Torrent Downloads and Personal Morality

A friend was trying to explain to me that he did not need Torrent to view such things as “Agents of SHIELD”, that he was willing to wait until God and the Networks allowed him to see it on Netflix.

Could it be that he was suggesting that I was in some way morally deficient, possibly even wallowing in sin?

I don't see it that way.

Like all misunderstood geniuses, I feel the need to explain myself, usually while the representative of conventional society, often dressed in a tuxedo, is held at risk, soon to be defenestrated, or laser-decapitated or even eaten by an Amazonian life form.  Unless I feel that he/she/they/it have properly acknowledged my good will and desire to help, their doom is certain.

Come now, Mr. Bond. You do not expect me to miss an episode of Agents of SHIELD, do you?

You see I am not stealing anything.  I am merely borrowing for my own personal and legally defensible use this media product, so that I might better analyze it and review it for this Blog and society at large.

My mission is to help the world, not to steal from it.

The networks were formed on the concept of advertiser-based content. Now, that is not good enough for them. Greed has driven them mad and now they change the rules and declare that the viewer must also subscribe to some service that they have made some sort of pact with to extract money from the newly disenfranchised.

When all I want to do is to view, unimpeded by any network latency or bizarre distribution rules, their creative product so that I might be morally or intellectually uplifted. Yes, I seek improvement, I seek enlightenment. They have broadcast the material, with advertisers as the FCC has permitted, should I not also be permitted to dip my beak and see what has been paid for?

Are we mere tools of corrupt, international media organizations who wish to extract more and more money from the innocent citizen?

And further, what harm am I doing?  Am I making financial profit with this material?  Am I generating badly derezzed rar files to send to my supposedly degraded and morally debased friends?  No, I am using it for my own use. What harm therefore do I cause?

Besides, these companies, all of them, owe me.  I sacrificed my life to help invent and prove the technology they use to create this product. Selflessly, I dedicated myself to that end, and what reward did I get? I was left for dead, impoverished and disenfranchised. Will it hurt so much for them to allow me to view their product created with technology whose early development they totally did not pay for, and review it for the benefit of my readers and all the world?

I personify, even objectify, the desire for all man and womankind to improve themselves through the new synthetic media.

I am only trying to help.

Introducing the Female Lead with Visual Effects: Three Case Studies

Even though we acknowledge the central importance of conflict between giant robots, the choreography of spaceship battles, and the sheer awe inspiring triumph of the hordes of zombies at the end of humanity, it does not diminish these vitally important tasks to suggest that there are other, perhaps peripheral, roles for visual effects which nevertheless can contribute to the film.  

To that end, we will present three examples here of visual effects used to introduce the female lead.

I can just see my reader's lips curl in disgust. The female lead? A girl? In a movie with giant robots or zombie hordes?    Yes, in spite of Hollywood's best efforts to diminish the role of women in film, they do linger on, if for no other reason than to provide a cheesy lust object for the adolescent male audience, as well as other, minor dramatic roles from time to time.  Thus it is reasonable to consider how special photographic effects might be used to help facilitate such story points as introduction of the character, death of the character, and so forth.

Just as in a musical, where a song must contribute to the story, in a visual effects film we would hope that there might be a way to use the same ideas that are featured in the dramatic sections of the film to introduce major or minor characters of the narrative.    If we have a film about giant robots, then perhaps the lead female can be born from the forehead of a giant robot, perhaps Optimus Prime, as Minerva was born from the forehead of Zeus. Or in a sensitive drama about zombies, we might first meet our female lead eating brains at lunch and worried about keeping her girlish figure.

Here are three examples where the female lead is introduced to the audience in a way that is (a) spectacular, (b) tells us something about the character, and (c) communicates something to us that will be useful in developing the story, or in the third example, to the (somewhat) surprising climax of the story.

The three case studies are from Roger Rabbit (1988), The Matrix (1999) and Shaolin Soccer (2001).

In Roger Rabbit (1998), our protagonist, a private detective, Eddie Valiant, is hired to see if Jessica Rabbit is involved with another rabbit, or person, as the rumors suggest. As part of his investigation, Valiant goes to see Ms. Rabbit perform at a fancy nightclub where he learns she is not a cartoon rabbit, but a cartoon femme fatale. This is a famous scene so I am sure you know all about the tone mattes and optical compositing done at ILM.  One could not ask for a better introduction of this character. The song also advances the story, helping to establish Jessica as a sex goddess who breaks the hearts of both men and rabbits.

Why does Valiant keep his overcoat on in this scene?   It feels inappropriate to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5THitqPBw

In our second example, we have everyone's favorite polyethelyne poster child, Carrie Anne Moss, known as Trinity in her landmark film The Matrix because she perfectly expresses the three values of sex, violence and shiny catsuits in women. We meet this woman typing happily on her laptop in a decrepit room of some sort, when suddenly she is the target of a police raid. There are several interesting things in this scene beyond the first use of so-called "bullet time", which is an extension of the Brigham morphing technology of years ago. First, we learn that she can take on two "units" of policemen without too much trouble (a unit is probably either 3 or 4 policemen). Second, we learn, when this is all done, that this incredible woman is terrified to hear that there are "agents" in the area, thus telling us something about the world we are in. Third, we learn that properly applying traditional analog techniques of lighting can bring out the best of Ms. Moss in a tight jumpsuit. Notice the subtle use of lighting below, which carefully accents her formidable attributes as perceived by many adolescents.

A careful use of key lights can add specular highlights to shiny contours

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtk7mweahY

In our final scene, we have a film that is well known in the far east, but got very little distribution in North America to the best of my knowledge, Shaolin Soccer (2001). In this intellectual drama, good is pitted against evil in the form of a soccer contest, and good is enhanced through the power of the secret techniques from the Shaolin monastery of China. This movie makes extensive use of the rather obvious in retrospect idea that some of the most important things in sports can be made trivial through using CG to create the soccer balls (or whatever the sport in question uses, ping pongs, basketballs, etc) and just having the actors / players mime performing the sport. But in this scene, our hero spies his future love, the poor and acne challenged Mui making bread. If you havent seen this scene before you should watch it, it is pretty great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBebT-rKeM\

Roger Rabbit on imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096438/

Shaolin Soccer on imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286112/

The Matrix on imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286112/

Visual Effects and Subjective Reality in Barton Fink (1991)

This is a spoiler alert for the Coen Brothers film, Barton Fink (1991).

Visual effects are usually used in a very simple way conceptually, to show the audience something that would be hard to film, or expensive to film, or impossible to film, or just inconvenient to film. But generally the idea that is intended for the audience is that what you see is what you get, e.g. what you see is supposedly what happened.

If the story is simple, by definition the visual effects are almost certainly simple.  If the story has many levels or ambiguity or an "unreliable narrator", then there is an opportunity for visual effects to contribute to the film in a more interesting, at least conceptually, fashion.

Visual effects could, for example, show us what the character is feeling, or if the character is insane, what he is seeing.     It is not "photo realism", that hated and evil term of art, but maybe it is "subjective realism".

The best example I know of this, and one of my favorite uses of effects in any project, is the climax of the film Barton Fink (1991). This is a spoiler alert, read no further if you don't want to know.

It is a plot point of the film Barton Fink that whenever Charlie the insurance salesman (John Goodman) is around, it is very hot. The temperature is hot, so hot that the wallpaper peels off the hotel room walls. When Charlie is not around, the temperature returns to normal.   The heat and Charlie are in some way associated with each other.

Charlie, who is portrayed in the film as a prototypical "every man" is,  it turns out, a psychopath as well as an insurance salesman, whose trademark signature is to cut off the victim's head and leave the body.

The climax of the film occurs when two police detectives arrest Fink at his hotel because they believe that he is an accomplice and handcuff him to the metal frame bed in his hotel room. Charlie (aka Mad Man Mundt) has returned to "save the day" in a manner of speaking, and we know this because the temperature at the hotel starts rising.

Put down the policy case, Mundt, and put your mitts in the air.

The police detectives go out into the hallway to confront Mundt but when Mundt appears this time we can see what he sees: and what we see is that Charlie is in hell. And it is hot because wherever Charlie is there are flames burning all around him, in this case from the walls, even though the flames do not consume anything, e.g. the hotel does not burn down.

This is one of John Goodman's best performances.  This scene, and the one that follows, in which he explains his actions to Bart is spectacular.

One of the structural problems with visual effects in filmmaking is almost a tautology: visual effects are there to serve the story, but if the story is banal then the effects are banal as well, generally speaking. This is one of the best uses I know where visual effects are used to illustrate the subjective world of the character in a way that is spectacular and yet completely appropriate.

Its dramatic, its poetic, its intelligent,  and it is really well thought out.  How unusual.   

Now we return to the world of giant robots beating each other up and things exploding, the normal world of visual effects.

Barton Fink at IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/

Aesthetics of the Sword Fight in Cinema: Realism is Not The Point

This is the third post on this blog that discusses the aesthetics of sword fights in cinema, a topic that I had absolutely no intention of writing about when I started this blog.   But I came across an odd fact that helped me to understand something about cinematic sword fights, so I am writing about it here.

It won't surprise you to learn that a sword fight in a film, at least a western film, is not realistic. But it might surprise you as it surprised me to learn that Samurai movies are often more realistic. And that is because, in real life, back when swords were used as the primary personal weapon, a sword fight was generally very brief and nearly always fatal. There would not be enough time to say much more than perhaps "Die You Scum" and maybe not even the time to say that. And even if they had enough time to say more, they probably wouldn't, because they would be out of breathe from trying to beat the other person to death with a piece of metal.

The fights were brief for a number of possible reasons and here are a few of them: (a) one party was able to get a blow in before the other party was ready, or (b) one party was that much stronger or that much more skilled than the other party that he was able to get a blow in first in spite of the other party being prepared, or (c) the two parties would fight for a few seconds, perhaps for a minute, but then one party or the other would get a blow in and one blow was all you needed in most cases. Depending on the nature of the first blow, the party who had received one was at a serious disadvantage. Occasionally when both parties were evenly matched, both parties might receive blows before one was disabled and killed.

Also, in a real sword fight they were not fighting by Olympics fencing rules. Better to think about a man in a slaughterhouse with an axe to get more of a feel for the situation. Once the other party was seriously hit, a blow or two and it was over. They were either dead, would be dead in a few minutes from the bleeding, or would be dead in a few days from infection.

Or possibly, one of the parties would avoid the fight or break it off, perhaps by running away. Then both might live, but that was one of the very few ways that both parties could survive a sword fight.

This has a number of implications for understanding the authenticity of certain genres of film:

1. I always thought that the incredible speed of the sword fight in a samurai movie was a way of expressing the skill and zen spirit of the warriors. That might be true as well, but it was the case that such fights were generally over very fast. A real fight from the period had more blood than you normally see in most Samurai movies, I think.

The following is an excellent example of what I think of as a somewhat realistic samurai sword fight, with blood.  This scene is probably from Zatoichi by Takeshi Kitano.  Three blows parried and one blow not parried, and the fight is over.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6SbihSMbPs&feature=related

2. There is actually one use of a light saber in the Star Wars films that was more authentic by this standard than the others. And that was the very brief use by Obi-Wan in the cantina in the first Star Wars film, where Luke gets into a fight with a patron who pulls a gun. It is over in less than a second and the character with the gun loses the arm that was holding the weapon.  The fight is over nearly instantly, but Obi-Wan poses for the camera and dramatic effect.

3. It is an interesting detail of light sabers that they have several advantages over a steel sword for the person who loses a fight. First a light saber is self-cauterizing, so there is no bleeding. Second, in the process the wound is also disinfected from the heat, so there is much less danger of infection. A third advantage from a cinematic point of view is that there is essentially no blood, and the amount of blood is a very important criteria in determining what sort of rating your film receives (e.g. G, PG or R).

4. With this new information, we can probably say that the sword fight and duel in Rob Roy (1995) is the most realistic sword fight in western film that I am aware of. It takes place over a few minutes, but in that few minutes there is perhaps 20-30 seconds of actual sword fighting (e.g. when blows are exchanged), it is physically very demanding, and there is very little talking.

Why do you keep pointing at my nose?  It is so very rude to point!

You can see this fight here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27M5KWI_q50

5. What we learn from this information,  is that the centrally important conversation that the two parties have during a sword fight, discussing good and evil, and raising the fight from a mere battle of steel to metaphorical importance, is not realistic or authentic. It never happened and it would never happen in real life.  The fight is not a fight for its own sake, it is there to advance the story.  The sword fight is the colorful and drama filled activity that is taking place while we are advancing the story.

I doubt that many people will be surprised to hear that a cinematic sword fight is not realistic, but the important point to take away is that it was never intended to be.

The same criteria should be applied to visual effects, whether what is being shown appears to be realistic or not, the important question is how does it serve or advance the story?

To read all the posts on the subject of the aesthetics of sword fights, click here.