king
King - Last Sunday’s post was an attempt to document some of my reasons for having a contrarian opinion about “the China threat”. It’s the first time I have collected my thoughts on the topic in one place, and I appreciate the excuse that external criticism gives me to arrange and refine my point of view. So the previous response should in no way be viewed as a flame of Tom Wiebe.
Here are some other facts about Tibet Autonomous Zone prior to liberation by the Chinese: The Tibetan religious royalty openly practiced slavery. About 5% of the population were slaves, and the rest of the country were feudal serfs. The Dalai Lama was a Nazi sympathizer. Again, these issues don’t prove that the Dalai Lama is a bad person, or that Tibetan Buddhism is bad — they just make me question the wisdom of supporting the political regime that they represent. I find it hard to understand how anyone would support the right of the “God King” to continue to have slaves and opress the population. This seems like a classic case of why we keep church and state separate. Another odd fact; on January 1, 2000, Larry King called the Dalai Lama a Muslim. It took Larry quite awhile to figure out that his holiness was not actually a Muslim.
Doc Searls liked the move Amelie. The movie was laden with every caricature of stereotypical France that the director could come up with (and got slammed by some French critics for this), but I think this was deliberate, and it turned out very nice. There were many scenes that were clearly intended to poke fun at scenes from hollywood blockbusters, but the most interesting thing for me was the use of some new storytelling techniques, perhaps borrowed from computer multimedia games. One example was the scene where Amelie takes the key surreptitiously and hides it in her pocket. Normally, a movie would zoom in on the hands as the protaganist makes the switch, but in this case you could never see the transfer take place. You assumed that Amelie had pocketed the key, but you hadn’t seen it for sure. This just feels “right” — if the camera had allowed you to zoom in and see the transfer take place, how do you know that someone down the hall hadn’t also spied the same thing? But just so you know for sure, the screen shows a little glowing overlay outlining where the key sits in her pocket as she walks by. Just a visual hint, only temporary, and it’s clear to the mind that the glowing bit exists only to help the viewer and is not actually a part of the world being represented. In my opinion, this is a far superior technique. There were a number of other places that the movie communicated through innovative visual cues that you would normally not see in a movie. I compare it to the first action movies that began to use the slow-motion rotating camera angle footage of fight scenes. Old kung-fu movies had been incorporating slow-motion and floating for at least 20 years, but some time around “Blade”, the first visuals like those used in Virtua Fighter and Dead or Alive appeared. These are the same style of visuals used heavily in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger. So if “The Matrix” typifies the movie techniques that borrow from fighting arcade games, I think Amelie will be the first example of a movie that borrows from non-first-person role-playing game conventions.