{"id":68,"date":"2005-01-04T03:21:17","date_gmt":"2005-01-04T11:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=68"},"modified":"2011-09-12T03:24:01","modified_gmt":"2011-09-12T10:24:01","slug":"one-dimensional-cube","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2005\/01\/04\/one-dimensional-cube\/","title":{"rendered":"One-dimensional <i>Cube<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the other side of the movie spectrum, I watched the rather disappointing <i>Cube<\/i> last night.<\/p>\n<p>I try not to write about the nitpicks I have with movies, especially with non-mainstream movies like <i>Cube<\/i>, because who really wants to read someone complaining?  But I just can&#8217;t help myself.<\/p>\n<p>The bad math soured a lot of the experience.  For example (<strong>spoilers ahead<\/strong>):<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul class=\"expanded\">\n<li>Leaven is supposedly a math whiz (she mentally can compute 26&times;26&times;26 in an instant), yet she spends many seconds pondering whether 645 and 372 are primes.\n<\/li>\n<li>Leaven somehow concludes that rooms numbered with powers of primes are traps.  She then states that she can&#8217;t identify such numbers (so how did she devise this theory in the first place then?), because factoring &#8220;astronomical&#8221; numbers is extremely hard.  While that&#8217;s certainly true, <em>three-digit numbers<\/em> are hardly &#8220;astronomical&#8221;.  Furthermore, if she needs only to identify powers-of-primes, computing a reverse lookup table is quite feasible.  No factoring necessary!  And let&#8217;s not forget that she had no difficulty distinguishing primes from non-primes before, which is just as hard. (As for how and where she&#8217;d record a lookup table, clearly there was enough blood to go around.)<\/li>\n<li>Leaven just jumps to way too many supposedly logical conclusions with little-to-no corroborating evidence.  Adding digits together produces Cartesian coordinates?  Subtracting them produces permutations? (I&#8217;m still trying to figure out what that means.) The shifting rooms eventually <em>must<\/em> return to their original location? Maybe whoever kidnapped her also secretly provided her with a handy jump-to-conclusions mat.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You&#8217;d think a film with mathematics as such a central element would have been screened by someone who aced high-school mathematics.  The filmmakers are Canadian too!  They don&#8217;t even have the lousy American educational system to blame. (Maybe Canadians really are slow, eh?)<\/p>\n<p>And there are plenty of other things not to like about it too:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"expanded\">\n<li>The lame ending.<\/li>\n<li>Too many unexplained plot details.  Sometimes it&#8217;s good to leave things to the audience&#8217;s imagination, but <i>Cube<\/i> instead left me thinking that the filmmakers were just too lazy to figure out how to write themselves out of a corner.<\/li>\n<li>Almost all of the characters were unlikable, shallow, and stereotypical, and not enough of them died grisly deaths.  The only two graphic ones involved characters we didn&#8217;t get to know.<\/li>\n<li>The dialogue was stiff, and the actors often did not do a good job of overcoming it.<\/li>\n<li>Returning to the starting point merely acknowledged that the movie wasted more than an hour of my time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the other side of the movie spectrum, I watched the rather disappointing Cube last night. I try not to write about the nitpicks I have with movies, especially with non-mainstream movies like Cube, because who really wants to read someone complaining? But I just can&#8217;t help myself. The bad math soured a lot of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves","category-reviews","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}