Bangkok cinemas, some of them, have taken to offering movies in “4D.” Now the moving images are complemented with smells—certain colorful old cinemas, sadly gone now, were way ahead of them on that front. And you might get rumblings in your seat, though these are often now more in sync with events on the screen that the tremblors from street traffic outside used to be. Other effects include fog and drizzle and stuff they originally built cinemas to shield you from while you watched a movie.
So that’s one excuse for having seen the latest Transformers flick.
And today, on behalf of Leary, I promulgate the original Ellie’s Law:
The quality of a modern movie is inversely related to the quantity of money available to make it.
Two things, here. First, you’ve got the hi-tech toybox of special effects, and the idea that, if they’re there, you’ve got to use them. Then you’ve got the destruction-of-life-and-property and the special-effects indexes, and the pole is constantly being raised. Movies are rated, in Bangkok as elsewhere, by the collective weight of mashed vehicles (robots, spacecraft, whatever) and the splash radius of blood.
The upshot? You have a much better chance of seeing a good movie if the film-maker has nothing to rely on but the quality of the script, the acting and the directing — as in low-budget films made in Ireland and Canada.
Leary tells me that Ellie, whom he likes to describe as a friggin’ genius, has also applied the notion of inverse relations to natural laws of political behavior (notably in the USA and other countries she could mention at this time). Leary says I should feel free to include some of these laws in my draft of The Intelligent Politician’s Practical Handbook, and I present them here.
In so-called democracies—roughly speaking, systems of government incorporating elected representatives of the population—certain invariant laws and corollaries tend to obtain. (Leary says Ellie—did he mention she’s smart as a whip?—can talk this way at the drop of a hat, and often does.)
* The effectiveness of a political message is inversely related to the complexity of its content.
* The simplicity of a political message is inversely related to its connectedness with anything important it has to say about political, social and economic realities.
* In any so-called democracy, a political candidate’s chance of success is inversely related to the complexity of his messages to the electorate, and directly related to their simplicity ( whether messages or electorate, you may be thinking).
Visitors may wish to add their own rules to this list.
Ellie is Leary’s second wife, the woman he married in 2029. She was driven to suicide by Brian Finister (a.k.a. Brian the Evil Canadian) circa 2035. Her subsequent resurrection as what was merely supposed to be a hi-rez ebee (electronic being), and Brian’s ultimate sex slave, actually heralded the next stage in evolution and helped to prove that evil genius’s undoing. (Read Syn, awaiting publication, for the whole story.)