djm's scribble

This week is the 5th anniversary of OpenSSH. My involvement with the project started about a month later than its real beginning on September 26th 1999, but it fell to me to send out the birthday announcement. My attempts at getting wider press coverage were only partially successful, but there was a good writeup in The Age. It has been challenging and fun over the last five years, though this has been marred by some pretty harsh criticism when we have made mistakes.

I have just purchased a light mountain bike and have been trying to ride into work every day. It is only about 12km and the way is very flat, so the ride isn’t difficult at all. Except, that is, on the return on my first day where it got quite wet and I was without a raincoat. I’m much more worried that some inconsiderate driver (Melbourne has plenty) will do something dumb and put me at risk. So far, so good. Riding along St Kilda road in the spring is simply lovely - the giant elms are bursting their first leaves and the bike lanes are good. Paradise. The big test will come next April - can I keep this up over winter?

My wife and I watched a couple of films recently, finally seeing Fahrenheit 9/11. Overall I liked this film, despite a few objections. I think the politics of this movie have already been thrashed to death by everyone with an opinion, so I won’t dig too deep into this aspect, except to observe the most of the political criticism has been pretty superficial. The unsung hero of this film are definitely the editors, as the film is largely a work of collage. It was very reminiscent of Koyaanisqatsi. In fact the similarity of pace and the Philip Glass-like music make me wonder whether this was deliberate emulation. As a work of polemic, the film was very effective - I think that the use of collage and irony perhaps brings the message home more forcefully than a documentary, or more directly critical style could. In forcing viewers to make their own associations between the images that they are presented with, and keeping the pace of change sufficiently high, viewers have time to come to a viewpoint (probably that which Moore intends), but not enough time to properly criticise it. This is the same technique that Koyaanisqatsi (more effectively) used. Between the effectiveness of the technique, its skill in execution and the nature of the argument, I don’t think that Moore needed to exaggerate and embellish to the extent that he did. Some parts of the film weren’t so good; in particular, the long sequences on Iraq and the obligatory reference to Flint, Michigan. On the other hand, the concluding sequence, and its reference to Orwell were very effective. 8.5/10.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. This film actually had a score by Philip Glass, though I don’t think he was at his fulminant best. The film is basically an extended interview with McNamara, tracing his career from the 2nd World War until close to the end of the Vietnam War. The intensity of McNamara’s intellect and ego were clearly visible, despite his age. I don’t know what constraints were placed on the interviewer, but the questions asked seemed to be very friendly and non-challenging to someone who played a real part in the deaths of millions. Moreover, I don’t think that the format of condensing a first-person historical discussion into “eleven insights” (which sounds like the title of one of those trite management texts one finds at an Airport) was an appropriate way to communicate the subject matter. Some of the visuals, especially the frequent shots of war plans, were a little repetitive. Despite this, the film is engaging and enjoyable. 8/10.

Japanese Story. There seems to be a rash of films using the Japanese as a device or as a metaphor. I’m not sure why, perhaps because they have visible cultural differences that are at the right level of penetration into Western awareness. These films get to both play up and resolve these differences for narrative effect. This is probably one of the better ones - it one goes deeper than Lost in Translation despite touching on some similar themes (individual alienation, being a stranger to the world). Mostly shot in outback Australia, it is visually stark and beautiful. The shock and the space of the landscape is enhanced by the use of silence in the film (hooray! silence is so rare in modern western cinema). It is difficult to describe the film in much more detail without ruining the central plot, so I won’t try. Suffice to say that this is well worth watching, especially if you are Australian (some great cultural critique in there). 9/10

Solaris (the 2002 Soderbergh version, not the better 1972 Tarkovsky version). I heard bad things about this film, and I didn’t expect Hollywood to do justice to Tarkovsky’s science fiction masterpiece. My concerns were largely justified: this film isn’t nearly as good as the original. A few aspects were interesting: many scenes in the film demanded solitude and silence and Soderbergh partially complied, foregoing music in much of the film. However, in most of the scenes where real silence was appropriate, Soderbergh filled the void with excessively loud air-conditioning noises, conveying an impression of a reflexive rejection of real silence. There was no narrative basis for doing this, just a typical western-cinema rejection of silence. The score, where it appeared was quite good, some parts had very strong resonances to that of 2001, A Space Odyssey. The original parts of the plot were reasonably good, but they paled when held up against the Tarkovsky version. I wonder if the film would have been better if Soderbergh had been more adventurous and had tried to re-tell the story in an entirely different milleu. 6/10.