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creekmax
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Name: Paul
Gender: Male
Interests: space exploration, good stories
Expertise: electrical & astronautics engineering, satellite navigation, stage lighting design, sound design
Occupation: Graduate Research Assistant
Industry: Aerospace
Message: message me
Member Since:
5/12/2007
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| From today's Washington Post:
Good News for Gay Christians
There's an online group of 13,000 gays who profess their belief in Christ. The Gay Christian Network is a bit of a miracle, given how hostile some religions are to gays. While fundamental ministers decry the "homosexual agenda" and gay activists deplore "ex-gay treatment," the members of GCN must live the tug-of-war over their sexual identity and faith. That's why gay Christians will benefit from a recent report by the American Psychological Association that says efforts to change someone's sexual orientation don't work. This isn't news to the many GCN members who are survivors of the programs that failed to turn them straight. But it might be comforting to a number of teens in the online network who fear being sent to a "reparative therapy" camp by their parents. A new generation of gay Christians could be spared pointless misery now that the world's largest association of psychologists has definitively declared ex-gay therapy is quackery. Continued in the full article here
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| What is it about shared vulnerability that is so powerful? Have you ever had the unparalleled privilege of being there for a friend when everything in their life seems upside down, and all they need at that moment is a good cry? This happened for me today, albeit over the phone. Honestly I don't understand this yet, but I'm beginning to. He didn't have to open up to me. He could have talked about something else. He could have brushed it off until I hung up. Instead, he gave me his trust. He allowed me to see his vulnerability.
I wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, tend to people and things that need tending, write my thesis, and make plans to become a starship captain. Life is reasonably well behaved right now. What my friend is experiencing, I am not. Yet somehow, I am profoundly affected in ways that I do not fully understand. There is a larger truth here; I am certain of it.
I lead a forum for gay Christians who are committed to saving sex for marriage. I must confess that I don't really know what I'm talking about when I champion the virtues of waiting, because I only know one side of the story. I don't truly know what it is that we give and receive with the act of sex. But I wonder if this little episode hasn't been a tiny glimpse.
Vulnerability. Ultimate vulnerability.
What if I told everybody else what my friend told me? What if I laughed at him for crying on the phone? In other words, what if I betrayed my friend's trust? By accepting his gift of trust, I have implicitly promised that I will protect his vulnerability. It is surely required of me.
I see parallels...
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| I have one word for this production team. CONTINUITY.
In the opening scene of Public Enemies, we see a 1940s chain gang trudging along, the sound of their footsteps... completely out of sync with the picture. The rest is downhill from there. Seeing Public Enemies is much like sitting in the passenger seat of a car while a teenager is learning to drive stick. The premise of the screenplay had lots of promise, and the film employs some strong actors, but nearly every other element of the production fails to deliver, plagued by overall discontinuity that keeps it from building up any real momentum. The progression of scenes repeatedly lurches forward and stops suddenly, ad nauseam. Where the score could have woven the scenes together and supported the actors, it instead wanders haphazardly without much apparent purpose or effect. The camera work isn't any help either, often lacking establishing shots when we need them and angles and lighting so poorly matched that even a simple two-person conversation is ill-represented. Most unfortunately, the director (presumably) chose to use the ghastly "shaky hand-held camera" effect. There are no hand-held cameras in 1940-anything, and while the effect can work for a movie like Cloverfield where the whole film is meant to be playback form a camcorder, it makes no sense to combine a shaky camera with crystal clear, 35mm color film in 1940-something. The Foley is less than skillful, often out of sync as at the beginning, but also often unrealistic in sound. Sometimes even the makeup was painfully obvious, heavily laden on Mr. Depp's face in close-ups.
Beyond the basic sense and scene of the time period, nothing in this movie fits together. It's all terribly out of place. If these were intentional style choices, they didn't work for me. The technical peculiarities drew me away from what could have been a fascinating character study of John Dillinger, if only we had the chance to get to know him.
My hat is off to the costume designer and the set dresser for not completely screwing up.
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| Trust is not something I impart easily. There is surely a continuum of trust from "not at all" to "quite a lot," but if I may discretely categorize, it could be said that I do not truly trust... anyone. I trust certain people to do certain things, but everyone has some kind of repetitive failure mode (or many modes). Today, I'm thinking about my personal connections to people. I used the word "love" in the title because I've been toying with the idea that "love" in a non-romantic, selfless sense is directly synonymous to our connectedness with other people. Friendships have everything to do with my connectedness.
Maybe there's nothing to talk about here. Maybe I'm just stating the obvious fact that I live in the midst of imperfect human beings who are all going to fail me at some time or another. But I've come to a point where I quietly expect it. Why? Because I'm nearly always right. And I'm beginning to feel a sense of apathy in this regard. I know there's a camp of people out there who would read this and say, that's terrible! Is it? Am I not wise to learn from the patterns I see?
That's not to say that I don't give of myself. I do. But I do so without expecting very much in return. It's kind of an Eeyore complex. Maybe that's a good thing.
Case in point: I'm deciding whether or not to fly half way across the country to go to a friend's wedding. Do I like this person? Yes. Have I been blessed by his friendship? Yes. But are we really close friends? No. He told me about his wedding by telling a mutual friend to pass along the information to me. [raises one eyebrow] Would he travel to my wedding if I had one? I doubt it. Assuming that I can handle it financially, will I go to his? Yes.
Why?.
I'm not sure. But this is what I do. There are people who are important to me in one way or another, and I see to their well-being as I am able to (I make no claim that I'm actually any good at it, mind you). I see to them sometimes knowing full well that they don't really notice or care. Again: why? Because it is important to me that they are okay. That they are adequately supported. That their path is clear of hazards.
The only danger I see is that I may one day grow tired of it.
Incidentally, I have a sneaking suspicion that I might be largely responsible for the state of affairs as I've described them here. That's a separate topic.
P.S. There's no hidden message here, you three people who actually read my blog. I'm not talking about anyone in particular.
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| A powerhouse of non-stop action and intricate special effects, the new Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen is worth a trip to the theater, but falls short of the masterful orchestration of the first.
I saw the film at its premiere location, the Westlake Village theater ("The Fox Theater") near UCLA. Surprisingly, I'll give the venue some credit for class. It's a single-auditorium theater with distinctive design and staff with a professional appearance. The THX-certified auditorium is quite largre, but the screen is a little small. The same could be said for some of Bill Warren's first auditoriums in Wichita, but in addition to the inescapably tacky preshow advertisements on the screen, this theater is lacking something very important to the quality of my movie-going experience. A parking lot.
Viva la Wichita.
So why isn't this new Transformers installment winning the rave reviews that its predecessor enjoyed? I give no credence to the "it had a silly plot and campy dialog" crowd. We didn't love the first movie for its deep story and florid prose. That's never been the point. Last time we had boy-wants-car-and-girl, boy-gets-car, boy-saves-world, boy-gets-girl. Not complicated. But we rallied around the film because it championed a vision of our industry, our military, and our government that makes us proud. Our Detroit muscle cars turned into a race of noble robots sacrificing themselves to protect us, our military fought bravely for their families at home, and a competent government empowered by the people came around and empowered the triumph of the common man. Seriously, when is the last time you saw the Secretary of Defense bust out a shotgun and start taking care of business? The vision is almost childishly naive, but we all want to believe it, just the same. This time the screenwriter turns the government into a tragically misguided enemy of our survival, represented by one bumbling fool of a bureaucrat. It's a tired old story element that contributes little to the screenplay other than a small amount of tension that we never take seriously anyway. And so we lose cohesion with the world we loved in the first film.
It also suffers from the classic "sequel syndrome." By that I mean that a major part of the appeal of the first Transformers movie was the exposition-- the reveal of an exciting, dynamic fictional world that the production team can't recycle for a second movie. It reminds me of Men In Black 2 in that way. We get some bigger robots and a new major landmark to fight around (the pyramids in Egypt instead of the Hoover Dam), but it's not enough. The Batman franchise on the other hand gave us so much in the Joker character to be enthralled with that we got to discover a whole new circumstance within the new but now-familiar world of Batman. The Transformers franchise tried to keep us engaged by giving us bigger robots and rocking the soundtrack harder. Really, all that gives us is more of the same.
That's all very ideological; there are of course technical matters to address, too. The CGI improved for the second film, but I still have a few issues with it. The robot vs. robot battles are less mottled and blurry that before, but it's still difficult to tell what on earth is going on. I can't count the number of times I saw what looked like a catastrophic blow dealt to a transformer only to see it perfectly intact and still fighting a few seconds later. Eventually I just sat back and waited to see who was left standing when it was all over because nothing else made sense in the meantime. This robs the experience of the in-the-moment tension it might have had.
Indeed, the pace of Fallen is monotonic and sloppy. I appreciate that the film hits the ground running and keeps the energy high, but then much like the third Pirates of the Caribbean, it doesn't give us an exciting "landscape" of tension to experience. The valleys are filled in and the peaks are lobbed off. For example, director Michael Bay doesn't punctuate major events in the storyline. Optimus Prime dies in a passing instant that's over almost before we knew it happened! There's no *GASP* moment where we see it coming just long enough for our heart to go up into our throat, and there's not a sufficiently developed connection to the characters to feel their dispair in the aftermath.
I have no problem with the actors. The transformers are campy, but that's an expected part of the style of the movie. (Remember Megatron's introduction in the first movie? "I... AM... MEGATRON!!") They're talking machines from what used to be a cartoon; I'll let that slide. Sam's parents have great chemistry and provide some nice comic relief along the way. I do miss the competent, authoritative figure that John Voight gave us last time, though.
This review sounds more negative than I intended for it to, but there's just so much to be learned from the things that went wrong that it overshadows the things that went right. The screenplay is lively, the action is intense, and it's entertaining. I remember laughing a lot, and I was, at least, engaged throughout. If there's a third installment, I will look forward to it.
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