Monthly Archives: June 2016

Anime, Fantastic Fest, Review

Review: Summer Wars (2010)

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summerwars The funny thing about modern technology is that it’s everywhere: Even in rural Japan, it seems like everyone has email, two blogs and a Tumblr account. The remarkable Summer Wars may be one of the first movies to really approach that ubiquity, and not come off as bad cyberpunk.

Along with nitro-speedster Redline, Summer Wars is the second film from Madhouse Studios at FF 2010, but it’s a virtual world removed. Categorizing it is a near-impossibility: Sort of slice-of-life, sort of techno thriller, sort of action flick, not solely anything.

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Documentary, education, Interview

Interview: Davis Guggenheim on Waiting for ‘Superman’ (2010)

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(In 2010 I interview Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud, about his education documentary Waiting for ‘Superman’, for the Austin Chronicle.)

Richard Whittaker: What was your intention when you started making Waiting for ‘Superman,‘ and how did it change during filming?

Davis Guggenheim: It’s amazing when you start doing press for a movie, and you start to realize these things you didn’t know. And I just thought of this right now, this idea that it’s a horror movie, and you wonder who the killer is, and you realize the killer is you. I went and said, “I’m going to find out what the real forces are behind our broken schools,” and I’m a lefty, I’m a Democrat, and I believe in unions, but I realized that the Democratic party, my party, hasn’t been doing what it should have been doing because it’s been getting money from the teachers’ unions to ignore the problems, to ignore the kids they should have been serving. I believe that unions are essential, and I’m part of a great union, and I was with my dad shooting documentaries in coal mines talking about the dignity of the worker, but the unions are this weird force that’s keeping our schools down.

RW: How does that work in Texas, where unions are effectively castrated, and teachers, far from having tenure, are on year-to-year contracts?

DG: But in Texas you still have 206 drop-out factories, 206 high schools where more than 40% of kids don’t graduate, and I suspect that for every drop-out factory there are five or 10 other schools that are pushing their kids through so they can have a great education and be productive citizens. Even though Texas doesn’t share a lot of the things that other states share, there’s still a chronic problem that states have different standards, and we have these huge bureaucracies that determine where money goes, and it usually means it’s not going to the school. We still have all this wonkish ideology to determine what should be taught, and we still have no idea what it takes to make a great teacher, how to assess a great teacher. So I imagine that a lot of the problems are the same, even though across the border some of the contracts are different.

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Austin Film Festival, Interview

Interview: Emily Pyle on Burned (2010)

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burnedSometimes there’s no feel-good ending when the underdog stands up to the powers that be, no matter how terrible the injustice. In 2007, former child inmate Joseph Galloway became the face of all the victims at the Texas Youth Commission: The terrible beatings and sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of staff and inmates at the Giddings State School made headlines, and his case turned out to be the first few rounds in a grueling fight to fix a broken state agency. After the police investigations started, big promises were made by lawmakers about fixing TYC and making amends to the thousands of children who had passed through its locked gates.

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Interview, Wrestling

Interview: TNA in 2008

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(A little wrestling flashback here: in 2008, TNA Wrestling was the insurgent pro-wrestling promotion in America. Now it’s all but dead, and just about everyone interviewed here – Booker T., Christian, Robert Roode, and Eric Young – is now with the WWE in some context or other)

Backstage at the TNA Wrestling event at the Travis County Expo Center last Thursday, five-time WCW champion Booker T swept the curtain aside. Twenty minutes earlier, he’d been wiped out by a chair shot delivered by Robert Roode. He’d then stood in the ring and signed autographs with fans. In the dressing room, he grins.

“Another day at the office, baby,” he says before swapping compliments with Roode. The same Roode who tried to crack his skull in the ring.

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Interview

Interview: Weird Al Yankovic (2010)

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weirdal(In 2010, Weird Al visited Austin to play the Fun Fun Fun Fest. It’s not often you get to interview a true cultural icon, but here’s a fragment of my Q&A with him for the Austin Chronicle.)

 

Richard Whittaker: When you visited Austin in May to screen your movie UHF, a lot of people were disappointed you didn’t sing.

Weird Al Yankovic: I just felt so terribly bad that they weren’t able to schedule an Austin show for our summer tour that when the opportunity to do Fun Fun Fun Fest came up, I jumped at it. We don’t normally do one-offs. We usually only do shows that are part of an extended tour, but this was something I really wanted to do.
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Books, Review

Review: I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

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I Shall Wear Midnight There’s a moment of sadness with every new Terry Pratchett novel. Since the English comedy-fantasy author’s 2007 announcement that he has Alzheimer’s disease, he’s admitted that each book may be his last. He’s undoubtedly bringing one part of his legacy to a bittersweet conclusion with the final tale of Tiffany Aching, the young witch on the mystical planet called Discworld. Across the first three books in the sequence of young adult novels (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith), Tiffany went from callow apprentice to respected hag o’ the hills.

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education, Politics, SXSW

Gamefication in Education at SXSW (2016)

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(Following on from yesterday’s posting about how IT and games are changing the education world, here’s an interview I did for the Austin Chronicle with Grace Lau, director of VR the Global Nomads Group, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the barriers of understanding between kids in different nations.)

It’s a small world, but, as the old saying goes, you wouldn’t want to walk it. For centuries, the only way to truly experience another culture was to visit it. Now international travel has never been easier, but it seems too much of the conflict-ravaged world is off-limits to the students most eager to learn about it. For Grace Lau, director of virtual reality for education nonprofit Global Nomads Group, technology can still help bridge the gaps of oceans and borders. She said, “When you put people in front of each other, whether it’s face to face or in the virtual world, we found that they’re able to draw out those natural human connections.”

The purpose of GNG is to make students into global citizens. So far, the nonprofit has linked students in the U.S. to kids in South America, Thailand, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and nations across Sub-Saharan Africa – “places with the largest culture gap between the U.S. and abroad,” said Lau. However, their biggest initiative at the moment is in the Middle East.

The core of this initiative was Project Syria, a collaboration with virtual reality pioneer Nonny de la Peña that connected South Central Los Angeles’ View Park Preparatory Charter High School and Mahatta Community Center in Amman, Jordan. Originally commissioned by the World Economic Forum, this VR tool simulates the experience of being in a conflict zone. Lau said, “Through CGI, Nonny’s team at Immersive Journalism re-created a street bombing in Aleppo, Syria. So with these headsets, the students in L.A. went through what it would be like on that street corner. Then we connected those students with Syrian refugees here in Jordan.”

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Politics, SXSW

The Not-So-World Wide Web (2008)

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(There’s been a lot of discussion about representation and access on the Internet in the last couple of years, but this piece I wrote for the Austin Chronicle’s SXSW 2008 coverage shows the issues have been debated, especially about the Anglocentric and Americentric nature of Internet culture, for a lot longer than that.)

Back in 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for a browser he called WorldWideWeb, it was supposed to connect everyone. “Its universality is essential,” he later wrote, saying it could “make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.” But whose idea of universal? Is it a one-size-fits-all, anything-goes approach, with no restriction on content? Or a tamed Web, where no one can find anything upsetting?

Before content, there is language. The Web was built in English. All those acronyms (http, URL, TCP/IP) mean something in English. Most websites are in English. But an all-English Web can also be an excluding Web. “Providing a service in English only shuts out huge amounts of users,” says Stephanie Booth, Web consultant and writer of Climb to the Stars, one of the first major bilingual blogs. Living in Switzerland, a country with four national languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh) where many citizens speak conversational English, she is exposed to the complexities of translation on a day-to-day basis. “People may speak enough English to communicate with the man on the street, but it’s not sufficient for them to try and tame new, potentially scary software or services in that language.”

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SXSW

Gamefication in Education at SXSW (2008)

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(Gamefication has become the buzzword in education circles, and here’s a SXSW 2008 preview for the Austin Chronicle on those issues.)

The line between educational software and games has always been a blurry one. Now educators and game developers are doing more than just making toys with some redeeming qualities: They’re adapting lessons from gaming into the curriculum, from interactivity in Nintendo’s Wii Sports to cooperative play in Halo 3.

“Games are largely misunderstood,” said Suzanne Seggerman, president of Games for Change. “They are not inherently sophomoric.” G4C introduces activist groups to the educational benefits of situated learning – the cognitive process of learning through doing, or in this case simulated doing. The idea is nothing new. “The U.S. Army has [combat simulator]America’s Army,” Seggerman said, “and it’s their number one recruiting tool. So why shouldn’t nonprofits have access to the same tools?” ‘

She points to the award-winning Darfur Is Dying. It’s a different view of battle to, say, Call of Duty: a deceptively simple online game in which players are Sudanese refugees, avoiding Janjaweed militias while foraging for water. They learn and are inspired by doing, a process she argues has always been part of gaming. “Will Wright has had hundreds of people mailing him, saying they became urban planners because of SimCity,” said Seggerman.

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Interview

Interview: John Halcyon Styn (2007)

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John Halcyon Styn(In 2007, as part of a package I produced for the Austin Chronicle on the interface of cinema and the Internet, I talked to John Halcyon Styn: a multi-time Webby winner, he made his professional reputation as a business-to-business marketing and branding consultant for an adult Web company running. We talked about what the film industry, especially independent filmmakers, can learn from online porn as a distribution model.)

Richard Whittaker: Why has porn taken to the Web so strongly?

John Halcyon Styn: The adult industry doesn’t have the option to go through traditional channels, so they’ve been forced to innovate. There are not a lot of advertisers who are prepared to subsidize adult content. But they have a product that is so much better suited to get people to pull their wallet out, which is a greater incentive to take risks and try new technology. Video distribution via IP and download on demand are convenient for every part of life but are a godsend for a porn consumer. In the same way the VCR revolutionized our viewing habits and was pushed by the porn consumer who enjoyed the privacy of it, this just takes it to the next beautiful level. It’s a purely personal, private commerce.

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