Movie Doubes

John Lone Special - 'Last Emperor' & 'Year of The Dragon'

Today's movie double is a trip down memory lane. For some reason I managed to pick these DVDs up almost one after the other. They evoked so much memory, I kind of had to watch them back to back.

There was a time under Deng Xiao-Ping that China's world profile was making great strides. There were constant jokes about Deng and Hu Yao-Bang - uh-huh, that's a real politician's name. Yes, there was a time when it wasn't Who You Knew in Beijing but Hu Yao-Bang.

Anyway, after some kerfuffle to do with oh, Tienanmen Square in 1989, China's big push for international respect took a beating. The hang over of which went against Beijing's bid for the 2000 Olympics back in 1993; and even the hand over of Hong Kong not withstanding, the international community probably didn't feel comfortable with 'Communist China' getting its claws on the Olympic Games to beat its chest. It would have to wait until 2001 for that to transpire, and even then it took a punishing in the media stakes this year at the Olympics. I would imagine the top level people in China are wondering if the two wek extravaganza really helped China's international image.

Part of the problem for them as well as anybody is that the goal posts keep moving - and the Western media is one of the most obvious examples of goal-post movers and history re-writers. There's no point in the finger-wagging the Chinese authorities leveled at the media, it may as well have been admonishing hookers for plying their trade on a busy night. Shame it was their party where the hookers turned up - but that's what you get when you invite the whole international community to your place. They tend to check out your ornaments critique your decoration choices, and joke about the bathroom smell.

So it seemed like an interesting moment in time to reflect back on those heady days prior to the Tienanmen Square incident and to see just what the West thought of China back in the late 1980s.

John Lone's Big Moment In Cinema

It's hard to imagine this, because he's been anything but prominent since, but these two films represent the apotheosis of the actor John Lone's international career. Its a shame because his filmpography reads as follows:

Iceman (1984)
Year of the Dragon (1985)
The Last Emperor (1987) as Emperor Puyi
The Moderns (1988)
Echoes of Paradise (1989)
Shadow of China (1990)
Shanghai 1920 (1991)
M. Butterfly (1993) as Song Liling
The Shadow (1994)
The Hunted (1995)
Rush Hour 2 (2001) as Ricky Tan
War (2007)

Judging from the fine performances in 'YotD' and 'TLE', he's hardly been used properly and it's a real shame he hasn't done more important work. It is possible, playing Henry Pu-Yi and arch-antagonist Joey Tai typecast him as the 'Suave Asian Villain' and there was nothing left to do. I'm actually surpirsed Quentin Taranatino hasn't cast him in one of his shoot'em up movies.

What's interesting about Joey Tai in 'YotD' for instance is the degree to which he reflects against the prejudices he knows are being leveled at him just because he's Chinese. It was pretty funky to see an Asian villain who could stare down the West and say "I'm not interested in what you've got. I want my own thing."

It's also ironic that the Chinese American community protested against this film, because in a very real way, this film opens up the future world where Hong Kong cinema crashes through to the west bringing with it Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-Fat and company. It is in that very sense that John Lone did pioneering work here and should get more credit than he's received.

As for his turn as Henry Pu-Yi, he was almost too handsome to be playing that man. He brought such an aesthetically pleasing facade to a man who was essentially a gormless twerp who had little moral or ethical compunction about doing bad things; Lone's Pu-Yi comes across as possibly more endearing and sophisticated than the real man. That's the 'beauty bias' for you - and I'm sure that was Bertolucci's plan - but all it leads to is a confused rewriting of history.

Rewriting History

If there's one thing that the movie business does well, it is to present image as a kind of defacto fact. If you saw it, you'd better believe it. Bertolucci's signature movie in the 1980s was 'The Last Emperor'; and it's a rather one-eyed book about the last Manchurian Emperor of China who subsequently got coopted into being the head of state of Manchukuo - his ancestral country - by the Kwantung Army of Japan. It's a miserable chapter in Japanese history, as it is a miserable chapter in Chinese history. Essentially, in the wake of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese sought to set up a buffer zone to keep Russian interests away from the Pacific Ocean. To that end Japan annexed Korea and then tried to set up Manchukuo as a sort of frontier 'buffer' country against Russia.

All of this is part of what makes it so miserable in as much as the Koreans and Manchurians forever won't forgive the Japanese for their miserable colonial experience; the Chinese will always blame Japan for a pile of its miserable woes, but neither was there to actually defend their miserable borders from an Imperialist Russia. So much Japanese blood was shed protecting those places from the Russians - all in the post-19th-Century-colonialist period that was the early 20th Century. Not that it jusitifes it in any moral sense, but the strategic imperative to set up Manchukuo and the subsequent administration of Manchukuo was a miserable experience for all because nobody wanted to be there or to do it properly except for the crazy and the dedicated.

I doubt you could sell that real estate to the Japanese today. That frontier has moved south to the 38th parallel, and it's North and South Korea's problem now. Although the nukes in North Korea has again made it everybody's problem.

Bertolucci's vision, alas, does not extend into the nuances of these post-colonial conflicts in the Far East. He's more interested in telling the decadent moody visual narrative he forcibly constructs around the persona of Henry Pu-Yi. If you read enough history like I have, the film's actually deplorable in parts, commendable in others and generally out of focus as to what really was Henry Pu-Yi's position and what was volitional. It even doesn't adequately address if his volition really mattered that much. The Juggernaut of History just runs him over as it runs over China. The fabulist ending with the magical cricket appearing from a little container betrays Bertolucci's own inability to come to terms with the Juggernaut of History running roughshod over human beings.

Post-Colonial Trauma

In the instance of 'Year of the Dragon', it's America's struggle with getting over Vietnam. Michael Cimino of 'Deer Hunter' fame directed 'Year of the Dragon', where Mickey Rourke plays a disgruntled, personality disordered, driven cop who takes his hard-boiled style down to China Town. Just as he is looking for a rematch with the Asians, Cimino was looking for a directorial rematch with Polanski and 'Chinatown'.

I won't go into the referentiality of the script, needless to say, that both films rest their case on the supposed inscrutability of the Asians. Back in its day, 'YotD' was a hard-hitting film about the drug trade, but time has not been kind to it. The subsequent influence of Hong Kong cinema has obliterated any sense of tension in the scenes in which the machine-guns are let loose in the restaurant. It just looks cruddy by our current standards. Remember, this film was Pre-Die Hard too, se we're talking about 3 generations of action movie violence that have come since.

It's ironic that the Manchukuo experiment contributed to the formation of North and South Koreas an therefore the Korean War. The Korean War soaked up a lot of blood too, but nobody talks about it anywhere near as much as Vietnam. The Vietnam War too is a post-colonial war which the Americans inherited from the French.

Thus, to see a character who is a Vietnam Vet who goes toe to toe with a resurgent Asian villain is indeed an appropriate and cogent set up for a story. The anxiety that flows on from the Vietnam war experience is in a sense the very trauma of the post-colonial experience, reflecting and coming back to haunt America. In some ways this film is being overlooked because of its out-dated crappy action; the deeper readings seem more relevant than 'TLE' today.

China As The Great Unknown

China never looks or sounds like China when people from the West talk about it. China, thinks it's the centre of the universe... at least the parts that matter. It has thought of itself that way for at least 3000 years. Its history is populated with real men - Men of Honour, Men of Valour, Men of Principle, Men of standing; and that is what the character for Han in Han Dynasty means. The Han dynasty was the Empire of Men, as in Mankind. The rest of the foreigners were just a pack of uncivilised animals. The West was like a bunch of barbarians who have suddenly manifested out of nothing on their shores in the 19th Century, disturbing their peace, peddling Opium.
It's a vast contrast to how the Average white person thinks back to their school days and their Chinese classmate, who they saw as "That Chink". Or "Ching Chong Charlie." It's kind of pathetic, really.

Thus China as it presents itself to the world is considerably different to the way the West views it. I think the Chinese don't get the depth of the contempt that's been leveled against China over the last 200 years. The gap in that understanding in a way underscores the angry tantrums the Chinese government displays when it feels slighted. Then the westerners ask a whole bunch of rude questions about its customs and pass judgment. It's really not a functional relationship.

Fortunately we get to see this dysfunction in both films. This is because in many ways these films are Orientalist fantasies of the west, projected onto the East. The West keeps insisting Asians are inscrutable. Well, yeah, if you want to paint your fantasies on their faces, they're going to just shrug and walk away, wouldn't you say? Neither of these films would've been remotely credible without John Lone for this reason.

Mickey Rourke And The Glory of '80s Cinema

I once read somewhere that only the French and the perverted like Mickey Rourke - and the French like Mickey Rourke because they're all perverts anyway. Count me amongst the perverted then, not because I'm not French, but because I'm still a big fan of Mickey Rourke's films. Don't ask me why, I just think he has a splendid screen presence and his 1980s filmography alone should be enough testament to the man. This is the guy who is in 'Angel Heart' and '9-1/2 Weeks', 'Year of the Dragon' here, and 'Rumble Fish' as the Motorcycle Boy. Even his vanity project 'Homeboy' features dialogue to die for and moments of true sentiment. The man has *something* going in his work.

Okay, 'Wild Orchid' was terrible and he keeps appearing as this orange-looking dude lately, but he's still great.

At The Movies

Vigilantism As Art Form - The Dark Knight

I've been meaning to write this review for weeks. I've seen the thing twice! Is it that good? Yes... But not without its obvious and not so obvious faults. He's not exactly Iron Man, and he's not exactly the Punisher, but the re-imagined Batman has many of these elements going in to this new brooding incarnation.

I keep saying I'm not sure about these comic book adaptations, but the more they make them, the more they seem like they are going to be the staple of adventure movies in the decade to come. One thing is for sure, these movies have matured and come of age within the context of cinema since the Superman movies in the late 1970s.

What's Good About It

I wonder about the merits of an epic action movie based on a comic book, but this one makes good on its promise. In fact I've never particularly liked either Superman or Batman so I'm actually suspicious about any offering from the DC stable as opposed to the Marvel stable. Having said that, this new series of Batman movies starring Christian Bale are making amends for the quixotic, idiotic, bizzaro and inept entries that collectively starred Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney.

The lighting and cinematography in this film is singularly sepctacular. It's one of the best pieces of lighting you will likely see this year. The sound is also astoundingly good. The film bristles with a filmmaker's kind of enthusiasm for the medium itself, and that is rare. The Spiderman series is the only one that comes close to combining the comic book tropes nicely into the cinema form.

The performances are interesting and in the case of Heath Ledger, totally riveting to watch. Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon is a fascinating study in understatedness, considering his earlier incarnations as bad cops galore; this is the guywho played Lee Harvey Oswald in 'JFK' after all. It's just not the kind of comic book movie that was around even 10 years ago. The constant drive towards a method-acting realism by the performers keeps the film consistently engaging. Gone are the extrvagances of a Jack Nicholson Joker or Jim Carey Riddler. In its place is a psychotic monster with guns. It's a long, long, long way away from when they used to throw up graphics of 'Kapow!' on the screen with every staged punch for the Adam West TV series - and it's a better viewing experience for it.

The lesson is, when you do any movie, be committed and true to the universe in which it is set.

What's Bad About It

Through out the movie, there is a sense in which the citizens of Gotham want to stand up and be counted. The ordinary people who are peripheral to the plot want to do good deeds. Perhaps they are inspired by the Harvey Dent character, or in the case of Brian, the guy in the hockey pads, he's inspired by Batman himself. Batman cares little for it. When he is aksed what the difference is, Batman's response is "I don't wear hockey pads."

It's funny the first time but there's a sting. Batman actually doesn't have a moral or ethical standing above Brian the wannabe. He simply has better means to put his vision into action. He can do it - and Brian can't - because he is rich and powerful in the city. Brian, the ordinary guy can take a back seat and keep out of the way. Frankly I think that's... uhh, for the wont of a better word, fascist.

So when in one of the shocking developments the psychopathic Joker kills Brian in his Batman get up and hangs him outside the mayor's window, it's a real drag. It's the moment you realise that the Batman text has nothing to do with the better instincts of people at all. It's kind of a dark fascist fantasy about survival of the fittest, dressed up as a battle between good and evil. It acknowledges that it is a battle between one kind of psychosis against another - and I'm not sure I like that patina at all. Indeed, the second time I saw it, the moment that made me almost cry (I kid you not) was when they show the video the Joker takes of Brian moments before his death.

The ordinary dude dies in the face of not only psychosis but Batman's disregard. It's a terrible, terrible moment that just flies by in the film. But I kept thinking where is Batman's personal responsibility to that citizen whom was inspired by his deeds? We're the ordinary people. Are we to be the victims of the powerful all the time? In a real world absent of Batman, are the filmmakers saying we're a bunch of putzes? Is one ordinary person, not up to the task of changing his world? Not sure I like the ramification of that at all.

Other Thoughts

I refrained from mentioning it here at the time he died partly because I'm not really into sensational deaths as such. Besides which plenty of people were blogging the event and what would be the point in duplicating those efforts here?

If you're going to check out of life, even accidentally as the case may be it would be nice to hit as high a note as Heath Ledger did with his Joker before turning out the lights. I know there is talk of a posthumous Oscar and all that. Trust me, it's much more deserving of finer accolades than a measly Oscar.

A few days before the film opened in Sydney a TV station played 'Casanova' starring Ledger, and it was stunning just how good Ledger was in that film. Then there was that wonderful debut in Hollywood with '10 Things I Hate About You' as well as his turn as one of the Grimm Brothers in Terry Gilliam's 'The Brothers Grimm'. Were reminded by this film that Heath Ledger actually was a colossal talent and his passing is an immense loss to the world of cinema.

Pope Is Upset At Frog On A Crucifix

Art World Causes Offense Again

I guess it's one of my hobbies now to keep track of instances where art causes offense. In fact part of the Art Neuro credo ought to be 'cause offense to idiots'. The Pope Benedict, he of the Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht, is upset at this work of art above:

It "has offended the religious feelings of many people who consider the cross a symbol of God's love and of our redemption," Pahl quoted the pope as writing in the letter.

Pahl himself has long opposed the display of "Zuerst die Fuesse" ("First the Feet" in German), even staging a hunger strike this summer and saying he would not seek re-election unless it was removed.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press today, Pahl said he was outraged by the museum's decision to keep the work, which he claims "pokes fun at the Catholic population and offends religion and the pope."

The 1990 wooden sculpture shows the crucified frog nailed through the feet and hands like Jesus Christ. The frog, eyes popping and tongue sticking out, wears a loincloth and holds a mug of beer and an egg in its hands.

The museum said the one-metre-tall sculpture has nothing to dowith religion, but is an ironic self-portrait of the artist and an expression of his angst.

"With humour and a tragicomic sense, which belongs to art since the times of Greek tragedy, Kippenberger ... faces his condition of suffering, which he expresses in many works, also, for example, in a video in which he crucifies himself," the museum said in a statement.

One would think a man associated with Nazism, even involuntarily might refrain from charging the art world with offense but no. Clearly he is a man born of his times and he sees 'degenerate art'. That Wikipedia links to this article, just in case you are too jaded to click:

Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely.
Degenerate Art was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria.
While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were narrowly traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience. Similarly, music was expected to be tonal and free of any jazz influences; films and plays were censored.

I take it His Excellency the Pope is not entirely enamored of modern art, let alone contemporary art. According to Wikipedia, Martin Kippenberger was more interested in his own existence than spiritualism. I really doubt a depiction of a frog on a crucifix is going to cast Catholicism in a worse light than it already is cast by some - but I guess even such a maliciously idiotic reading is also a reading of the work itself. Clearly the Catholics are champing at the bit to take offense, and that is by defition wowserism, and they have that much in common with the Nazis.

The irony in all of this is that this was once the Church that paid for the Sistine Chapel. You'd think they had a bit more latitude with art and artists.

Yankees Update

What's Actually On The Farm?
This one is going to be a look at the farm system, because the big league team just burnt down the bridge to the post-season yesterday with their 7-3 and today's 11-3 loss to the Red Sox. I mean, that's it. End of the dynasty thank you very much. So it's time to look at 2009.

Looking at the MiLB stats, it seems to me there is the shortage of position players is only going to get worse before it gets better.

I think it's another year of failure for Eric Duncan, which is really bad news, because he's essentially following the same trajectory as his 3B predecessor Drew Henson - always a bad sign in my books. Both were touted for their power, both never quite mastered the strike zone, both peaked early to go to the Arizona Fall League, and both have struggled afterwards. There's something wrong with the development in Yankees scouting and development when they've made the same mistake twice.

Juan Miranda on the other hand seems to be proving himself. If you discount Melky, Betemit, Broussard, Shelley Duncan and the retreads, the cupboard's actually bare for position players. Whoever the position players a re meant to be, they're not coming up in 2009.

The limiting factor to this problem is that between 2008 and 2009 there might not be a significan turnover of the roster. The Yankees are pretty committed at C, SS, 2B, 3B, and LF/DH. CF is in flux, but it seems hard to see how they'll go back to Melky after his disastrous season. Maybe it's Brett Gardner's job to lose. 1B and RF are up for grabs, but the Yankees seriously need to think about those spots going forwards. To make matters more complicated, their old players actually did all right. It was mostly the young players who failed to turn in the projected performances. It's going to make for an interesting off-season.

Steven Goldman Says...
The Yankees have been drafting nowhere near as well as the Red Sox. I can't reproduce his chart here, so you should go have look, but I can see his point of view.

It took until 2006 for the Yankees to have a better draft than the Red Sox, with a quicker turnaround on the best players. Until then, it wasn't draft position that did them in, but savviness. If the Red Sox are up at the moment and the Yankees down, that's why.

Beyond that, as the saying goes, the Yankees know that if they have any bullets left in their gun they'd better fire them. There's nothing deeper than that that needs to be said — they can keep the Wild Card race interesting, or they can end it. Stay tuned.

It's not even close. The Red Sox farm system has drafted better. That's not to say it's been more fruitful overall, but the Yankee drafts at this point in time are not looking good. After Gerit Cole didn't sign this year, you can almost count the 2008 draft as another lost year for the Yankees.

CJ Henry
2005 top pick by the Yankees, CJ Henry has signed up to go play basketball.

What makes Henry's decision particularly newsworthy is that he is the older brother of 6-6 small forward Xavier Henry, one of the top five players in the 2009 recruiting class.
C.J. Henry said Tuesday he is enrolling in classes at Memphis and will join the Tigers for the 2008-09 season. His contract states the Yankees will pay for his college, so he will be a walk-on for coach John Calipari at Memphis.

It will be Henry's first competitive basketball season in more than three years. He is 6-3 and was a successful high school player with big-time college ambitions before turning pro in baseball.

"It had to be a quick decision," Henry told Sporting News. "It came down to Memphis and Kansas, and I made the choice of Memphis because of the players they have there, and it'd be a great chance to win a national championship. Coach Calipari has a track record of putting players in the NBA."

Henry contacted Memphis and told the coaching staff he wanted to come. Calipari coached Carl Henry, C.J.'s father, when Carl played for Kansas in the mid-1980s.

Xavier Henry also will choose between Memphis and Kansas. A source close to the recruitment told Sporting News in July that Xavier is leaning toward choosing the Tigers.

"Before I even started thinking about which school," C.J. said, "I asked him what he thought about me going back and playing basketball. 'Would you be fine with it?' He said yes. 'What do you think about me going to Memphis?' He said, 'I don't care.' It's not going to affect his decision. I made the choice based on me, the best situation for me. And he's going to do the same."

He's a weird 'prospect', CJ Henry - he sure stretches the definition of the word. It's doubtful he even fits into the definition any more. The weird part is that he's going to come back and pay baseball for the Yankees next year. I sort of doubt it.

Of course in the intervening time since the 2005 draft, he was traded to the Phillies for Bobby Abreu; then cut, then picked up again by the Yankees earlier this year. If his sole function was to make the Bobby Abreu trade, then he has done more than enough for the Yankees, but it is weird that such a non-baseball type has lasted this long in the system. My guess is that he won't amount to much in basketball either, as we saw with Drew Henson and Football - so toegther with Eric Duncan, he underscores the failures of the Yankees to spot and develop the right kind of talent.

Mailbag

Large Hadron Collider Nears Completion


Pleiades sent in this cool link showing some pictures of the Large Hadron Collier being built on the border of France and Switzerland.

Psychopaths Rule The World - That's Why It's Crazy
Here's another interesting link from Pleiades about the psychopaths who rise to positions of power.

Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization — the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers—was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.

Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers — unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.

In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true “Revolution in Military Affairs” was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: “Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges” (Grossman, p. 4).

Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers — the 5% who are natural-born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators—did almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)

Marshall’s work, brought a Copernican revolution to military science. In the past, everyone believed that the soldier willing to kill for his country was the (heroic) norm, while one who refused to fight was a (cowardly) aberration. The truth, as it turned out, was that the normative soldier hailed from the psychopathic five percent. The sane majority, would rather die than fight.

Pretty interesting reading. It echoes the Bolero section of 'Allegro Non Troppo' where the psychopathic chimp blows the world up.

Yankees Update

Jeter Hits 2500th Hit

It's been a lackluster season in some ways for both the Yankees and Jeter, but Jeter did manage to make milestone by hitting his 2500th hit of his career. As usual, he gave his patented vanilla-flavoured-athlete-comment:

BALTIMORE (AP)—Derek Jeter is honored to be part of an exclusive club with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. For now, however, the New York Yankees shortstop is more interested in keeping his team in the playoff hunt.

Jeter got his 2,500th hit Friday night, joining Gehrig (2,721) and Ruth (2,518) as the only players to reach the mark with the Yankees.

“Anytime your name is with someone like Gehrig and Ruth, it’s pretty special,” Jeter said. “To be quite honest with you, I don’t even think about it much because we’re trying to win games here. That’s something you reflect on maybe when your career’s over.”

New York entered Saturday trailing Boston by six games in the AL wild-card race. Jeter is doing his best to keep the Yankees’ hopes alive—he was batting .486 over his last eight games to raise his average 15 points to .296.

Jeter is the 88th player in baseball history to have 2,500 hits. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, in the last 65 years only two players were younger than Jeter (34 years, 57 days) when they reached the 2,500-hit plateau—Hank Aaron and Robin Yount.

“When you think about Derek Jeter, he’s been consistent through his whole career,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “He stayed healthy, plays everyday, works very hard at what he does. There aren’t a lot of people who have 2,500 hits. Shows you what kind of player he is. Been a very good player for a long time and he’s got a ways to go, still.”

God, the boringness of the comments from Jeter have been just as relentless over the years. It's like he took the 'Bull Durham' dictum of "give boring interviews" to heart at some point in his infancy and stuck to it for 30+years. Just like clockwork, he knocks out a milestone hit and says essentially the same thing he did when he knocked out his 2000th.
Well, we still love you Jetes.

Carl Pavano Sighting

Amazingly, the season has come to this: the rotation consists of Moose, Pettite, Sir Sidney Ponson, Darrell Rasner, and now Carl Pavano. Wang, and Joba are sidelined with injuries, Phil Hughes too, but he was effectively demoted, just as IPK was; and Dan Giese who did so well is out with injury as well.

So, Carl Pavano it is is.

BALTIMORE (TICKER) —With the New York Yankees in desperate need of starting pitching, the team is turning to an unlikely source - Carl Pavano.

Pavano, who has not pitched in the major leagues since April 2007, was activated from the 60-day disabled list and returned to the Yankees’ injury-riddled rotation Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles.

New York’s Opening Day starter last season, Pavano underwent “Tommy John” surgery two starts into 2007. It was supposed to be a comeback season for Pavano, who missed the entire 2006 campaign with a variety of ailments, including two broken ribs suffered in an automobile accident.

But that comeback was put on hold indefinitely, as the 6-5 starter needed more than a year of rehab and recovery. In five rehab starts at Class A Charleston and Class AA Trenton since July, Pavano went 1-1 with a 3.31 ERA in 19 innings. In his most recent tune-up, he struck out six over six innings for Trenton, giving up a one run.

That was good enough for Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who is hurting for depth on his pitching staff. Ace Chien-Ming Wang has been out since mid-June with a torn tendon in his right foot, and second-year phenom Joba Chamberlain is sidelined with tendinitis in his rotator cuff.

Top prospect Phil Hughes, who has been nursing a fractured rib, was a candidate to start, but his recent rehab outings have not been promising.

That leaves it up to Pavano, who is 5-6 in 19 starts over the last three seasons.

Pavano signed his lucrative four-year, $39.95 million deal with the Yankees after a breakout 2004 season in which he went 18-8 for the Florida Marlins and finished sixth in the National League Cy Young Award voting.

He began his Yankees career in stellar fashion, throwing 6 1/3 strong innings to defeat the division-rival Boston Red Sox - who also had coveted him during the offseason but lost out in the bidding war for his services - in the second game of the 2005 season.

Since, it’s been all downhill for Pavano, who went 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA in 17 starts in 2005 and missed the last two months of the season with an injured right shoulder.

Thus in the 4 years, he's made half a season's worth of starts in which he's been just under league average. Had he done so for the other 3 and a half seasons worth of starts that got given to the assorted combo of Shawn Chacon, Aaron Small (who both did okay by the Yanks), Darrell Rasner, and whoever else that the waiver-wire scouring threw up, this might have been a sort of all right contract.

I know that earlier in the year I said if the Yankees ever needed to go so deep as to require Pavano to pitch at any point in the season, this season would be a disaster. Well, it is that disaster now.

Melky Cabrera
I jinxed the guy at the beginning of May. He did look very good at that point in time.
Since then, he's been nothing short of a disaster, so he finds himself in AAA Scranton Wilkes-Barre. In his place is Brett Gardner but it remains to be seen if he can do significantly better than Melky.

I think I pointed out the last time I delved into it, but his BABIP has been disappointing for this season - .264 is 36 points lower than his norm of about .300. If you put those 36 points back on to his line it would amount to an Ave of .278 and an OBP of .363; which is sort of what the Yankees were looking at on paper as the season started. His ISO is around .110 so his SLG would have been about .470, so he should've been about a .830 OPS player. Instead he turned in .633.

I'm not really willing to write the guy's future off, but this year sure was an unmitigated disaster for young Melky. Wouldn't you know it, he's killing the ball in AAA.

Play Off Odds
The erstwhile fellas at RLYW have a beautiful pie chart showing the Yankee's chances of making the playoffs. It's not encouraging:

You'd have to say they're toast.
I don't think I've felt this toasty in a long, long, long time. I'm kind of resigned to it in as much as there hasn't been a Yankee team with enough pitching since 2003. This year was going to be transitional, and a lot of things did go wrong.

Sick In Bed

Stomach Flu Is Not Much Fun
For a few days I've just had this gastroenteritis. Anything I eat except crackers goes through me like I am a digestive non-entity. Nearly crapped my pants 3 times a day for 4 days now. Anyway, I'm getting better now.

View From The Couch - Olympic Softball

I caught the play-off game between Australia and Japan that went into extended innings. Of course the Olympics being the Olympics, they have a special rule for extended innings where both teams start with a runner on second, to speed up the game. Of course if the managers are idiots, then the game does not get shortened by a great deal, as evinced by the 12 inning game. That's almost 2 games in one, so clearly it didn't work.

Pleiades rang up during the break between the 7th and 8th and asked me what I thought. At the time I thought it was a nice tight game. But then as the innings progressed, it dawned on me that these managers were going to Sacrifice Bunt every lead off hitter. I got depressed just watching.

The game was already a low-scoring Pitcher's duel as the game stumbled into extended innings with a 2-2 scoreline. What was really annoying to see from both teams was that the first batter in each of these extended innings laid down a sacrifice bunt to move the runner over from Second to Third. The crazy thing is that the runner on second is in scoring position already - that's the point. So what you should be looking to do is simply get a hit to score that run, with 3 outs to do it. Not sac bunt that runner over, and try to score that runner with 2 outs in hand.

Now call me Bill James' long lost cousin, but it plain sucks to see so many outs wasted. Indeed, Australia scored a go ahead run in the inning when they didn't sac bunt, but swung away. The Japanese also scored a run in the bottom of the inning, but that was also swinging for it albeit after an unnecessary bunt. Had they not bunted, they might have won it in the bottom of the 11th.
It was as if neither manager wanted to win.

Let's put it another way. The run expectancy on a 0-out runner on 2nd situation is actually 1.189 to the end of the inning. This is compared to the 0.555 of 0-out, nobody on:

That's a chart I stole from here.
Now, that's from the MLB 1999-2002 seasons, but I can't imagine that Softball is skewed significantly differently to the above. So the managers are given roughly half-a-run advantage to score 1 run, which would stand up if your closer is Mariano River or Trevor Hoffman. The thing is, the other team also gets the same leg up in the bottom of the inning. In a sense, that runner on 2nd is illusory in that you start with a runner on second against you in the other half of the inning. That is to say, the other team has the same run expectancy to score that run right back.

So if you really want to put a winning margin on the other team, you have to score more than the bonus runner, because chances are, they have a just as good chance of scoring that runner on 2nd... except in this game, both managers quickly converted their runner on 2nd, 0-out into Runner on 3rd, 1 out.

Runner on 3rd 1 Out has a run expectancy of 0.983, which is just under a run. So you can see that by sac bunting the bonus runner across, the team has subtracted from its run value by a quarter of a run and made it less of a sure bet. Sure, the hitter could fly out and the runner stays on second for an even less (0.725); but you still have to look at scoring more than the bonus runner for the same reasons. A Sac Bunt is giving away a precious out.

The best way to put it is this: if you play for 1-run, that's all you will get. And when the opposing team gets the same bonus runner, then it's a moot point whether you really are closer to the end of the game by having that bonus runner on 2nd base - unless your opponent manager returns the stupid favor of sac-bunting their bonus runner over. Which is exactly what happened in the seemingly interminable game.

Other things I saw that made me wonder:
Was Australia's Pitcher really called 'Tanya Harding'?
Was Australia's Catcher really called 'Titcume'?

From the Mailbag

Some Stuff From Pleiades

Pleiades has sent in a couple of interesting links.
No.1 is interesting, contrarian commentary from Uruknet, which is dare I say some kind of Pro-Saddam English language site in/about Iraq.

The ruling, by Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle -- a long-time right-wing apparatchik -- must be seen to be believed. As Reuters reports:

Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.

"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.

WP's excellent analysis of the ruling and its implications should be read in full. But here is a taste, from his conclusion:

So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.

Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?

And these are the people who preach to the world about democracy and freedom and rule of law.

Well, maybe. The guy I work for likes to say "Sucks to be you!" when ever he gets his way over other people. I think it's a descendant of the Thucydides notion that the strong do as they do and the weak can only deal with the strong in the capacities which they can.

No.2 is the actual source quoted in the article. I think the point is this:

It is interesting -- and horrifying! -- to note that this decision ventures well beyond the "just following orders" defense which was used by the Nazi war criminals and found wanting at Nuremberg.

It even goes beyond the "divine right of government officials" long desired by the Dominionists of the allegedly "Christian" so-called "Right". At least under the proposed "Constitution Restoration Act", government officials would have to claim they believed they were carrying out the will of God in order to be absolved of their crimes.

Now, at best I'm not big on War Crimes Tribunals - On bad days I think they are a bad joke. I mean, hanging Saddam or Milosevic or Karadzic is just so little compensation for the vast pain and suffering they visited upon ordinary people. trying them makes us feel better as it serves to make it look like justice is being served but it's always just a political front - And then to kill them in a kangaroo-court-sanctioned execution is pathetically inadequate. They can only pay with one death for millions. Calling it justice is an insult to the idea of justice. But that's just me.

So Thucydides is right. The strong do as they do. The rest of the world just has to deal with it in the ways that they can.

News That's Fit To Punt

Hello Big Foot?

In amidst the excitement of the Beijing Olympics is news that Big Foot (insert guffaw here) albeit as a cropse, has been found. Yes, that's right, Big Foot, a.k.a. Sasquatch has been the elusive beast of the wild in the North American continent since the famous footage of 1967, but to my amazement there have been people *hunting* for him all this time.

TWO US professional Bigfoot hunters claim to have found a body of the legendary creature and will present evidence of the astounding discovery to the world's press and scientists tomorrow.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, who run Bigfoot expeditions, say they found a dead Bigfoot in the woods of north Georgia, in the southeast of the US, about two weeks ago and have put the carcass in a freezer.

They along with "the real Bigfoot Hunter" Tom Biscardi, who has endorsed the find, will front a press conference in California, where they say DNA and photo proof will be presented.

Mr Whitton, a Georgia police officer on leave to recover from a shooting, and Mr Dyer, a former prison officer, have posted photos of their "find" on their searchingforbigfoot website.

They describe the creature as being a 2.3m tall "part human and part ape" male and weighing over 230kg with reddish hair and blackish-grey eyes.

The infamous feet are described as being flat and 41cm long with five toes.

I'm glad to hear the feet are as advertised. There's something so idiotic about this that you hope it is a passing hoax that will be debunked quickly, but something tells me it's going to turn into such a media circus of claims and counter claims that the scientists will never get a clear shot at it - like Cold Fusion or UFO sightings.

The Montauk Monster

Then there's this other internet sensation story about a corpse of a creature that washed up on the East Coast of USA.

Dubbed the Montauk Monster after the Long Island town where it was found, the creature has prompted speculation it was part of a secret mutant breeding program undertaken by the US Government.

I don't know. It's just too much. As if that' not enough...

The Alleged Yeti Hair In DNA Lab Tests

This is even nuttier.

A BRITISH scientist is anxiously awaiting the results of DNA tests on hair claimed to be from a yeti after initial examinations showed it had human and ape-like characteristics.

Ian Redmond, a biologist and expert in ape conservation, said the hairs found in the Indian jungle resembled samples collected by the conqueror of Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, in the 1950s.

"Under the microscope, they look slightly human, slightly like an orang-utan and slightly like the hairs brought back by Edmund Hillary," Dr Redmond said.

"These hairs remain an enigma. They could be a new species, but the DNA tests will hopefully tell us more."

The hairs were brought back from India this year by BBC journalist Alastair Lawson, who contacted Dr Redmond and was put in touch with a team at Oxford Brookes University in south central England.

Lawson was given the hairs by yeti believer Dipu Marak, who retrieved them them in dense jungle in the Meghalaya state of India after a forester allegedly spotted the creature on three consecutive days in 2003.

Mr Marak believes the hairs come from an ape-like Indian version of the fabled yeti, or abominable snowman, called mande barung, which he believes stands about 3m tall.

Dr Redmond and scientists from Oxford Brookes examined the hairs last Thursday under powerful microscopes, comparing them with samples taken from an Asiatic black bear, yaks, orang utangs and gorillas at Oxford's Natural History Museum and even a hair from Dr Redmond's beard.

"The hairs are complete with the cuticle, and between 3.3cm and 4.4cm long and thick and wiry and curved," Dr Redmond said.

"At one point we thought they looked like they came from a wild boar. That was quite a tense moment, but when we got a sample from the museum it turned out they were quite different."

Dr Redmond also contacted the English laboratory that analysed the hairs brought back by Hillary in the 1950s from his Everest expedition and found they were similar in appearance.

While the microscope tests were inconclusive, the hairs are now undergoing DNA tests in separate laboratories in Oxford and Cardiff.

Dr Redmond admitted his excitement at a potential scientific breakthrough was tinged with fear.

"My concern is that if we do find something unusual, it will be from a very small population of animals and I would want to talk to the State Government and Indian Government so they are not inundated with people trying to catch one for a museum.

The mind boggles. The picture up to of this section is Sir Edmund Hillary with an alleged Yeti scalp.

Meanwhile In Texas...
I just want to offer you this link.

The animal appears to have a long snout and forelegs slightly shorter than the hind legs, the textbook, or rather folkloric, description of the animal that likes to attack livestock, particularly goats, and drink their blood. Short-haired (rather than hairless like the classic chupacabra) the dread beast looks like a small dog, or perhaps a coyote crossed with a small dog such as a pit bull.

Uh-huh.

What I'm Working On

One Last Time

I'm prepping a CD of 'Satellite City: Live at the Manning Bar'. Yes, I'm re-working those recordings one last time. Sometimes I feel like I've polished these recordings so hard there's nothing left of them to enjoy for myself. However, it is this one last time because after this process is done, I'm consigning it to history - and so I should. I've been the custodian of these recordings for the last 19 years and (yes, you read that right, 19 years!) it's getting to the point where if I can't get this off my plate for good, I'm just going to not deal with it at all.

Even so, I trotted on to Sydney Uni campus to get some photos of the Manning Bar - and it was closed so I ended up with some photos of just the Manning House from outside. It's been years since I'd been on campus; so damn long that I couldn't even recollect my angst of trudging past the Physics Building towards and away from the Bosch Lecture Theatres. All I could recall was a vague feeling of discontent and not belonging. Winters used to be shit, and summers were shit too. I used to hate it, but it was long past the embers' last flash of anger in that fire.

When I listen to it as closely as I have done, all the faults manifest themselves mercilessly while the actual *good* seems to recede more and more. It's hard to explain but I feel buried in the faults getting more and more depressed. All the charming mistakes and bum-notes just revert to being just that, while the added clarity actually sheds light on what exactly it was that was being played. You know this used to be good and fun, you think, but the process keeps demanding closer inspections of things that perhaps are better left to sleep in time.

Yet I have a memory of what it was like to play these songs on those particular nights - and its significance still resonates within me, and it is that which keeps me at the grind. The pleasant surprise is, there are people actually waiting for these recordings. I guess the best outlook is that this time next year, it would all be history at long last. Until then, it is one last herculean effort to get it right. Really, the last step is just getting it self-published and them I'm done. I feel like I'm staggering to the finish line with this thing and when it's all said and done, I'll crack open a scotch in a lonely room and have one last listen and be *done*.

First Memories of Politics

Post-Watergate Generation - Gen-X Style

It's been bothering me for some weeks now that any time I stop to think about politics an politicians, my mind turns to preconceived cynical positions - that they are tax-spending, self-indulgent, corrupt, power-hungry, self-centered, costly narcissists, living on hefty sums from the public purse. That if you took most of the suits an expensive trappings away, you'd find naked ambition incarnate. None of it's good. And when it comes to my gut feeling about how they impact our world, I see them more as ineffectual or arbitrarily tyrannical but mostly incompetent. This is probably not true, so I have been wrestling with where these thoughts came from.

I've been chatting with Terry McGee lately, when I see him on the odd occasion, and it turns out he once ran for office. He didn't win, but he did run. In other words, he had great faith in the system. I couldn't believe it, but it's true. And he is very proctive about issues and participation. When we do chat, he seems to find my degree of profound cynicism pretty disturbing. So I told him of my political memories and he sort of smiled and said, "That's different. The worst thing then, that Watergate did was rob a generation of people their political faith; and you're just another casualty. That's probably why governments try to cover things up. They're protecting the children."
Interesting thought.
Terry says he grew up across the road from a MP, and that was enough for him to look up to politics as a noble cause. Maybe Terry is right, and we of the Post-Watergate Generation got really jobbed.

Thus I began to ponder what my first recollections of politics was about, and then it hit me. It was Richard Nixon resigning over the Watergate incident. I remember bobbing up an down in a suburban pool with some fellow kids from the primary school and the conversation was about what a bad man Richard Nixon was to have be forced into resigning as POTUS (we didn't quite use the term POTUS, but it's late night typing so...). We didn't quite understand it, but what I remember talking about was how Nixon made some people do illegal break and enter jobs - and POTUS really should not be sponsoring such activity. That was 1974 - a great year for prog rock records but an awful year for politics.

I remember watching the movie 'All The President's Men' on television at some point, and while we never see Richard Nixon himself, the film made a great impression upon me of just how crooked the man was - and while revisionist histories come an go to rehabilitate his legacy, the biggest impression it may have left is on Generation X who won't trust politicians. I'm sure I'm not alone in this outlook. My school friends certainly weren't.

Another thing that left an impression on me was the 1976Lockheed Bribery Scandal in Japan which brought down indictments against Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. Within 2 years I had witness 2 heads of governments brought down by their own wrong-doing. After that, what can a poor boy think of politicians but as corrupt bastards? I don't think I ever got over it in the sense that I have never found any of these people admirable on a personal level.
Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, these men are all deeply flawed in my eyes. The list of Japanese Prime Minsters is even worse.

The other thing is this: my own adage about Politics has been since my High School days, 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. Why? Apart from the fact that The Who left an indelible impression my thinking back then, it really comes down the great suspicions it levels against ideologies and ideologues. In that sense, the song allows a teen to confront the unfairness of teachers, school, and even the petty boss presiding over the crappy summer jobs. So even if it's true that the new boss is the same as the old boss, as long as we practice a healthy cynicism towards politicians, it seems to me we will be safe.

When I got to University, it was a year after the Australian Union of Students had collapsed (Thanks to Peter Fucking Costello!). There was a great sense of loathing floating around University of Sydney Campus over that. What I remember most vividly is a cartoon by Adam Long where he wrote:

1. Dogs lick their balls
2. Dogs lick each other's balls
3. but there's one thing that dogs won't do and
4. that's indulge in Student Politics.

In other words, politics was shit. You got the feeling from the ambience on campus, ALL politics was shit, and it was. Somehow, these things then became the building blocks of my political perception. They were lying, cheating, power-hungry mutts with fleas, but worse.

So when it comes to the recent Obamamania, it leaves me a little cold. For heaven's sakes, he's a politician, I think. How different could he really be? How different would he be to any of his crap POTUS predecessors? When he preaches 'change', I think about Bill Clinton's campaigns - and I recall in 1992 how suspicious I felt about him too.

What does all this mean? It means that my jaundiced view is perhaps an inevitable product of the times in which I've lived and that when I do go and have a go at them and they wince, they've only got themselves to blame. :)

Obituaries

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn passed away this week.

He was born on December 11 1918, in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, and grew up a loyal communist and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University before becoming a Soviet army officer after Hitler's invasion in 1941. As a student he edited the Komsomol newspaper and was awarded one of only seven Stalin scholarships for outstanding social and scholastic achievement.

It was while at university that he began to write short stories, and drafted the plan for an immense Tolstoyan novel intended to celebrate the October revolution. But his devotion to socialist principles and indiscreet hostility to Stalin's autocratic rule led to his undoing.

Shortly before the war's end, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the labour camps.

For many years he had little expectation that his writings would see the light of day but the daring One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation. Its revelations about Stalin's policies and the evils of the labour camps were described as "a literary miracle". Within weeks his name was known all over the world.

Last night the Russian government expressed its condolences over his death. "President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family," a Kremlin spokesman said.

Back in the day when I had literary ambitions, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's work stood there forbiddingly telling me I didn't have the kinds of life experiences from which to base great fiction upon. I would start reading Gulag Archipelago and just want to cringe and die at the thought that I had something important to say. Now I know better - I don't - which is why I write this blog. Yes, there were other writers with more style or more insight, or more moral authority, but Sozhenitsyn was the living literary witness to the devastation of Stalinism. If Orwell was able to describe the mechanism of such brutality in Animal Farm, Solzhenitsyn was the man who copped the brunt of that mechanism.

As such, it's kind of weird to see how conservatives took Solzhenitysn to their collective bosoms as the leading light of anti-communism. It sort of glosses over his literary achievement. Of course that all got lost in the shuffle of Perestroika, Glasnost and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall. You don't see the same conservatives lining to save the other people on the planet who are caught in other awkward, awful situations. Some of them even create them, like Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray, but we won't get into that today.

So now Solzhenitsyn is gone, you sort of wonder if his work is going to continue to carry that weight going forwards into history. How much relevance do such texts hold in a world given over to iPhone releases and instant gratification.
Anyway, I'm sort of meditating on all this and drawing a blank. Does anybody care to offer a comment?

The Bank Job

More Fiction Than Fact, But Fun!

That's it, that's most of my review... So repeat after me with your best husky cockney tone: "what's it all about then eh, Jason?"

What's Good About It
I don't know why crime fiction from England is so compelling. The robbers in the East End, the sleuths, the crooked cops, the journalists, the politicians, the prostitutes and pimps; it's all a never ending circus of characters that make up the vast ocean of crime fiction in England. This film lands somewhere in the tradition with the attendant trappings. It's one part 'Get Carter', one part 'Italian Job' and one part 'The Ipcress File' - All of them are some-time-cockney-boy-done-good Michael Caine's movies. If if were still 1971, I'm guessing it would be Michael Caine organising the gang that goes digging into the vault.

Luckily for us, it's not Caine's cine-successor Jude Law doing the stuff, but a more rough-around-the-edge Jason Statham. I don't know why, but his baldness and scruffy charm lends a certain credibility to his life-weary character. He is a wonderful star who carries enough baggage into the role to understand what we are seeing is highly contextual. Indeed, the world of London Crime in the 1970s is something that requires a nuanced, relativist mindset to navigate. Prostitution and porn, graft and greed, high office and bondage, all roll around in the mud joyously and it takes a seasoned-looking Statham to make it look overwhelming as a daily grind.

Then there is the preposterous connectivity of the narrative that links John and Yoko through to Lord Moutbatten via Porn Barons, black activists, crooked cops and the MI5. It's all very entertaining how the screenwriters manage to juggle so many balls in the air and still get the story to hang together. Indeed, it's dressed like a heist movie, but it's only when they get to the vault to find that what they find does the story hit the thrill-gear - and that's not a bad choice.

Tim, the MI5 guy looks like an echo of Connery's James Bond - dapper, casual, with a hint of capacity for incredible violence. The Conservative politicians look like echoes of the type who got caught in the Profumo affair; and the cars look just fabulously 1971. A Ford Cortina actually looks fresh on the London streets in this film. As period pieces go, this one is very nice with many laughable touches.

What's bad About It
I imagine English boys who know the terrain so well would actually object to this film. If you're far away from London as I am and live in an entirely different kind of corrupt town, the shenanigans of the underclass of London is actually quite amusing entertainment fare.

Also, I'm not really sure about the claims to truth. For instance, the film places Gale Ann Benson as an MI5 operative undercover - which may be true, but there are indications to the contrary - you only need to dig around with Google. I guess I'm left wondering about the facts and in so doing I feel a little disappointment with the conception of the film.
Having said all that, if the worst thing I can think of is that it plays a little hard and fast with the facts, then what am I really saying?

True Story, Loosely Based On Fact
Well, there was a bank robbery, to be sure...

Films are suppose to be fanciful. To go watch a movie and then complain that it's fanciful is a little like going to a brothel and complaining that there's too much sex going on. One of the big myths about cinema and even cinema verite documentary making is that there is a literary 'Naturalist' representation of anything going on in front of the lens; or that this naturalistic representation survives the process where there is picture editing, sound effects added, music composed, and then colour-graded. It's just not feasible that any object can go through this process and be naturalistic or for that matter approach the kind of literary naturalism or realism.

Cinematic meaning is a lot more motile and fleeting than that, and we should all be aware that we could all be misreading the text - but that's all okay. Texts are there to be fundamentally misread. My year 12 English teacher Mr Lucas would spew, but that's the kind of world we live in now. So just because they say it's based on a true story, don't complain when it doesn't ring true. After all, we live in post-Post-Modern Times where authoritative texts are largely stripped of the said gravitas. There is no space for capital 'T' truths in the Dream Factory. The rest is just... entertainment.

Criminality, 1970s Style

If I were doing a 'movie double', the film I would pull out of the video store would be 'American Gangster'. Both feature a moment in history when Black activism crossed over into violence and crime as well as shed insight into the nature of how crime and policing inevitably seem to meet up, resulting in corruption. Simply put, the amount of money in crime grew so fast and far outstripped the capacity of police to pay enough to its own.

Indeed, revelations this week about the late Abe "Mr. Sin" Saffron in our own city of Sydney and his relationship with the police and politicians shows that there was a point in time in the First World that was totally vulnerable to this problem. It's actually a mystery if it ever really ended. Here's a dose of the SMH article:

THE disgraced former Liberal premier Bob Askin was not only on the payroll of the late crime boss Abe Saffron, but was the recipient of payments via horse races that were fixed as "a courtesy to premier Askin".

Askin and a police commissioner were among those who received thousands of dollars a week from Saffron, the crime figure's son has confirmed in a book on his father, to be released soon.

Saffron was also involved in loan sharking. One of his borrowers was Kerry Packer.

Despite Saffron's lifelong denial of involvement in criminal activity, in Gentle Satan Saffron's only son, Alan, 59, says his father controlled the vice trade, including illegal gambling and prostitution, in every state except Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and bribed a host of politicians and policemen to ensure he was protected.

At one stage, the American "Mob" tried to persuade Saffron to operate a casino in Las Vegas on its behalf, but his father declined, he said.

Mr Saffron details his father's "excellent business relationship and long-standing friendship" with Askin and the police commissioner of the day, Norm Allan, who died in 1977. Questions were asked about the size of Askin's estate, almost $2 million, when he died in 1981. Askin was knighted in 1972, while he was premier.

"There have been many accounts of my father's relationship with these two men but none realised the depth of his association and influence. Both were totally corrupt and my father's excellent business brain and complete integrity in his dealings with them allowed him to exploit their greed to its fullest," he writes.

It's really hard to stomach this sort of criminality where top elected officials are on the take, but there you go. The pay offs were $5,000 to $10,000 per week in 1970s money. Just think about the enormity of such sums. Why wouldn't a cop go on the take?
Compared to that, you sort of wonder why blackmail photos of Princess Margaret having an orgy in the Carribean is such a big deal.

A Nice Touch
At one point, Terry falls into a burial cavern that dates to 1665 - the year of the Great plague of London. It's poignant to recognise history is everywhere in a town like London.

The nice touch they missed is this: Sherlock Holmes' office was on the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road - something that was not missed by the real robbers who spray-painted: "Let Sherlock Holmes try to solve this."