So recently, I got a time capsule. Which is a nice way to say that I finally repatriated the stuff I had left behind temporarily when I went home from abroad in 2012. Altogether, I have moved from one country to the next a handful of times, last earlier this year. And everytime, I find myself staggering (often literally) under the amount of stuff that I possess.

I have heard of decluttering; I went through a period earlier this year of, because I was going to move, watching minimalism videos on the internet. These videos don’t help. I watch other people declutter, but I don’t feel like the amount of stuff I have compares to what they are dealing with. Moving between countries every few years, I have already shed a fair amount of stuff. I don’t buy a lot of clothes and I give them away when I don’t wear them anymore. I use my shoes until the soles have holes in them and I resole the ones that can be. I give books away when I have read them. I use the crockery that I own, the art material that I own. But yes, I do accumulate bits and bobs. I have trouble separating myself from things that were given to me, or t-shirts that I bought at concerts but that I’ve stopped wearing, or my favourite old shirts that I used to wear a lot etc. I have what I call my incompressible.

And my incompressible is heavy.

And my incompressible is growing.

But try as I might to reduce it, there is only so far I can dent it.

Example: I am an avid photographer. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you how mad I drive them when I got on a photoshooting binge and stop every few metres to shoot. No, my pictures are not necessarily brilliant, though there are a lot I am very proud of. Now I hear you say, what’s the problem with taking pictures? They don’t take up space, just buy a big external hard-drive and you’re sorted. Well, you may recall a post I wrote back when I discovered pinhole photography. Since then, I have moved to shooting instant, then in 120 format, then in last year I bought myself a 1980’s SLR. But the thing is, I shoot in film. I like film. Very much. I like the unpredictability of it, the lucky shot that I get, and also the getting it wrong. I get a lot wrong, and I have films which are not very good and others that are pretty rubbish, but I am a hoarder so I keep them all. Also, I now have a half a dozen cameras.

Repeat the pattern for art material, then for notebooks and journals and sketchbooks.

How much of that is clutter? How does one define clutter? Should I for instance, discard my developed films since I have most of them scanned? I look at minimalism and I think, oh yes, sure I’d love to have (by choice, btw, not because I can’t afford more) only 7 sets of clothes (shirt-bra-knickers-socks), one skirt, one pair of trousers, one pair of shoes. Sure, who wouldn’t like the simplicity of it? Who wouldn’t like the amount of money saved by not buying clothes or shoes? But the people in these videos who tell you, have one good quality pen and a good quality notebook to journal in (somehow, journalling is very important), what do they do with their notebooks once they’re filled up? Where are these stored?

I understand that the idea behind reducing your clutter is reducing the mental charge that comes with storing the things you own. I appreciate that every time I tidy my desk. It is nice to have the space, it is nice for everything to have its own place. And in times when I am confined with my stuff, I do feel like I need some of it to go. But I haven’t figured out how to part with a lot of stuff, even when it’s old and useless. The best that I can try and come up with is looking at it in terms of the death-cleaning thing and think, someone will have to clear that after me, I shoud try and make that easier. So now that I do have my stuff back, it might be time to go back through everything and say, okay, if I don’t use it and someone else could, why keep it. Is this the right question to ask?

Bon bah voila. Premier jour de la premiere semaine complete de ce nouveau confinement (je me comprend).

Je vais tenter (no promises!!) de reprendre ce blog, ca me fera un petit projet confinement, autre que mon sketchjournal.

Voila.

So I went to see Hitman : Agent 47 last night. Oh, boy!

It is visually very sleek. The action scenes are well done, and well executed. I have not played the game so I can’t really compare the two 47’s, but it seems to me that this one seems to keep closer to what I imagine a 47 to be, more clinical than the first one, but also clinical by conscious choice. Some of the actions sequences are weird, as if the camera purposely avoids shooting the actors faces. There’s no romance in it; even the one scene where Smith and Van Dees are together is wooden and artificial, though quite possibly that’s intentional. And yet again, here is a movie with ONE female lead!

The story, well, that’s a different matter. It is full of rather cheap devices. This is the point where you decide to either go see the movie first, or decide that it’s ok, you’ll keep reading, after all, wasn’t the first one already bad.

 

Do you remember the trailer, where 47 is shackled to the table in the interrogation room and the other guy puts his rifle on the table? Well, that’s a scene from the movie. I know, you’d expect that from a trailer, right? It’s supposed to show you snippets of the movie. Now I ask you, who in their right mind, arrests a man carrying a rifle in a bag, and two guns on him, shackles him to a table in the interrogation room and then, brings said rifle in the room? Never mind mentioning that it’s a very fancy gun, with a hair trigger, or loading the gun for that matter. Another such moment is the utterly predictable one where the guy who hasn’t come out of his office for years, obviously comes out of his office, because the guy he wants to talk to is shackled to a chair.

 

Now if we wanted to be really finicky about all this, we could mention Smith. Smith’s got a very fancy body armour. The kind that apparently means that even when he gets shot or in a car crash, his clothes remain immaculate. But you don’t know that when he gets shot first. We could also get onto the character who has stage 3 lung cancer, yet walks around with symptoms resembling those of asthma. We could mention the fact that once again, a character gets comfortable with killing uncomfortably quickly. Many things we could mention, which don’t take away from one simple fact.

 

The movie is fun. As action movies go, it’s not bad.

Went to see Mission Impossible : Rogue Nation last night.

The movie is a lot of fun. It’s got a nice balance of car chases and actually not that many explosions or completely impossible shit happening. Well, yes, there is that being on a taking-off plane thing. Still, ultimately, MI is about gadgets and impersonating skills, in which case, it doesn’t do a bad job.

One is given to notice at some point, how the movies have evolved from the first one, with stunts becoming increasingly bigger and more impressive. That being said, apart from the plane stunt, there isn’t that much over-the-top action in this installment, which is very refreshing. The action is different, perhaps less flamboyant and yet, impressive because of it. The staple mask is there, but its use is almost mundane. Instead, the story relies on good old infiltration, trust and poker faces. Another way the movies have evolved is this one’s complete lack of romance; there is but a hint at the end.

Also, there is much more wit than in previous installments. It ranges from the banter between agents, to the outright ridicule. There is something deliciously irreverent about the way Alec Baldwin’s character is treated throughout the movie. I should say, informed, more so than treated. The movie serves as a mission statement really, for how the IMF is different from other intelligence agencies and for how it should stay that way. That being said, that wit is something which has surfaced a lot over the past few years and perhaps MI is just catching up.

One may regret that the movie is completely predictable. None of the characters surprise you. What should look like betrayals don’t. There are no real plot twists. And Rebecca Ferguson’s character is given way too many second chances, perhaps because she is actually, the only lead female character in the movie.

Still, the action and the fight scenes are enjoyable. It’s a fun way to spend two and a half hours.

 

I love postcards. I love sending them; I love receiving them. I send at least four postcards when I travel anywhere new and I always bring back some more. In today’s “snap and share”  climate, I guess it makes me a bit of an outsider. Well, a lot of an outsider, since I am rather parsimonious with the photos I share online. But here’s the scoop, folks : people LOVE getting postcards. As in, I know NOBODY who will be unhappy to open their letterbox and find a postcard in there.

Because receiving a postcard means that someone has taken the time during their time away to choose a postcard for you. That someone has taken the time to think about you long enough to write something, remember your address and hunt for a stamp (because yes, there are places where the post office is not just around the corner and the shop won’t sell you international stamps). And in places where there is no internet, because yes, there are still plenty of those, it’s a way to let at least one of those who might worry about you, that you’re doing fine.

The postcard is an old tradition; it started in the mid-nineteenth century. It’s the cheapest and the most personal souvenir you will ever buy. It can allow you to share that painting you saw in an exhibit and that you really liked. It can be funny or naughty. And even with digital cameras getting better and better, a postcard has the best pictures. You can use it as bookmark, pin it to your partition in work, put it on your fridge, show it off to your friends. It’ll make you smile when you see it. You can even collect the stamp from it. It’s something that was sent to you. It’s not something that was posted online, something that everyone has and that you have to print afterwards.

In short, the postcard is awesome and I struggle to understand how people don’t send more of them.  Though it is a two-way street, isn’t it? It’s always nice to receive postcards, but well, truth is, you’ve got to send some of your own. Tis only fair, don’t you think?

So I went to see Jurassic World a couple of days ago.
The story is predictable enough and the trope of the geneticist who mixes up various bits of species (for perfectly good biological reasons) to make one smart super monster perdures yet again. And obviously the various strands of DNA spliced together had just the genes that are… inconvenient, to put it mildly. The female lead spends the entire movie (including all the time spent going through fields, forest and being chased by dinosaurs) on two-inch heels. It does have wit, but very unfortunate when the kids tell their aunt that no, they want to stick with “her boyfriend”, not her. So yeah, the moment is funny,  but cringe-worthy all the same.
Another thing that I had picked up on back when the first trailer came out, and in fact, my main,  if not my only real source of grief with the movie, is the size of the pool for the mosasaurus. The mosasaurus is an aquatic animal, according to the Jurassic World website 18 meters long. For those of you struggling to relate to this size, it’s slightly longer than an adult sperm whale. The bit we see in the trailer is that the mosasaurus is fed a great white shark.  There’s an aerial shot of the pool, then people wonder if the animal is going to even show, then it jumps out of the water, a good two-thirds of its length.
I said it at the time and I repeat it now. There is no way that a pool where the depth of the water almost lets you see its bottom, is deep enough for an animal of that size to move around without its back breaching the surface, never mind finding the space somehow to take enough momentum to jump out of the water and get its food. Again, think of a sperm whale, then imagine the amount of space it would need to move comfortably. The next bit, seen also in the trailer, is the mosasaurus but seen from underground, sea-world style. And the water is again, somehow shallow enough that sunlight is enough to light the animal as it turns around and finishes its two-bite meal, again, without its back breaching the water surface. I don’t believe that there is a single shot throughout the movie, where the mosasaurus is correctly proportioned, with respect to the observer or to its environment. And I totally get adding this one for the “wow factor” and how it fits in the story. Which is precisely why it annoys me that possibly the coolest of the dinosaurs (apart from the triceratops) is somehow never the right size. Also, the animal is in an empty artificial pool. As in, there is nothing in the water with it. So yes, past the ending, all I could think was “Wow. Koo-koo-ka-choo got screwed.”

That being said,  I liked it. It’s pretty good, very enjoyable. It’s well done, visually. References to the original are very nicely woven through the story, including past cast members, so there’s a lot of continuity. It’s got plenty of wit  and kick-ass characters. And it does credit to the dinosaurs’ variety and intelligence.

For a long time, I’ve carried in my satchel a phone with a camera and a sketchbook. I don’t often sketch, if I am to be fair, but I do snap a picture when I see something that I find interesting. Just like you do, I reckon. What’s the use of the camera on your phone otherwise? (Bear in mind that I didn’t get a camera phone to catch cops being unpleasant) It’s handy; I began with a VGA camera so I can appreciate the 5 mega pixel on my current phone (and yes, I know that’s quite low, but it’s a phone, not a proper camera) Better still, it’s quick. Something catch your eye, take it out, snap, and repeat as necessary for a satisfactory output. And it’s the same with the digital camera. Take, check, put away.

Operative words here : take and check.

Recently, I’ve gotten interested in pinhole photography. So I got films, I got myself some materials, I spent a long time making a pinhole, I built my camera, I loaded and I started shooting.

Ah.

See, the principle of pinhole photography is that a tiny hole in a dark box works as a lens. Then you stick photographic film at the back of the box, open the shutter, et voila!

Sounds easy and it is. Except that since there’s no lens, there’s nothing to focus the light. That means that to make an impression, you have to go old school and count the seconds needed to expose the film. Some of you are probably very familiar with long exposure, but I wasn’t. So I am learning to wait and control my exposure times. This is a problem for me, because I tend to shake a lot. So I try to take pictures where I can set the camera down for a while.

That cover the take aspect. If you want to deal with the check aspect and you haven’t made a pinhole digital camera, then you have to fill the film up. So now, I am relearning how to wait to see my pictures. Again, probably very natural to many of you and also, part of the fun, but still. So yeah, I am relearning patience.

 

Isn’t it funny, how quickly you loose certain habits? I’ve only had a digital camera since late 2007. I remember taking rolls of pictures. I remember sending my rolls in to be developed. And I have never been a great photographer, so I’d take some pictures twice, if I thought I’d shook too much for the first one. Then I’d get them processed and see how well they turned out. I remember doing all that.

Perhaps I just need to be taking more pictures. As in just go around shooting everything. After all, that’s one nice thing about pinhole photography is that it requires you to wait at least a couple of seconds in the same place to take your photograph. So you don’t look at things the same way. You see more details, because you take the time to see more. And I like seeing all the little bits one doesn’t notice at first. It’s just hard not to see my pictures as I take them.

 

 

 

 

 

At the beginning of the week, I went to see Seventh Son. I was looking forward to it, because I’d seen the first trailer for it a couple of years back, and I had not gone to see it in France (where it came out back in December) because there weren’t any showings in English. So yeah, I was looking forward to it.

It did not disappoint. The special effects are incredible. The creatures are beautifully made and look fantastic. They integrate really well into the rest of it. The change from human to creature is also very well rendered, often due to the way it was shot, so it could be integrated seamlessly.

The story is perhaps, not the newest thing out there (I have no idea how close the movie keeps to the book either), but the movie has no obvious plot-holes that I could detect on first vision. It has no exposition either, which is quite a nice change. Granted, since one of the character must teach the other, there are a couple of “This does that” and “this is who” moments, but no “this is going to happen because this happened bla-bla-bla”. There is plenty of wits and some funny moments. The ending is not unpredictable, but as a whole, the movie keeps you interested to the end.

If I had one qualm about it, it has to do sadly, with the visual aspect of it. I went to see it in 3D, which may be the cause of it. Basically, the whole movie looks as if there is some kind of mist over everything. For instance, when Ben Barnes’ character talks to his mother by the lake, it looks like the lens is slightly foggy, like there is a slightly white hue over the image. I know, I’m not describing it well, and I wager it is something that is intentional, to add atmosphere and keep the special effect more realistic. But it makes it look like the whole thing was done over a green screen, it makes it difficult to know what was filmed on a real location, and it did bother me a little.

 

I liked it. It’s a good movie, and worth the wait.

I went to see Neill Blomkamp’s  Chappie last weekend, a movie about a robot who is being given artificial consciousness. Set in Jo’Burg, it casts Ninja and Yolandi from Die Antwort as well as Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver, and is fantastic, because it is well written, it is well cast and it is well done. And there is more. There is Sci-Fi. There is music. There is social commentary.

 

Chappie is a beat-down robot into which a file is uploaded. A piece of code which takes a very intelligent piece of machinery and gives it that something else that makes us more than just machines. It effectively makes Chappie a child. And that is where things begin going wrong. Chappie is about how and what we teach our children. It’s about how they soak up behaviour. It’s also about how much they will forgive and the lengths they will go to for their parents.

 

But there’s more to that. Chappie’s body is that of a police droid. He still wears the uniform. Therefore, he still elicits trust in the people he meets. More exactly, his uniform does. And therein lies the problem. We trust people in uniform, because of what the uniform stands for, be it a bus or train driver, be it a plane pilot or a firefighter, be it a police officer or a soldier. Someone who wears a uniform represents a larger entity, therefore that entity has taken care to ensure that whoever wears its uniform will be doing so in a way which upholds its value. In short, it has vetted whoever wears its uniform. So what does it say when the person wearing the uniform is not deserving of our trust? And when it’s a robot wearing the uniform, does its misbehaviour reflect on those who made it or those who use it?

 

And then there’s the company which made Chappie’s shell. The company which makes the police droids. A company which also employs someone who works on a human-driven crowd control machine. A man who is a weapons maker. One who has his elbow greasy from working on his machine. Someone who wants to play with his toy. Never mind that the toy is a machine, amongst many other things, strong enough to take a man by both ends and rip him apart, middle-age-style. There is something terrifying about the glee with which Hugh Jackman’s character directs his machine. The man used to be a soldier so killing and atrocities are not new to him, but surely that’s not enough to justify that glee, is it? And surely, someone which such tendencies ought not to be employed as a weapons designer?

 

Maybe I don’t understand the point of Chappie. In general, I’m not very good at subtext in films, most often because I don’t really want to be either. Sometimes though, it glares at you in the face. It did in District 9. It did in Elysium. It does in Chappie.