The Best Jesus vs. Dinosaur Fight Scene Award, 2007

The Best Jesus vs. Dinosaur Fight Scene Award for 2007 goes to Jeff Rowland, and will probably be the same for 2008, or forever, if nobody can top this.

This post is about movies that I have watched recently.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a pretty awesome movie, and I would like to thank whoever leaked the R5 dvdrip because frankly, we were dying out here. I need to watch this again.

And not knowing anything about film as an art-form, for me it usually boils down to whether I would watch something again or not. In rare cases there are movies which I really liked but could not bring myself to watch again, but none of this set falls into that category. Also, given that I watch movies almost exclusively via torrents and have only so many gigabytes of disk space to work with, a Darwinian imperative comes into play, with the delete key playing the role of Grim Reaper.

Once a year or so, when I am mildly depressed, I watch Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi, better known to the anglophone world as Spirited Away. Something about it soothes the soul.

Why do I watch the same thing again and again? I don’t know. There are many books I re-read, some of them regularly. Part of it is the simple comfort of familiar ground, and part of it is the precise opposite of that, a delving into things that you haven’t noticed before. And there’s something else, I think; things that you return to have -even if in a small way- mythic importance, and myth thrives on resonance and recurrence.

But we were talking about movies.

Sunshine is an unexpectedly great sf movie. A big part of the unexpectedness is that the cast includes that androgynously pretty dude from Breakfast on Pluto, Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four, and Michelle Yeoh. And yes, it works. May or may not watch it again, depending on whether the mood strikes before I run out of disk space.

Wanted, on the other hand, is a movie that sucks tremendously badly. Not only is it a stupid movie, it manages to not have anything to do with the Wanted comic. This isn’t just me complaining about adaptations: for example, I thought the last Harry Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix, was a pretty great movie that stripped away most of the tedious dross from the book. It is possible for a movie to improve on a book, especially if it has Helena Bonham Carter in it. Wanted, on the other hand, raises the question -what’s left in this story that ties it to the comic Wanted? The book was not great, but it had a fierce humour, a great love of the pulp and trash of the spandex-pants superhero genre, and perfect dedication to the spirit of being an asshole. The movie was just… damp. Deleted after watching, and had a shower.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall was not bad. I generally prefer movies with explosions in them, eh, but I had to see the post-Veronica Mars Kristen Bell. And on seeing her, I suppose I realized that it wasn’t Kristen Bell that I thought was so awesome, it was Veronica Mars, and Sarah Marshall was somebody else altogether. Which in turn is something of a compliment to Kristen Bell, I suppose. But basically, candyfloss comedy, not the sort of thing I could stand to watch twice.

One more: Teeth; also unexpectedly a good movie. I don’t fault plots for being predictable, because that would apply to every story mentioned so far. Pitch-perfect as horror-comedy, I think, where every moment of the one is also one of the other. The abstinence-movement meetings, for example, are funny, but also horrific; the castration scenes are horrific, but also hilarious. Only the self-aware, mocking tone of the whole thing makes it shallow. It’s difficult to make a film genuinely surrealistic, I suppose; it looks too much like the real world. But if this were a book or a comic book, I think it could have transcended mere cleverness.

The Kill Your Boyfriend Quote Generator …

The Kill Your Boyfriend Quote Generator is making me want to go dig it up and read it again.

The Comic Book Scripts Archive has a few gems -it’s surprising, when you look at the ones you’ve read, you realize that in some cases the writer laid it all out exactly, and in some cases the artist did pretty much everything except plot and dialogue. The “Archive” is sadly incomplete, of course. Some day people will start publishing the scripts as an art form in themselves, but that day doesn’t seem to be here yet.

The Almanac of Precariomancy is yet another tarot deck (featuring The Intern, The Manager and The Conspiracy), simplified in the service of political idealism and in many ways gutted of much of the ambiguous symbolism that makes the older variations so interesting.

A hand-drawn tree of life can be strangely compelling.

I assume you’ve all already seen Weezer’s Pork and Beans video. It’s so viral I feel ill.

What’s the literacy rate of Sri Lanka? …

What’s the literacy rate of Sri Lanka? I read a post by Kasun Herath over my morning coffee with the neighbourhood meta-aggregator. In the process of laboriously re-debunking the much-debunked myth that humans only use 10% of their brains, Herath makes a passionate plea to Sri Lankans to get their shit together, etc., and notes that our literacy rate of 92% should help in this endeavour. Now, this number is interesting, because it may well turn out to be as much of a myth as the idea that people only use 10% of their brains.

First, the obvious preliminaries. According to the CIA World Factbook, based on the 2001 census, is 90.7% of the total population (male 92.3%, female 89.1%) is literate. These numbers are matched by Department of Census and Statistics, UNESCO and USAID survey figures in the last decade, varying only slightly. Definitions of literacy used in these surveys are generally “age 15 and over, can read and write”, where at least one survey admits that “literacy data are generally based on self-declaration (i.e. one person, usually the head of the household, indicates whether each member of the household is literate or not)”. This isn’t just a Sri Lankan problem (see below paragraph for a very Sri Lankan problem), but a methodological flaw in how “literacy” is measured in general.

According to the Department of Census and Statistics in their special Millennium Development Goals survey, the literacy rate is 95.8% (male 94.8%, female 96.6%) in the 15-24 range. Their definition of literacy is the percentage of the population in the 15-24 range who can “both read and write fluently or read fluently and write with difficulty in everyday life”. My emphasis, obviously. The Department’s own census in 2001 measured that the 15-24 age group to be 19% of the total population, so this indicator is being restricted to the fifth of the population likeliest to be in late secondary or tertiary education (this is presumably because the relevant Millennium Development Goal is about achieving universal primary education, though I don’t see how measuring literacy at secondary/tertiary levels is supposed to help with that) and being given a lax definition of “literacy” -it doesn’t say if they got to simply declare themselves fluent or not fluent, or if there was some sort of test. I doubt, however, that they were more rigourous than all the surveys (including their own) mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you take the pass rates for the GCE Ordinary Level language exams, perhaps that would provide a better picture of how many 16-year-olds in the school system could be considered fluent in their native languages? Discounting English (since it would drive the numbers down badly), the averaged pass rate for Sinhala and Tamil in 2006 was 81.3%. This doesn’t include 16-year-olds who didn’t take the exam or aren’t in school, of course, which would drive the number down again.

Meanwhile, a presentation by Chandra Gunawardena of the Open University, 1995 (PDF) reporting on a survey of literacy in disadvantaged communities in Sri Lanka, says pretty much what I was going to say: the official statistics are optimistic, to put it charitably, and most of the data above relies on self-declarations of literacy, or overly simplified tests. This survey tested 50 households each from 12 disadvantaged communities (including urban and rural working class, slum, fishing and plantation communities), age 10 years and above, meaning that the survey results are biased to begin with, not to mention being more than a decade out of date. That said, the survey is interesting because respondents were tested on both claimed literacy rate (self-declaration) and an “actual” literacy rate, based on several tests of reading, comprehension, oral interviews, writing in context, and so forth. This is the disparity between claimed and actual literacy, averaged, in these communities: claimed 83%, actual 60.1%. Even given the various caveats about the limitations of this survey, this says bad things about the tendency to exaggerate or overestimate in self-declaration.

So, what’s the magic number? Given all of the above, it is probably not below, say, 60%, but it is almost certainly not as high as 90%. We’re not going to know until someone replicates something like the above study for a national sample. And that’s not gonna happen as long as everyone clings frantically to the 90% myth in a desperate attempt to find something to feel good about.