Day: March 16, 2005

Vertigo

looky

Hello Hello

I just saw Vertigo for the first time- I know, for a supposed film buff, this is inexcusable. I love the “Hitchcock shot.”

DIANE: Uno dos tres catorce!

Kim Novak is hot, but in a 1950s way- her platinum blonde hair and eyebrows plucked to the center of her eyes made her look patrician in the 1950s, but combined with her overbite and wide face makes her look old by today’s fashions. When her character gives her age as 26, I couldn’t believe it- I thought she was much older.

Looking it up, it turns out she was actually 25 at the time. I think if you if you were making a period film for the 1950’s you could analyse her face and how it differs from modern starlets to come up with a good measure of how fashion in women’s faces has changed. I know it’s less marketable, but it seems to me that when you make a movie set in a different era, a different place, you should make an effort to match the tastes of that setting. You could could have rich Mayan girls with foreheads compressed from birth, or Japanese courtesans with blackened teeth and eyebrows painted inches above the natural line of their brow. Yeah like anyone is going to go through the trouble to do that!

We had fun placing the locations in different neighborhoods in San Francisco… Also, the scenes in San Juan Batista were fun, because we were looking for the wooden shack on display in the background… in real life this shack was on my grandfather’s farm. At some point some historians arrived and told him they wanted it; they ended up lifting it whole and loading it on a truck or something. It was constructed by settlers, without nails. Grandpa was using it as a tool shed at the time. I’m not sure it was at San Juan Batista in 1958 however.

In the tower, we see the Hitchcock Shot twice… not nearly as dramatic as the way it’s used now. And what happens next is so fast and anticlimactic… Diane insisted that since Barbara Bel Geddes was in Dallas, it must have been “all a dream,” completing a “circle of Dallas.” They even refer to oil wells at one point.

Speaking of anticlimactic – Scotty’s friend Elster’s final speech in the courtroom is so quick and he’s out of the picture so quickly that it reeks of a character being written out of a soap opera. Kind of weird. There are other artifacts of this kind of writing too- like in the Legion of Honor, when Scotty gets the booklet. Can I have this? Yes. Poof! The guy is gone. Maybe that is intentional, to set up this later scene with Elster.

ELSTER: Don’t blame yourself Scotty- we both know who killed Madeline.
DIANE: Yeah! Bono did!

Did I mention we were drinking while we watched this movie? While I’m free associating, the beginning of the dream sequence is like the Beatles Yellow Submarine. And have I bagged on Jimmy Stewart yet? Boy is he Mr 1950s. What a sap. Golden Age my butt.

BRIAN: This is the Mission? Wow it looks much less crappy than I remember.

One more thing: Hitchcock is very consistent with movements between cuts. Jimmy reaches out his hand; in the next shot it’s in exactly the same position. Movement is never started or stopped across cuts- when Madeline drifts towards the ocean, Scotty stands there like a gaping mullet in a reaction shot, THEN walks over the next time we see him. It’s one of the things that dates this movie. On the other hand, the use of backgrounds is still great- you are always aware that the scene is set in San Francisco. When Scotty’s driving you can see the street; when the scene is in an apartment you can see the view of the skyline.

I hadn’t realized how much of Basic Instinct was a reference to this movie- even down to her hairstyle. The notion of the look-alikes, the stepped-on Barbara’s “Betty” to Kim’s “Veronica”… Except in that movie Verhoeven / Eszterhas have purposely made the characters more perverse… The money now belongs to Catherine (Sharon Stone), Scotty now is still a cop, but just as much of an obsessive asshole. Making him masochistic is just extra funny. The husband character is elminated; all the power now rests with Madeline/Catherine, made into a lesbian for extra edginess. The ruse is still there, ambigously with either the same number of people, with more, or with less. If you’ve seen both movies, hopfully you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Actually come to think of it, it’s entirely necessary that he’s a masochist, because the lust interest is now the antagonist. The Betty is now the identity swapper as well. Catherine’s girlfriend, if you think about it from a structure persepctive, is now mostly superfluous. I read an analysis once which said that Basic Instinct fails because it tries to combine a Detective/Cop story with a Noir – but in a Noir everything is futile, and a Cop story ends in success for Law. While I agree with that, I don’t think that’s what makes Basic Instinct weird; I think it’s the jumbled roles of Catherine. I don’t want to sell that movie short, even though it’s sort of clumsy. It’s not entirely a rip-off of Vertigo. But it’s pretty similar!

Incidentally, on the other Vertigo, Bono says “1, 2, 3, 14” because How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is their 14th album.

Links:

The Eternity Puzzle

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There was this jigsaw puzzle called Eternity which had a prize of 1 million pounds for solving it. That’s about 1.8 million US dollars.

The puzzle was designed by a guy named Christopher Monckton, and consists of a bunch of angular shapes which fit together on a giant gridlike board. As the Guardian said, “less of a jigsaw, more of a mosaic.” Because the various pieces fit together in so many different ways, finding a solution which fit all 209 pieces was next to impossible. Monckton offered the cash prize, awardable after a few months of the puzzle’s launch. The first solution to be received would get Monckton’s money.

Enter the puzzle geeks. The second this puzzle was announced, a huge effort formed around trying to solve it. A message board was formed, with a mailing list, full of geeks with computers who quickly reduced the pieces to simpler data representations and started working on algorithms to solve what is essentially a really crazy 2D “bin-packing problem.” Monckton estimated it would take about 4 years to solve, likely earning him more than the 1 million pound prize.

They cracked it in 16 months, twice. The award money went to the first solution, a team of two guys ( Alex Selby and Oliver Riordan ), although another man ( Guenter Stertenbrink ) solved it independently, with a different solution.

Obviously Monckton wasn’t planning on Eternity being solved so quickly. It was supposed to have taken over 4 years- he had planned to release “hint pieces,” pictures of the board with progressively more pieces on it. Ironically, complexity analyses have shown that this would have made the puzzle harder! At any rate, he had to sell his mansion (“Crimonmogate House in Aberdeenshire”) to pay out the prize money.

But the really funny thing is, it turns out Christopher Monckton is a big Nazi asshole. One of the reasons we barely heard about this puzzle, I mean aside from people not making a big deal about puzzles in general, and the prize money evaporating right after its launch, is that Monckton publicly said that everyone with HIV should be put in quarantine camps . Needless to say, his distributors didn’t want to be associated with his hateful bullshit.

Google for “Christopher Monckton AIDS” for more details on the incident… After this incident, I’ve seen him referred to as “British right-wing commentator Christopher Monckton.” Turns out he was an advisor to Thatcher.

Anyway, back to the puzzle:

Something that is interesting to me was the collaborative yet competitive nature of these message boards. To the puzzle enthusiasts, this was a bunch of money which they each considered their own. The Eternity puzzle would be solved eventually, but they had this stiff competition, spread thinly all over the world! However, these competitors were all fellow puzzle nerds.

Reading the boards is funny. The motivation to share solving techniques and hints is complex- there is the usual “look how smart I am to have thought of this,” as well as an altruistic desire to add to the “community.” But given the mercenary nature of this particular puzzle, there is also the hope that someone else will share their tidbit that hadn’t yet occurred to the first poster.

The puzzle itself is grossly complicated and tedious to solve. It’s made of a giant (hexagonal) grid of equilateral triangles which can be tiled with larger triangles… but each of those larger triangles is potentially cut in half (into a 30-60-90) on a random axis, and is not necessarily aligned with the tilings of other larger triangles. It makes more sense if you look at pictures of the puzzle.

Monckton planned to release “solution pieces” every so often after the first year, showing the board with one of the pieces placed correctly. The puzzle was solved too early for these to help- but ironically, these solution pieces would have made it harder. After a thorough analysis of the puzzle, the puzzle geeks determined that the puzzle was generated such that solution space was not as sparse as it could have been- not surprising, since calculating the puzzle to have exactly one solution would be an equivalent problem to solving an unknown puzzle in the first place! I’m assuming that the two solutions presented didn’t have any pieces in common with the “official” solution.

The architecture of solution approaches are fairly uniform- as you might imagine, a bit of dynamic programming (like the knapsack problem solution) is used- the tricky bit seems to be choosing the order of the pieces to add to the incremental solution. The winning approaches used a “goodness” of the piece to be added as a heuristic- amongst other things, the number of broken edges (the square edge of a 30-60-90 triangle) exposed to the perimeter of the piece would contribute to its “badness.”

Something that seemed obvious to me but I didn’t see thoroughly explored- representing the profiles of piece perimeters, thus enabling piece-piece interactions. What I mean is- most approaches I read simply tried to add a piece to a given tiling… instead of trying to add pieces together into larger and larger constructs. Sort of a reversed approach – the tricky part would then to grow the tiled area in a way which is “good”, that is making a tiled area which is mostly convex and similar in shape to the goal board shape. It would probably end up using a hill climbing approach to allow for temporary “bad” board shapes (to allow for new shapes being added).

But, whatever, the contest is over now, and I never did anything on it.

Links to solution sites: