Lens Flare vs. Film Scratches

So Eric Meyer posted an interesting response to my Instagram rant the other day:

I have a theory that the popularity of their faux-aging filtration is that it triggers our often unconscious assumption that age increases worth. It makes that picture of you and your bros doing beer shots at the bar seem more important and special because only the best, most special pictures are kept long enough to age. You must’ve been one special crew, to have that picture still around and looking like that.
And when you combine that with the arty framing and subject matter of half of Instagram, where you have a tilted washed-out sepia shot of a beer glass on a table in a garden, man, it’s like you just produced one of the lost works of Ansel Adams.
This is why I’m not so sure that people will look back and laugh the way we do at, say, synthdrums or autotuning. Those were brand-new things that captured our shiny receptors for a while, then wore them out with overuse. The veneration of aged artifacts runs a lot wider and deeper.

The thing is, I’m not sure this will turn out to be true.  The reason the Polaroid look is so popular now is because this generation associates it with faded Polaroids, which is what signified “old” when they were children.  But the upcoming generation of five- and six-year-olds will not see Polaroids a lot – we’ve shifted into the era of disposable camera photos, which don’t look all that different.  To them, this Polaroid look will most likely be interpreted as “Why did everyone in the 2010s bleach their photos out of color?”, in much the same way that we look at the 1960s as a riot of clashing colors (ignoring the African roots) and the 1970s as a bunch of horrible disco suits.
But it could also be that this technical limitation becomes the shorthand notation for “age,” and they absorb that into their psyche.  I mean, lens flare was basically defeated in the 1970s, but it had been ingrained in people’s consciousnesses so much that movies started putting it in because “lens flare” signified “hot, unbearable sun.”  It’s gotten to the point where they artificially insert this effect, at more cost than it would take to leave it out, into videogames.
You see these sorts of technical glitches making their way into the modern consciousness.  I was watching a Disney trailer where everything came to a sudden halt, and they used the “needle scratching across the record” noise to indicate that the music had shut down.  But this was a movie for eleven-year-olds.  They barely know what a CD is, let alone an album.  Yet that noise will outlive the technology, having become a shorthand to a generation that won’t even know what it was originally for.
Whereas other glitches don’t make it.  Oh, you’ll see the “scratchy film” look occasionally in videogames to indicate old film, but you’ll also see stuttering DVDs and hand-held cameras to use that.  I doubt the scratchy look will become a universal.
So there are two paths for the Instagram look: it becomes a cliche, and thus laughable, or it becomes shorthand for “aged” and retains its veneration.  And I’m not sure which path it will go.  The future still holds many fascinating mysteries, and that’s why I’d like to be alive to see it.

Why Mitt Romney Was Scheduled To Win The Debate

I knew Mitt Romney would win the debate about a month back, because I saw what happened to Obama and Kerry.
See, in 2004, everybody knew who John Kerry was: robot Frankenstein flip-flopper.  We all knew he was stiff, couldn’t relate to people, constantly vacillating, a mess of a campaign. The man was an incompetent, a sad loser elected by some mystifying luck to hold the Democrat’s flag this year.  He would get destroyed during the debates.
Then he showed up and spoke pretty well.  Hey!  People were surprised that he wasn’t that bad!  He got a bounce in the polls.
Likewise, in 2008, Obama was too callow to play in national politics, a boy with no real experience, a shell of a man who would collapse at the first real touch of challenge.
Then he showed up and spoke pretty well.  Hey!  People were surprised that he wasn’t that bad!  He got a bounce in the polls.
Then in 2012, the narrative was that Mitt Romney’s campaign was in shambles, the man making gaffes left and right, Mitt too clueless and too rich to relate to anyone.  He’d look like a doof at the debates.
Then he showed up and spoke pretty well.  Hey!  People were surprised that he wasn’t that bad!  He’ll doubtlessly get a bounce in the polls.
The point is that the media loves a narrative about winners and losers, and magnifies everything going in.  Once Mitt starts to lose, that becomes the defining point of his campaign, and it becomes such a speaking point that people tend to forget that you don’t get to run for President of the United States without sounding good to someone.  And what happens every time at this point in the campaign is that the guy who’s been smeared the most actually gets to step out from underneath all of everyone else’s impressions and speak directly to America…
…and guess what?  They actually aren’t nearly as doofy as they’ve been made out to be!  And people go, “Oh, this guy is way better than I thought he was!” and revises their estimates of him. Every freaking time.
Now, I hear tell that Romney won fairly decisively this time around, for two reasons: first, while Obama is near-unstoppable if he has a chance to prepare, he is not quick on his feet.  That doesn’t mean he’s dumb, any more than the George Bush Sr. was dumb because he didn’t speak well off the cuff.  People have various strengths, and Obama is very smart but not particularly good at the cut-and-parry of debates.
Second, Romney sounds good if you know nothing.  I overheard his spiel about “We’ll cut everything that makes us beholden to China,” and damn if that didn’t sound sensible!  Now, his solutions were fucked – as has been noted, cutting the funding to PBS is like trying to regain space on a 500-gigabyte hard drive by deleting text files, and his idea of “Let’s kick it back to the states, who are also now going broke!” is a recipe for collapse.  But if you don’t know that stuff, it sounds good.  And that’s what we’re always fighting against – the people who don’t know anything and like simple solutions.  That’s why Clinton’s speech was so passed around – it was a good synopses for people who knew no better.
Will this victory lead to Romney’s victory?  Didn’t for Kerry.  Doubt it will for Romney.  But you write off Mitt at your peril.
 

Borderlands 2 And Bad Mission Design

My daughter Erin has mostly stopped playing Borderlands 2 with me, and it may be time for me to take a break.  This is because the mission design of Borderlands 2 is pretty damned dreadful, and the skill tree is a disappointment.
Now, the core run-n-gun gameplay is fun, which partially saves it.  But each mission you can take is long – I’d estimate at least an hour to two hours for each one, assuming you’re mildly incompetent, as we are.  And it’s long in the same way, in that most missions involve you fighting your way through a bunch of enemies to find the foozle.
There’s gotta be some study for “ideal mission length” that Diablo uses to entrap people’s souls, but Borderlands misses the mark.  See, when the missions get to be that long, you forget what the point of them is.  Sure, there’s a lot of clever writing about how you’re trying to hunt down a broadcast radio or rescue an innocent or deliver a fire cultist to the immolation pit… but when you’ve spent the last forty-five minutes repeatedly shooting and running and taking cover and hiding, you forget all that.  The flavor drains away, and you’re enmeshed in the same stupid gameplay mechanics, fighting your way to the blue rectangle on the map.  I can’t count the number of times I finally reached the goal and forgot why I was supposed to be there.
So what’s left is the mechanics.  “Oh, here I am, shooting again.  Just like I was an hour ago.”
Plus, the goals are often these absurdly padded multi-part extravaganzas: hey, don’t just kill one mutated vorkid in an annoying acid-melting fight, fight four of them!  Don’t just have one part to this tea party mission, have five of them!  And of course, you get no XP until you’ve eaten every last one of your vegetables.
It might help a little if the levelling up was more rewarding, but too many of the skills are passive (and thus easily forgotten), like “reloading faster after you kill an enemy.”  It doesn’t really seem like you’re reloading faster.  There’s no graphical doodad to remind you that this +15% speed boost is, in fact, a reward, so it just feels like you’re the same old guy.  And then half the skill tree things have multiple levels, so levelling up has zero excitement – what am I doing for the next five levels?  Well, I guess I’m maxing out this skill.
It’s a good game at the core, but it’s the little things that are fucking killing it.  If they’d had twenty-minute missions, then it would feel flavorful, like I’m making constant progress.  I’d be addicted.  As it is, I’m thinking of taking a break, and Erin already has.

A Brief Rant About Fucking Up Perfectly Good Photos

On Facebook, there was a lovely picture of a friend of mine.  Then some asshole “fixed” it using Instagram.  Suddenly, my friend’s beautiful skin tones are all bleached out, the contrast gone, and now she looks like an idiot hipster.
What the fuck, man?
Instagram is just proof I can never predict the future, because if you’d told me, “People will pay money to make photos look like overexposed Polaroids,” I would have laughed in your face and asked seriously, where are my teleporters?  But no.  People have now come to purposely make their photos look like the mistakes of the 1970s.  In fact, we have gotten to the point where people think that a photograph that actually has some semblance of the original flesh tones of the world itself is wrong, all this lovely fidelity an error to be corrected.
Worse, they think this tweaking is fucking art.  Oh, yes, you’re very deep, iPhone owner.  You pushed a goddamned button on your iPhone to tint a picture.  I’m sure if you asked Michelangelo, who spent four years hunchbacked, teetering on unstable scaffolds as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he’d bob his head and go, “Yes, yes, you and I?  The same.  Perhaps I spent a lifetime honing my craft with oils while you tilted your camera at an angle and selected ‘Washed out’ and called it day, but no!  We are both artists!”
No.  It doesn’t make you artistic, or quirky, or anything.  You took a fucking photo, which is the beginner rung of artistic skills; not that there aren’t brilliant photographers, but “getting the person’s face mostly in the picture” doesn’t make you fucking Annie Leibovitz.  I know, I know, it took you ten whole seconds to get the composition of that photo you took at Applebees, and your friends will call it art because they’re in it and it looks moody – and then oh my God, you apply the “sepia” filter!  That’s the stuff, man!  That’s what turns it all around!
Look, there’s also value in having photography represent real life, and what you’re doing?  It’s the Matrix bullet-dodge, the synthdrums of 1980s music, the feathered 1970s haircuts, the autotune  – it’s that stupid, overused technology you’re going to look back on in ten years and be so fucking embarrassed because everyone was doing it, and it wasn’t that good, and in hindsight you’ll come to realize you were part of a dumb, omnipresent trend where you weren’t cutting-edge, you were part of the lemminglike wave, and all those photos are just so hideously dated that when you try to show people what it was like back in the day they’re just going to ignore all the heartfelt emotions you were trying to convey about your twenty-something years and laugh, laugh, laaaaugh at the stupid Instagram, Jesus, did we all do that?  We did.  What the fuck were we smoking?
Be a real hipster.  Get ahead of the trend.

The Fine Details of Directing Porn

I scan probably about thirty porno scenes a day.  This is because I have a subscription to Videobox, which provides five full-length porn movies a day, split into scenes with multiple preview screen-caps, and I feel obliged to drop by and see what sort of filth is on tap for the morning. I can preview a DVD, and then download the scenes I think are hot.
I watch only out of obligation, of course.  Why, I have mistakenly given my money to this purveyor of smuttery, for which I cannot procure a refund, so it’s only in my best interests to not let this expenditure go to waste!  What a shame, Margaery, but let me reap some small guttering light of enjoyment in between my bouts of rickets and my inevitable demise to cholera.
Anyway, what I’ve come to notice is that I download scenes in clusters.  You’d think I’d just download scenes according to my kinks, but most porn DVDs leave me cold, even if the subject matter is technically up my alley.
But a few DVDs, I’ll download every scene from.  Further analysis shows that this is all due to the directing.
What’s fascinating is how personal porn direction is.  And why not?  The director is trying to put his hottest masturbatory fantasies up on-screen.  I can usually tell, just by glancing over the screen caps for a given DVD, what turns that particular director on. In this sense, the porno director’s trying to connect with an audience.
There’s a lot of fine choices about what goes into porn, and the first one is “the women starring in the porn.”   If you’re a woman watching straight porn, well, I feel sorry for you, because the men are usually this sort of blurry afterthought, reduced to a set of mushy abs and a cock.  No, what gets the starring role is the female at the heart of it.
And I don’t doubt there are some real-world restraints in terms of who they can get, but most porno DVDs – at least the ones that aren’t compilations – have a very similar look in women from scene to scene.  Even though there are three women here, featuring a blonde with a short bob-cut, a brunette with long curly locks, and a redhead with frizzy hair, all of them are so skinny they have that ladder-look between their boobs but quarter-bouncing tight butts.  Or they’re all naturally stacked, with big lips and a bit of jiggle in the belly.  Or they’re all white trash harlots, looking like they stepped out of the trailer park in jeans and a belly cut-off T-shirt.  They all fit a kind of archetype, what the director (or perhaps the producer) says, “These are the women worth fucking.”
So if you have a DVD full of so-called MILFs who are actually thirty-year-old strippers with overinflated implants teetering around on high heels, that’s not gonna do it for me.  I tend towards the slightly goofy natural look, women who giggle during the act, who can at least pretend to have a good time.
Then comes the story – do we have one?  I like the ones where people talk for a bit before they fuck – yes, it’s artificial, but at least I know who these people are and am kind of invested.  But we have the other range, where people are just naked and fucking from camera one.
Then: how do they fuck?
I feel bad that American society is so repressed, because if the world was a little more honest, we wouldn’t use a universal noun for “fucking.”  Well, I guess we have two in the sense that there’s “fucking” versus “making love” – a useful distinction – but realistically, there’s so many styles of having sex that I wish we had a greater, agreed-upon vocabulary to describe it.   Hell, there’s about ten different ways of approaching cunnilingus alone, from concentrating on fingering with a touch of tongue, to the “focus all the attention upon the clit” frenzy, to the G Spot Tornado, to the gentle tease… and while you can use and combine any of these techniques, it’s clear in watching porno that there are schools of fucking, and some directors subscribe to them severely.
For me, the number-one goal of porno fucking is “The woman has to look comfortable.”  If I’m watching some poor girl balanced to hamstring-breaking proportions on a cold piece of wood, I think, “God, she can’t be having a good time” and something turns off within me.  Please.  Get that girl a comfy couch.
But some directors are clearly into porno fucking, which is to say you both swap positions every three minutes like some sort of dick-infested Chinese fire drill, contorting both women and men into these gymnastic methods that can only be done by the most physically fit.  It’s a bizarre abstracted style of fucking, bereft of actual enjoyment, but very athletic.  (And I’m sure some of you do enjoy this “All right!  Stand on your head now while I squat!” fucking, but my sneaking suspicion is that if you do like it, you like it because it makes you feel like you’re in a porno film.)
Others are into “women as object” fucking, wherein the woman is a doll to be fucked, and any attempts by her to, you know, participate are actually annoying.  I see that all the time in porno, and it vexes me – “She’s trying to suck your dick!  Let the woman use her skill instead of you just grabbing her fucking head!  She could demonstrate – oh, no, you’ve flipped her over the couch.  Why not just get a RealDoll, you idiot?”
(This is different from, say, face-fucking, where the woman is expected to be used.  You can see these poor porno actresses reaching for the cock, trying their best to actually pleasure the man, and being overridden.  Worse, I’m pretty sure there are men who get off on this overriding.)
Still others are into a strangely gentle kind of porn, long slow grinds where positions are held for minutes at a time – a classic 1980s porn riff, usually to terrible music.  This gets kind of boring, actually. I’m sure it’s nice for the woman, but I’m fast-forwarding.
There’s a ton of little bits.  Is there kissing?  What kind of kissing – genuine kissing, or that little snake-hiss you get when the actress actually doesn’t want to kiss anyone?  Is cunnilingus treated like an actual act where the woman gets to react, as opposed to some sort of brief aperitif before the inevitable penetration?  Is it all genitals, all the time, or can attention be given to, say, the back of the neck or the belly?  And what the hell is wrong with the missionary position, anyway?
(Don’t even get me started on how imaginatively bereft most MFF scenes are.  Having been in my share of the glory, I’m going to tell you that there’s so much bad MFF positioning that I can barely watch them.  You have no idea where all the fun is, people.)
And finally, you can have all the elements for hotness and have it taken away by the directorial style.  For example, what gets me off is watching women’s reactions.  I enjoy the kind of naughtiness where the woman knows she shouldn’t be doing this, but oh, what s/he is doing to me is just making me fucking mad.  That’s cool. So I watch to see faces.
So when I get mechanical close-ups of pounding genitals, it turns me off.  I mean, everyone has those.  If you watch porn, you’re gonna see more than your share of genitals.  They’re not that exciting, particularly the dangling balls in close-up, boinging around like some constricted ping-pong tournament.  But a lot of porn directors think that this is hot.  A lot of people, including some I know, agree.
But the porno director focuses in on what they like.  Hey, are they a big butt fan?  You’re gonna know, even if this isn’t a big butt video, because hey, rear entry closeup.  You’ll get a lot of headless body shots if they think that’s the stuff.  And that can kill your porno-buzz right there.
Basically, what you come to realize is how varied and multi-tonal the human sexual impulse is.  You’d think watching two humans humping would be hot, and it is at first, but as your personal porno tastes become refined and you see enough to see how others’ tastes trend, you come to realize that sex isn’t just one thing.  It’s a host of many tiny things, like atoms aligning in the cell to create chemistry, and sometimes you wind up with a dead organism.
Sex is not sex.  Sex is not necessarily sexy.
This is what happens when you get a damn Videobox subscription.  And watch probably too much damn porn.

In Other Fine Cinema….

….Looper does not have the greatest death scene in movie history.  That glory belongs to the Turkish movie “Kareteci Kiz 1973,” and it features this poor man getting shot.  It is amazing in every way, yet perfectly work-safe.

…I feel that way some days. Most days, in fact.

Looper: The Mostly Spoiler-Free Review

All my science-fiction writin’ friends are in love with Looper, and it’s easy to see why: Looper isn’t a movie.  It’s a science fiction book that’s been filmed.
See, the plots of movies are like a snake eating itself: the first half sets up all the elements in the movie – all the characters, mysteries, and plot points – and then you hit the tipping point and the movie spends the last half tidily wrapping up each element that it’s introduced.  They usually shift the third act to a new location just so this pattern isn’t quite as evident… but once all the elements have been touched upon, the movie is over.  Roll credits.  It’s satisfying, but it’s also predictable – nothing wrong with a good formula, but you can use it a little often.
Whereas Looper is a lot like an Alfred Bester novel.   It’s still introducing new concepts and mysteries when you’re halfway through the movie, and they turn out to be central to the plot.  There are a lot of side journeys and toss-off concepts that aren’t wrapped up in a tidy way.  Things are very messy, which makes Looper as unpredictable as a spitball.
That doesn’t mean it’s the best sci-fi movie ever, or even the best time-travel movie starring Bruce Willis meeting his younger self, but the novelty makes it something far fresher than the usual slew of pre-fabbed films.
The trick of Looper is that time travel has been invented, but it’s instantly outlawed.  The mafia sends people back in time to be killed – it’s explained that technology has advanced to the point where they can’t hide a body in the future – and quite often, the Looper-hitmen are assigned to “close the loop” and kill their future selves.  As Loopers are chosen from a bunch of hedonistic junkies, this is approached with a cynical fatalism – hey, I’ve got thirty years to party!  And those who are weak and let themselves go encounter horrible, horrible fates as the Mob chases both of them to ensure that the future isn’t changed.
That’s the first sign of how unpredictable Looper gets.  In any other film, the shocking twist that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has to kill his older Bruce Willis self would be the unique factor – he’s the only one who’s ever had to murder himself!  Why?  But making the self-destruction mundane is just one of Looper’s many hidden tricks.  This subtle bit of worldbuilding actually makes things far better.  If this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, then Young Joe would immediately sympathize with Old Joe and they’d team up to get revenge.
But no.  Young Joe is infuriated by the way that Old Joe is fucking with his life now, sees Old Joe as greedy and selfish (which, yes, they both are) for not succumbing to the fate that he signed up for, and so the two of them are at odds throughout the film. They don’t like each other.  They shouldn’t.  Even though they’re the same person, they have entirely different agendas.
The acting is also top-notch.  The makeup to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like Bruce Willis is a little intrusive at times, making him look a tab Kabuki, but both actors meld – you’d expect Bruce Willis, being the big star here, to be just Bruce Willis, but no, Bruce takes on just enough of JGL that it’s not quite the Die Hard of the Future.
Now, Looper has some serious flaws.  People have called it an internally consistent time travel movie, which it most certainly is not – it’s the usual messiness of multiple futures, not quite explained.  And while the characters are wonderfully defined and acted, their ends are not often well thought-out – Jeff Daniels plays a mob boss with such a beautiful affability I wanted to watch him all day, but in the end his character is almost literally discarded. If it was a book, it’d probably be a B-grade book – lots of great ideas, a weakish plot.
But as a movie, Looper is something interesting and new and worth watching just for a fresh take on cinema.  I liked it an awful lot.  I’d encourage you to go see it, if you like time-travel films.