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Reviews
Ready Player One (2018)
Spielberg just too old and does not get video games
I watched this movie in the cinema when it was first released and had not read the book prior to this. I am also in the target market as I am a fan of science fiction and video games. I am also a fan of most Spielberg movies. My initial impression of the movie was slightly disappointment. It is not a terrible movie, but it is certainly no Jaws or ET. Or even Jurassic Park.
Having now read the book, the movie is actually a travesty as an adaptation of the novel. It is essentially a coming-of-age story, mostly set in a virtual RPG world where the real world has suffered some kind of post-apocalyptic melt-down. Role playing games (like World of Warcraft, which is specifically mentioned in the novel) have very specific conventions; like levelling up for example. The movie does a very poor job of presenting that. In the movie its more like a star-trek TNG style holodeck environment. But then when characters die in the movie the main character is driving around in his DeLorean hoovering the shower of coins. That is not only ridiculous but also offensive to anyone who has actually played an RPG game. That is just not how RPG games work. That is how 2-D platform games like Super-Mario work. The novel is essentially a homage to gaming lore, so its quite important that the movie represents the RPG gaming environment recognizably.
So, not only does Spielberg massacre RPG but he also kills off the coming of age aspect of the story. The main character is a high school student for gods sake! There are about 1000 high school movies and the movie's target audience is primarily high school age young adults. The twist is that main character is supposed to be attending high school in the virtual world. That is where he spends most of his time. That is where he makes the great discovery that changes his life ... in a boring class of Latin. His best friend is also a high school student. He does not have a virtual robot design workshop! He has a chat room where he basically 'hangs out' with fanboys. He is famous for playing in Doom style first person shooter games, in which he is one of the most highly rated players. His character is basically like Thanos in Avengers Infinity War.
The one thing I did like about the movie was the museum of the Sheldon Cooper style designer of the matrix style virtual world. This is not in the novel, but it made sense. It also allows the Woz-like character to interact with the main characters in a slightly more credible way. But then Woz gives the main character a quarter as a result of losing a bet. That quarter has great significance in the novel, and winning it just as a result of a trivial side-bet just dramatically undermines the story as presented in the novel.
The main character all start off as high school outcasts and they progress to characters of great power. The main character builds a fortress of solitude style base on his own private asteroid. Just imagine the asteroid field in Star Wars, and the main character has his base in one of those asteroids. And then he has his own giant spaceship to travel around in. That is just crying out for a cinematic adaptation. Yet Spielberg just skips over that.
We also have a complete misrepresentation of I0I, which is a giant corporation which sells the paraphernalia for accessing the virtual word. Sorrento is not some dumb-ass who is best suited to making the coffee and leaves his password on the side of his terminal. He is also not the head of I0I, just the corporate heads department -- tasked with solving the quest. We know from the novel that the main character is very biased against the company, and is not exactly a reliable narrator in this respect. Sorrento is in the novel a powerful and knowledgeable character in his own right. He does not need the help of some school age loser, who in the novel is actually the friend of the main character's best friend. You also cannot just wander around I0I HQ and hide behind the furniture to see what Sorrento is up to. That is just face-palm ridiculous. In the novel I0I has an indentured servitude program for debtors and they have a scarily efficient way of controlling those who are signed up to it. The plan to infiltrate I0I is a major plot point in the novel, and its completely replaced in the movie by I Spy style childish silliness. I0I also does not have a Blade Runner 2049 style head of security who blows up trailer parks and hunts down gamers. That is just totally not in the novel. They do (allegedly) blow up the main characters trailer-park home, but really this is wish-fulfilment by the main character. He lives with his aunt, who unlike Spiderman's kindly helpful aunt, is more like a zombie like junkie who makes our hero's life a misery. The incident is officially written off as a meth-lab explosion, or some such misadventure. I0I does try to eliminate them in the novel, but much more discretely. That is also one of the weak points of the novel, and it would probably be better if it was left more vague than it is.
Another thing that really grates, is the denigration of game and sci-fi cinema history. The central quest in the novel is a history of important games and landmark sci-fi. A central element of the quest is mastering important early arcade games (like Joust and Pac-Man). This can easily be translated to cinema. We have some excellent examples to work from, like Wreck-it-Ralph and Tron. But yet all we get is some I0I dweebs failing to solve Adventure on the Atari 2600. Sorrento has no such trouble in the book, and in fact he makes short work of a game like Joust. In the novel we also have a kind of behind the scenes segment through the movie Blade Runner; which is a seminal film in sci-fi. It is also incredibly cinematic. What does the movie do? It skips Blade Runner and plonks in The Shining instead. Not only is The Shining a horror movie rather than science fiction, the original novel by Stephen King is pretty poor compared to the source material for Blade Runner -- which is a sci-fi masterpiece. I mean, the central twist in The Shining is the word MURDER spelled backwards! REDRUM! That may be enough to please those looking for a quick read at the airport, but its just not on the same level as Philip K Dick.
The ending is equally poor and contrary to the novel. In the novel the characters travel to the land of Woz where they are provided with state of the art VR hardware to use and then they kick Sorrento's ass. There is no Terminator style car chase nonsense. I mean why does I0I in the movie not just drop a bomb on the van. Or just call the police to have them arrested? Its not only just silly, but its the wrong genre. Its not supposed to be a car-chase movie! And from the point of view of a car chase movie, its also pretty poor. Just look at Terminator 2 to see how its done properly. T2 also has the benefit of being proper sci-fi.
So in summary, Spielberg should know better. I mean, he had the author right there helping to write the script. Its not like he understand the story and intentionally wants to make it terrible. Its more like he just does not get it. Kind of like he never got Star Wars. Anyway, this story is probably better suited to a longer serial format ... like a Netflix series. Perhaps similar to the Avatar series (also a coming-of-age story). The ILM animation is great, just the direction and writing is poor. The ILM animation has already been paid for and could easily be reused. The novel has a lot of very cinematic scenes that are just crying out to be animated.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
amateur pretentious twaddle
What happens when Max Fischer graduates from Rushmore and goes to Hollywood? He reads Stephan Zweig and makes a totally pretentious 'art-house' movie 'inspired' by a cursory reading of a few of Zweig's minor novellas. In his own imagination Max Fischer is a great director/playwright (and also master of calculus) but in the real world he is an industrious but dim-witted student whose grades are so low he fails to graduate from high-school. On a subject which he knows something about, which is documenting the torment of his daily life at Westchester High or describing the interactions of the members of his very odd family the level of writing/directing is what one might say juvenile (that is written by a juvenile, and in this case for a juvenile audience) but decent. Now, the young Mr Fischer with a few movies under his belt may well imagine (as he is prone to) that he is the next Dostoyevsky, but that does not make it so. Just as he might imagine himself to be the next Einstein of mathematics when in the real world his endeavours are failed by his 11'th grade math teacher, this work is equally woeful in respect of literature. The really sad thing is that some really quite good actors have fallen for this claptrap, as have almost all professional movie critics.
So what is it about this movie that flags up amateur night most prominently? It is probably the name of the fictional country in which the film is set: the republic of 'Zubrowka'. Which is the trade name of a polish vodka, previously banned from the American market due to a toxic grass extract but which was reformulated specifically for the American market in 2011, and promoted with an equally pretentious 'art-house' advertising campaign. Can you imagine an author like Zweig or Dostoyevsky being so taken by a 30 second vodka spot that they turn it into a novel or play? And these are not Ridley Scott mid-80s European type advertisements (which have some small modicum of artistic merit), but much more run of the mill adverts for the American market (where shouting about a 'monster truck rally' is considered normal fare). At the 'monster' truck rally young Max might have seen an advert for 'my brother is facing the electric chair for a crime he didn't commit ... after his appeals were exhausted we knew there was only one way to get him out ... blam! blam! blam! ... Prison Break! Thursdays 8:30 (9:30 mountain), only on Fox!!'.
Yes dear reader, when the vodka runs out (which takes about 10 minutes) we move straight on to Prison Break. Once the protagonist has broken out of prison (which is very long and tedious, taking about half the movie) we move on to a pursuit by 'Jaws', of the Bond variety. And then it's fair to say it only goes downhill from there.
Now if Wes/Max had stuck with the pretentious pseudo-arty vodka advertisement then the resulting short film would probably have been OK, rescued perhaps by Ralph Fiennes performance. Set design is quite nice but very 'stagey'. It's a bit like one of the plays-within-the-film that Max puts on in Rushmore, which we are led to believe are fairly pedestrian but have amazingly intricate sets. What is missing is the real movie outside of this play within a movie.
For Max's next movie I would suggest a film about a very 'artsy' and pretentious Hollywood writer/director who leads a very dull drab life, is picked on by his peers and is forced to make very stupid movies about monster trucks ... which despite the prosaic subject matter are amazingly intricate and detailed (like transformers as animated by ILM) ... of which we get to see interesting fragments to punctuate an otherwise dull drab cruel world.
Bitter Lake (2015)
important viewing about the history of American involvement with saudi arabia and Afghanistan but padded too much with inconsequential 'found' footage
Overall, as a documentary of American involvement in Afghanistan and its role as the power behind the 'throne' of Saudi Arabia it is overly long and of insufficient substance. There are many long sequences of essentially 'art house' material that does not drive the narrative. The actual narrative is no more than 15 minutes in length, and really that is well worth watching. Is it worth wading through more than 2 hours of 'found footage' for this narrative; for most people, I would say it's not. And that's probably why the BBC decided to release this only online on iPlayer. Even there it's not exactly very well promoted; the BBC's own iplayer search engine will not find it. It is still there but you have to use google to find out where it is. As to the narrative itself there are a number of fundamental flaws. The most important part of which is the importance and relevance of a British role in current affairs; there is a constant refrain of America and Britain, as if the two were somehow a joint force; that Britain somehow leads the way and America follows. It is Britain that industrialises and then so does America. It is British banks in which the Saudis kept their wealth, and it was this wealth that was then lent to people who could not pay it back, and the Americans followed along with this. In reality, it is Britain who has industrialised following its loss of empire, along with other previous European imperial powers like France. And it was British and other European banks that were bankrupted by wall street banks trying to shift their bad loans onto anyone foolish enough to buy them. Yes, a few wall street banks did go bankrupt but today they are stronger than ever. British banks are by contrast still bankrupt, kept alive by state ownership. Yes, there is the 'rust belt' in America where you can find disused factories but there is also 'silicon valley' which is a model of efficient production. In reality there has been a shift in the American economy which has led to decline in some areas and great wealth in others. And that shift is in some way reflected not in Britain in but within the European Union as a whole. Areas such as Britain are in decline but areas such as Germany, Denmark, and Netherlands have no empty factories and are very much in the ascendant.
As for the political narrative that is superimposed onto events this is even more naïve. The image of 'good and evil', of 'liberating' foreign lands and bringing modern 'civilization' and technological progress to backward peoples is straight from 'empire'. The Americans don't really believe this because they quite plainly install corrupt undemocratic client regimes where they can and don't put serious money into improving the countries over which they have dominion. What Curtis is actually describing is the narrative of 'empire' where the British attempted to colonize much of the world including countries such as China and India; and where this did include huge investments to rebuild entire nations in the British imperial image, which was done under the narrative of 'modernization' and 'civilization'. America has always been careful in reflecting this narrative of 'empire' to the British to allow them the illusion of past glory. Curtis uncritically and unthinkingly reflects this back again, apparently unwittingly inwards to a British audience.
Adam Curtis therefore makes fundamental errors in describing our own society. His narrative of Islamic society is much worse. Just as one example; to say the Osama bin Laden as a major influence in the Islamic world is just wrong. He was a member of a (tiny) militant offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which was (and still is) led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri. Curtis knows this because he made a similar (and much better) documentary about 9/11 in 2004. The conclusion of that documentary was that 'al-queda' was an invention of the American intelligence and did not really exist. Here Curtis seems to forget the conclusions of his previous work and play into the conventional narrative put forward by Washington. Rather conveniently, it is all the fault of the 'extreme' views of the 'wahabis'. He draws a rather convenient thread from the extremists who brought the Saudi 'king' to power to the current target of an American bombing campaign in the middle east : Islamic State. Again, this does not in any way reflect the complexities of Islamic society in the middle east but rather a concern some in Washington have about their ally Saudi Arabia, on whom they depend on for oil. Who are Islamic State really? Surely Curtis would be aware of the small band of extremists who started in Mecca and Medina 1400 years ago and whose 'caliphate' within a few years threatened the gates of Constantinople, the imperial capital of the eastern roman empire. The greeks who ran the eastern roman empire had a great fear of these 'crazies' from the desert. Ironically the beliefs of these greeks stemmed from five centuries before this when another small band of 'crazies' threatened the roman empire; a band of extremist jews whose radical interpretation of Plato undermined the belief system of the roman world.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)
a passable prologue and a most disappointing ending ...
Really, this movie has a quite nice prologue ... but as it turns out its all prologue. We see the home front, then a tour of the provinces, followed by the splendour of the capital. A spectacular triumph for the survivors of the gladiatorial games of the past. All the competitors are given a nice blade-runner like intro sequence. They each have a 'special skill' (ie. sort of a super-power). Just in case you missed this, they get another intro via an all-live all-province glammed up TV interview. Very flash! But it is all building up to the 'games' and when we finally get to those games they are over before they really get started.
And it turns out this time its a team sport rather than a first person shooter type of game as in the first movie. Our heroine of course is pretty good with a bow (her 'super power'). But when it comes to choosing team-mates that's when the plot starts to fall down. In a fight to the death with no chance of a reprieve do you (a) choose the carnivorous teeth sharpened jugular biting woman from the district where they have to go head to head with large vicious baboons ('think beauty and the beast -- she's both') or (b) do you choose the nice little old lady who dabbles with healing herbs? Do you go for the guy who can throw a spear with enough force to mow down 5 holograms in a row or do you choose the weirdos in the corner puttering about with the arts & crafts who the others nickname "nuts and volts". Maybe 'Volts' is a misunderstood genius but the herb lady is so old and arthritic she has to be carried everywhere she goes, and her herbs are pretty much useless.
So OK, our heroine is pretty good with a bow but is not very smart and is useless at picking team-mates. But she has an adviser who should know what he is doing; who tells her 'stay away from nuts & volts ... and don't even think about that nice little old lady'. But who does she end up with as team-mates? How does this happen? Its not exactly clear. Supposedly they are planning the great 'revolution', but its not a revolution that our heroine wants any part of. She seems to have no political ideas, and no ideas on how to win the games. I'm quite partial to revolution and political ideas (like Terry Gilliam's Brazil) but actually there is nothing revolutionary or political in this movie. It makes Luke Skywalker look like he has a PhD in political science, so devoid is it of any real social commentary or political insight. OK, she comes from a remote mining district and so is not very well educated, and has little to no social skills or political savvy. And the older wiser authority figure is no Obi-Wan Kenobi who can tell her what is happening or given any useful advice (his special skill seems to be drinking straight from the bottle). And so she gets it into her small unthinking mind that she should sacrifice herself for her 'great love Peeta' (or as we would call him ... Peter). Never mind that she does not really care for him and that their 'love' is a ploy by the state to keep the masses contented. He is a bit like her gay best friend ... useless, no special skills of any kind, always falling over, running into force fields and that kind of thing ... but looks good on TV and and gives good motivational speeches. So of course he is on her team ... and when we finally get to the games she is constantly mumbling 'we have to save Peeta'. That gets old really fast! For 2 hours we wait for these great games to get started (which are supposed to entertain and thrill the entire world's population) and then all we get is a bit of wandering around in the jungle and mumbling about how 'Peeta' must survive. Even though the old lady with the herbs and who need a wheelchair is more likely to live longer than this toyboy! There is no fighting, no devious plots, no 'thumbs up or thumbs down' moments. What is the first thing that happens? 'Peeta' runs into a force field (despite having been given a tutorial about detecting force fields). He should have been blown to bits but seemingly by magic he is brought back to life (no, not by the herb lady -- that would have made too much sense).
Once they've wandered around the jungle a bit they need a plan. The 'game makers' have left a spool of cable lying about and 'Volts' immediately comes up with a 'plan' that is just a rehash of the one he used to win (by some miracle it seems) a previous game. Past games are of course televised and studied by all the gladiators, so anyone could tell you will end in disaster ... and of course it does turn out to be a complete disaster. But then just before being blasted to oblivion our heroine comes up with the idea of plugging an extension cord from the bedroom socket into the kitchen socket. Will this form the great infinite electrical loop that will destroy the world's electrical grid? All that will happen is that if you are not careful you will get a nasty shock and die. And we would say good riddance to them. But our heroine (as if by magic) survives the nasty shock, being only stunned ... but is mistaken for dead by the 'game makers' who helicopter her seemingly dead body out. Depriving us of the GAME! The title being "Hunger Games" ... and the so called 'games' end seemingly before they have begun. Games which we have waited more than 2 hours to get started. Now that is a disappointment!
Insomnia (2002)
Dumbed down remake of fine Norwegian original
Movie Reviews =============
Insomnia -------- Everything about this remake reeks of an attempt to censor the original Norwegian film. While no masterpiece, the central attraction of the original film is the morally ambiguous central figure. Outwardly a sophisticated metropolitan hero detective who always get his man and who presents an image of virtue and integrity, the real person is very different. Initially we buy into the image of hero, but the more we see how he operates in private the more we begin to doubt his moral integrity. Everything he does after we are initially introduced to him seems to cast further doubt on his character, and it seems that he is sinking into a quagmire partly of his own making. In the end a fortuitous events resolve matters, the crime is solved and the hero leaves town basking in the glory of another success. All the messy details are packed up and swept away.
And so it is of great surprise that the Hollywood remake, like some nasty corporate censor, erases every single act which shows the protagonists moral slide downwards. First of all our expectations are dampened in the remake by making the protagonist not a hero cop, but a cop who is being investigated by internal affairs and sent into 'exile' for various misdeeds in the past. He seems a decent guy, but then his own partner says he is going to inform on him. He admits to out and out framing a criminal in at least one case. This it seems weighs heavily on his mind. This makes him a rather tarnished police officer. We are also not really given any indication of past heroism or why other police officers would look up to him. The original introduces the protagonist as an effective investigator as he takes charge, finds new clues, makes television broadcasts and so on. This is missing in the remake. He remarks as an aside that the murderer has washed the victims's hair, but it doesn't sink in. The introduction ends when the partner is shot and killed and we begin the moral descent.
First we meet a rebellious stroppy teen who wants something 'exciting'. The protagonist gives her an extended and unpleasant grope before showing her the place where the body of her friend was found. In the remake this is deleted and the protagonist plays a game of chicken with an oncoming truck instead, which is stupid, out of character as well as pointless.
Next we meet a dog that is destined to receive the substitute bullet. Our protagonist has killed his partner (by accident) and the bullet will eventually identify him. During a gun battle with the villain, our protagonist by chance finds the villains gun, something he keeps to himself. Having the villain's gun in his possession he shoots something with it, digs out the bullet and replaces it with the one the coroner found. The dog acts as substitute for a human gunshot victim. In the original the shooting of the dog is quite a gruesome episode. In the remake, the dog is already dead! It is a rotting corpse.
As he descends further into the moral quagmire (symbolized by his battle with the sun and inability to sleep) he just about rapes the hotel receptionist. In the remake she has sex with him (which we are left to assume was pleasant and consensual) to stop him from disturbing his neighbours.
And then the protagonist is dead! Villain and protagonist kill each other. The end! The original has a 'hollywood' ending where the villain is dead/caught and everything is back to normal. But the remake removes the Hollywood ending and kills off the protagonist. The horror, the horror!
The remake does have a few redeeming features. The scenery from Alaska is nice and the small town is well presented. The dash over the log filled pond is quite nice. Al Pacino as the protagonist is very good, as is Robin Williams as the villain. Al Pacino though is let to overact, when the protagonist should generally be more understated. The actress who plays the female rookie is also quite good.
The action scenes also do not work in the remake, with the exception of the log chase scene. In the original the protagonist is almost killed in the chase scene. That is deleted. The cable car scene where the protagonist catches up with the villain is brilliant. No action is possible during the cable car and instead they have a 'quiet' chat. One would think that with a Hollywood budget and a Hollywood production they could have at least improved upon the original's rather limited and drab action scenes.
V for Vendetta (2005)
everything intelligent or coherent about the original has been either stultified or cut out leaving as a result a ridiculous and uninteresting shell
On its own this movie is little more than a sub-standard Hollywood action movie. An action movie which doesn't deliver any credible action and a super-hero movie that doesn't deliver a credible (super)-hero (or anti-hero). Why does this super-villain mumble Shakespeare while cutting the throats of policemen (poor sods just doing their job) -- we don't know, and in the end don't really care.
The V figure could easily be more of a shadowy figure, of whom one could only catch brief glimpses of (as he is to a large extent) in the graphic novel). As a central figure, however, the immobile 'mask' simply does not work. Even in the graphic novel the mask is to some degree animated. If V is the central figure (and he is in practically every scene) then the 'mask' must obviously be animated -- something that has been done before in movies like The Mask(w. Jim Carrey). This is supposed to be the future & V is supposed to be some kind of genetically modified super-human -- so an animated mask would not be out of place. Even if there movie was otherwise great (which it isn't) it would be hobbled by this central immobile mask -- which works in the graphic novel, but just falls flat in a live action movie.
The other things that have to work in this movie are: (1) the super-villain's lair (V is a kind of super-hero after all) and (2) the backstory (the world in which V lives). The shadow gallery (the lair) is a kind of shape-changing netherworld in the graphic novel but here it is like a pokey and dusty museum -- neither cool nor interesting. More importantly, the alternate fascist near future presented is simply confusing even for an intelligent educated audience. The 'leader' shouts and rants at his top men via giant video-screen, which makes no sense at all (can't he tell the difference between a televised political speech and management of his staff). We get no idea of the political institutions like the 'Finger'. Even if you are intimately familiar with the graphic novel you will be confused by brief and unintelligible references to 'Eyes', 'Mouth' and 'Ears'. You only need look at Terry Gilliam's Brazil to see how to expertly stage the backstory. Also, most of the background is completely changed from the graphic novel. Will a kind of 'bird-flu' which kills a token 100,000 people really result in a fascist coup? Not likely! In the graphic novel most of the world is destroyed in some kind of great holocaust -- and apparently only greater London survives. There is chaos, starvation and disease. The fascists bring back order and pull civilization back from the brink. This makes sense. A bit of bird-flu is just non-sense.
To illustrate (hopefully in an interesting way) the backstory is of course the main function of the plot in a story such as this -- that is, the plot is more or less a vehicle for the ideas (presented via the backstory) the author hopes to present and convince the reader (ie. agitprop for the intelligentsia). Writer/director must therefore pay considerable attention to the backstory to make sure they 'get it right'. Most importantly there must be ideas & a clash of ideas there. Alan Moore presents us with a world devastated by a great holocaust of some kind and where the survivors in response create a state that is so secure and vigilant that it is able to predict (down to the second) when & where drops of rain will fall. Yet in this lazy adaptation we are apparently presented with a Britain much as it is today (that is, not really a model of efficiency), the only difference being a neo-fascist(or rather ultra-nationalist police state) type of government. People are well fed, have plenty of warm beer (which they quaff in pubs) and watch lots & lots of television (which they also seem to mostly do in pubs). Strangely this fascist gov't, aside from the occasional public service rant on the evils of islam and homosexuality, seems to content itself with providing warm beer and round the clock TV chat shows with funny Benny-Hill type skits making fun of the leader (which is actually the only genuinely good part of the film -- quite funny and well done). But no, despite much amusement in locals, the poor chat show host is arrested & dragged off (how he got this past the omni-present televised 'leader' if it was not authorized is not explained). Then somehow, unexplicably, these slothful masses revolt en-masse and march on the center of government (braveing the machine guns of the military) after V manages to broadcast some mumbled Shakespeare onto their TV screens. In the graphic novel V more or less singlehandedly causes destruction and anarchy, and thereby ending the last known civilization, which in any event had been securely but desperately holding itself from the abyss by its fingernails. V is able to do this to the super-fascist gov't because he is a genetically altered super-man. This makes some sense at least. On the other hand, why people with all the food they can eat and plenty of beer to quaff should leave their pub and march to their certain doom after receiveing a 'package' from a crazed anarcho-terrorist is not explained and makes little sense.
Overall, however, this is not the worst movie ever made. On its own it would be unremarkable. However, it bastardizes and subverts the original graphic novel. So much so that one has to ask: are the writers & directors banal and evil or are they simply agents of what is banal and evil within our system. Hopefully it will encourage people to buy the original graphic novel series, and lobby for a proper adaptation (a 10 part TV series would be nice, given the complexity and detail of the graphic novel) to be made so this tripe can be quietly forgotten.