Some sort of insomniac response to Benedict C. as Alan T. ...

The beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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28 December

* Contains some spoilers *

This has the beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)

Section 1 of Alan Turing's paper is headed 'The imitation game', but its title is 'Computing machinery and intelligence', @ImitationGame...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 31, 2014

It was not the first visit to Bletchley Park (@BParkPodcast), but a friend who had not already been and who came to an excellent amateur production (at The ADC Theatre (@adctheatre)) of Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code was then taken there that same weekend : we easily agreed, seeing The Imitation Game (2014) together (@ImitationGame), that it could have given no such impetus, because it is best watched by someone knowing little about BP or Alan Turing (and unprepared to know more) :

One wishes to be wrong, but The @ImitationGame (2014) seems no more likely than Enigma (2001) to cause people to visit @BParkPodcast ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

It is fanciful in the extreme to show people trying to crack a code who not only have no notion what would / should happen, if they did so, but who are also – in consequence, and as if such decisions could would be left to them – left squabbling about what to do.

Not only that, but it is presented as if, finding out in the middle of the night on the edge of what is now Milton Keynes in the early 1940s, that someone’s mother is about to be eaten by a shark on a remote beach, one can simply summon up a passing shark-hunter (via the offices of the beneficent Steven Spielberg, no doubt)…

-> Falsifying facts in The @ImitationGame about Turing's war, the bombe machine, Hugh Alexander, etc. does not even serve a good story ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

-> Justified by the 'twisted genius' slant (e.g. of A Beautiful Mind (2001)), to hell with how, with whom and when Enigma was broken ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

-> Just to make out that Turing - alongside Mark Strong (as a creepier Jeremy Northamthan Enigma's (2001)) - decided who lived or died...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Some film-posters make more fanciful claims than others :

Only by oddly defining 'British' (or 'film') is @ImitationGame 'The best British film of the year' (poster), @dimensionsmovie - Mr.Turner ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2014

The worst thing about the film (because there were not just half-a-dozen codebreakers, and only one woman amongst them) was also a source of the best : Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) reaching out to what he found kindred in Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), and the sense of their valuing and encouraging (the best in) each other.

Though, that said, it did feel as if one had been there before, with the premiere of Dimensions : A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads, at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) in 2011… :

Not uniquely, @dimensionsmovie, but more than a little reminded of Stephen and Annie by @imitationgame (2014)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2014

Period touches in Graham Moore's script for The @ImitationGame - such as KeiraKnightley (as Joan Clarke) three times exclaiming O My God ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Of course, depressing a key on an Enigma machine, and seeing the correlate light up, beats The @ImitationGame, too : http://t.co/7gOTiDec2v
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Of course, the film has a number of good things about it, from Alexandre Desplat's score settling down nicely, after seeming too prominently like the tappings of Morse Code (even if he is made to over-egg the sentiment at the end ?), to evoking in miniatures the horrors and hypocrisy of Sherborne, but they feel in the significant minority.

Quite a fun, knowing review, from Michael Phillips at @chicagotribune, of The @ImitationGame... : http://t.co/C1t1WrovKh
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Geoff Pevere, in The @globeandmail, is also quite interesting about The @ImitationGame : http://t.co/y7GCR57CBt
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

So the friend (a former animator) had the same reservations about the doom-laden flights / convoys in impossibly tight formations - that they were designed to have an instant content for those who know nothing about The Second World War, and sought thereby to make a virtue of their alien look and qualities* :

Oh, and the CGI in The @ImitationGame and what, despite achieving period costume / scenes (as people flee The Blitz), it inaptly connotes !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

End-notes

* Almost as if machines themselves were waging war, whilst, quite clearly in the editing, we have counterpointed the quiet, calm Turing (supposedly infuriating everyone's patience by being unnecessarily fastidious), but biding his time to rob such machines of their brutal power with a different sort and class of machine...

Yawn ! (Facile sub-Matrix juxtaposition to enliven any in the audience who are uninformed about Turing (and who he was for our times) with a subliminal notion of those things, i.e. that he is Neo to Agent Smith's machine-world...)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

News from Writer's Rest

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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8 September

Lindsay's latest posting at http://writersrest.com/2012/09/06/pretending-to-be-human-the-latest-thing-in-robo-calls/#comment-1542 has enthused me to write this :


Ah, The Turing Test, one of the beloved things that returns and returns, and always pays returns!

I always had an interest in Alan Turing and his fellow theorists and code-breakers, and had been to the place that gave rise to the present GCHQ (the UK’s Government Communications HQ), but seeing the play about his life, brilliantly performed by an all-amateur cast, had me taking my then girlfriend that same weekend to that place in Buckinghamshire, Bletchley Park.

Turing’s sister (who calls him Alan M. Turing) has written a book about him, which I shall some day read, as I shall some day read the text of the play and be amazed again at how much the actor who played him embodied that role and knew a huge role almost word perfect.

For now, I see a little bit of his lively mind and thinking from the thirties and through and beyond the Second World War, and feel moved to support the campaign that he should be pardoned for being gay before his time, and also for his seeming suicide to be looked at not as the self-crime that it then was in law.


If that does not encourage you to visit Writer's Rest, I admit failure...


Plus there's now :

Another thing is that the best AI is where the money is being sought: it is not in the very unconvincing services that ‘direct your call’ by getting you to press 1 then 3 then 2, etc., etc., or the stilted automated announcements at the station, as they have no interest in conveying the notion that they are persons, just suitably comprehensible cut-up bits of persons’ voices.

Actually, that is no false economy, but not pretending to be any more than one is, whereas those who use highly developed AI fail to realize how objectionable people will almost always find a however-clever machine that rings them up, if they catch it out as one, and may have to learn a difficult lesson about what matters to human-beings.

The reason? Simply the same affront at a computer seeming to personalize a form-letter, but addressing me incompetently as Mrs Apsley, because of the principle rubbish in, rubbish out – the seeming care about me as this mythical ‘valued customer’ is belied by not even knowing who I am! Just as irritating as if the new doctor calls one by the wrong name, but he or she can be corrected, and should apologize…


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Turing tested

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 August

Turing tested

For Lucy


Can we can safely say
That, not having
An optical computer,
Alan Turing could have been
On the German side
Without a difference?:

The Allies had, not just him,
But secure code-books,
A machine that Axis hadn't seen
(Without Enigma's flaw),
And the Germans not knowing
Enigma and Lorenz cracked

So the Germans had their pride,
Relying on technology whose
Non-self-encryption
Left them more open,

And, never knowing the truth,
Could only have set Turing
A tougher task: to break
The Allies' code,
Probably not listening
If he challenged their
Self-assurance


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Not yet the festival

Saying that, to-night's special science showing of Enigma had all the hallmarks of the best festival events:

* A packed screening

* An introduction from the front

* A talk By Dr James Grime (pictured), infomed by a demonstration, about what we were about to see in terms of what the Enigma machine was, did and why it was important to decode its messages and who worked out how to do it

* The film itself, which was rather more implausible thriller - complete with the unlikely prodigious agility and speed of a Cambridge mathematician who did not look in shape - pinned onto the background of the workings of Bletchley Park than any meaningful story

* A chance to ask questions about the accuracy of details in the film, the set-up at BP, and the Engima machine, as well as to photograph it and even press a key and see a different letter light up, still working 75 years on!

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