One, two, three... WOW! Those are Fibonacci numbers! (Nymphomaniac)

So I waded through the misanthropy of both parts of Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac, and I now hate humanity almost one tenth as much as von Trier does. But I didn't want to talk about the whole movie, I just wanted to comment on one element that annoyed me spectacularly: the shallow fake intellectualism of the character Seligman.

The movie is basically a sex addict named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) recounting her penis-filled life story to an asexual bachelor named Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard - no, I'm not looking up the HTML code for that 'a' with the circle on top character) after he finds her beat up in the alley. A central theme of the movie is Seligman saying something supposedly smart and intellectual after Joe recounts some sexual encounter. The problem is, most of the 'intellectual' things he says are in fact really stupid.

An example is when Joe says that the first time she had sex, her boyfriend Jerome humped her three times in her vagina and five times in her ass. "Those are Fibonacci numbers!" says Seligman, and goes on to say some hand-wavy stuff about how they're connected to other mathematical things, like the Golden Ratio and such.

While it's true that they are Fibonacci numbers, this is an incredibly trivial and stupid observation to make when confronted with the numbers '3' and '5,' considering there are only two numbers, too little to imply much of a series, especially when these two numbers are part of countless other significant sets and series (the odd numbers, the prime numbers, the smallest Pythagorean triplet, and so on).

A humanities equivalent would be see the letters 'e' and 'a' and then to say 'Amazing! Did you know those are two letters in the name of the name of Ezra Pound, a writer of poetry, an art form also practiced by the great thinkers Rumi and Samuel Taylor Coleridge?'

It might be a little less idiotic if Jerome had humped her 13 and then 21 times, but I'm not sure that Joe could count that high; stupid as Seligman is he's still an intellectual titan compared to her.

In the second movie, when Joe tells  Seligman she lost her ability to orgasm, he tells her something like "you were just like Xeno, who could never reach his goal!" Even Joe gets annoyed here, though not because she recognizes that this is even stupider than the Fibonacci thing. For her situation to resemble Xeno's Paradox she'd have had to tell him that she got asymptotically closer and closer to an orgasm but never quite reached it (a not unheard of situation). Instead, she lost all sexual sensation whatsoever; she never even crossed the starting line. She's more like the Tortoise in Godel, Escher, Bach and the Charles Dodgson dialogue on which the dialogues on that book are based. But I doubt Seligman could get past the second page of that book.

It has occurred to me that von Trier might be doing this on purpose. Maybe Seligman is supposed to be a fool who is convinced that he is a genius. But I don't think so; the stuff he says about fly-fishing are clearly meant to sound really brilliant. No doubt if I knew more about fishing those would look just as dumb to me.

But did you realize that the first word in 'fly fishing' has three letters, and that three is the first digit in pi?
FASCINATING.

Coraline: really good, really scary.

Update below

I've been dying to take Jeff to see Coraline, but I was a bit worried he'd have bad dreams. Now that we've seen it, I'm worried I might.

Visually it's stunning. I saw it in 3D and was worried it'd be gimmicky. But we're well past the old scary-hand-sticking out the screen phase. The animation is every bit as good as Wall-E, maybe better.

The only thing I worry about is that the movie might be too scary for its intended audience. Like Murasaki's Spirited Away, Gaiman's original story plucks at some really primal childhood fears: abandonment, betrayal, dark passages and of course getting eaten by really nasty monsters. And the Other Mother is easily the scariest monster anyone's come up with in the last few decades.

The one thing that keeps the movie from being too scary for any young child is the plucky courage of the heroine. When Coraline cranks up her mouth and puts down one eyebrow you believe she is a match for The Beldame. Still, if you know any children that are faint of heart you might want to view it on your own first. Unless you're faint of heart yourself.

Update
As I feared, Jeff had trouble getting to sleep. If his grandma hadn't happened to be in town & sleeping in his room he probably would have had to sleep with us.

Inkheart

I just saw 'Inkheart' with Jeff & decided to post on it, since it's so rare I see something new (it was released yesterday). (Mild spoiler alerts follow, but nothing you wouldn't get out of seeing the previews.)

The premise of the movie is essentially the same as the far stupider looking 'Bedtime Storeies' starring Adam Sandler. Mo (Brendan Fraser) reads books and brings characters to life in them. And for every character he brings out, he sends one from this world into the book.

But the theme is fed to us in a far more sophisticated way, opening with a series of events that are as mysterious to us as they are to Mo's daughter, Resa (Eliza Benett). Mo's powers are already well known to him, and his use of them has broken his family; reuniting it is the main arc of the movie. Fraser is his usual self, doing about as much as the role needs. He's sort of a bulldozer of an actor who just charges through his role until it's finished. A bit like Harrison Ford minus the hint of irony.

What makes the movie is the play on the idea of how an author interacts with his or her work, and how the work interacts with the world. Fenoglio, the author, can't get over his fascination with seeing his own characters brought to life, even when they're about to kill him. My favorite lines:

Mo (speaking to Dustfingers, a character summoned from the Inkheart book): "You selfish, cowardly man!"
Dustfingers (pointing to Fenoglio): "Blame him, he wrote me that way!"

I don't know if this is a movie for everyone. But if you love to read fantastic novels (especially if you write them), it's highly recommended.

Note to parents only: It was almost too scary for Jeff in a few places (he's 6), but he never asked me to cover his eyes. I would rate it on the same scariness level as 'The Princess Bride,' if that helps.

Best kids' movie in last decade?

Jeff's grandma just sent him a copy of The Iron Giant - along with a beautiful hand-knitted scarf.

I saw TIG when it first came out, before Jeff was born, and I've seen it a few times since. But unlike most of the other kids' movies I've had to watch a bazillion times (that's how kids are, when they like something they want to see it a lot), I just can't get tired of it.

The story is about Hogarth, the child of a waitress single mother in a small town in Maine during the height of the Cold War, who makes friends with a giant robot from space. Who the robot is or where he came from isn't gone into much. What's more important is who other people think the robot is. Hogarth has to hide his enormous friend from the suspicious world - especially Kent Mansley, an insanely paranoid government agent who makes General Jack D. Ripper look like a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hogarth has the help of Dean, a beatnik junkyard owner who makes art out of his junk. The portrait of the period is just fantastic. Of course I wasn't actually born yet, so maybe someone who was alive then could contradict me. But the American Paranoid attitude never goes out of style, and the CW was just one of the more famous incarnations of the same attitude that's running our country today.

The movie has some great action scenes when the robot's weapon-like background reveals itself. But in the end the movie is about the struggle (both within the robot and within us) between the inclination to shoot first and ask questions later, and the much more difficult decision to try to accept what we don't understand. Especially for boys, it's got the perfect combination of cool action and the right message.

Whether you have kids or not, you absolutely have to see this. To make it even better, it might be one of the last great big-budget animation movies done with hand drawings instead of CGI. Check it out.

Eternal Sunshine of Thoughtless Science

I recently saw the previews for Sunshine,, and was incredibly annoyed that what looks like such an otherwise interesting movie is based upon such stupid science. They seemed so serious about doing such a hard sci-fi flick that I had to double-check to see if there was some new discovery their thinking was based on, but it only took a few clicks find several experts have confirmed what I'm sure I first learned in 8th grade science, at latest.

Did it occur to the marketing department of Fox Searchlight that the same kind of people who would like to see a movie like this would be well acquainted with the fact that:

1) The sun has another 5 billion years of fuel,
2) When the sun does run low on fuel, it will not cool off but simultaneously get much hotter and expand its radius to near the orbit of Mars, and
3) Compared to the strength of the sun an atomic bomb, even the one "the size of Manhattan," is like a Black Cat that goes off in the radius of the Hiroshima device?

I know, I know, I'm the one that's always saying that what's important is telling an interesting story about people, not picky scientific details. And I'm really not too obsessed about scientific accuracy, especially if it's something you'd need at least a Masters in Physics to understand. But if you're going do something in a genre, you have to stick to the conventions, which in this case of science fiction means at the very least not using science that is obviously wrong even to a person who has a Discover Magazine subscription or stayed awake through Science 101 for the Humanities. This plot is like having a spaceship captain press a button and accelerate his ship to ten times light speed without even bothering to put a fake-science fig-leaf over it like "his ship turned into tachyons" or something like that.

So will I go see it? Probably. But you might not want to sit next to me, because I'll bitch the whole time.

Superhero Saturday

I had said I was going to talk about Batman next, but first I should mention that I saw Fantastic Four today. It was okay, in spite of some stupid dialogue. Sample quote from Richard Reed:

It's our wedding, Sue, and I'm not going to let anything interfere with that. Not even widespread disruption of matter at the quantum level.

The quote above might not be word for word accurate, but it's close enough to what he actually said.

The best part was the way that the movie plays with the idea of the vapidity of celebrity culture obsession. One of the things that makes F4 unique is that they don't have secret identities. So when the entire world is in danger of being devoured by Galactus, the only thing anyone cares about is what Reed & Sue's china pattern is.

The main reason I wanted to see this is that the Silver Surfer is in this one. In the movie the Surfer is being blackmailed to work for Galactus, going to planets and surfing holes through them for a few days before the big G comes and chows down. Upon learning that Earth has developed sufficient CGI technology to portray him, he puts us next on the list.

Faced with the mystery of Surfer-boy causing disruption throughout the planet, the Four are strongarmed into working with Victor Von Doom, upon which they come up with a "tachyon pulse" which separates the SS from his board, upon which he turns into a dude in silver body paint.

Luckily for us the Surfer decides he cannot participate in the destruction of a planet that contains a rack like Jessica Alba's, so all that's left to do is get the board back from Dr. Doom, who of course stole it, so the Surfer can get on it and go blow up Galactus.

Two insanely obvious questions: first of all, as a massive blob of cosmic energy that devours planets, what exactly did Galactus need Silver Surfer for? Second is Silver Surfer could blow up Galactus, why was he ever working for him?

But ignoring that, the plot flows pretty smoothly. Better, it doesn't have anything that Jeff (4-year old son) can't see. So that's a good summer afternoon turn-out.