Ntuple Indemnity

With 120 stars in hand, I’ve seen most (but not all) of what Super Mario Galaxy has to offer—and my favourite thing about this wholly remarkable game has to be the Comet Observatory waltz. In the many hours I spent with the game, I expended no small measure of time hopping and bopping about in those plumber’s overalls and immersing myself in the rhythm of the piece, which exhibits the sweet, stately lilt of a Tchaikovsky ballet. Like the level selection music in Yoshi’s Island, the instrumentation changes as you progress through the game, building from a lighthearted melodic statement by the flute to a fleshed-out lullaby of Straussian violins befitting a midnight hour with a Disney princess.

Galaxy is the first Mario title to feature live orchestral music, as opposed to music generated by the game system’s MIDI instruments. While most video games have been moving towards scores on par with movies in sound quality and composition—two of the most promising film composers of the past decade, Harry Gregson-Williams and Michael Giacchino, come from a background in games—Nintendo has traditionally been reluctant to move away from programmed music, mostly because of its adherence to the philosophy that interface is always the highest priority (something we similarly observe in their attitude towards story). For instance, they insisted on programmed music in The Wind Waker so it could change dynamically in response to the actions of the player, such as consecutive hits with the sword, and to indicate changes in the environment like the presence of unseen enemies.

In the Mario series, the music serves an even subtler function: it determines the rhythm of the game. It’s there to push the player towards a natural tendency to activate sound effects associated with certain actions—jumping, hitting blocks, collecting power-ups—on the beat.

That’s what the composers claimed, anyhow—and that’s the kind of claim I just had to verify.

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Astrophysicist/novelist Alan Lightman delivered a reportedly eloquent keynote address at the University’s Art & Science Symposium yesterday. I regretfully did not attend—a tremendous mistake, I gather, as Lightman’s talk concerned precisely my field of interest.

I have long held the twin opinions that rejection of or apathy towards rational scientific thought is the single greatest threat to the survival of human society (yes, Virginia, all human society), but without the creative manifestation of the imaginative faculties, we have nothing to live for. It is always heartening to see a lucid defence of the scientific and artistic pursuits from someone who recognizes that one cannot happen at the exclusion of the other.

Now I’ll need to read his books.

Or, as they say in the London Underground: mind the gap.

Lust, Caution is now playing in select theatres. I had the opportunity to see it a few weeks ago at the Edmonton International Film Festival, and although my impressions of a film are never wholly reliable after only seeing it once, my initial judgment is that it is the very best film I’ve seen with Ang Lee in the director’s chair. Mind you, I’m far more familiar with his recent films than I am with his works in the early 1990s, but this is still a strong statement of praise on my part when you consider that I’m suggesting comparisons to the likes of Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—excellent films both, but not as consistently tight in pacing. Highly recommended.

Is it just me, or are we in the middle of a spy cinema renaissance? In the last two years alone, we’ve seen Munich, Casino Royale and The Bourne Ultimatum—and I don’t hesitate to append Lust, Caution to the list. Be it the franchise blockbuster or the historical assassination thriller, the standard of achievement in the espionage genre, with respect to both brains and execution, is now at least comparable to the Hitchcock oeuvre without being completely outclassed.

And Lust, Caution begs to reach for the Hitchcock benchmark anyway, regardless of whether or not it succeeds. Even beyond the explicit allusions to films like Suspicion, it’s a film about the manufacture of a woman into a femme fatale, a theme that occurs time and again in Hitchcock’s best work— Vertigo, North by Northwest, and perhaps my personal favourite, Notorious (to name a few). Like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, the femme fatale put in the position of using her sexuality as a tool of entrapment (Wong Chia Chi, played by Tang Wei) is the heroine who guides us through the plot, and not someone whose side of the story is concealed, as is often the case in classic noir driven by male protagonists of variable moral righteousness.

Naturally, how much of that “sexuality as a tool of entrapment” you can actually show has changed dramatically since 1946, which is why Lust, Caution is rated NC-17 in the United States, and where my discussion of the film becomes a tad more involved.

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I’m not someone who is intimately familiar with poetry, but I’ve always had a weakness for heroic verse—a trait that has become all too apparent to me again as I pore over the sweeping couplets of Lord Byron’s The Corsair. It’s a pity that the ongoing reinvention of poetic forms in the last century and a half, much as I appreciate some of its products, has progressed at the expense and exclusion of antecedent formal constraints: my impression is that most journals of poetry don’t even take rhyming couplets anymore as an editorial decision—partly under the expectation that nobody can do it well, that they are bound to tumble off the shoulders of the giants of the Western Canon and spiral towards a fiery and generally messy doom. It’s easy to imitate rhyming and metrical patterns and let a work fall into parody, but I almost wish for epic poetry of genuine earnest and good faith.

I’m sure it’s out there, and I just don’t know about it. That’s one of the first rules of art consumption in any medium: never assume that something hasn’t been done. I got a taste of the possibilities when I attended Derek Walcott’s reading at the University of Alberta last month, and I’m really going to have to look into Omeros, Walcott’s reinvention of Homer’s Odyssey.

This is all a fancy setup, by the way, for one of my ill-conceived what’s-the-big-ideas: why not deploy the heroic epic in the genre of science fiction?

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By far the most amusing story on the outing of a certain Harry Potter character (and I know it’s by now ubiquitously known, but I have unconverted readers and will maintain a strict policy of not spoiling anything for them, as I swear to you they will read the books eventually) is this succinct article from CBBC Newsround, the children’s edition of the BBC:

Fans at New York’s Carnegie Hall were initially stunned into silence by the announcement, but soon started clapping and cheering.

JK said: “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy.”

The news should help to clear up lots of rumours about [the character’s] mysterious past once and for all.

Yes, I’m quite sure it will.

Rowling has made some additional statements, defending the supposed lack of textual evidence or relevance by arguing that the character “did have, as I say, this rather tragic infatuation, but that was a key part of the ending of the story so there it is. Why would I put the key part of my ending of my story in Book 1?” And she’s quite right. Spoilers follow.

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