Ayn Rand reviews children's movies
Via Kottke, some reviews of children's movies by Mallory Ortberg, channeling Ayn Rand.
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
An industrious young woman neglects to charge for her housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté. She dies without ever having sought her own happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie, finding it impossible to sympathize with the main character. —No stars.
...
“Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory”
An excellent movie. The obviously unfit individuals are winnowed out through a series of entrepreneurial tests and, in the end, an enterprising young boy receives a factory. I believe more movies should be made about enterprising young boys who are given factories. —Three and a half stars. (Half a star off for the grandparents, who are sponging off the labor of Charlie and his mother. If Grandpa Joe can dance, Grandpa Joe can work.)
The GoPro life, broadened
First watch the GoPro Hero3 promo video, released in October 2012:
Then watch the GoPro Hero4 Black promo video, released in September 2014:
Do you notice a difference?
I do, and it's not about video quality. It's subtle, but the earlier GoPro promo is made up almost entirely of footage of people participating in extreme sport or recreational activities. While the whole promo is a hell of an adrenaline rush, it clearly positions GoPro as being a camera for the adrenaline junkies who are wired differently than most.
The latter video maintains GoPro's brand leadership as the camera of choice for people in the most exciting moments of their lives, but it is more inclusive. There is footage of kids dancing at EDM festivals, a cowboy riding a horse, stars blinking to life in a time lapse of a night sky, and people whale watching. Granted, there's still a dose of the more extreme stuff—some Japanese driving Lamborghinis through a city at night, two guys climbing an iceberg that threatens to crumble and dump them in the middle of the ocean—but that material makes up just a portion of the footage.
This is a brand trying to appeal to a broader base of consumers. It makes sense. The size of the market for people who ski off of cliffs and do somersaults in the air is limited. It's still a $400 or more camera, so it's not as if GoPro is including video of people lying on a sofa binge-watching Scandal, but I'd expect the shift to continue the next time they update their product line and release a promo video. I wouldn't be surprised if that promo includes footage of a young child cannonballing into a pool while filming himself with a GoPro attached to a selfie stick, or footage from the family dog's point of view as she chases down a frisbee on a sandy beach, or even drone footage of an outdoor wedding.
Perhaps we may even start to see a celebrity or two make a cameo appearance, to give the GoPro a wider type of lifestyle appeal, not just one centered around activities for people not afraid to die. I also suspect they've pushed up against a ceiling on price (the Hero4 Silver runs $400, the Hero4 Black $500, and that's just the starting point before piling on costs of accessories like mounts and additional batteries). GoPro will likely want to start pressing down what is for now a generous price umbrella for competitors must salivate when they see GoPro's $7B+ market cap.
Spit it out
I listen to podcasts while commuting, and this past year I started listening to them at faster and faster playback speeds. 1.25X, then 1.5X, and now I'm routinely at 1.75 to 2X playback.
Now, when people speak to me in real life, it sounds like they're speaking in slow motion. I think that's one reason I have to dial in some Kendrick Lamar regularly, he's one of the few musicians who sends words at me at the pace I prefer.
Also, he's really talented. Here he is free stylin' to Taylor Swift's Shake it Off on DeDe in the Morning and performing a new untitled track on Colbert.
A recommendation for fans of Serial
Plenty of folks have been offering great suggestions for books, TV series, or movies to seek out next if you're a fan of Serial.
I'll toss out one I've been working my way through: The Missing, an original series that's a joint production between Starz and The BBC. In the U.S., you'll have to catch it on Starz for now, and I know most people don't have a subscription to that premium cable channel that runs behind HBO and Showtime when it comes to original series. Perhaps the show will be released on iTunes sometime after the series concludes on Starz in the next two weeks; having not ever watched any Starz original series, I'm assuming they follow a windowing system similar to HBO or Showtime. Of course, it airs on the BBC overseas two weeks before episodes air on Starz; those familiar with torrenting probably skipped this paragraph anyhow.
The series concerns the disappearance of a five-year old English boy while on vacation with his parents. The series jumps back and forth from the time of the boy's disappearance to a period eight years in the future, a la True Detective or The Affair, and that retrospective re-examination of the case gives the mystery a Serial-like feel.
In the past, I've found red herrings in television mystery series to be a huge turn-off, a narrative gimmick to prolong series for no reason other than for profit (remember the American version of The Killing?). Serial has given me a newfound tolerance for such false starts. In real life mysteries like the murder of Hae Min Lee, when you don't know the truth, everything bit of evidence the least bit prominent puts us on the scent of some suspect(s).
This is especially true for the father in The Missing. Tony Hughes (James Nesbitt) feels a soul-searing guilt over his son's disappearance because he was watching his son Ollie when he vanished. In his quest to find Ollie, Hughes pursues every potential lead with a Biblical wrath, all human relationships, including his marriage, be damned. One of the odd pleasures of the series is Hughes' distinct bulldog unpleasantness; he's so exasperatingly unreasonable at times you want to shake him, yet of all the characters he seems to be the only one with a persistence to uncover the truth that matches the viewers'; Hughes is often both protagonist and antagonist, and Hughes and detective Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo) become an odd couple akin to McConaughey and Harrelson in True Detective, each representing dueling impulses within the viewer: the desire to solve the mystery via the high road or by any means necessary.