Underwhelming Slumdog

Since I liked director Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later several years ago, and Slumdog Millionaire walked away with all those gold statuettes last week, it seemed like it was time to head to the theatre.

What a disappointment.

Slumdog wasn’t a bad movie, by any stretch. It certainly deserved to be released to theatres rather than going direct to DVD, as was nearly its fate, but it was ultimately underwhelming.

I was actually prepared to like it:

• As I said above, I found 28 Days Later compelling.
• I thoroughly enjoyed Bend It Like Beckham and My Beautiful Laundrette in their time—both of which had dealt with the results of British Colonialism in that region of the world in some serious ways while telling a slight personal story.
• While I was never a fan of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, when the new Doctor Who series spoofed the game show, I laughed and was moved.
• I enjoy movies that take me elsewhere.

The movies is certainly beautiful. Boyle and his cinematographer find angles that give even the poorest slum shacks exciting lines, vibrancy and color.

But the movie felt like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. Were we supposed to be shocked at the squalor and violence of the slums, or struck by their dizzying beauty? Are the kidnappers and gangsters that cross our heroes’ paths supposed to be truly ominous, or cartoon villains with no real threat? The tone shifts from scene to scene and sometimes within scenes.

I’ve gotten used to Oscar-winning films being underwhelming in recent years: The Academy wants something bright and shiny that seems “serious” but isn’t truly threatening. But something led me to expect more from Slumdog. I shouldn’t have.

Pop some popcorn and rent the DVD when it comes out. You’ll have a pleasant evening. But there’s nothing really memorable or deep or honest about it. It’s a Hollywood romance set in India, with a Bollywood dance number tacked onto the end.

Blu-Ray Blues

It's time to declare Blu-Ray dead.

There was a big announcement yesterday in the Bu-Ray industry: A coalition of companies is forming another company to make licensing for Blu-Ray technology easier. "By establishing a new licensing entity that offers a single license for Blu-ray disc products at attractive rates, I am confident that it will foster the growth of the Blu-ray disc market and serve the interest of all companies participating in this market, be it as licensee or licensor," said Gerald Rosenthal, former head of intellectual property at IBM, who would head the one-stop licensing shop.

And the very nature of this announcement makes it clear why Blu-Ray is already a dead technology: Blu-Ray's customers are the studios and the equipment manufacturers. That's whose interests Blu-Ray was designed to serve. Consumers? Not so much.

When the DVD hit the marketplace, it met a consumer need, so it took off. Its combination of vastly improved video quality, smaller size, ability to jump to scenes without having to fast forward through all the other content, multiple audio tracks, closed captions and subtitles that could be turned on and off, and relative indestructability compared with tape outweighed the initial downside of not permitting an easy way to record to the discs.

The problem with DVDs, as far as the content owners was concerned, was that they didn't offer sufficient Digital Rights Management (DRM). The designers of the DVD standard had relied, pretty much, on security through obscurity and then encryption standards that were bolted on after the fact rather than part of the initial specification. This approach didn't work for CDs, and it didn't really work for DVDs, either. So the goal of the designers of Blu-Ray and DVD-HD was to make something that would have the encryption built right into the medium, be harder to crack, would make it harder for users to copy, use, and make mash-ups of the content on the discs they buy. All you can do is watch it as intended.

But why should users make the leap--especially in the midst of a recession? Those who are prone to collect copies of video programs they like already have a substantial collection of DVDs they don't want to replace or see made obsolete. And if you go to your local Best Buy or Fry's and compare a nice HDTV of the size you'd have in your living room and compare the image produced by a good upsampling DVD player with that of a Blu-Ray player, you will notice some difference in quality--but your socks will definitely remain safely and snugly on your feet.

There are no additional consumer features for Blu-Ray beyond slightly better rpicture quality. The discs are the same size. Menus act pretty much as they did for DVD. You still can't skip the FBI warning at the beginning of the disc, even though you surely have it memorized.

Do you remember DAT--short for Digital Audio Tape? It came out right around the time of the CD as the recording medium that the industry wanted you to buy. It had all the DRM controls the industry wanted, but less flexibility for users than the good old audio cassette or the MP3 format that soon followed. All that it offered over the cassette and MP3 was somewhat better asudio quality. And the industry sold...hundreds of them.

Welcome to Blu-Ray--the video DAT of the 2000s.

Hallowed Atheism

Today, in a post labeled “Hallowed Secularism,” Andrew Sullivan writes:

They are, despite the propaganda of the atheists and the fundamentalists, compatible—even necessary for one another. Bruce Ledewitz, a non-believer himself, discusses his new book Hallowed Secularism:

I am afraid that without the influence of religion, secularism will eventually succumb to a weary relativism, or even nihilism. That is the fear as well of other secular thinkers, such as Austin Dacey, in his book, The Secular Conscience. My proposal is that secularists continue to learn from religion, especially the lesson that Martin Luther King, Jr., called, “the moral arc of the universe.” Religious symbols and language, such as redemption, salvation and forgiveness, can have real meaning for secularists.

But as any fan of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer can tell you, ideas like redemption, salvation and forgiveness are powerful ideas with real meaning even for atheists. When Willow nearly destroys the world out of grief, she must seek redemption, salvation and forgiveness through her family of choice—her friends. This is all takes place outside the structure of any religion we would recognize as such.

Yes, she is a fictional character, in a fictional universe in which vampires and demons are real and the Christian God’s absence is repeatedly implied and occasionally made explicit (see, for example the season 4 episode “Who Are You?” the season 6 episode “After Life,” and the season 7 episode “Beneath You”) , but that only underlines how powerful these ideas are even shorn from religious baggage—and not just for secularists, but for atheists as well.

Indeed, these ideas are, or, as the hosts of WNYC’s Radio Lab and psychological philosopher Joshua Greene put it, and expression of our “inner chimp”—deeply ingrained in our human DNA. They do not depend on belief in a deity for their power.

False Compromise on Same-Sex Marriage

In Sunday's New York Times, David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch present what they call “A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage,”

It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.

...

Further sharpening the conflict is the potential interaction of same-sex marriage with antidiscrimination laws. The First Amendment may make it unlikely that a church, say, would ever be coerced by law into performing same-sex wedding rites in its sanctuary. But religious organizations are also involved in many activities outside the sanctuary. What if a church auxiliary or charity is told it must grant spousal benefits to a secretary who marries her same-sex partner or else face legal penalties for discrimination based on sexual orientation or marital status? What if a faith-based nonprofit is told it will lose its tax-exempt status if it refuses to allow a same-sex wedding on its property?

Cases of this sort are already arising in the courts, and religious organizations that oppose same-sex marriage are alarmed.

But the question they avoid is: Do we really want those cases that have come before the court to be decided a different way? Do we really want a religiously-affiliated hospital associated to have a get-out-of-court-free card when it refuses to honor a Health Care Power of Attorney for a same-sex couple and prevents a woman from visiting her dying partner’s room?

Do we want physicians to be free to deny care to gay men and lesbians simply because of their status as gey people on the basis of a religious exemption.

When Rauch and Blankenhorn write: “What if a faith-based nonprofit is told it will lose its tax-exempt status if it refuses to allow a same-sex wedding on its property?” they are clearly referring to the case in Ocean Grove, NJ, which religious apologists have been demagoguing about for months. Certainly churches should not lose the tax exemption they receive for being a religious organization, but that’s not what was at stake in Ocean Grove. Religious ownership of a place of public accommodation should not exempt the place from the anti-discrimination law with regard to same-sex couples, and tax exemptions extended on the basis of treating the property as a public accommodation should be at risk if the property is not open to all members of the public on an equal basis.

Rauch and Blankenhorn write: “What if a church auxiliary or charity is told it must grant spousal benefits to a secretary who marries her same-sex partner or else face legal penalties for discrimination based on sexual orientation or marital status?” But why should some but not all employees of a charity be protected by, for instance, federally mandated family leave protections simply because that charity is associated with a church?

Ultimately, though, the bill proposed by Blankenhorn and Rauch is an attempt to short-circuit debate rather than an attempt to facilitate it and make it more civil, as Blankenhorn and Rauch claim. We should simply repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), as our new president has recommended, and let the states fight it out.

(This post originally submitted in a similar but less developed form as a comment on The Volokh Conspiracy blog.)

It's emergence, stupid

So I was laid off December 1, 2008. After 20 years in the same office. The company changed around me several times in the past couple of years (acquisitions, name changes, restructurings), my job changed and expanded to take on new things, but I was working among basically the same group of people performing essentially the same mission.

Until the economy forced a restructuring and I was no longer needed.

And the company did all it could to ease the impact. I can't go into the details of the severance package, but there is one, which is why I still have a computer to write this blog and a roof over my head as I do so.

But as I listen to the news reports about the economy, as I think about letting the woman who cleans my house every two weeks go (and chicken out, hoping against hope I won't have to, especially after she told me about her own children returning to Poland because there is no work here), as I receive discount flier after discount flier from Banana Republic (a company name that looks more prophetic than could ever have imagined), I can't help thinking about emergence--the hive mind.

“Emergence” is an idea that Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad discussed in a 2005 episode of Radio Lab. It's how insects seem to act in concert. It's how if you have a group of people guess at the number of jelly beans in a jar their individual guesses will diverge wildly, but the average of their guesses will be remarkably close. And, yes, it's Adam Smith's Magic Hand, setting prices in that sweet spot where supply and demand converge. But it's also Christmas shoppers tampeding and killing a worker at Wal-Mart.

My company let me go because they predicted that the world financial crisis would reduce our customer base, which means I am constricting my spending--in all sorts of places, including the sorts of companies that our customers worked at. And when I let my housekeeper go, she will have to reduce her spending, as will the people and comapnies she buys things from.

We like to think we are in a world where bad things can be blamed on particular individuals. It's easy to hurt a Bernie Madoff--a bad actor who probably would have escaped detection long enough to die, had it not been for the economic downturn. But that's looking at the wrong end of the telescope: The economy is a chaotic system, and we've tried to tame it. The result is a lot like what happened in the 1980s after years of forest management where the directive was to avoid forest fires at all costs. When the fires finally did come, they were wild fires. Better, we learned, to have smaller, regulated fires over time.

Will the stimulus be enough to stanch this fire, avert this economic Katrina?

Will I still have a house, a computer and a blog in six months?

Switching be3tween the macro view and the local is always dizzying and more than a little disorienting.

I am cautiously optimistic.

What could be more important?

A couple of weeks ago, in his continuing discussion of religion, faith and atheism, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

But if the Divine exists, how do we regard it as pointless to understand it more deeply? And what else could be more important?

But, really, what could be less important?

Even if the divine does exist, there is no reason it is inherently any more important a field of study than slime molds, Chinese literature, galactic drift, or recipes for cooking ostrich--all of which I know exist but have chosen not to study because the study of other things has either interested me more or had a more direct impact on my life.

And there is no evidence for the divine. All we have are the words upon words of people who claim to know something about it, and the words of those analyzing those who claim to know something about it, and the words of those who pretend that it does or should have some impact on our lives, but have no evidence to support those claims.

I have no beef with those who sincerely find studying the divine of value to their lives. My only complaint is with those who claim I should, too, or those, like Sullivan, who claim its inherent importance is somehow obvious.

First Entry

It's always good to get these things out of the way.

Like the first taste of a new food, first entries rarely give much of a taste of what a blog will become in tine.

I'm a guy from the midwest, older than most, past the middle of my life, with a partner, two cats, and cautious optimism about the future of a country that could elect Barack Obama. I live in Illinois.

I am currently:

• Looking for work
• Appearing in a play
• Planning to fly to California this weekend to see some of my family and meet some of my partner's.
• Starting this blog

I read blogs daily--Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Joe.My.God, Volokh Conspiracy--not because I agree with them but because I learn from them.

I tend to read blogs that primarily discuss public issues, and I suspect that this blog will become that, so that this post will be a bit of an anomaly. But everything starts somewhere, and that's what incipitation is all about: Starting things: First words; first notes; the birth of phenomena.

First impressions can mean a lot.