MovieMonday: Wildland

After the recent flurry -- the enormous flurry -- of wind-fed fires in the western states, this seemed like a good film to watch.

It's a documentary that was filmed in 2018 about a team of 20 firefighters trained in Grants Pass, Ore., by Grayback Forestry and their team's work in that year's fire season.

While my understanding was that many firefighters are college students earning money during summer breaks, this group is different.  (It is possible that the lengthening dry season in the west, from May into October or November, means that students can't miss that much of a school year, or at least could not in 2018.)

The novice firefighters are a mixed bunch, including several with records and previous substance abuse issues.  Several smoke cigarettes.  But as a group, they are willing to do hard work, and they seem drawn by the opportunity to do work that is meaningful.  

After a week of fairly intense training, they are sent out as needed to clear land after fires and, finally, to fight a major fire outside Monterey, Calif.  

If you think you know how fires are put out, this movie will teach you a good bit, starting with, "Never carry your pulaski on your shoulder."  

           (A pulaski is a short-handled combination of an axe and a hoe that is used by firefighters to clear vegetation and cut trees to establish fire breaks.  Fire breaks are lines of cleared soil to frustrate the spread of fires by depriving those fires of fuel.)  

In one amusing adventure the group use their pulaskis to check and clear hot spots after the suppression of a fire presumably set by an angry marijuana farmer on a competitor's plantings in public forest land; this is in the area around Eureka, part of Northern California's Emerald Triangle, a region where the biggest industry has been growing pot since long before the state legalized the stuff.  My impression is that, even after legalization, most of the business operates off the books.

The movie is short, and its characters are sincere.  It will benefit us all, not least in the west, if we begin to consider what is at stake as seasonal rains decline and vegetation dries and becomes more vulnerable to any strike of lightning or crazed firebug.  

In one amusing adventure, they are sent into a forest near Eureka, Calif., heart of what is known in the state as the "Emerald Triangle" of marijuana growers who have been cultivating crops on federal land since long before the state legalized marijuana.  I have a young acquaintance who has worked several years in the business, which remains almost entirely off the books, and the fire in this movie is suspected to have been set by one pot farmer to sabotage another pot farmer's crop.  The movie is not long and, while centered more on the personalities of the individual crew, does provide a nice introduction to the growing business of controlling burns in western wildlands.

Books of Note

If you have even the remotest interest in fighting wildfires, you should read Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, a literature professor at the University of Chicago who returned to Montana, where he was raised and started writing his own books.  

        After the first, the fine novella, A River Runs through It, Maclean took as his subject the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949.  In that fire, 13 smoke jumpers -- elites in the fire-fighting community -- were dropped on the ground and died within a couple hours, chased up a steep hillside by a wind-driven fire that they could not escape.  Maclean studied the men, visited the site and clamored up the same hillside to research exactly what had happened and how.  

        Maclean died in 1990, apparently leaving behind an early draft that was edited by his son and his publisher, the University of Chicago Press, and released in 1992.  The book observes improvements in firefighting techniques between Mann Gulch and the days of Maclean's writing.  It also is a deeply moving story about the smoke jumpers themselves, respectful of them and ennobling their efforts. 

On the 25th anniversary of Maclean's book, another edition was published with a forward by Tim Egan, who wrote 2009's The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, a recounting of the hot, dry summer in 1910 that culminated in August in a then-unthinkable fire that burned three million acres across parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia and that left 87 persons dead. The book also places in context the expansion of the US Forest Service after the event.

Meanwhile, John N. Maclean, son of Norman, gave up his editing job at the Chicago Tribune and began investigating another deadly fire.  This led to 2009's Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire.  Fourteen firefighters died in that 1994 fire on Colorado's Storm King mountain. Three were smoke jumpers and nine came from a 20-member crew called the Prineville Hotshots, another Oregon team like the Graybar Forestry group that is the subject of this week's movie.

          The younger Maclean has kept at it, publishing other books on firefighting and management of firefighting efforts.  He discusses these regularly on his blog. 

MovieMonday: E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial

This movie, Steven Spielberg's third, was released in 1982 after Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Its first-year sales were greater than those for the first Star Wars film, a result that gobsmacked Hollywood and established Spielberg as the  pre-eminent filmmaker of his generation.

Most of us have seen it before, but let's recap the story.  A being from another planet is left behind on earth when his spaceship leaves in the middle of the night to avoid humans investigating their presence in a forest.  

The being, eventually named E.T., wanders into the garden shed behind a suburban family house.  Elliott, a 10-year-old boy who lives in the house with his mother, younger sister and older brother discovers E.T. and offers acceptance, friendship and Reese's Pieces candies to the puzzled alien.

There is tension in the house because the dad is gone.  The mom learns that he is off in Mexico with a girlfriend.  One of the boys calls the other "penis breath," which, given how square moviegoers were at the time, caused critics to warn parents not to take children under the age of eight to see the film. 

Effectively, E.T. becomes Elliott's imaginary friend -- such are not uncommon comforts for children -- and then, as the two other siblings inevitably encounter E.T.,  he becomes a family member to be protected from the still-menacing adult men searching the neighborhood and tracking the strange footprints they have found.

E.T.'s physical form also was designed with children in mind.  He does not look at all like a human, but he is about Elliott's height, has two arms, two legs and great big eyes that reflect emotion. 

In addition, E.T. is a quick study.  He learns English by watching television and applies what he learns to voice the film's memorable line, "E.T. phone home", that expresses his dearest wish.  E.T. also applies what he already knows (unexplainable, but it works) to contact fellow extra-terrestrials on his home planet.  In the process, he identifies so completely with Elliott that, when E.T.'s health declines in an unfamiliar environment, Elliott gets sick too.  

The goal becomes to help E.T. return to his home.  This effort knits his adoptive family and neighborhood children into a magical effort that leads to the expected conclusion.

The film retains its interest because the children and their world don't seem so different from that of today -- except for those bikes with small wheels and banana seats -- and because it gratifies the sincerity of all children and their wishes to do good.    Adults who have happy memories of the story might want to share this movie with younger persons of their acquaintance. 

Note

A caveat:  In the movie, 10-year-old Elliott's class (presumably fifth grade), is assigned a science activity that may not be familiar to students of this generation: the dissection of live frogs that students have narcotized but that still have beating hearts.  This apparently was a middle school project in some locations, but in my city, it was only a high school biology exercise.  My impression is that it since has been eliminated and replaced, occasionally by "dissection" of frog-shaped silicone material.  E.T. casts the project as painful for big-hearted Elliott and gives him a chance to display his honorable and humane nature; but even the set-up may be more stressful for today's young viewers than the occasional "shit" bombs sprinkled through the script.  

MovieMonday: The Social Dilemma

This documentary consists mostly of thoughtful comments from early social media innovators and designers.  To a person, they seem to be looking back, scratching their heads and thinking, "My God, what have I done?"

The story is this:  Digital technology -- artificial intelligence, online search and social media -- seemed initially like a huge net benefit for humanity.  Over time, the warts began to show, chiefly as the little machines became more sophisticated and their human owners remained, well, human.  

The lead speaker is Tristan Harris, an ex-Googler who raised some of the issues while he was at the company; these raised a flutter of interest and then disappeared.  He has founded a Center for Human Technology that he hopes will have greater effect.

The film is mostly speech but includes intermittent vignettes of a teenager who cannot extricate himself from his attachment to his cellphone and how algorithms in human form keep demanding his attention and feeding it/him attention-seeking narratives.  This a bit awkward, but it does serve to break up the talking head bits. 

Here are some of the questions raised:

Addiction 

"We have moved away from having a tool-based environment to having an addiction-based environment," says Harris, who means what he says.  

A former Twitter executive says, "I had to write my own software to break my addiction to Reddit."

Another commenter:  "Do you check your smartphone before you pee in the morning or while you're peeing in the morning?  Those are the two choices."  

Facebook/Instagram comes in for much of the criticism here.

It's worst for the young, says an addiction professor who says Facebook interactions "dig down deeper into the brain stem and take over kids' sense of self-worth and identity."

And for what?:  "Hearts, likes, thumbs -- they're fake, brittle popularity," says Chamath Palihapitiya, a Facebook alum.  

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at Stern NYU notes that babies born in 1996 were the first children to have cellphones in middle school.  Between 2010 and 2020, he says, suicides by pre-teen girls more than doubled.

(I believe this one, by the way.  Two years ago in our state, a 12-year-old was harassed constantly by mean girls in her first year of middle school -- a sample text was "Why don't you kill yourself?" -- and was so affected by it that, at the end of the school year, she did kill herself.  The state had a detailed law requiring the filing of reports and actions to be taken starting with the first incident, but that school's officials did nothing.  The girl's mother arrived home from her latest pleading for help to find her daughter dead.)

Haidt offers advice for parents on when and how much social media are appropriate for children.

What They Know and How They Use It

As a search engine gathers and sorts your internet traffic, it apparently forms conclusions about your personality, your favorite color, the foods you like to eat and the types of books you read (if you read), among others. Other algorithms gather and slot your work history, your medical data, etc.  

There are problems here, says Cathy O'Neil, a mathematician on a mission.  

"Algorithms are opinions embedded in code," she says -- code whose validity is seldom challenged.  (Her 2017 Ted talk, "The era of blind faith in big data must end," goes into some detail)

As the teaser notes at the top, you can get different results from identical internet searches, depending on where you live, or your political affiliations or your previous search history.   Effectively, these algorithms try to find "which rabbit hole is closest to your particular interest and then feed you more of the same."

This is one thing if your rabbit hole is golf courses in California or memoirs written by American ex-pats living in Japan.  

It's another if you have an interest in news of the day, or if you live in a dictatorship or if an election is coming up soon.

An example: If you mistrust Antifa, you might have been convinced over the weekend that most of the fires in the American West were set deliberately by progressive extremists.  But if you support Antifa, you might have been convinced that the 100 nights of protests in Portland, Ore., this summer were peaceful except on occasions when right-wing extremists came into town with flags and weapons.   Sorta like CNN v. Fox, with the source of your news flying under the radar.

Another problem is that a steady diet of news-you-want-to-believe tends to convince you that all the reasonable people agree with you.  

"If everyone is entitled to their own facts, there is no need (in anyone's mind) for compromise." says Harris.

The agreed-upon fix among the speakers in the film is that government regulation is needed.  They call themselves optimists and maybe they're right, but I'm skeptical. 

On the plus side, Facebook announced last week  it will not accept political advertising between now and the November election

Anyway, The Social Dilemma is a relatively brief 90 minutes and is worth a look.  It raises questions we need to be asking ourselves.  Why not watch it with a friend or relative, and discuss it in person or over the phone, instead of on social media?  

Couldn't hurt.

Notes

Not mentioned here is the Silicon Valley-based Stanford Digital Persuasion Lab, formed in 1998 and still active.  (No, the founder and head of the place is not named Darth Vader.)  I would have liked to learn from the regretful early innovators, who mostly live and work nearby, what ethical considerations have been introduced in the lab's work over the last two decades

-----  

Neither does the film mention medical data.  In late 2018,  Google bought a huge bank of medical information from Ascension, a big healthcare company.   My primary care doctor, whom I like, is employed by Ascension.  This raised some hackles, and not just from me.  

Early on, one federal investigator posited that perhaps the doctors owned their patients' blood reports and tissue samples and that these were not Ascension's to sell.  My reaction was this: NO.

My medical history and test results were paid for by ME (through my health insurance).  When I signed up with my doctor, I signed the usual HIPAA privacy statement.  Why should Ascension or the doctor be able to share my personal data, with or without my name attached, without my permission?  (And, again, I like the doctor.) 

Why should Google -- effectively a large advertising company attached to a search engine -- be able to aggregate my data with those of thousands of other people to provide a data bank to be monetized, in any way,  without my permission?

MovieMonday: Mulan

This is another Disney live-action remake (the 15th, by my count) of one of its animated features.  The original, a girl-power story, was released in 1998 and is discussed later in this piece.

The story comes from traditional Chinese poems about Hua Mulan, a brave young woman who disguises herself as a man and serves with distinction as a soldier in the emperor's army for 12 years and whose sex is revealed to her fellow soldiers only after she returns home.  The story has been revived many times since it was written around 500 AD.

In this case, Mulan is the daughter of a former soldier who admires her strength and agility.  

"Your chi is strong," he tells her.  (Chi translates into "essential life force" for westerners who haven't been paying attention the last few decades.)

There is the usual blah blah blah from the mother, who tells her husband, "You forget -- Mulan is a daughter, not a son.  A daughter brings honor by marrying well." 

When Rouran nomads invade from out west, the Chinese emperor calls for the conscription of one man from every family to defend the (yet-unnamed) Silk Road.  When the recruiter arrives at the Hua home with a summons, Mulan's father agrees immediately even though his health is poor.

"I am blessed with two daughters. I will fight," he declares with pride.

 The night before her father has been ordered to report, Mulan takes the conscription scroll and lights out on the family horse to enlist, presenting herself as a young man.  

At training camp,  Mulan hides her femaleness and proves herself.  The commander, who remembers her father, says, "I know your secret.  You need to cultivate your gift."

Then it's off to battle after battle.  The Rouran leaders are Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee), plus a possibly magical female leader, Xian Lang, (famed Chinese actress Li Gong).  Mulan deals with both, effectively, while her comrades, including the serious Chinese soldier who admires her, defeat the rest of the enemy team.  

All ends well.  The film is beautifully shot (appropriately, given its $200 million budget), and the characters of Mulan and the people who care about her are portrayed movingly.

But the justification for a war with nomadic tribes who perceive their land to have been seized is taken as a given, rather as in another recent film whose viewpoint is less benign.  

As someone unfamiliar with the geography or history of the Asian steppe,  I have no way of evaluating the matter.  Interestingly, China's current leaders preferred that this newer film, unlike the one discussed below, involve enemy invaders from a different century.  The Chinese government, of course, controls film distribution in the country.

Mulan 1998

This Mulan functions as a late-century Disney princess movie in which Mulan is a more active version of Snow White.  

Mulan goes off to war and is surrounded in training by silly recruits who act as humorous relief and who are improved by their association with her.   (Similarly, Snow White fled her castle and settled in with the seven dwarfs, gray-haired goofballs who were won over by her kindness and sincerity.)

Also in the Disney theme, Mulan 1998 is assisted by a comical dragon named Mushu, who is voiced by Eddie Murphy and who camps it up with American idioms and is very funny but who is absent here and perhaps not just because Mulan 2020 is not a film aimed to make children laugh.  (The Han Chinese are not thought to be welcoming toward persons of different ethnicities.)   

In addition, this movie has a musical score and popular songs that are referenced, infrequently and orchestrally, in  Mulan 2020.

Note

Mulan 2020 is a more sincere and more serious movie than other Disney live-action remakes of cartoon stories. 

It has been designed to appeal to Chinese audiences, who have been deprived of the opportunity to see typical R-rated American releases like Deadpool, the poor folks.   

The single kiss between Mulan and her presumed infantry admirer has been excised. 

Her military commitment to be "loyal, brave and true" has been given an added requirement:  devotion to family.

Both movie and earlier cartoon portray soldiers devoted to their country, but the film does a bit more valorizing of the emperor and his devotion to "my people."  China's dynastic history stretches back thousands of years and ended only in the very early 20th century.  It is likely that its most recent strong man, Xi Jinping, sees himself as something like the emperor in the movie, protecting his people from threats in Tibet, Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, among others.  

                 A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that six million Mongols who live in greater China are resisting the government's efforts to make them speak Mandarin.   From the story:  “'All ethnic groups must embrace tightly like the seeds of a pomegranate,'” read a slogan from Chinese President Xi Jinping printed in Mandarin on the wall." 

Another interesting point is that the Mulan star, who was born in China and raised in the United States,  has signaled support for the police in Hong Kong -- the police who have been suppressing agitators who want democracy and want China to abide by the "one country, two systems" 50-year deal that it signed in 1997.  

This may be the actress' opinion (an unusual one in the US except among players and executives of the  National Basketball Association), but it has been noticed and has inspired movements to boycott the film in Thailand, South Korea and other Asian countries.  

On reflection, I wish I had not paid $29.99 to see Mulan 2020 on Disney +.   If Disney wants to kowtow to China, that's Disney's business.  But I do not.

Notes:  

An opinion piece in this morning's Washington Post notes that the credits for Mulan 2020 thank several Chinese agencies in Xinjiang province, including a Turpan public security bureau, for their help in the making of the film.  Xinjiang is home to China's notorious "retraining" facilities for an estimated million Muslim Uighurs.   Why Disney would choose to shoot much of its movie in that province, given international sentiments of the last few years, is a bit of a question.  Another question is why China would want to draw attention to the place.

Flu Shot Time

 

I picked up a prescription at Walgreen's yesterday and also got my annual flu shot.

Given the pandemic environment, a big push is on to make us all get flu shots this year.  

I didn't have to wait around, but I'll bet if I'd waited a month, there could be some long lines.

Just saying.

Note

The last time I had the flu, there was a two-year-old in the house.  The toddler did not get sick, but required the usual attention.  It was a rather difficult period.  

Since then, I have presented myself annually for this immunization.  I recommend it.