I am not the Robot Tourist

Since his earliest days, humanity has been entranced by movement. From tribal dances to the subtle signs of emotion given by the actors on the daily soap operas. And now we can watch all these things on our phones. However, back in the day, while your computer had advanced to a whole 256 colours and might have been able to show you video at a few frames per second, there really wasn’t a good way of getting that video to your computer. Unless you were AOL, CD-ROMs were still expensive and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology was only a twinkle in some engineer’s eye.

The future finally arrived when video compression techniques and the grainy mobile phone camera met the popularisation of home broadband internet connections. However, in those primitive days before video on demand we had to get our kicks in a way that was just a bit more low-fi.

You probably need a connection speed of at least about 1 Mb/s to watch medium quality videos without having to wait too long for it to load. Even with dialup’s best, a 56 kb/s modem (or 0.056 Mb/s), Youtube is a hardly worth your time. So back when modems were approaching a blistering 19.2 kpbs someone thought it would be a good idea to extend Compuserve’s Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) so that it could be used to show animated images within 10 minutes of opening the page.

Times were good, for a while. We had little sparkly images that said ‘New’ beside the new links on the Yahoo directory and then along came the ‘Hampsterdance’. This was awesome. Music, and dancing hamsters, in your web browser. The world should have been satisfied, but it wasn’t. Clones appeared everywhere and despite the great things that could be done with an animated GIF, the web nearly descended into animated chaos. Everywhere there were advertisments laden with animation, which meant I spent even less time at ad-supported sites, but worse was to come: the horror of the animated emoticon. Thankfully I discovered a great feature in Opera: I could uncheck a little box in the preferences labelled ‘Enable GIF animation’. That little action did not make the world perfect, but at least I am now sane, and if I have to read a phpBB forum I don’t see those crazy animated signatures the creators think are soooo cool!

I wasn’t looking forward to Marley and Me, but I was looking forward to the company, so I went anyway - and enjoyed both.

Marley and Me is the story of the American dream for today. In fact, it’s almost like the anti-Trainspotting, not that the characters choose a big ******* TV, but they do start a family, get bigger and bigger houses and at every stage in life choose life rather than drugs, because of a dog.

Apart from that you can’t really compare it to Trainspotting, but you can compare it to Click and I think Marley and Me is by far the better film.

Marley and Me is sweet, but not too sickly, though I thought it was a little light on drama. There is a little tragedy for Wilson and Anniston’s characters, but overall they had it pretty good compared to most characters in most films. I was sure Owen Wilson’s character was going to have an affair at one point because modern drama has conditioned that expectation into me. Maybe the writer was making a point in keeping Wilson’s character faithful: not everyone has a dramatic life, so why should movie characters have to have unbelievable roller-coaster lives?

Jennifer Anniston was good because she didn’t completely remind me of Rachel from Friends. Her main role was by turns to look totally hot, then stressed by motherhood and then totally hot and I felt she did it well. The script didn’t give her a whole lot of room to develop her character, since nearly every shot of her was in her house or beside her husband. By contrast, Wilson got lots of screen time either on his own with the dog or with his friends or with his boss. I’m no arch-feminist, but the writer could have done a bit more for Anniston.

The film could also have done with a few slightly stronger characters than the lead pair. Wilson’s boss is excellent as the archetypal Mentor, and his friend Sebastian is good as the perpetual bachelor, but no one other than Wilson and Anniston stood out enough.

My biggest criticism though, is that there isn’t enough Jamaican music in the soundtrack. The dog was named after Bob Marley of the Wailers because one of his songs came on the radio on the drive home from the puppy farm. After that, nothing. There was some good music, but no other reggae and certainly no ska. Not even any american third wave!

There are few compelling reasons to watch Marley and Me, but on the other hand there are few compelling reasons not to watch it and for me it was an enjoyable way to pass a couple of hours. Most dog owners will enjoy it and many will shed a tear at the end. Non-dog owners might even be tempted to get one. Hopefully more people will be inspired to have lots of children and love them deeply.

I was stupid to say Orange County was the 2nd best film (though it’s still great). Heat is the second best film. It shouldn’t be, but I’ll explain that later.

The film centres on the showdown between two men. Both are leaders, who might have been heads of rival tribes in another setting. Michael Mann’s story sets them in the broken city of 1990s Los Angeles. One man is an hard-bitten police detective who is married more to fighting crime than his current wife, or either of his past two wives. The other man is an armed robber, head of a small gang of highly successful criminals, ruthlessly focussed on doing the job and getting out.

The main plot is interesting and pushes the story on well, but is actually largely unimportant. This film is really about women and family and how men, particularly men driven by career ambition, resolve the timeless, universal inner conflict. On the one side there is the love of a woman, the love for their family and ultimately their own sense of humanity, all set against the masculine idea of loyalty to friends, workmates and ultimately their sense of eternal purpose.

The criminal has chosen his path of crime, but fears getting caught, and if he has any soul he builds a family, but then fears dragging them into his dark world. At any risk of being caught, the criminal must be prepared to walk away from the job or even his family, both to save himself and them. But the policeman equally has chosen the path of fighting crime, and fears also his family being dragged into his dark world, risking his relationship by withdrawing from them to spare them from the horrors he has seen.

The criminal we are shown is the mythical ‘honourable’ thief, who may perform brutal armed robberies, but he only does the job and gets out. He wants to retire some day. The policeman just wants all the crime to go away. He loves his job, but he’s only human. The whole way through, the film alternates between showing the criminal’s life and the policeman’s life. We see family, loyalty, friendships and how the criminal’s life mirrors the policeman’s. They even meet for coffee at one point, having what some may see as an almost homoerotic conversation, sharing personal stories and showing their respect by saying they would kill the other without hesitating.

Which is more pretentious? Me, or the film? If the film is pretentious, though, it doesn’t matter. Director Michael Mann somehow lifts the film above the pseudo-intellectual, bringing out superb performances in the stellar cast. Except Robert De Niro, who can’t do love and has an annoying facial tick, though as the stoic criminal he is quite good. And the president from 24 acts his part well, but he just doesn’t sound like a criminal. The soundtrack is perfectly wrought and songs are well-chosen. The cinematography is lusciously epic, though the lenses are a little wide for my taste sometimes.

Finally, the action is not the best I’ve seen, but it is suitably dramatic and the firefight after the bank job is even almost believable, being a metaphor for the war between two men that wrecks the lives of those at he centre of it and threatens all those not directly involved.

My next task is to watch LA Takedown. It’s the same film, only made for TV six years earlier for probably a tenth the budget.