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I am incredibly excited to see tonight’s Sleater-Kinney show. It is in a theater, which is less intimate than a club but it increases the chances that I will be able to sit down. And I have listened to the new album several times already, and it is fantastic. Not that they have ever recorded a bad album, but the past few have not been particularly memorable; the songwriting is much less inspired than the Call The Doctor through The Hot Rock. The new one is loud and raw and complex and weird and sounds strangely like Led Zeppelin covering Sonic Youth. Suddenly they seem urgent again. And even as their album quality was stalling, their live show has gotten consistently stronger every time I have seen them. Plus it is a quasi-home-town show, and the opener is Mary Timony, the driving force behind the excellent band Helium. (This is my third Mary Timony or Helium show, and they have all been as opening acts. I assume she tours on her own at times.)

The show did not disappoint. Check out the tour or album if you get the chance.

How is there not a bad flash animation called “Captain Beefheart and Tenille”?

It seems that Larry McVoy is skeptical about what can be accomplished with open-source software:

The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That’s easy. It’s way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it’s true.

As if to prove his point, someone recently did a comparison between Outlook and some major open-source alternatives.

Questions about what can be accomplished in open- and closed-source software projects are important and often overshadowed by dogma. It is true that most large and influential open-source projects succeed by providing a free and similarly-featured alternative to commercial software. I would place Linux, Apache, JBoss and Mysql in this category. At the same time, access to source code allows creative hackers to do strikingly new things with software. Greasemonkey is a great example of this behavior. However, I do agree with McVoy that few large-scale innovations come from open-source projects, which is logical given both the difficulty these projects have at raising capital and the decentralized leadership they demand.

Both innovation and imitation serve important economic functions. The former creates new technology, while the latter makes technology widely accessible. A number of recent trends have driven the software industry to be more focused on imitation in recent years. These include the influence of open standards and open-source software and corporations’ skepticism towards IT projects. This is probably healthy; I doubt we will ever see an IT company with the influence that IBM, Microsoft, Sun or Oracle had at their peak. But it also makes me wonder where the next round of groundbreaking innovation will happen. Will a large technology company approach a major problem (natural-language processing is one obvious choice) and produce a solution that is difficult to imitate (for either technical or legal reasons)? Or will applications distributed through the internet allow for individuals and smaller firms to proliferate interesting minor innovations? Maybe once open source products have caught up to commercial ones, the large open-source organizations will be redeployed to do work that is more distinctive?

It seems like the question on everyone’s mind is whether Revenge of the Sith is a good movie. It is an interesting question, giving the complex mix of jaw-droppingly good and bad elements to the film. In my opinion there is a lot to love about this film, but it is quite different from any of its predecessors and needs to be viewed accordingly.

I should start by saying that I watched it under ideal circumstances. An email went around work offering tickets to Friday morning’s showing at the Cinerama. (I go to the Cinerama as often as possible. It is the finest movie theater I have ever been to; its enormous screen can turn a mediocre film into a fascinating spectacle.) The theater lobby was filled with free Top Pot doughnuts, and at showtime they went directly into the film without distracting us with trailers and dancing snack food.

There are a lot of bad elements to Sith. The actors’ lines continues to be stilted and cliché, and the accompanying acting is wooden and unconvincing. (The exception to both of these lies in Ian McDiarmid’s performance, which benefits from his lack of exposure in the earlier films.) The story is illogical and oddly paced. The too-frequent civics lessons are heavy-handed and dumb. There is almost none of levity that makes Star Wars films fun to watch. And most distressingly, the film is filled with characters making pivotal choices, and utterly fails to give the audience any insight into their thoughts, motivations and feelings.

But the one thing that each of these defects has in common is that they involve the dialog. The dialog in this movie is really bad. It is also completely unnecessary. If you are on top of the story you know all of the elements going into the film. You know what is going to happen and why. (I know that new viewers are supposed to watch the newer movies before the originals, but I have a hard time seeing that working for this film because it is so crafted around our expectations from the old ones.) This is a contrast to other Star Wars movies, in which live or die based on snappy dialog and plot twists. While the original trilogy was a special-effects spectacular, it was also so dialog-driven that it was easily adopted into a radio drama. The other prequels were full of exposition to be dissected by fans. But the dialog in Sith seems to be purely obligatory. It is also achingly bad. So I think that the best way to watch the film is without dialog.

There are a number of ways this could be achieved. The best would be if the DVD had a dialog-free audio track (I am not holding my breath on this). Simply muting the sound would be inadequate, because the score is stunning and a large part of what makes the film work. And the lightsaber noises help. The next best approach would be to watch the film dubbed into a language you don’t know. I did not have any of these options, so as I realized that all of the problems were in the dialog, I concentrated as hard as I could not to listen to it. I tried to let the characters voices just be another set of sounds coming from the screen, but not to treat it as language. This is not something I am good at, and it is hard to do. But it makes the film drastically better.

This is because visually, Sith is an amazing spectacle. It leaves all of the other Star Wars films in the dust. All of the emotion that is missing from the characters lines is present in the camera. Shot after shot are beautiful and sad and stunning and instantly unforgettable. The montages faithfully recall Eisenstein and the end of the first Godfather. The action is exciting. The treachery is upsetting. The tragedy is heartbreaking. The special effects are enthralling and real without being showy. And the pacing and emotion is sustained by an awesome score. The movie was assembled with a huge amount of care and talent. Learning to step back from what the actors are saying and just watch it is hard, but well worth it.

The most surprising thing to me about Danny Boyle’s Millions is how difficult the film is to explain. It is a movie about two pre-pubescent brothers who find a large amount of cash but only have a few days to spend it before the British pound is abandoned in for the Euro. One of the brothers tends to carry on conversations with Catholic saints. As soon as you start to say this, you can hear the pitch: “It is like Brewster’s Millions crossed with The Fisher King directed by that Trainspotting guy, and there is a kid who gives it a creepy Sixth Sense vibe.” And that might be an interesting movie. However, it wouldn’t be much like Millions, which is rather unlike any film I have ever seen.

It was not until the end when I saw whole families leaving the theater that I thought about how Millions is a family film, in the best sense of the term. The filmmakers are quite disciplined about making the entire film exist in the world of two children, and anyone in the eight-to-thirteen demographic would immediately relate to them. At the same time, much of the humor and poignancy comes from the difficulty the boys have understanding the motivations and morals of adults, which might make more sense to older audience members. The story is easy to understand, but the questions it asks are hard to answer. Most importantly, it invites a broad audience and group of characters without ever condescending to either. And as engaging as the story is, this film is driven by Boyle’s visual flare. He finds a new way to make ever scene energizing; I have seen a couple of his other movies but never been so impressed with the craft of his filmmaking before.

I don’t mean to indicate that Millions is a perfect movie. There are a number of threads that could have been resolved in a more satisfying way, and nothing was so funny of poignant that I am in a hurry to watch it again. But it is an uncommonly good one, and I do not know why it has not gotten more attention.

Speaking of overlooked films, there was a trailer for the new Miyazaki movie before Millions. The movie looks as fantastic as one would expect, and the trailer makes it look like Disney will do a better job of attracting crowds to this one than they did to Spirited Away.

Rating: 7/10