Kept you Waiting huh?

This moment in the movie is unmistakably Spike's style at work

Hi folks. KeMiro, presiding.

I said I would write a deeper reflection on Miracle At St. Anna’s, and I’ve got some time to kill finally (been busy!) in front of the comp, so here we are, as promised.

Miracle At St. Anne’s is, for the unaware, Spike Lee’s latest project.  It released a couple of weeks ago to mediocre reviews.  I was anticipating it, thanks to some compelling trailers months before, but when the reviews came in, I decided to let it go, being an unknown quantity.  It’s hard to outright say if I’m a fan of Lee’s work since the last Spike Lee movie I saw was Malcom-X, and I was like.. 9 years old.  I honestly would have missed it had it not been for the suggestion of a lady friend who wanted to see it.

I didn’t put up any resistance, and I’m glad she expressed interest in seeing it, because the next 140 minutes were deep, layered and engrossing story telling.  The movie is long, make no mistake, which is one of the big knocks against it, but when it finally gets to the end, it was emotionally satisfying and uplifting.  I would have otherwised missed what got panned as a lengthy, long-winded and otherwise weaker effort on Spike Lee’s part, and probably never picked up the DVD (or High def Blu-Ray for that matter).  This is the second time I’ve thoroughly enjoyed an experience at the movie theaters that flopped and/or got poor ratings by the media and sites such as rottentomatoes.  My friend enjoyed the movie as well, so at least it wasn’t just me.  I guess the main thing to take from that is, ‘if you were interested in seeing a movie, go see it, because reviewers aren’t quantitative instruments.  They’re qualitative, to give a shout to Brian’s previous entry (*wink and a gun*).

The movie is about four soldiers in the 92nd Infantry Division, George Company, who find themselves past enemy lines, holed up in a small village in Tuscany, occupied by Nazi forces during WWII.  They’re all that’s left of what was a larger Negro unit that gets wiped out after crossing a river which, as best as I can recall it, served as the line between Nazi fortified territory and them.

The story starts in 1983, and after the inciting incident (the last remaining soldier from the Division, murdering a man at a post office at point blank, with a damn WWII German pistol [which I, of course, forget the name of, forgive me], flashing us back to, well, the movie proper.  What ensues is a story with a surprisingly diverse cast.  Spike Lee gives us an honest look into the struggle of being black in World War II — what these men thought about, felt, struggled with on a daily basis.  You’ve got the oppressive, heavily-armed, well-hidden Nazi regime in front of you –and if you come back alive, is a country that hates you.  White commanding officers who didn’t believe the word of their black soldiers didn’t make things easier.  They were seen as dumb, incompetent, cowardly, and dishonest, when they were some of the bravest men in the field.  We hate you; go die for your country.

And they did, with honor and courage. The people they come across along the way are equally compelling.  The Italian civilians who have to cope with every day life under the thumb of Nazi occupation.  No electricity, soldiers routinely barging in, taking what they please.  And the lives of the four men become intertwined, among others, a young boy who (without spoiling much) is a bit of a good luck charm.  The cast was surprisingly large and involved, managing to connect several important players, not just the four main heroes but the people they stay with in Tuscany and the local resistance, or “partisans.”  Lee spends some time on both sides of the line, demonstrating that Nazis weren’t all evil men.  A lot of them had a conscience, an inner struggle, and families they wanted to get back to.  Lee doesn’t belabor the issue, but he doesn’t go out of his way to caricature Nazi Germany.  His portrayal of all the film’s people are both impressionistic and honest.  Credibility isn’t an issue in the movie, I never found myself sitting back going, “wait a minute.”

I’m not sure how much of a religious man Spike Lee is (and am frankly not terribly concerned, it’s not a big deal), but Miracle is a profoundly religious picture.  For some reason I was surprised.  You don’t think much about the word ‘miracle’ being in the title, at least I didn’t, but the movie really openly deals with the faith of people facing adversity.  People knee deep in death and destruction, in a war.  Some people turn to God, because who else do you have in times like these?  Others deny him, or turn away from him resentfully, because how could God allow these kinds of things to happen?  Two of the four, during some quiet time:

“If there is a God, then how come he allow this kinda thing to happen?”

*silence*

“See?  That’s why I don’ belie’e in ‘em.”

*pause*

“Well, if you don’t believe in God then..how you trouble ya’self wit’ why He allows this kinda thing ta happen?”

*pause, then, evasively*:

“You startin’ tuh sound like my momma.”

Just a small example.  I don’t want to give too much away, and I do encourage anyone who gets the chance to go check it out, or rent or buy it when it’s released.  The bright side to movies that flop is you don’t have to wait terribly long for their video releases.  You can see for yourself what I’m talkin’ about.

My only gripes with the movie are the beginning and the near-end, when they bring us back to the movie’s present, 1983.  It’s the weaker, brittle shell casing the rich, thick, chocolatey center, but thankfully resolves itself in a very satisfying way.  If this is a misstep by Lee, as the critical media at large would have us believe, and almost did for me, he played it off damn well and his other pictures deserve a closer look on my part.  It’s a story of race, culture, war, internal and external struggle, faith, and miracles.  I guess you could say some b.s. about it being a very ‘human’ story (*rolls eyes*).

One love.

As Long as I’m Bitching About Science

Creative Minority has the top ten “explanations for the dancing sun at Fatima.”

In all honesty, I want to make clear that I’m not some anti-science twat. I simply reject it as the All-Encompassing Explanation For Everything and the entire mindset that a thing can only be known if it can be verified. The Testable World is the world of endless suspiscion, a world bereft of meaning, because meaning cannot be empirically verified, duplicated in the lab, surveyed and demarcated.

I wonder at the human brain. It’s a marvellous thing that has enabled us to invent labradoodles and penicillin, iPhones and Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls, water wheels and waterslides. It makes science and religion possible. But I don’t worship it or its capabilities; it is a tool by which we can understand the world both physically and metaphysically, and it is one of the essential components to our being made in God’s image. But it can’t solve every problem or comprehend every truth.

The very notion of science, the existence of the Testable World, is taken on two very large leaps of faith: the first is that the world is sensible, something we can comprehend, that our testing is of any avail, and that the findings we make have any actual relation to the world; how do we know gravity exists, and not invisible gremlins who accelerate falling objects at 9.8 m/s? How do we know the Hubble Telescope isn’t staring at a giant, infinitely detailed sphere? I’m not saying these things are the case, but we are making a large leap in assuming a sensible world of which we have accurate observations.

The second is that the mass of flesh between our eyes is capable of soundly interpreting data and coming to understand the meaning behind it, the intuitive, metaphysical sense of the physical, the connections between things which are very testable. We place faith in its ability to do so, or else science is a farce. We hold that our minds can understand an understandable world, that we are not under constant delusion, that red is red and one is one and no animal is more equal than any other are all true statements our brains have managed to hammer out.

But both of these are metaphysical statements, beliefs about the world which are themselves untestable because they assume testability is something possible. You cannot test the notion of experimentation.

So yeah. I take exception to that understanding of the world. After all, it’s destroying us.

The Tyranny of Starfleet

While googling around for something or other, I found a crazy website called Canon Fodder, which, like DITL, is an admirable fan effort to smooth out some of the wrinkles in Star Trek’s continuity. But it also pointed out something I’d thought about, but never really put together:

Starfleet dominates 24th century society to an unprecedented degree,

The Federation Council in ST:IV seems to have about a third of it’s membership consisting of active duty Starfleet personnel. Picture Congress, Parliament, the UN, etc. consisting of that many active duty military personnel if any at all. It’s almost a bit like a more subdued version of ‘Starship Troopers.’

In the few times we’ve seen one in action, the Federation President’s only advisors, apart from a Changeling and the Romulan Ambassador of all people, have been Starfleet personnel exclusively on matters ranging from Earth security to rescue operations that might lead to interstellar war. Not one civilian advisor in sight to argue a non-Starfleet perspective.

In addition, the President has no security personnel to speak of and is entirely reliant on the goodwill of Starfleet to protect him from harm, which on at least two occasions, has come from… you guessed it, Starfleet.

Who was solely put in charge of the initiative to sue for peace with the Klingons? Starfleet. Who’d they send? A Captain who openly acknowledged his desire to let the Klingon Empire die by it’s own hand. Who tried to sabotage that peace initiative? Starfleet. No civilian ambassadorial ships or at the very least civilian ambassadors could have been present at the opening talks with the Klingons? Sarek pushed for it, where was he? Spock’s obviously trustworthy but as a member of Starfleet he is not entirely without conflict of interest.

Who patrolled the streets of Earth in support of their own proposed Draconian security measures? Starfleet.

How To Be Obscurantist

Via BoingBoing and Cory Doctorow, a rant on science education.

As an obscurantist Christian, particularly a Catholic, I would be remiss in my duties and likely become a target for Jesuit assassination if I didn’t take the time in my public space here to spend some time criticizing the pursuit of knowledge by areligious means. I, of course, am opposed to science and hate the very concept of human advancement for nonsense reasons, really, it’s all nonsense, and hope to get others to join me in my insanity. Catholicism is firmly against such things as medicine and astronomy.

In all seriousness, though, I do get irritated with the arrogance a lot of scientists possess, being arrogant myself. I’m a language Nazi myself, with a love for precise definition and a belief that clarity is a virtue, but if I have to hear about what “theory” really means, I’m gonna smash highball glasses on the ceiling. But it turns out that the idea isn’t clear in science. A survey of science graduates from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, working in a variety of fields, yielded interesting results:

• 76% equated a fact with ‘truth’ and ‘proven’.
• 23% defined a theory as ‘unproven ideas’ with less than half (47%) recognizing a theory as a well evidenced exposition of a natural phenomenon.
• 34% defined a law as a rule not to be broken, and forty-one percent defined it as an idea that science fully supports..
• Definitions of ‘hypothesis’ were the most consistent, with 61% recognizing the predictive, testable nature of hypotheses.
  The results show a lack of understanding of what scientific theories and laws are. And the nature of a ‘fact’ in science was not commonly understood, with only 11% defining a fact as evidence or data.

The article I linked to disagrees with this assessment, full disclosure, but I clearly don’t. Neither, frankly, am I surprised. That’s not intended as a criticism of science or scientists, but a statement more that any field, even something as quantitative as the hard sciences, is still essentially qualitative; everything is interpretation, everything assessment of cold data by warm brains. Everything we do is human, done by humans, and prone both to error and amazing spiritual insight.

Where I get antsy is the consistent chorus coming from the Educated Class that the world is nothing more than the sum of its parts, as though there were data to that effect, when, in the end, it is exactly what I just described: qualitative assessment by a brain between two eyes.