Maths/Stats Question

A section to discuss matters not related to Chess in particular.
John McKenna

Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by John McKenna » Thu May 12, 2016 1:16 am

All that green reminds me - what about Tom's performance in The Green Mile?

Did I hear someone say "Bog standard"?

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Fri May 13, 2016 1:00 am

Everybody Wants Some.

Tom Hanks movies? No, this is Richard Linklater’s not unentertaining white-boy nostalgia-fest shown at Everyman Screen on the Green tonight.

Dudes and their love interests arrive for college, September 1980. The recently concluded Korchnoi-Polguavesky Candidates’ match is not discussed.

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Sat May 14, 2016 4:15 pm

Our Kind of Traitor

The young Obi Wan Kenobi looks bored as - for no readily apparent reason - he helps overly hammy Russian Mafia boss avoid gruesome retribution from his employer. Damien Lewis has a chess set on his coffee table because spies.

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Sun May 15, 2016 7:57 pm

My Neighbour Totoro

Another great film from the Studio Ghibli season. Very different to Laputa Castle in the Sky and it doesn’t have any chess in it either


The Bayou Maharajah

Great documentary about the - previously entirely unknown to me - New Orleans pianist James Booker. Dead at 43 after a lifetime of addiction to drugs and alcohol. No chess although thinking about it I wonder if some parallels could be drawn between Booker’s life/early death in and that of Paul Morphy.

AustinElliott
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by AustinElliott » Sun May 15, 2016 8:40 pm

John McKenna wrote:Last film I saw was Bridge of Spies and it was good - even the real-life Samaritan played by Tom Hanks was good. But, the low-key Soviet agent played by Mark Rylance was also good. The film is about authority coming to terms with itself by relaxing its grip just enough to let very different kinds of people breathe a little easier after almost choking them to death.
Lots of fascinating aspects to the Gary Powers/Rudolf Abel Cold War saga, but the one that most tickles me is that 'Soviet master-spy' Rudolf Abel was born and raised on Tyneside, and attended Whitley Bay High School.

John McKenna

Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by John McKenna » Sun May 15, 2016 11:49 pm

Austin, I suspect that you may be off an age to remember the claustrophobia and paranoia of the 1960s, which the film faithfully conveyed. I thought the movie could really only fully speak its message to an audience of such people.
Rudolf Abel, as played by Mark Rylance, certainly was a laid-back, stand-up kind of spy. Great European mimetic performance - to complement Hanks' all-American one - that eventually stole the show.

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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by AustinElliott » Mon May 16, 2016 10:28 pm

John McKenna wrote:Austin, I suspect that you may be off an age to remember the claustrophobia and paranoia of the 1960s, which the film faithfully conveyed. I thought the movie could really only fully speak its message to an audience of such people.
Rudolf Abel, as played by Mark Rylance, certainly was a laid-back, stand-up kind of spy. Great European mimetic performance - to complement Hanks' all-American one - that eventually stole the show.
Thanks, John.

I was born at the start of the 60s, so I remember it more through later (70s) movies and through the accounts of my parents - e.g. my dad joking that, because he'd been on the Aldermaston marches and had once attended a scientific conference in Moscow, he must have an MI5 file, or my mother telling me that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most scared she had ever been. My father was actually an Oxford college contemporary of David Cornwell (AKA John Le Carre), and I read all his early books as a teenager. So the Cold War period has always fascinated me, kind of as a backdrop to my early life somewhat dimly perceived. Indeed, it was reading an article about the imminent Fischer v Spassky match, and it's Cold War context, in 1972 that sparked my interest in chess as an 11-yr old.

Anyway, you have convinced me that the movie is worth seeing. Off to Netflix...

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Mon May 16, 2016 10:47 pm

Mustang
John McKenna wrote:Austin, I suspect that you may be off an age to remember the claustrophobia and paranoia of the 1960s, which the film faithfully conveyed. I thought the movie could really only fully speak its message to an audience of such people.

If the part of John’s post that I"ve highlighted is true, that’s a sign of the film maker(s)' failure. I, for example, have never been a young girl growing up in Turkey*. I’ve never had to come to terms with my place within a stifling patriarchy nor deal with the virulent misogyny of those around me. And yet Mustang absolutely "spoke its message" to me. I felt the drama of the sisters’ lives. I felt the joy, the laughter, the despair, the anguish the devestating sadness. And the hope. Every single life-affirming minute of it.

I’ve been seeing the argument that John puts forward quite a lot in various ways recently. You can’t get Deadpool unless you’ve read the comic books. You won’t really grasp Captain America: Civil War unless you’ve seen all the other Marvel films being two examples. I simply don’t trust it. The best films take you somewhere you don’t know - somewhere you’d didn’t even know you want to go - and have you love the journey.

Anyhoo, Mustang: Beautifully shot with with a superb soundtrack to boot and stand out performances from the whole cast, especially Gunes Sensoy as Lale. Very much a Must See film.

No chess.







* or anywhere else for that matter.
Last edited by Jonathan Bryant on Tue May 17, 2016 8:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Mon May 16, 2016 11:24 pm

PS: John will no doubt be delighted to hear that I have booked to see Tom Hanks’ A Hologram for a King on Wednesday next week. I’ll report back in due course.

John McKenna

Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by John McKenna » Tue May 17, 2016 12:16 am

AustinElliott wrote: Thanks, John.

I was born at the start of the 60s, so I remember it more through later (70s) movies and through the accounts of my parents - e.g. my dad joking that, because he'd been on the Aldermaston march... or my mother telling me that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most scared she had ever been. My father was actually an Oxford college contemporary of David Cornwell (AKA John Le Carre), and I read all his early books as a teenager. So the Cold War period has always fascinated me... Indeed, it was reading an article about the imminent Fischer v Spassky match, and it's Cold War context, in 1972 that sparked my interest in chess as an 11-yr old.

Anyway, you have convinced me that the movie is worth seeing. Off to Netflix...
Thanks for sharing, Austin. Hope you enjoy the film. I may say more later. Watch this space, please.

John McKenna

Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by John McKenna » Tue May 17, 2016 12:33 am

Jonathan Bryant wrote:PS: John will no doubt be delighted to hear that I have booked to see Tom Hanks’ A Hologram for a King on Wednesday next week. I’ll report back in due course.
Jonathan, thanks for starting this thread (even though you did so under somewhat dubious math/stats starter) and for being open-minded enough to give Tom's latest movie a (re)viewing.

Just time to add that I admire your ability to put yourself in others' shoes. I agree that it can be done to a certain degree. However, I could never imagine that watching a film about a major historical event of, for example, WW II, would ever be the same as experiencing it directly.

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Thu May 19, 2016 11:26 pm

John McKenna wrote:I admire your ability to put yourself in others' shoes. I agree that it can be done to a certain degree.
I think we’re talking about different things John. It’s not that I have any special 'putting myself in others shoes' super power. We all do. We will do it whether or not we want to. Empathy being an inherent human trait for all save a relatively few very damaged individuals.

However, if you’re point is that people with different experiences will take different things from a film then I entirely agree. To me, though, that’s about what we receive not the message that a film sends out. Rather different.


Anyhoo, on to tonight’s film. X-Men: Apocalypse has exactly the same problem that Bridge of Spies has. No, not Tom Hanks. It’s that everybody over the age of 8 knows how the film is going to end long before they even get to the cinema. Hence no dramatic tension.

That said, Bridge of Spies is infinitely better made than this dreary X-Men effort.

The one moment I was interested: there’s a chess set in Charles "X-Men Boss" Xavier’s office. No idea why. I guess that’s what you have in your office when you’re in a super hero film. It wasn’t on screen long enough for the audience to see whether it was set up correctly or not and I went back to being rather bored.

John McKenna

Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by John McKenna » Fri May 20, 2016 12:50 am

Thanks for the review, below, Jonathan.

I will respond this Sunday, hopefully.

Meanwhile...

I've seen The Martian!

And, I've got The Wrong Box.

(PS Tom's got type-2 diabetes.)
Jonathan Bryant wrote:
John McKenna wrote:I admire your ability to put yourself in others' shoes. I agree that it can be done to a certain degree.
I think we’re talking about different things John. It’s not that I have any special 'putting myself in others shoes' super power. We all do. We will do it whether or not we want to. Empathy being an inherent human trait for all save a relatively few very damaged individuals.

However, if you’re point is that people with different experiences will take different things from a film then I entirely agree. To me, though, that’s about what we receive not the message that a film sends out. Rather different.


Anyhoo, on to tonight’s film. X-Men: Apocalypse has exactly the same problem that Bridge of Spies has. No, not Tom Hanks. It’s that everybody over the age of 8 knows how the film is going to end long before they even get to the cinema. Hence no dramatic tension.

That said, Bridge of Spies is infinitely better made than this dreary X-Men effort.

The one moment I was interested: there’s a chess set in Charles "X-Men Boss" Xavier’s office. No idea why. I guess that’s what you have in your office when you’re in a super hero film. It wasn’t on screen long enough for the audience to see whether it was set up correctly or not and I went back to being rather bored.

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Fri May 20, 2016 8:01 am

The Martian was the first film that I saw in my current run of cinema going back in October. I remember rather liking it.

The Wrong Box, I hadn’t heard of before.

John McKenna

Re: Maths/Stats Question

Post by John McKenna » Fri May 20, 2016 11:07 am

The Wrong Box is a British comedy classic set in Victorian times. Those two facts make it a doubly-dated film.

I'd last seen it on TV many years ago. I had a somewhat different impression of the film from my memory of watching it all those years ago compared to watching it on DVD recently.

Over time the object (this film) remains the same but does the observer (that me and this me)?

How have I and the things that affect my perception of that film changed over the intervening years?

As I said, Jonathan, I will try to respond on Sunday about your comments on peoples' "different experiences" I.e. their subjectivity (and their objectivity, too, perhaps.)

I'll just say now that, like you, I also "rather liked" The Martian.

It won an unexpected award -

https://www.yahoo.com/celebrity/news/ma ... tml?ref=gs

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