The unexamined life

I saw Wanted last night, and it was much better than I expected it to be. It is rare for a trailer to able to show the soul of a movie, and in this case the producers did not even try. The trailer for Wanted is the standard collage of action scenes and one-liners that could have come from any summer movie of the last ten years.

What sets Wanted apart from your run of the mill action flick is the frame: a sci-fi conceit (that there are people born with the ability to move and react so much faster than the average human) wrapped inside of a fantasy motif (that there is an external force--here called fate--that can communicate with our reality). The central question faced by the hero is: Who am I? What shoudl I be? These are questions I've thought about quite a bit recently.

I will be changing jobs in fall of 2009 when my current contract expires, and naturally this has led me to ask myself: Who am I and what do I want? There is the immediate question of where I want to head next in my career. Do I want to emphasize my teaching, my research? Or move in a third direction? Towards money? Towards a family? Who am I? What do I want?

In Wanted, the choice was made far easier for the hero since Angelina Jolie was willing to act as his guide towards a new life. Most of us have to make our own way without an archetype of sexuality looking over our shoulders. Still, I thank my personal fate that I live in a time and place where I can ask these questions, and take action on whatever I decide the answers to be.

The power of choice

So I popped in the Blu-Ray version of "I Am Legend" and there is was before me: a choice. Theatrical version, or Alternate version.

Looking back on my life, I can really only pinpoint four or five choices that I made that had any long term impact on my life. Before I was 18 of course, my parents made the big decisions about where to live, what religion to embrace, and when to get up. But then the ball was in my court: where should I go to college, what to major in once I was there, where to go to graduate school, which postdoc to accept, whether to accept a position at Duke or Miami. Each of these decisions was mine to make and had a long term impact on my life. The other things, even long term friendships, long term research collaborations, etcetera, were to be honest external in nature; products of fortune and circumstance rather than in my active control.

Of course, what version of "I Am Legend" to watch will (I guess) not be of long term import to my life. But it was still a decision. Like life, you only watch a movie for the first time once, and how you view that movie will be most strongly influenced by the initial version. I could not go back and unwatch the first version before seeing the second, and so had to pick.

In the end, I found the version I did watch first more satisfying than the other.

Is there such a thing as a negative product placement?

Saw two movies today, "Idiocracy" and "Talladega Nights". I enjoyed them both immensely, very good comedies. As I watched though, something struck me. Although the two are very different films, they do have one thing in common: they both managed to fund themselves with negative product placements.

For example, in Idiocracy, a dystopian 2505 where the average IQ has dropped to rock bottom, Carl's Jr. now has the ability to take over the care and raising of children for customers who cannot pay their bill. In Talladega Nights, our hero's deadbeat dad tells him he has taped a bag of cocaine to the bottom of the car where in fact it is merely a bag of Lucky Charms.

Now, what I want to know is: does this really work? The Carl's Jr. ads where all over the place in Idiocracy, but in every single instance they were doing something negative. Everyone knows the expression that any publicity is good publicity but presenting your company as a facist organization seems to put paid to that bit of wisdom. And children's cereal instead of cocaine? Not eaten by the protaginist, but dumped on the ground in digust. It was a funny scene, and a good joke, but why would Lucky Charms pay to have their cereal, their product name be the butt of a joke?

Guess I just lack the skills to survive in the world of advertising.

Wall-E

I saw Wall-E yesterday, and the first thing that I want to say is how blown away I was by it. There is of course a long standing tradition of just how the apocalypse will go down in science fiction, but Wall-E managed to create a vision that was simultaneously 1) not a simple retread of a Twilight Zone episode, 2) horrible, 3) funny, 4) suitable for children. Not an easy task!

Computer animation techniques are still improving. Especially noticeable in this movie was the use of focus to emulate a camera operator frantically trying to capture the action as it unfolded (example: the scene with the shopping carts.)

I can only imagine Pixar greenlit this film before they were sure they would remain part of Disney: The irony of a giant multinational corporation like Disney bankrolling and promoting such an aggressively anticorporate film added an extra layer of mirth to the film for me.