Across the Universe (2007)

Took the anonymous housemate to Julie Taymor's Across the Universe for his birthday last night. It's a mess, but a beautiful, groovy mess. Taymor previously directed Titus (1999) and Frida (2002).

Comparisons of Across the Universe to Moulin Rouge are fairly apt. It's a post-modern musical using songs by the Beatles sung by various cast members, including at least a couple who don't have professional-grade voices (not to mention Eddie Izzard, who speaks his rendition of "Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite"). As in Moulin Rouge, the use of normal voices lends a winning feeling of naturalism and vulnerability to what is otherwise an entirely artificial concoction. The dramatic structure and flow is nowhere near as coherent or powerful as Moulin Rouge, however.

Basically, it's a bunch of really imaginative eye-candy matched to groovy tunes. The way that much of the dancing is developed out of normal, mundane movements is quite clever as well, particularly a typically crowded sidewalk scene in Manhattan that becomes a massive dance and also a football practice that becomes an acrobatic ballet. Some of the set pieces, such as the gospel version of "Let It Be" used for a montage of simultaneous funerals for a soldier killed in Vietnam and the victims of a race riot, are very moving.

The movie was apparently taken away from Taymor and re-edited against her wishes. It's hard to say without more knowledge how much of the narrative mess is a result of clashing aesthetic choices. The story meanders. It does not pull its many strands together. It leaves many questions. (How did Jude learn to draw? How did Max kick the habit -- or did he?) But this is a visual feast, and I'm tempted to see it again just for the swirling spectacle. Then again, I'm a sucker for post-modern musicals.

Update: Looks like I was wrong about the re-edit. The production company was apparently unhappy with Taymor's original edit and did their own much shorter edit, but what was released in the theater was apparently pretty close to Taymor's original edit.

Dunbar's number

I'm not on Facebook and don't have any plans to join, but those who are might be interested in this semi-amusing (and perhaps semi-informative) take on Facebook etiquette: The Facebook Commandments - How to deal with unwanted friend requests, the ethics of de-friending, and other social networking etiquette predicaments by Reihan Salam. What jumped out at me in reading the article was this bit, in a consideration of the right number of Facebook friends: "Noted anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that the mean clique -- a group of primary social partners -- consists of around 12 people. Average maximum network size -- a group of real friends plus friends of friends -- is around 150."

Consulting Wikipedia's article on Dunbar's number, I see that Dunbar actually calculated a mean group size of 147.8, which is a much funnier number. But I digress.

I note in passing that I currently have 108 Friends on LJ, although some of those are actually the same people in different guises, but what this really got me thinking about was fanzine mailing lists and the whole topic of Big Tent vs. Elitist Fandom. I think the current mailing list for Chunga is around 200 people, and I seem to recall that Rob Hansen gave 200 as the ideal size for a mailing list in his fanzine Epsilon way back in the Dark Ages Golden Age of the '70s.

One of the things I've always enjoyed about mailing out a zine is that it's like a little convention in my head, where each label represents somebody I know. The process of putting the label on the envelope is like saying howdy to a friend at a convention. But there are always those names on the list that are unfamiliar -- inherited from somebody else's mailing list, handed down from generation to generation, presumed to be a fanzine fan of some repute that I'm just not familiar with yet. When I was TAFF administrator, my address database expanded with dozens of voters whom I had never met or heard of but who were known to fans I did know. It embarrassed me at the time not to know some of the people (including Christian McGuire, who turned out to be the chair of the next year's Worldcon in LA and who is running for TAFF this year), but maybe it's just a testament to the limits of our social networking capacities.

Which isn't to say that Big Tent Fandom is a mistake or impracticable, by any means. It's more to say that maybe Elitist, Exclusionary (aka Core) Fandom is just an attempt to keep the personal social network manageable. The mistake, really, is to imagine that your particular social network within fandom is the elite or the center around which everything else rotates. Fandom is a bunch of overlapping social networks, and many of us share parts of each others' networks. It's always fascinating to look at my Friends' Friends lists to see who of my Friends is one of theirs.

Uh, did I have a point? I think it's that there can only be 147.8 fanzine fans, and if you try to replace me, you shall die! You can, however, be a smof, no problem.

Nah, that's not it at all.