Love Eternal – not reviewed

This year I organised a fairly large group of friends to purchase tickets for the Sydney Film Festival. Together we purchased around 80 tickets. Some of us are seeing more than 10 films, others just a handful. I was surprised that nobody else wanted to see Love Eternal. After the film was introduced by the bloke who programmed the “Freak Out” selection I realised that I’d not fully read this film’s description in the programme. I was expecting something completely different because I’d only skimmed the description. Love Eternal is largely about necrophilia.

I should have walked out, but I sat in hope. For me, it wasn’t entertaining, nor about finding love. Almost half way in I really wanted to walk out, but I was sat in the middle of the centre block of seats and I didn’t want to disturb those either side of me. It wasn’t that the film was badly made or poorly acted, it was just the subject matter. Suicide and death I can deal with in films, but not necrophilia. This wasn’t a funny zombie film, it was all quite serious and I’m afraid that if this kind of thing actually happens, I don’t need to know about it. Unfortunately the film became one of those what’s-seen-can’t-be-unseen moments. Hopefully I’ll eventually manage to forget it.

The Rover – Review

Another film that I really wanted to like but couldn’t.

Bleak. Much desert. Guy Pearce embarks on a quest to regain his Holden Conform-odore in a “post-Collapse” world (not further defined). He shoots a dwarf and sundry other individuals. Meanwhile, Robert Pattinson practices mumbling, mostly inaudibly, in an unrecognisable and inconsistent accent. No jokes. Ends in a cluster-fuck.

Pretty terrible. 2/5

In Order of Disappearance – Review

This violent action comedy from Norway is very well done. It lasts for almost two hours, but there are no flat spots and it moves along at a great pace. It really is laugh-out-loud funny.

The violence begins with the assassination by over-dose of an innocent young man who is a colleague of another soon-to-be-a-casualty who steals some drugs from a Norwegian drug lord (The Count). This soon leads to Nils, the father of the young man, embarking on a long path to avenge his son’s death. Fortunately the movie keeps a running scoreboard marking each death as they mount up steadily as a result of the father’s actions and a war that develops between the Norwegian and Serbian drug lords.

One of the best laughs comes from the kidnapped young son of The Count who asks his kidnapper Nils whether he has heard of Stockholm Syndrome as Nils reads him a bed-time story.

The cast is brilliant and it is a very tightly written script that delivers almost a laugh a minute along with some terrific visual gags. If you need  a good laugh and don’t mind some violence, it is a must-see film.

My score: 4/5

Calvary – Review

I know that it is a big call this early in the Sydney Film Festival, but Calvary by writer-director John Michael McDonagh has made the whole festival worthwhile for me. I think it is faultless and a model for other film makers in terms of story-telling, entertainment, brilliant script writing and character development. It deals with the role of the Catholic church in child abuse in Ireland (and many other places), but the writer-director very skilfully weaves the tale together through the life of a good priest played by the amazing Brendon Gleeson as he tends to his village flock under the threat of death from a victim of child abuse.

I also enjoyed the writer-director’s previous film The Guard, but I think this is even better as it deals with such a terrible  aspect of church history, whilst reminding us of the good that is done by individuals within the church itself.

The script writing doesn’t avoid or trivialise any of the serious matters the film covers, but very effectively manages to recognise them and then pepper the story-telling with some wonderful conversational humour. It is a black comedy, but there are enough laughs to keep it truly entertaining and it is not so black a story that we are left without hope. I must also confess to loving the Irish accent of the brilliant cast as they seem to enjoy demonstrating John Michael McDonagh’s obvious love of language. One of the best lines for me was when Brendan Gleeson’s lead character drunkenly abuses his colleague (Father Leary, played by David Wilmot), saying that he lacks integrity and should be an accountant in an insurance firm. The is also an hilarious dialogue about those who join armies in peace time and whether a desire to murder someone should be seen to be as useful as an engineering degree.

In addition to all of this, the camera treats us to some stunning visuals  of the Irish coast and Benbulbin to give us a true sense of place, and the musical score adds a further important dimension and mood to the film.

Film makers like John Michael McDonagh keep us coming back to the cinema. I stayed for his Q&A and two things he said stayed with me. Firstly he said that as a film maker he was committed to entertaining his audience. I think some other film-makers in this Festival could benefit from his advice. He writes to entertain and his method of story-telling leaves most others in the dust. Secondly, in response to a question he stated that it is foolish to refer to actors being “brave” in taking certain film roles, or for writers to take a “brave” perspective in dealing with subjects like child abuse. He said that was simply rubbish and that brave people are those who run into burning buildings to rescue others.

My score: 5/5, I really could find no faults at all.

Tom At The Farm – Review

I really wanted to like this film. I think it is the first Xavier Dolan movie that I’ve seen in a cinema and the cinematography in this film really is wonderful. There are beautiful panoramic shots of Canadian farming land, there is brilliant use of the close up and some artistic almost still imagery and there is the brilliant action footage shown above as our hero Tom, played by Xavier Dolan who also directed the film, tries to escape through a razor-sharp cornfield. There is a lot to like as well in the music he has used so well and in the strong cast of actors.

I was, however, left unsatisfied by the film and I’m not sure that I can really put my finger on it. It is a very complex film that attempts to deal with many deep issues including the love and loss of a lover, the grief of a mother for her lost child, loneliness, tension between rural and urban folk, isolation, repressed and ambiguous sexuality, dishonesty in relationships, and homophobia. Maybe there lies the problem in that many of these issues were not fully explored after being introduced. I do enjoy those art house films that leave a lot unsaid; leaving interpretation up to the audience. In Tom At The Farm Xavier Dolan holds back well on the storyline, but I think the development of the characters was somewhat jerky in many areas and that might have been because of the scenes that were edited out, as there were so many complex issues being covered.

Some elements of the plot or story seemed to stick out like sore thumbs and I didn’t think they needed to have been introduced, such as the dead son’s fictional female lover from Montreal. The point had already been made well enough and I think the visit of that character Sarah, to the farm, at the request of Tom, didn’t really add a lot to the story and it was also left just hanging there after a far more significant scene between Tom and a barman.

I was also left a little uncomfortable that we are again seeing a gay character portrayed as very flawed, inconsistent, fairly weak, and effectively persecuted and manipulated by a stronger bigoted homophobe. That tends to reinforce some rather unfortunate stereotypes. And for once I’d just like to see a gay character portrayed on the big screen that I didn’t have to be embarrassed by or feel sorry for.

My score: 3/5.

Leaked NYT Report on Innovation

Twitter and other social media yesterday was crazy about a leaked 91 page report from the New York Times on innovation in the mobile and digital age (use the Google or contact me if you cannot find it). It primarily addresses their environment of rapidly changing media platforms, but there is a lot in it that also applies to us in library-land. In particular, our own web strategy at UTS Library, which is very informal, and where we are going with our Open Access press UTSePress.

Initially I thought I’d just send it to the managers responsible for those areas, but after quickly reading the lot I found more and more general ideas that I liked, so I sent it to all of our managers and we will all meet to discuss it at a later date. If you can still find it, you’ll see that it isn’t a marvellous copy, but it is mostly readable and I think very valuable, even if it seems mostly to affirm some of our existing directions. 

Here is a start on some of the ideas it touches on that I think are of relevance to library-land:
  • web publication trends (we’ve been closely following these of late)
  • audience reach and why it is important (agreed)
  • reader experience (acknowledging it and doing something about it and we must do more in this area)
  • having a web strategy – do we want one that is more obvious, a little more formal and that evolves?
  • disruption and what it means for us (too)
  • content aggregators – what are they, how they impact on us and how we make best use of them
  • the importance of discovery – new tools & getting the basics right, like tagging and structure (we’ve been focussing a lot on this for the last couple of years)
  • experimentation – how it works, why it is needed (agreed and we do try to encourage this)
  • personalisation (see above re discovery as we’re trying to do something like a recommendation engine that our users can opt into)
  • using data layers or adding them in (I’m not exactly sure how this applies to us and need to think more about it, but I’m pretty sure we should be doing more in this area)
  • user generated content – is that relevant to us? (we are essentially doing that in the physical space now with curations of student works and could extend that to our online presence, perhaps using social media more – we’ve experimented with this a little already)
  • events (this is a big area for us and they always have a planned and strong online dimension)
  • going “digital first” or digital equally? (I think the latter is more relevant for us – we should not concentrate simply on either digital or physical programs)
  • boosting analytics (this is why I desperately want to get some professional UX people into the library)
  • employee movement between departments – to boost collaboration & understanding (I think we could really do more here)
  • failing, learning, & sharing results (I think we’ve already started on this path)
  • making more creative roles not just (passive or responsive) service roles: makers, entrepreneurs, advocates, observers (agreed)

Photos from Iraq (2008)

HMAS Parramatta

Before I came to UTS I was working at the Australian War Memorial. In late 2008 I visited Iraq and the Northern Arabian Gulf area for the Memorial, collecting and recording records of war before all Australian forces were withdrawn. This post from the AWM website explains:

http://www.awm.gov.au/blog/2009/11/04/proactive-collecting-with-hmas-parramatta/?query=HMAS+Parramatta

Recently I was advised by a former colleague that some of the photos I took (including the image above) are now available on the AWM website (which means they’ve finally cleared security):

http://www.awm.gov.au/search/all/?query=Mal+Booth&op=Search&format=list&relatedFilter=related_events&filter%5Btype%5D=Photograph&section%5B0%5D=collections

Academic libraries, design and creative futures

This is a presentation (slides and speaker’s notes) from a presentation that I gave last week. It was a public talk at a UTS Shapeshifters event on Creative Futures. I was humbled to be on stage with Paola Antonelli from MoMA and Professor Anthony Burke and Hael Kobyashi from UTS. Read more here:

http://newsroom.uts.edu.au/events/2013/12/shapeshifters-creative-futures

I should explain more about the 3rd slide. The things listed on that slide are often forgotten or discounted in the blind pursuit of efficiency or traditional KPIs. For libraries, these things (i.e. delight, surprise, engagement, serendipity and curiosity) are at least as important and should not be forgotten, dismissed or left until later.

The video of this talk is also now available:

Highlights from Educause 2013 #3: Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal, the game designer and author of the best-seller Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World gave a wonderful keynote called Higher Education is a Massively Multiplayer Game. 

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She sees and advocates the incorporation of gaming as possible future for higher education, saying that over one billion people now play games for at least an hour per day. Some people are so committed that they  play games like it is their job. Apparently games bring us 10 positive emotions: joy, relief, love, surprise, pride, curiosity, excitement, awe/wonder, contentment and creativity. Games also provide an environment in which it is safe to fail and easy to learn from one’s mistakes.

She said that games also develop a 3:1 (positive to negative emotions) resilience that makes people more productive and successful. She showed some images of resilient gamers on stage like these two:

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She also showed some neurological research scans of brains from Stanford that showed the difference between active and passive brains. They were most active when engaged in a game. She said that Play was not the opposite of work, it was the opposite of Depression. Apparently, gaming activates the same part of the brain as a cocaine addiction. It encourages: the mastery of a skill, solving puzzles, driving personal ambition, motivation, the anticipation of rewards, practicing habits, determination and further skill development.

She urged educators to super empower learners about their own ability to succeed in learning  by using things like points to complete missions, badges for development of new skills – anything that gives learners a meaningful goal and recognises their achievement. What could be done with a billion gamers on connected devices? What could they do together? 

She then spoke of Joi Ito’s belief that students should now be creating knowledge and insight as part of their education, not just learning what is already there. More from Joi Ito (who is Director of MIT’s Media Lab) :

I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore. Rather it is the process of establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

And those thoughts beautifully flowed on from the sentiments expressed earlier by both Ken Robinson and Mimi Ito.

Jane then illustrated three projects that bring together the concepts of play and acting as a node in a broad network:

  • Foldit, from the University of Washington teaches protein folding, building on the fact that manipulation by participants in the virtual space was better than that of super computers because gamers were more skillful and possessed of better spatial intelligence. They knew not to apply brute force. Soon after an invitation to join the project was published in Nature, gamers solved in three weeks a problem with HIV/AIDS that had baffled scientists for over 10 years.
  • Evoke (based on Grand Theft Auto?) is a project that helps solve social problems with young people becoming super heroes for the rest of the world. It focussed on youth at university age in Sub-Saharan Africa as a source of solutions not just problems. The aim is to solve real-world problems by making the best use of youth skills and with their collaborators and allies. Blogs, photos and videos were uploaded to prove progress. The World Bank Institute (WBI) provided Social Innovator badges and it resulted in 20,000 students being enrolled from 130 countries. They accidentally ran a MOOC! 50 new social enterprises were funded by the WBI like Libraries Across Africa (now Librii) : a franchise model that is up and running in Ghana now.
  • Find the Future is a game that Jane helped to create for the New York Public Library (NYPL) Centennial in 2011. It kicked off with an overnight event that offered 500 places for players (18 and over) to explore the NYPL’s collections for clues locked away in 100 objects that changed history. They had 10,000 applicants. Together the participants put together a collection of stories over night for the NYPL’s rare book collection.

Jane believes the future of education is in a blended environment of gaming, something like MOOCs and live events that allow learners new ways of learning through creative practice anytime, anywhere and in collaboration with others.