Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 60

Gone Hobbitting

Saw The Hobbit last night with Galley Friend A.K. on a full-boat screen: IMAX, 3D, high-frame-rate. Assorted, non-spoiler, thoughts below:

* I didn’t experience any of the headaches or assorted unpleasantness that some people reported from the HFR. Nor did I find it particularly objectionable in the pan-and-scan, South American soap-opera, sense. There were a handful of scenes where the HFR created ghastly images, and the worst was the scene of the marketplace in the introduction. That rang so false, and looked so awful, that I’m surprised Peter Jackson kept it in. If I were him, I would have cut it just on the grounds of trying not to prejudice viewers against the new experience early on.

* It seemed to me that the HFR worked best on medium and long shots where the camera was either locked down or moving slowly. It produced the worst-looking results in tight shots with sudden movement. Such as when Bilbo is framed closely in Bag End and reaching quickly for dishes and whatnot. That’s when the HD camera soap opera effect was at its worst.

* The 3D was so unobtrusive that my eyes forgot it was there after just a few moments. About half-way in I had to remind myself that I was watching a 3D movie. Perhaps using 3D as a background effect will become the equivalent of using CGI not to create spectacle, but to make special effects seem not special, as it was during the golden age of CGI in the late 1990s, circa Titanic. I don’t think I’d mind that at all.

* For me, the technical high-point of the movie was the shot where the company makes its way across the bridge into Rivendell. The characters are shot in the medium-distance, with the camera panning very slowly around them. The environment is captured both cinematically and with great immediacy. For a moment, it really does feel as though you are standing in Rivendell–in the best sense. At that moment, I could see the allure of the 3D-HFR technology, and why Jackson and others would be attracted to it. No other shots in The Hobbit achieved that level of brilliance, but several came close.

* Overall, I would definitely agree that 3D-HFR lends the theatrical experience a level of “immediacy” that conventional film-making lacks. As an audience member, I felt more like I was present in the proceedings, rather than observing them at some narrative remove. I’m not sure whether, or how much, this is helpful to the storytelling.

* The tradeoff, at least to my mind, was that the immediacy of the experience took away some of the dramatic weight that the conventional cinematic experience commands. I felt more like I was there watching The Hobbit. But the dramatic tension, which has traditionally been the backbone of the moviegoing experience, was sapped.

Now maybe that’s a function of me being new to the medium. Maybe it’s a function of the particular narrative and dramatic problems with The Hobbit. But maybe not.

* Is The Hobbit any good? I think so. It’s lesser Peter Jackson and lesser Middle Earth. But it’s still Peter Jackson on Middle Earth, and that’s not nothing. Some parts of it were wonderful. For example, the execution with Galadriel is stunning, from the way she’s depicted–her movements and speech–to how her presence impacts the characters around her. I very much liked the way Jackson portrayed the power of the Voice of Saruman without ever telling us, “Look! Saruman’s very voice has the power to persuade those around him!” Smaug looks amazing.

Other parts were less wonderful. I like comic relief, and think it’s necessary. But the dwarves are played for laughs too often. So much so, that it takes away from the sense of their quiet suffering at being refugees. Martin Freeman’s Bilbo, I’m afraid, is very uneven. Pitch-perfect at times; annoyingly out of sync at others.

* I’m waiting for someone on the left to make the case that Jackson’s Hobbit can be read as an allegory about Palestinian statehood, with Thorin and the dwarves as the Palestinians violently turned out from their rightful homeland by the violent interloper, the dragon Smaug. Fill in the blanks with asides about Israel, gold, etc.

* So the Pale Orc’s face was clearly modeled on Jon Hamm, right? Look closely at the facial structure next time.

In other news, I’m going to be gone for the next couple weeks with Christmas and a qualifying life event. Blogging will be light to non-existent.

And in case I don’t get to it, here’s your NORAD Santa Tracker.

And as a bonus, this customizable message from Santa is high-level awesome. Your kids will flip.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’s to all of you.

 

Japan’s Demographic Cliff

A looooong reaction to the New York Times piece on Japan’s demographic problems over at the Standard.

I continue to be surprised by the disconnect between liberal demographers and social scientists who study this stuff and the opinions of lay-liberals in the media.

Overheard

I’m sitting in a Starbucks next to George Mason University and the two middle-aged women next to me are discussing the Connecticut shooting rampage. One of them just said she thinks President Obama is a “coward” because immediately after the shooting he should have “outlawed all assault weapons and those long clip things” then “let the Supreme Court just try and overturn him” and if they did “just declare martial law.”

Then they wrapped up their coffee because they said they had to get back to class. Unclear if they were students or teachers.

Wal-Mart Ads on Facebook

This story in the WSJ about Wal-Mart’s big ad partnership with Facebook is as interesting for what it doesn’t say as it is for what it reports.

But the best aspect of it is that Facebook’s future rests in large part on mega ad-buys from what is probably the least-cool corporation on the planet. Turns out that Eduardo Saverin wasn’t being stupid when he tried to get Zuckerberg to run ads from low-rent companies when Facebook was in its infancy. He was just early.

And away . . . we . . . go

Jeff Jacoby writes a very nice column (permalink here) about What to Expect When No One’s Expecting  in the Globe. (The comments section over there is hysterical.)

Philosophical Anti-Pro-Natalism

I can’t be sure, but I think this guy is really just trolling Ross Douthat:

I have been explicitly told three times over the past year, by young philosopher parents, that there are philosophical insights that one simply cannot have without living through the fundamental experience of parenthood. That such an expression of pronatalist normativity exactly mirrors the sort of bias philosophers are by now so well trained not to express, about other quodlibetal forms the intimate life can take, is something that is surely in need of explanation. I suspect it has something to do with the recent, massive success of the campaign, which I support, to deheterosexualize the idea of parenthood. Once this goal was largely reached, at least within pockets of our society, the academics who found it desirable felt comfortable reverting to an evidently innate sort of conservatism. The family unit has been shaken up a bit, and the role of fathers reconceived, but in the end the nearly compulsory philosopher-dad-with-kid pictures that now clutter the faculty profile pages of departmental websites are every bit as conventionally pro-family as the ‘at home’ pictures on the now-defunct Romney-for-President website. They send the message that to be a philosopher is largely, even principally, to be invested in the bringing up of the next generation, to be doing it all ‘for the children’.

It gets awesomer. Worth wading through the comments, too.

A Nation of Singles–Update

I’ve always thought that while marriage is fabulous and can be the best thing to ever happen to a person, it only works so long as you’re married to the right person. If not, better to be single. Because no matter what, being single is pretty awesome. You can read as much as you want, work as much as you like, and go wherever, whenever, without tending to other responsibilities.

But this essay might as well have been written by Brad Wilcox and Maggie Gallagher: It’s the single most depressing view of singlehood I’ve ever seen. Yikes. Instead of making an intellectual argument for marriage, pro-marriage groups should just send copies of this thing to everyone in America.

Exit question: Back when the virtual world didn’t exist and everyone was fully engaged in the real world, being single was a blast. Has the internet made being single less fun?

Man of Steel

Tomorrow’s internet today: Wait a minute–how does Superman shave? They show him with a beard, but then he doesn’t have a beard. If his facial hair is removable with a simple razor because Kryptonian hair isn’t impervious like Kryptonian skin, then doesn’t the hair on his eyebrows and head get all jacked up when he’s on fire, or punched real hard, or stuff?

 

Putting a Quarter in the Asymmetrical Information Machine

Today’s WSJ piece on Apple talking with TV suppliers seems like the most solid evidence we’ve had that there might actually be an Apple TV coming down the tracks at some point. Yet I’ve been reasonably persuaded by many of the Apple TV skeptics that an actual television set doesn’t really jibe with APPL’s economics. I’d be very interested to hear someone smart (like Megan McArdle) walk through the various business challenges the TV market would represent to APPL. The rough list, to my mind, goes something like this:

* Most of APPL’s products are intended to be replaced on a semi-regular cycle. They want you to buy a new iPhone (and iPad) every 12 to 24 months and new laptop/desktops every 24 to 36 months. To that end, they have an aggressive product refresh cycle adding new features and designs every year or so. And they’re able to do this in large part because APPL customers are able to take advantage of a brisk secondary market for used products which defrays the cost of upgrade. You can afford to buy the iPhone 5 because someone on eBay will give you a few hundred bucks for your iPhone 4s.

I wonder what the typical TV replacement cycle is for an American household. My guess–and it’s nothing more than a guess–is that it’s a good bit longer than 36 months. If APPL jumped into the TV market, could they make the economics work on a longer product cycle? Or are they dependent on needing repeat buyers to help lower their manufacture and R&D costs? Or would they try to lure consumers into replacing their TV sets as often as they do their cell phones?

* How would consumers react to an Apple TV set if it was going to be refreshed and improved annually? Would they take to replacing their TVs more regularly, or would it prompt them to postpone purchase because they’re afraid of missing a key feature set in the next iteration?

* Would their be a secondary market for older Apple TVs, or does shipping large-screen panels make this a less attractive option for secondary buyers?

* Those are the hardware questions. From a “software” perspective, the biggest challenge would seem to be untangling broadcast rights. If the Holy Grail of an Apple TV is making channels and/or individual programs something like apps, which you purchase and then consume as you go (and this is a giant assumption), I can’t see how APPL achieves that without unbundling TV packages.

* A la carte channel subscriptions have been The Dream for a long, long time. But instead of moving toward an a la carte system over the years, we’ve actually moved further away from it. Sure, you’d rather only get the 30 channels you really want from Comcast–even if you had to pay almost the same amount you’re now paying for 500 channels that you don’t want. But from Comcast’s perspective (and the perspective of the media companies which own all of those channels) they’d much rather force you to buy the bundle. Their entire business model is based on bundling–forcing you to buy the little-watched networks if you’re going to get the most-watched networks–because it gives them more platforms and space for advertising. Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom, et al, know their business. It’s not clear what APPL could possibly offer them to make them begin to abandon it in favor of a model which would primarily benefit APPL.

* And if an Apple TV didn’t break up the bundling model, then what could it really offer consumers that the Apple set-top box doesn’t already give them? A better UI? TIVO on steroids? A TV panel that does Facetime? I’m not sure how much value there is to be added if the underlying economic systems of cable and advertising stay in place. In a strange way, the xBox is basically doing all of this stuff already. APPL could almost certainly do it better. But they don’t really need to actually be selling the panel if that’s the scope of their ambition.

Like I said, I’d be really interested in smart thoughts about this.

All Of This Has Happened Before . . .

I’m not quite sure why Ross Douthat is engaging Matt Yglesias on questions of demographics. Yglesias often seems to know next to nothing about the topics he writes about. But I don’t really read him, so maybe Yglesias has spent the last five years deep-diving in demographic research and has a solid understanding of the field and its history. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Anyway, here’s Douthat:

This is why the moral aspect of the case for, well, familialism — the hackles-raising argument I’ve been making that a society that isn’t replacing itself isn’t fulfilling a basic intergenerational obligation— cannot just be set aside in favor of less charged and more technocratic arguments about economic self-interest and social cohesion and public health and the sustainability of public pensions and so forth. These arguments matter, obviously, and may matter immensely as we enter our ever-grayer future. But even allowing for all of the practical problems associated with demographic decline, it is still possible to imagine a world of declining birthrates and more attenuated relationships being more comfortable, in strictly material terms, than the present or the past. Matt Yglesias has been making roughly this case, for instance, painting a portrait of a future where the surplus from technology and automation under-writes leisure pursuits (mostly virtual, I would expect) and social-service support for the many singletons left underemployed and unemployable, and everyone else finds work in the booming, ever-expanding elder-caregiver industry.

There’s a precedent, of course, for seeing technology as socio-economic liberation, as Philip Longman explains in his essential (and awesome) book on demographics, The Empty Cradle (page 114):

In the go-go year of 1966, the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress issued a report warning of a “glut of productivity.” Juanita Kreps, who would late become Jimmy Carter’s secretary of commerce, coauthored part of the study which made bold predictions about what life in the United States would be like in the mid-1980s. Productivity was growing so rapidly, the study concluded, that by 1985 the economy would provide Americans with any one of the following three choices:

A universal twenty-hour workweek

A twenty-two week standard vacation

A standard retirement age of 38

Kreps was in good company in making these predictions. Policy intellectuals at the time were infatuated with the idea that America had become an “affluent society” and that the problems of economic scarcity has essentially been solved. In 1966, Time magazine surveyed leading futurists and reported their consensus view: “By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy.” So bountiful would the economy become by 2000 that only 10 percent of Americans would be needed in the labor force, and the rest, Time reported, would “have to be paid to be idle” with inflation-adjusted government benefits of up to $40,000 a year.

Longman goes into detail about the policy consequences of this worldview. Spoiler Alert: They didn’t turn out to be useful.