GeekReads

Anh Do's not only the happiest refugee, but also a shining example for all Australians

For those who haven’t heard of him, Anh Do is a popular Australian comedian and TV personality. Released prior to the recent political debate, The Happiest Refugee is his memoir, and in it he recounts his life’s story from the time when he was living in Vietnam during the war-torn communist era, his family’s harrowing escape from the country, and then life in Australia as an immigrant.

Do speaks very candidly about a great number of things in his past, including his relationship with his father, who was a pillar of the family until tragic circumstances led to his leaving his wife and kids; he even manages to uncover a family secret that’d been kept by his grandmother for years until asked about it in the researching of the book!

I was inspired by this amazing and touching story, and his enthusiasm, drive and attitude makes you proud to be able to call him a fellow Aussie. Granted, not all refugees are going to be as driven as he and his family were, and many will drown against the adversity of poverty that caused the Do family to flourish. But it gives the reader a deeper insight into the challenges that refugee families face, and how it’s not all  regretting the past and sucking on the teat of welfare handouts.

Along with Go Back To Where You Came From, the recent SBS documentary, The Happiest Refugee should be compulsory reading for anyone who’s interested in gaining insight into the plight of refugees.

Models – of the enthusiast hobby kind as opposed to the category of human coathangers – are a useful analogy for discussing Super 8. Just as gluing together molded plastic parts creates an aesthetically pleasing replica of an ideal form, director J. J. Abrams has taken a bunch of old plot elements to create a very pleasant pastiche.

You’ve seen bits of this movie elsewhere. The Roswell/Area 51 alien conspiracy themes appear in more movies than I can name, and there’s a strong echo of The Goonies and Tomorrow, When The War Began where you’ve got a bunch of ordinary kids trying to grapple with everyday issues (love, identity, etc.) around extraordinary circumstances. But the “mystery monster” aspect in the promotion of this flick gives me the sense that Abrams is trying to make good on the poorly rated Cloverfield.

Happily, he delivers. Super 8 is very enjoyable, and the charm of the kids making their own zombie home movie spills over into the rest of the actual movie. The characters are very likeable and well cast, and the adults mostly stay out of the way to let the kids shine.

The script tackles a lot of themes so the story does get somewhat messy: a bunch of kids trying to make a zombie movie; father-son dealing with grief from losing their wife/mother; strange things happening all over town; two kids falling in love – but Abrams manages to hold them all together without, ahem, losing the plot.

It’s a fun “comfort movie” that Jenny and I will probably come back to over and over again (when we get it on Blu-ray).

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A franchise, by definition, relies on a tried and tested formula across multiple narratives, but Pirates of the Caribbean – birthed from a themed ride at Disneyland – takes the Mickey (har har). Rather than coming up with an original idea, the writers borrowed (adapted) a Tim Powers novel called… On Stranger Tides.

How closely the movie follows the book, I can’t say (I’m not a fan of Powers) but it certainly fits the Pirates theme perfectly: pick a mythical destination, pick a fabled creature, a supernatural enemy, and a cameo appearance, then have the protagonists find object(s) in order to reach said mythical destination where a swindle and double cross occurs, but Johnny “Cap’n Jack Sparrow” Depp prevails.

The returning cast and crew phone in their parts, being almost identical to their previous incarnations with nothing new to add – which I’m sorry to say, includes the usually wonderful Hans Zimmer (the music composer). On Stranger Tides looks, feels and sounds so similar to the previous movies that it wouldn’t be fair to say it’s bad, because it would imply that the others were too (and they weren’t).

If you aren’t sick of Johnny Depp doing his Keith Richards impersonation yet (or Keith Richards doing his Johnny Depp impression for that matter), by all means go and see this movie.

This poster should be in the running (ha ha) for a "most inaccurate representation" prize

Source Code is the second feature from Duncan Jones, director of the sci-fi thriller Moon. His first movie was shot on a modest budget of $5 million, and while this cost an estimated $30 million more, retains somewhat of a “shot on a budget” feel about it – which is not a bad thing in Jones’ hands. With an interesting premise dealing with trying to change the events of the past, Jones cleverly uses the same sets over and over again to great effect, creating a kind of cinematic claustrophobia that matches how boxed in his character feels.

The story is this: a terrorist detonates a bomb on a passenger train, and announces that a second, more devastating bomb will be set off soon after. A special scientific enterprise attempts to uncover the perpetrator through a cutting-edge technique that allows Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) to access the past through the memory of one of the victims on the train. But because the brain only retains 8 minutes of information, that is the time window Stevens has to uncover the truth – revisiting the same period over and over again. But as the captain uncovers details of about the terrorist plot, he also uncovers some disturbing information about himself.

Time travel stories always abound with problems, and Source Code requires a heightened suspension of disbelief in order to buy into the conceit: e.g. how does the victim’s memories contain an entire reality for Captain Stevens to interact with? Fortunately Jones had the sense to ensure that none of these were critical to the main plot, so they’re easily dispensed with, leaving a compelling character-driven story that dares to appeal to the intellect and ask complex moral questions.

Looks like a snake if you squint, dunnit?

You may or may not have noticed the “Currently reading” byline beneath the title of this blog, which because of the nature of its positioning, appears on every page. I started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan at around the same time that interest in the film of (nearly) the same name starring Natalie Portman was peaking in its post-Oscars glow, which amusingly led to a large number of search hits.

It’s this kind of serendipity that Taleb (or NNT as he often refers to himself) champions in this book. The unpredictable occurances which in hindsight seem obvious; so obvious that our minds feel compelled to join the dots retrospectively and think that we could’ve somehow worked it forward if we’d only thought to look.

The author’s writing is very self conscious, often setting out structure, positioning the reader, etc. It gives the impression of a writer who is struggling to contain his idea, but is trying his best to ensure that the reader doesn’t get lost. He succeeds in that much, and I found the text more accessible than if it were a purely intellectual work. At first his laconic, laid-back style seemed pedestrian to the point of being boorish, but his idea was so compelling to me – crystalising many of thoughts that I myself had thought, that I was fully engaged for a good part of the book.

Then the topic of applying the Black Swan idea to reality. Buried right in the middle of the book – like the miserly contents of a cheaply made BBQ pork bun – is a few precious nuggets of practical advice that one might find useful, in the same sense as the 10 commandments against the rest of the Holy Bible. Even then it’s very begrudgingly given, but reasonably so because of the author’s unreserved antagonism towards false frameworks and formulae.

In fact, Taleb gets downright rude. The latter part of the book is almost solely dedicated to the intellectual destruction of his opponents: economists and academics participating in “the Great Intellectual Fraud” of Gaussian bell curve modelling. It’s by far the bitchiest content I’ve ever read in this genre. NNT basically lays the smack down on why virtually every model is wrong, how there’s not much you can do about it, and then proceeds to name names, especially those who have crossed the author in some way. Even the Nobel Prize (specifically the one for Economics) cops a hammering.

The Black Swan is one of those books that offers intellectual emancipation. But like a domesticated animal released into the wild, I found myself not knowing what to do with the newfound freedom, and as a result reverting back to my old ways. It has caused me to think differently about things, and look much more skeptically at certain “facts” presented by the media (although in that regard I needed no help. The media are already under full assualt by blogs like Grog’s Gamut and books such as Lindsay Tanner’s recently released Sideshow).

At least now I know better than to trust Economists.