The food porn is worth the cost of admission and the interviews have lots of interesting tidbits. The problem with the film is that it doesn’t commit to just covering industrial food design, or psychological factors in food enjoyment, or how our senses perceive food. It’s a shotgun approach that will leave you feeling unsatisfied.

For example, Food Design opens with a shot of fishsticks and eventually discusses them in depth. But they don’t mention the history of fishsticks: they were developed as a control for product testing. Fish sticks are explained as appealing to people who don’t really like fish but they don’t interview anyone who’s actually involved in the design of fish sticks or go into any depth about how we experience eating them differently from a fillet of cod.

It is mentioned that food design is as old as agriculture; for example, the Dutch bred carrots to be the national colour. But the film mostly focuses on contemporary food design. In order to cover the breadth, the interviews with industry insiders are about the philosophy of their business. I’d be interested to see a documentary about the process of actually designing a new product, like this excellent Gladwell article.

Food Design dismisses organic food and raw vegetables in general. Consumers are framed as being concerned with pleasure above all else and therefore easily manipulated by food design. This would be fine for a focused documentary, but is odd when insightful industry professionals are asked to wax philosophical.

The first half the film is a fun fish-out-of-water tale about Erik accepting that he has to play along with the LARP to get back the girl. The girl, Evelyn, is a flakey disposable woman with no features worth fighting for besides her “wonderful ass”. It’s tolerable because she’s used as a living MacGuffin to explore Duché de Bicolline and the emotional relationship between the viking brothers. This half is why the film won an audience award at Slamdance.

The second half of the film is all about perpetuating the myth that role-playing makes people go psychotic. I can only assume the Duché de Bicolline players had no idea this was in the script when they supported the filming of The Wild Hunt. Although this segment is well done (eg: it doesn’t glamorize violence), it’s exploitative and cheap. The script had enough subtlety that the brothers’ relationship provided a compelling conflict.

Kyla theorizes that the film makers were worried that regular audiences wouldn’t get into the high fantasy camp. I think that having Erik as the audience surrogate alleviates the need for such a dumbing-down. I’d love to see a documentary about Duché de Bicolline that trades the high production value of The Wild Hunt for a more engaging portrait.

* Notably, Mark Antony Krupa’s character Bjorn is in-LARP-character the entire film. Does that mean that Mark never played Bjorn-the-21st-century-guy? Discuss.

The film develops into a flat-out monster-hunt action movie. I find the disconnect between these two acts to be quite disconcerting: how could the writer-director be so unclear on what kind of movie he wants to make? (But maybe consistent style is an Occidential thing?)

Interspersed in these two acts is noir satire, which includes some very clever scenes. The development of the main characters is pretty ineffective and quirky supporting characters fly in and out of frame – it feels as if Rule #1 was written as the pilot to a TV series. (Perhaps this is what reviewers meant when they compared it to the X-Files?)

Normally when a protagonist discovers that he is battling previously unseen supernatural forces, he is simultaneously given some weapon that is effective against them. Not so in Rule #1. There is no way to put benign ghosts to rest and the only way to fight malicious ghosts is to kill the innocent bystanders they’ve possessed. The film has a unsettling and unenjoyable theme of hopelessness and inevitable failure.

The third act presents two alternate endings, one bad and the other worse. I know that happy endings are a Hollywood thing, but why not make one of the alternatives cathartic to give the audience a sense of closure?

It’s implied at the beginning that the protagonist could simply be suffering from post-traumatic stress – that alternate explanation is quickly discarded. A well-written script would have allowed the audience to maintain this alternate or even presented it as a third alternate ending.

Kelvin Tong should stick to directing and stay far away from his typewriter.

The saddest people are the women sex trade workers. Their stories are cliche (hooker with a heart of gold and a stripper trying to get her kids back) but the delivery, editing and location keep it poignant.

The drug-addicted men treat the women in their lives as poorly as they treat themselves. They have a calm acceptance of their situations that makes me neither despise nor pity them. I’m particularly interested in high-functioning heroin addicts because heroin is generally presented as being so damaging to society, particularly the Vancouver of my childhood.

The other two characters, a giglo and a swinging woman, don’t seem sad at all: they’ve discovered unconventional sexualities that work for them. You could argue that they’re repressing existential loneliness, but who isn’t? Their lives would probably be most improved if the rest of the world didn’t make them sneak around in high-privacy motels.

There’s also Mr R, who isn’t fully fleshed-out. From what I gather, the director knew him in advance. His scenes are shoved into what is otherwise very tight editing.

I didn’t put Love at the Twilight Motel on my wish list, because I was worried that it would be too Miami-centric. But the purpose-built motels in Miami are just used to provide establishing shots for atmosphere. The people could just as easily live in any city in North America: you’ve heard these stories before but this is an engaging way to hear them again.

The film opens with Hollywood’s consistent message that women are evil and single mothers are especially evil. It’s nice that Eggers nailed it on his first time out. But then femininity seems to fill the rest of the film.

The fantasy world here is not a little boy’s. It’s either the fantasy of a little girl (“guess what, mummy? Barbie and Ken are having marital strife!”) or the projected fantasy of a psychotherapist (“tell me more about the fat monster that represents your father and punches holes in family trees”). No child would sit through this movie.

Co-opting a child’s story for nostalgic adults is fundamentally dishonest to the source material. Why can’t Jonze, Eggers and all their hipster fans go rip off someone else’s childhood?

Little boys’ fantasies are like play-within-a-play that Max dictates in the first act (what’s with all the teeth symbolism, anyway?):

…The vampire bites off the top of a building and loses his teeth. Another vampire says, ‘Why are you crying? Those are your baby teeth.’ And he says, ‘No they’re not; they’re my adult teeth.’

It’d be way more fun to watch a movie about wild rumpus.

Charles Mann is a journalist (Jared Diamond is a professor of physiology and birds) but the book’s research feels thorough and up-to-date: I haven’t found any major academic criticism online. The book itself is over 9000 pages long due to huge amounts of historical background. The background is quite interesting, but I think a lot of it could be cut without weakening the argument.

The first theme is why the Algonquians didn’t drive the Pilgrims into the sea. The unnecessary background is about Tisquantum, the Pilgrim’s Uncle Tom. As Mann tells it, his story is much more interesting and epic than Pocahontas and John Smith. (1491 should be optioned!)

The second theme is the pre-European colonializations of America by humans. The key question addressed here is whether the Indians are “responsible” for the extinction of most potential livestock and beasts-of-burden in America. There’s lots of interesting information in this chapter, but Mann doesn’t manage to give a definitive answer to the question.

The third theme is the fall of the Inca Empire. The Aztecs and Mayans get significantly less space, probably because they’re better covered in Guns, Germs and Steel and the Incas should have been better positioned to resist the Spanish: the Inca Empire is one of the largest continuous empires by latitude that has ever existed. The only two things that ever made it over the Andes are corn and disease and Mann is unfortunately unable to offer an explanation for why disease hit the Incas before the Spanish arrived.

The book is focused on the civilizations that one would reasonably expect to resist conquest. I was expecting the book to be about the state of America before colonialization. For example, James Douglas chose the location for Fort Victoria because he admired the natural rolling fields, which were in fact being slashed & burned for camas by the Songhees.

He’s done a couple more posts in the last few months to pimp his new book co-written with 50 Cent, The 50th Law, ostensibly about how fear controls our lives. “50 bled his fear out into the gutters of the New York ghetto — now u can 2!”

The book, which just came out (there’s an interview with Greene in the Globe today), strikes me as a naked exercise of the laws. It helps build 50′s personality cult while convincing people to depend more on Greene. The 48 laws, for example, are all good strategies for things like complicated games (poker, chess, go, Avalon Hill games, German games, business, etc). But telling people that a book will help them defeat fear might just be creating a need and then selling the solution.

That said, the times in poker and life when I’ve acknowledged my fear and implemented a strategy anyway have, without fail, been fulfilling.

“Fuck this guy, it’s time to raise him with air.”

“Fuck it, time to eat a bunch of mushrooms and hand out flowers to strange women.”

“Fuck it, time to walk out on this job.”

Or, you know, blogging. There’s fear here too. There’s fear pretty much everywhere, but you just deal. That’s humanity. I’ve been heckled while public speaking — it wasn’t that bad. I even met my own personal fear demon once. Again: Not too terrible.

I don’t want to come off as an expert, writer’s block is a kind of fear too, but I know the basic strategy. I asked an actor once, just after he read Gordon’s part in Jaded for me, how being a professional creative person was possible for him, how he sheltered his ego from the constant rejection that’s simply the name of the game.

“You just do your best,” he said, “and sometimes it works.”

Wise words. In poker they say, “there’s no point in being results-oriented.” Same thing. You gotta be in it to win it, but success itself has a large random factor susceptible to multiple retries. You gotta accumulate that expected value.

Digressions aside: You have to meet and murder your fears. A book probably won’t help. You “just” need to do it (though to be fair The 50th Law is billed as containing meditations on fear, which sounds interesting in a sith-zen way).

All-in, I will be getting the book because I’m a fan of both Jackson and Greene. Actual review to follow.

Physical violence is one of the most difficult parts of shoestring film development. In Brazil lots of the physical blows are done across camera cuts, so you never actually see them hit.

When you’re doing film you want to show as little as possible — just jump between the important parts.

Susan wants a sandwich, gets on the elevator, crosses the lobby, crosses the street, lines up, orders, pays, crosses back, heads up the elevator, sits at her desk, and eats the sandwich. Except on film. Then she: Wants a sandwich, maybe she orders or pays, and then she’s eating it back at her desk. You just show the key points.

That’s what the physical violence is like in Brazil: We see a kick, we see someone flying backwards. The impact is superfluous, implicit, which makes those sequences easier to film as well. You shoot someone kicking off camera. You shoot someone falling over. Edit-edit-edit and movie magic presto-chango you’ve got violence without stunt people or specialists.

Good ‘ol Gilliam. I loves it.

[Added: And a clear Bronyenosyets Potyomkin reference in the climactic gun battle! It really is everywhere.]

Because of Tarantino I’m watching Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse at the moment. From the very first scene the titles it’s already the most unique black and white film I’ve ever seen: It’s in color. That’s no trivial claim either. I watch a lot more black and white films than others my age might suspect. Last night I took in Bogart’s High Sierra and those ultralate morning-bleeding writing nights are well-served by a solid Charlie Chan film nattering away in the background.

Tarantino uses color, and specifically weird color balances and saturation, in his films extensively. Literally — checking the time on the video now — 2:29 in to the movie I’m picking up neat ideas with color and mise. This is the kind of stuff we had to do on the (awful, awful) short: Color-balance the digital cameras to blue instead of white so that everything looks more red. Color use is easy to see in Freudlose because there’re only two, and one of them is always black. It’s like a training film.

When Tarantino talks, I listen. I do with any artist because they talk from a place of love and passion. Critics, more and more often I find, just hate what they don’t get. That’s understandable: A critic eats on knowing a genre. Innovation and creativity just make more work for them, and no one wants that.

The real test of the matter seems to be this: Who makes better film critics? Film critics or film directors? It’s just a personal taste thing, perhaps, but when Tarantino recommends a film I watch it. Ebert, not so much.

I put a key fob in my pocket. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I pushed the start button to turn the car on. When I got to the parking lot I pushed the button again to turn the car off. Walking away, I had to touch the fob again to lock the car.

Half an hour latter I trudge toward the car, loaded down with groceries. The door automatically unlock as I approach. I still have to open the door, but depositing the groceries is easy. I’m back on the road without once having to squeeze my fingers into my tight jeans.

Since I bike to work I’m always having to fiddle with locks: bike locks, house doors, storage locker codes, office radio cards, etc. If I could have keyless entry to all of them it would be like a dream.