Malcolm Muggeridge used to say, “the camera always lies”. His denunciation was frequently made while holding forth in front of a camera – he seemed to enjoy sawing off the branch on which he was perched. According to Muggeridge the camera was a perfect example of what William Blake meant when he wrote:

They ever must believe a lie
Who see with, not through, the eye.

I wonder what he would have made of Youtube; he probably would have hated it.

Like much of the Internet, Youtube has given the common man a means to express himself, wresting it away from the grasp of the elite – who generally are inclined to overindulge man’s natural tendency to lie. This isn’t such a bad thing: with 10 hours of video being uploaded every second, the lies will tend to cancel each other out.

From the Post:

YouTube at five: how its videos became our collective memory.

Chances are, we never would have heard of Susan Boyle without YouTube.

If the frumpy Scottish songstress had blown away a skeptical audience with her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” in April of 2004 rather than April of 2009, no one except those who were watching Britain’s Got Talent on television that evening would know the name Susan Boyle. The more than 120 million people around the world who watched Ms. Boyle’s television debut would likely never have seen the rags-to-riches story.

That’s because five years ago, YouTube didn’t exist.

While it’s hard to imagine a world without YouTube, it was just five years ago last Saturday that a trio of ex-PayPal employees joined forces to register a Web address which would eventually become a site where anyone could post videos to the Internet.

A few months later, the first video, “Me at the Zoo,” was uploaded to YouTube’s servers, kicking off a revolution that would fundamentally change the role video and the Web play in our culture, altering our collective consciousness and helping millions of people understand obscure references from The Simpsons.

Today, YouTube is the world’s largest repository for video clips on the Internet, with a mind-boggling 10 hours of new video uploaded to the site every second and more than 100 million videos watched every day. It is now physically impossible for any human being to watch every video on YouTube in the span of a single lifetime.

I took my mother to see Titanic when it came out. As soon as the first actor spoke, I knew it was a mistake: my mother at the time was in her late 70s, but her mind was – I was going to say the equal of a 20 year old’s – when idling, the equal of the combined mental capacity of fifteen average 20 year olds concentrating hard. She liked her films to contain interesting dialogue, a commodity that had been thoroughly expunged from Titanic.

So my expectations from James Cameron’s latest attempt to turn the graphics backdrop of Far Cry 2 into a film were low. I watched it this evening and was not disappointed; my mother, were she still with us, would not have approved.

Leaving aside the inevitable demonising of the military, large corporations and industry, the lionising of noble savages in ecstatic pantheistic harmony with their computer game vegetation – all of which are irritating enough in their own right – the dialogue was so mind-numbingly trite, it make Titanic look like Proust.

For those who are interested and want to save 3 hours, the story is: nasty men want a rare mineral that is under the noble savages’ village. Nasty men try to kill noble savages to get rare mineral; some enlightened scientists and a crippled soldier help the noble savages drive out the evil humans with bows and arrows and send them back to their own planet which is not green; in fact Gaia earth is dead. Finis.

And it was very long.

Other than that, I enjoyed it from the professional perspective of marvelling at how many hours it took to render so many pixels for so little edification.

I watched the film “Angels and Demons” this evening. If you are tempted, don’t bother: the religion is wrong, the science is more or less wrong and it commits the cardinal (not a pun, really) sin of being boring: the hero played by Tom Hanks is Indiana Jones on a valium overdose. The supposed contention  between religion and science is part of the plot, but in such a ham-fisted way that even the casual viewer will come away convinced that there is no contention. There is an anti-matter bomb whose only reason for being in the film, as far as I can tell, is so the heroine can talk about the God particle. The Higgs boson actually has no more to do with God than any other particle; nevertheless, its appearance is portrayed as  somehow challenging God since it was present “at the moment of creation”. The anti-matter bomb also blows up, of course, but, really, an anti-matter bomb isn’t terribly practical:

Antimatter is a real substance, first theorized in 1928. “Every time you squeeze a lot of energy into a small space, you produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter,” Landua explains. “Nature doesn’t like to create just one sort; it always produces both to keep a balance. I compare it to digging a hole in the sand, and then you have a pile next to it. You can’t do one without the other.” The first antielectron was produced in 1932, and particle accelerators helped scientists create the first antiproton in 1955. Antimatter was first produced at CERN in 1995, though not by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But unlike in the movie—where CERN has produced a gram of antimatter—the facility has actually only produced a small amount of the substance. “In the movie, we switch on the LHC and it produces a gram of antimatter in a few minutes,” Landua says. “That’s not possible for two reasons: It would need much more energy to do it—with present efficiency, it would take 10 ^ 22 joules—and the reality of how quickly antimatter can be produced … it would take about a billion years to produce a gram. We can make about a billionth of a gram in a year.”

All of this I could forgive if I had been entertained: alas, the film is dull. The acting is stilted, the characters unconvincing and the plot silly. The worst part is the Tom Hanks character wasn’t killed, so he could be back.