a very clever usage of the idea of 10 people being killed off one at a time, but with a logic of its own, and a completely different ending.
In terms of the killer, there’s a certain similarity between Wargrave and Jigsaw, the killer from Saw (which you need to have even more of a stomach for). Jigsaw (also suffering from a terminal illness) takes it upon himself to harass people who he doesn’t consider worth living. That’s a completely different premise, and quite a bit nastier, but the writers (at least of the original film) had the same sense of cleverness about it all.
Well, hopefully, none of you felt cheated by the ending (my apologies if you did). This was fun enough that I might do another Agatha Christie at some stage down the track. I’ll see how it goes. Thanks to all who participated (either commenting or uncommenting) – especially those who showed the remarkable restraint of being able to read the book over three weeks instead of all in one go…
And Then There were None – Epilogue September 26, 2009
Posted by Matt in Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, Books, Classic Books, Novels, Reading.Tags: Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, Books, mystery, Novels, Reading, thriller
2 comments
Just so there’s no misunderstandings, this post is on the epilogue, the next post tomorrow is on a mysterious “letter found in a bottle”.
In some ways, this chapter is a bit of a nod to Christie’s normal detective novels, where the police come in and try to sort out the crime. And maybe if Hercule Poirot was on hand or Miss Marple, they’d have a better chance.
But they’re coming up with nothing. We’re now enlightened about the fascinating back story about why the boat never came to rescue the 10 during the week, the involvement of Isaac Morris (the Jewish gentleman referenced back in Chapter 1, if you remember three weeks ago) and a little bit more background on our characters. (Though obviously our killer knew more about their back stories than the police were able to uncover.)
So in some ways, this chapter just serves to reiterate the mystery and deal with any final theories that people might have. (I like the bit best where they’re trying to work out how the last three could have died.) And who doesn’t feel creeped out by the chair below Vera’s body being placed neatly back against the wall?
Without a doubt, U N Owen is the 1930s precursor to Keyser Soze.
And sometime after this investigation was closed – we’re not sure how long – a boat comes across a bottle floating in the water with a letter in it. That letter, which we’ll read tomorrow, contains the final missing pieces of information that shed light on what took place on Indian Island . . .
See you tomorrow!
And Then There Were None (10 Dead; 0 Alive) September 25, 2009
Posted by Matt in Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, Books, Classic Books, Novels, Reading.Tags: Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, Books, mysteries, Novels, Reading, thrillers
3 comments
In many ways, the best thing to come out of this novel getting renamed as And Then There Were None is that it sets up a promise that – staggeringly – gets delivered in the final chapter.
We could believe, when it just came down to Vera and Lombard (why does he always get referred to by his last name, but she always gets referred to by her first?) that Lombard was it. Like Vera, we instantly see the wolf snarl and the cunning as the mark of a man who could cold-bloodedly pick off eight people one by one.
But then – the magnificent twist: the countdown goes down to zero. I remember I read this novel out loud to my sister when I was a teenager and at the time, none of us knew how it was going to end. And we hit this chapter, and it really just set my teenage brain reeling.
What on earth happened here? Did I really read what I thought I read?
For my money, it’s one of the greatest “What the…?” moments in storytelling history. The rug has been completely ripped out from under us. We know what we’ve witnessed – but we understand none of it.
And it is in that state of confusion, that Agatha Christie rolls out the Epilogue. I’ll see you tomorrow night for that one …
