When music makes the movie

by bobster855

I remember sitting in the movie theater seeing the original The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 in 1974. In fact, it is one of the few movies where I really remember sitting in the theater and I can visualize myself watch watching he movie.

That is, for most movies I remember the movie, just the scenes, as if I had visualized them in my head. They are not much more different in my memory that the visualization I have for important scenes from my favorite books. I do not remember my surroundings or where I watched the movie.

But a few movies were so affecting to me that I not only remember the scenes but I remember exactly the theater I was in, what it smelled liked, what the event of watching the movie was like. I can ‘see’ myself sitting in the seat watching the movie. Some of the other movies where the event of watching the movie, of my emotional reaction to the movie, is still as visceral as the scenes I watched are: A Clockwork Orange (first adult movie I snuck into), Jaws, and Star Wars, All have one important element – sound.

For me, music has always been a way to achieve an altered state. I put something like Dvorak’s New World Symphony on the headphones, lay down and I am gone. The ego, I, no longer exists until the music is done. My wife disturbed me one time when I was in that state and it was like being hit with a hot poker to come out of it so fast.

Hearing affects our memory as much as sight. Each of these movies has an incredible soundtrack, one that was like nothing that had been used before. Clockwork Orange uses classical music to drive the movie. Jaws has the dread-enducing theme for the shark, and Star Wars does not need any explanation.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 was a pretty workman-like movie with little big scream machinations. It has Walter Matthau for goodness sakes. It feels like it is shot on handheld cameras located right in the action (well, actually, based on the many jiggles seen while driving in New York, it probably was). But it is an emotional blockbuster, setting up tension in ways that are so understated that you almost fail to realize how wound up you are by the end. It does this not only with a wonderful plot and great acting but with a dyscophonous soundtrack that is both irritating and hypnotic. The rhythms are both so wrong, yet so right.

Watch and listen to this incredible video edited to the theme from the Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Simply listening to it puts me back in the theater. Watching the video makes me want to see the movie again. I think the music helps make this fan’s edit one of the best ‘trailers’ for the movie.

I doubt that the new version will hold up as well.Star power is much more important in this one than acting or tension. Maybe I will be wrong but few movies surprise as much with the use of sound as the original.

Technorati Tags: General

Massive failure?

by Image Editor
The Value of Consistent Science Education Standards:
[Via AAAS News - RSS Feed]

Houston Chronicle Commentary Urges Support for Consistent Science Education Standards

“Voluntary, nationwide education standards in science, along with reading and math, are the next logical step” toward improving K-12 education in America, according to commentary published 10 June 2009 in the Houston Chronicle.

Read “Adopt National Standards to Help Children Compete” by Alan I. Leshner and Jo Ellen Roseman in the Houston Chronicle

The op-ed article, co-authored by AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner, executive publisher of Science, and Jo Ellen Roseman, director of Project 2061, the AAAS science-literacy initiative, urges Texas, Alaska, Missouri, and South Carolina to join the push for consistent learning goals for all children nationwide.

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I would like hear why science should not be included in these standards along with math and reading. Science is simply an attempt to understand the world around it.It penetrates everything we do, fro taking in a breath, to walking and even forming sounds.

Reading is required to understand what we write, the data that informs our lives. Math is needed to help support the constructs of our society, from balancing a checkbook to building a structure.

But without science we would not have a real understanding of any of those things. Understanding the world around us is, at base, the thing that makes us so different from other animals. It has permitted us to tame animals and develop agriculture so we no longer need to search our food. It permitted us to tame the wilderness and build our cities.

And it has brought us to the levels where we can actually affect the world’s climate. It will be necessary for finding the solutions to this problem.

Yet we do not have a plan for teaching our children about science.

Technorati Tags: Science

Deniers are so tiresome

Groundhog day:
[Via RealClimate]

Alert readers will have noticed the fewer-than-normal postings over the last couple of weeks. This is related mostly to pressures associated with real work (remember that we do have day jobs). In my case, it is because of the preparations for the next IPCC assessment and the need for our group to have a functioning and reasonably realistic climate model with which to start the new round of simulations. These all need to be up and running very quickly if we are going to make the early 2010 deadlines.

But, to be frank, there has been another reason. When we started this blog, there was a lot of ground to cover – how climate models worked, the difference between short term noise and long term signal, how the carbon cycle worked, connections between climate change and air quality, aerosol effects, the relevance of paleo-climate, the nature of rapid climate change etc. These things were/are fun to talk about and it was/is easy for us to share our enthusiasm for the science and, more importantly, the scientific process.

However, recently there has been more of a sense that the issues being discussed (in the media or online) have a bit of a groundhog day quality to them. The same nonsense, the same logical fallacies, the same confusions – all seem to be endlessly repeated. The same strawmen are being constructed and demolished as if they were part of a make-work scheme for the building industry attached to the stimulus proposal. Indeed, the enthusiastic recycling of talking points long thought to have been dead and buried has been given a huge boost by the publication of a new book by Ian Plimer who seems to have been collecting them for years. Given the number of simply made-up ‘facts’ in that tome, one soon realises that the concept of an objective reality against which one should measure claims and judge arguments is not something that is universally shared. This is troubling – and although there is certainly a role for some to point out the incoherence of such arguments (which in that case Tim Lambert and Ian Enting are doing very well), it isn’t something that requires much in the way of physical understanding or scientific background. (As an aside this is a good video description of the now-classic Dunning and Kruger papers on how the people who are most wrong are the least able to perceive it).

The Onion had a great piece last week that encapsulates the trajectory of these discussions very well. This will of course be familiar to anyone who has followed a comment thread too far into the weeds, and is one of the main reasons why people with actual, constructive things to add to a discourse get discouraged from wading into wikipedia, blogs or the media. One has to hope that there is the possibility of progress before one engages.

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This same sort of exhaustion occurs when dealing with most sorts of deniers. Reason and reality are usually not part of their world so it eventually just becomes useless to engage, They really do not want to learn about the world or to see what new data have to tell us about reality. To them, data are bad.

To scientists, data are what makes life so much fun. Being able to wrestle understanding away from the complex world around us is one of the most ego-boosting and satisfying things I know.

But to deniers, actual understanding is never as important as their arguments for denying data. It explains why so many of them are lawyers. The argument is more important than the truth. Understanding is completely secondary.

They do not weigh you down with facts. They tire you out with redundant arguments. They say A. You destroy that argument. They say B. You destroy that argument. They say C. You destroy that argument. They say A. You say “Again?”

It gets pretty tiring doing this again and again. But we now realize that if you do not engage with these deniers, they think they have won and try to do something really stupid.

So we have to pick ourselves up and re-engage. But, the Web being what it is . We can respond faster and with more force. Beside, like the old joke, most times all we have to do is respond “#43″ or see the answer at Skeptical Science. We do not have to do it all ourselves. We have help.

Technorati Tags: Science