Kick Ass

Righteous Vengeance Demands Righteous Violence


Spoiler Alert.

I've been meaning to see this film for weeks but it's just stayed elusive for some silly reasons. Well, I've watched it now and I'm a satisfied customer thank you very much.

What's Good About It

There are many things good about this film, but if there is one thing that deserves to be singled out as particularly good, it is the remorseless manner in which extreme violence is meted out by a 11 year old girl in a mask. I know there are critics out there who are appalled by Hit Girl, but she is the best thing in this film.

It's also so extreme, it is pissing off people it sets out to piss off, and there is something delightful about that too. With each punch and stab and kick and shot to the head, you feel the wowser critics are copping it to the part of their brains that just can't handle this spectacle. In that way, it's very punk.

I loved the opening titles which was a straight lift from the 1978 'Superman'. The opening scene where a deranged guy in a costume plunges to his death thinking he can fly is such a sly comment about one of the urban myths about George Reeves's deaths - that he was on LSD and thought he could fly and leapt out a window. The film is full of pop culture and comic book references that leave you in stitches. I was shedding tears as I laughed so much.

What's Bad About It

It's not terribly thematically deep - and it's not meant to be - but considering how 'Defendor' worked this material, it comes off second best by a long shot. Nevertheless the good thing is that such a fault is not really a blemish. The film is damn fine entertainment and asking for thematic depth is like asking for a Tetsuyas dish at McDonalds. Or nuance from a newspaper review. It has one theme - comic books - and works it beautifully.

I guess it's not much of a complaint, really. More like a casual observation. It's actually nice to see a film with not too much ethical consideration and minimal moral depth that is exciting, fun and bone-crunchingly intense.

What's Interesting About It

The controversy over Mindy McCready and her foul-mouthed crime-fighting ways, is actually a little curious. Have a read of this line for instance:

But Australian movie critic Andrew L. Urban said publicity material and the film trailer could give parents the reasonable expectation Kick-Ass was a frivolous teenage comedy.

Instead it ''failed to recognise the line between black humour and sadism'', with scenes of carnage and massacre played for laughs, and had no moral framework.

''If I was a parent of a 12-year-old who took them to see this film I would be incredibly annoyed and upset,'' he said.

Got that? No moral framework. Did he  just watch the film we saw? Last I looked, the film was pretty solidly normative in its 'moral' outlook. Goody guys (and little girls) are allowed to exact vengeance upon the evil in any which manner they see fit.

Here's another line, this time from Sandra Hall.

Once again, the action is beyond belief. The heavy artillery includes a bazooka and the choreography reaches such a level of violence that it would be anatomically impossible for anybody to get out alive if the laws of the real world were in play. It's ridiculous and the fact there's an 11-year-old behind Hit Girl's mask is supposed to make it even more ridiculous. But in me it produced a weird sense of disorientation. I felt as I did when Jack Bauer and his good guys were licensed to use torture in the early episodes of the TV series 24. On the surface, there's no comparison between Bauer and Hit Girl but they do have a couple of things in common. Both are signalling a shift in the moral compass by which mainstream pop culture sets its course and both make me feel very queasy.

I simply doubt there's any such shift in the moral compass by the mainstream pop culture. Likening it to Jack Bauer and '24' is simply an attempt to hang the pro-violence politics of '24' on to 'Kick Ass' when 'Kick Ass' is so obviously ironic (from title down to character concept and costumes), is disingenuous and an underhanded attempt to link it to something that actually is morally questionable. It's Sandra Hall's own business getting queasy with both but they are by and far not the same thing.

I don't really have much sympathy for people who are put off by strong art. If you're likely to be put off by strong art, then don't hang around places that might have it. I like my art strong, and this creation of Mindy McCready/Hit Girl is terrifyingly powerful. In years to come I imagine Chloe Moretz won't be living this down any more than Jodie Foster or Gary Coleman. Who knows what it will do to her, but this creation is something immortal. 20 years on, we will be talking about Hit Girl the way we talk about Batman.

Hot-House Parenting

What is probably more immediately disturbing about the film is Nick Cage's character Damon McCready who hothouses this girl into being an assassin. Vengeance is one of the most powerful story engines for violent tracts, and inculcating a character with such repressed fury as Damon McCready does with his daughter is at once hilarious and scary. Not many of the critics of the film seem to be picking up on this angle, possibly because they're the sorts of people who would be hothouse parents themselves. For there to be a Chloe Moretz to play Mindy, there must have been a stage-mom hot-housing the young actress - and nobody seems to mention the parallels between that and the story.

I'm not saying Hot-house parenting is wrong. It depends on which way you develop your kids. You see some amazing musical talent on YouTube where 4 year olds are playing Mozart sonatas and 9 year olds are playing live with Ozzy Osbourne. Yet it seems at least half appropriate that if people are going to complain about a Mindy McCready, they at least look at the issue of Hot-house parenting.

In turn, a fictional character like Mindy McCready really isn't a problem in the world when compared to the recent incident where a Tasmanian mother sent out her 12 year old daughter to be a prostitute. That's a deplorable story and I can guarantee you that it didn't happen because the mother was into edgy fiction.

Vengeance And Retributive Violence

As important as vengeance and retribution might be in fiction, this film is actually quite ironic and light-hearted about the notion. It is also very hip about the rhetoric surrounding power and violence, especially when one of this film's fine quips is "With no strength comes no responsibility". The line exposes the fact that one's strength and power actually is not tethered to social responsibility except by the character's free choice.

This idea is repeated several times at the beginning where David explicitly explains that he himself has no vengeance and retribution text to propel him into the world of masked crime-fighting. Even the very macabre opening where some disturbed Armenian dressed as a superhero plunges to death in his costume serves to show the gap between appearance and reality. In a sense they do away with the moral polemics of hero action early on. Thank you for playing Mr. Shakespeare, and so much for Hamlet-like consideration. This film is firmly in Fortinbras' corner. Don your Nikes and just go for it, boys and girls.

The film also goes to illustrate the point that it is not the Law that keeps society in the shape that it has, but because of the power structures within the society. The Law is simply a byproduct of the power structure. Retributive violence therefore is a byproduct of the injustices the exercise of power brings. For a film that likes to just zip along and tell a yarn, it actually has a Macchiavellian view of the city. In that sense, it's realpolitik at least is intellectually honest.

You'd think they were selling The Prince to little children.

There Goes Mark Strong Again!

He plays such great baddies. Just once I'd love to see him play a goodie. Like a particularly hard-nosed detective or an embittered spy doing the one noble thing. He's got such a great screen presence playing bad guys in 'Rock'n'Rolla' 'Sherlock Holmes', 'Robin Hood' and 'Kick Ass' but I sort of want him to do something different now. Or perhaps a comedy where he's Stanley Tucci's brother.

Thanks Mr. Lowy

Tell It Like You Think, Frank

This week's lovely news from the wonderful world of Westfield as they had they 50th anniversary do, was this little morsel in the papers.

Mr Lowy defended his family's position at Westfield when it was pointed out that he and his sons, Steven and Peter, collectively earned $31 million from Westfield last year.

''It's wrong in the first place to lump the three Lowys together,'' he said. ''They are three different people doing three different jobs and they are entitled to get [paid]''.

''I don't work for nothing … I'm entitled to get paid,'' he said.

Mr Lowy let it be known that he saved his charitable streak for philanthropic interests.

''I don't keep that money I get from the company, I give it away to a lot more deserving causes,'' he said. ''I don't think Westfield shareholders are a deserving cause to give them an extra cent.''

I'm trying to get my head around that. If you were the capitalist asking the shareholder to put in money to do your venture, how on earth do you come to the conclusion that the shareholders are undeserving, especially of an extra cent per share? I knw he's a powerful, rich man, but calling your shareholders undeserving of an extra cent per share is such contempt and hubris on Frank Lowy's part.

I'm never going to invest in Westfield Shares while it is under Frank Lowy's control. Ever.

The Other Boleyn Girl

Tragedy, Comedy, Tragicomedy, Historico-Tragico-Comedy

Sometimes you have to love a good frock opera, especially when it involves the kind of intrigue to do with English Royalty. Sex and Religion have a way of making itself felt in anything to do with Henry VIII, and in Anne Boleyn we have perhaps the most intriguing of Henry VIII's Queens. In short, she reeks of scandal and she perished amidst scandalous accusations. All of which should make good fodder for any drama to unfold.

So what do we have in this Hollywood adaptation? It seems we're not really interested in sticking to facts, and more interested in the titillation of Henry VIII having many a shagathon with multiple women in a bid to sire a son.

I missed this film at the cinemas in early 2009 because even with its strong selling points it wasn't really a match for whatever else was on offer at the time. Now that it's on DVD and selling for peanuts I thought "hey why not?"

What's Good About It

The attitude of the Boleyn family portrayed in this film is alienatingly naked in its aggressive pursuit of advancement. They make your average social climber look like kindergarten bullies. Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk portrayed in this film is a scarily Macchiavellian man and that alone makes it riveting to watch.

In turn, the Boleyn girls as portrayed in this film are every bit up for some royal action in a bid to produce the future heir to the throne. It is decidedly un-modern and the attitude carried by the characters in this film are beautifully distant from our own present day mores. It's positively exhilarating to watch naked, unfettered ambition. It plugs you right into the pulse of England as it reforms its way away from the Catholic Church.

The production design is great. The directing is okay, the cinematography is good. I don't know how large the budget for this film was, but it has a lovely look to it. The locations looked fantastic.

Also, the actress who plays Catherine of Aragon - Ana Torrent - is excellent. More on that later.

What's Bad About It

It's a star-driven product. I don't really know how to take Eric Bana's King Henry VIII seriously. It's not an issue of his acting so much as recognition, and what we recognise is that he can't quite shake his Melbourne Aussie diction.  It's distracting and on par with Russell Crowe's Robin Hood when it comes to unbelievability. I mean, for a start, Henry VIII was a big boofy ranga. Eric Bana looks more like Ivan the Terrible than Henry VIII.

Similarly with Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn kept reminding me of her turn as Queen Amidala in the lesser-and-latter Star Wars trilogy. Yet, in many ways Natalie Portman manages to present a certain mood of a person who is gunning for power, she might not be the worst casting for Anne Boleyn. It's just too hard to get past the baggage she carries in to this film.

Scarlett Johansson completes the triangle of stars that probably got the project up and running, and oddly enough she is the most believable of the three. I don't think she looks like a period picture kind of actress, but she put in the most credible performance of the three. Then again her part may not have been the most difficult.

You feel sorry for the film for the casting that they had to make to get it made. Together with the casting disaster that was Russell & Cate's 'Robin Hood', this film points to a great malaise in film making this decade.

Oh, and one more thing... the sex scene between Henry and Mary in the first turning point with its out of focus drift off camera move is godawful.

What's Interesting About It

I guess the usual thing to do would be to pick nits and historical inaccuracies, but being that this film is already based on a book that is loosely based on history, I won't go in for that fun too much. There are some interesting things about this film.

First of all, it is a very strange film where you are not sure if what you are watching is a kind of dramatised history or whether it is heavily molded to suit the screen. The movie flops about as it changes tenor of its gravity and all the while you think, "That's Anne Boleyn, she's going to get the chop" so there really is no suspense to the film. It makes for a better than average viewing of the emotional process,  but it takes too many liberties with history to you wonder if the emotional journey presented is even worthwhile.

I mean, for a start, Mary is Anne's older sister, not younger. When Henry VIII says he relates to Mary Boleyn because they're both second-children, it's completely bogus as rationale.

The Catherine of Aragon Angle

Catherine of Aragon is one of the sadder characters in history. She may have been a religious zealot of sorts and a rather strident strict (and dire) Catholic of the Iberian persuasion, she also has the misfortune of being the first cab off the rank in the scheme of Henry VIII's six wives. Indeed, she is history's official first recorded member of 'The First Wives Club'. Even though she was born to rule and she was queen to Henry for a solid 27 years, she never quite fills the pages of history as a totally positive figure. There is a lingering feeling even today, when people pass judgment that her failure to produce a male heir, alongside with her producing Mary I -aka "Bloody Mary" - as her contribution to the lineage of English Royalty, are her personal faults.

Indeed Henry's other 5 wives are crammed into the last 11 years of his reign, and not many depictions of Catherine of Aragon amongst the other 5 wives cover this point. In most of his adult life, Catherine was Henry VIII's love of his life, and it is in the last decade of his life that he turns himself inside out with his kingdom to produce a male heir that results in the strange set of events.

As such, the crux of the drama rests on how Anne Boleyn convinces Henry VIII to abandon his long trusted Queen and in the process junk the ties to the Catholic Church. Catherine in this film is an unfortunate bit of collateral damage, but in reality she would have been far more active in trying to preserve hr claim to being Queen. It's an odd decision then to downplay this part of the drama, because this is where the best materials lie.

The Bountiful Boleyns

You kind of have to know how subsequent history went to understand the ironies of this film to get your money's worth of laughs. Anne Boleyn's daughter of course is Elizabeth I who goes on to reign for 45 years as one of the great monarchs in English history AND she got played by Cate Blanchett, another Australian like Eric Bana; so in recent movie-land at least the House of Tudor is a bunch of Aussies and Eric can ask Cate, "Who's your daddy?"

Yet putting such casting related jokes aside, had Henry not been so fixated on a male heir he might not have worked his way through the other 4 wives. He actually had 3 issues who would reign, out of his first three marriages - Mary I, Elizabeth I and Edward VI. He did alright, as they would say, but how was he to know?

Perhaps the lesser known angle to all this is what happened to the Mary Boleyn line. Mary Boleyn's descendants are still around and through history they have counted amongst them Winston Churchill and the late Diana Princess of Wales. Princess Di of course gave us the two princes, one of whom William will presumably one day sit on the throne.

Rick Wakeman Wherefore Art Thou?

This is just an aside and doesn't have much to do with the film as such.

The more one reads about King Henry VIII and his Six Wives, the more one comes face to face the morbid fear of death that must have plagued Henry VIII. These marriages, as amorously charged in the beginning they may have been, all seem to have weird confluences of courtiers' ambitions and issues of state hanging over them. The whys and wherefores of Henry moving from one wife to another is like an early harbinger of modernity and the search for true undying love.

Surely he loves Catherine of Aragon who gives him one daughter, but the needs of the state weigh upon him so greatly that he engineers a break from the Roman Catholic Church to get to Anne Boleyn. He gets a daughter, not a son and so he engineers a witch-trial to get rid of her to get to Jane Seymour. Jane Seymour gives him a son, but dies, so he quickly mail-orders a bride from Saxony and gets buyers' remorse when he sees Anne of Cleves. So he ends up with Catherine Howard by which time he's old and obese and has a pustular infection in his thigh - what a turn on for a teenage girl -  who essentially refuses to shag him. So he gets rid of her and sends her to the chopping block, and replaces her with Catherine Parr by which time he's no longer really able to do it.

No wonder people keep going back to this well for stories to tell. The film made me want to hunt up for my copy of Rick Wakeman's 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII'. Yet, as interesting as the parade of these women are, I don't think there has been a great cinematic investigation into the emotional crisis that was in Henry's soul in the last 11 years of his reign.

The frantic changes of wives in the last ten years of Henry's reign aren't just scandalous by conventional moral standards, they're existential and desperate. The man is clearly trying to affix something that cannot be affixed, like nailing the proverbial jello to a ceiling. He is searching for the perfect Queen who can at once give him what Catherine of Aragon gave him in her best years, plus give him that male heir, all the while his animal potency as a male is dying. Talk about raging against the dying light.

Today's Whaling Guff 28/05/2010

See You In Court, Slanty-Eyes!

Australia is pressing ahead with its International Court case.

The Federal Government will initiate legal action against Japan early next week over its "scientific" whaling in the Southern Ocean.

The legal application will be lodged with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Environment Minister Peter Garrett announced this morning.

In a statement Mr Garrett, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and Attorney-General Robert McClelland said the decision had not been taken lightly and had come after the government tried to reach a compromise with the Japanese Government through the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and bilateral talks.

The ministers' statement says the legal action is about one dispute with Japan in an otherwise "comprehensive strategic, security and economic partnership".

"Both Australia and Japan have agreed that, whatever our differences on whaling, this issue should not be allowed to jeopardise the strength and the growth of our bilateral relationship," the statement said.

Mr Garrett said: "We want to see an end to whales being killed in the name of science in the Southern Ocean."

They - as in the anti-waling lobby - are saying this fulfills an ALP election promise and so this is a good thing. It's questionable politics at best. The SMH analysis on the move is here.

By committing to a Hague case — but only if significant progress has not been made in diplomatic efforts — the ALP politically trumped the Howard government on the one environmental cause that almost all Australians support.

But would they really go so far as to upset a country who is a crucial economic and diplomatic partner over a few whales?

Instead of rushing to the lawyers when they first came to power, Environment Minister Peter Garrett and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith sensibly attempted to first hammer out a compromise with the Japanese.

For three years Smith and Garrett tried different avenues. They flirted with a small working group within the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which is trying to break the impasse between whaling and anti-whaling nations. They held bilateral meetings with Japanese officials. And they held out hope that the change of government in Japan last year would present new opportunities to cut a deal.

But in the end the compromises on the table from Japan weren't enough. Left with no option Smith informed the Japanese Government last night that papers would be lodged in The Hague early next week.

The timing of the case is not accidental. Next month the IWC will meet in Agadir to discuss a compromise deal put forward by the IWC chair that allows Japan limited commercial whaling rights in the Southern Ocean.

If that deal passes Australia will no longer be able to take Japan to the International Court of Justice. Japan would have a legal right to continue its commercial whaling operations in the Southern Ocean.

Darren Kindleysides, director of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, says Australia's case will likely centre around "abuse of rights".

Those "rights" are a loophole in the 1949 Whaling Convention that allows member countries to kill protected whale species for scientific purposes. Australia will allege Japan has been abusing this loophole for commercial gain.

I'm sort of worried by how they're glossing over the clause at the IWC which allows scientific whaling, and calling it a loophole. I'm also worried about the fact that they don't mention that it is agreed at the IWC that any whale taken for research purposes can't just be thrown back into the sea, it has to be sent to the market. So the Australian case that the research whaling is a front for a commercial whaling industry is going to have a hard time proving their case given that the Japanese whaling fleets are abiding IWC rules to the letter.

Australia sure has its work cut out. And oh look, emissions are up.

Anyway... the response in Japan is pretty mature.

「事実なら大変残念だ。調査捕鯨は（国際捕鯨取締条約で）認められており、それに従ってやっていく。日豪関係全体を悪化させたくないが、駄目なものは駄目と主張していきたい」と述べ、６月にモロッコで開かれる国際捕鯨委員会（ＩＷＣ）総会などで反論していく考えを明らかにした。

豪州はＩＷＣで調査捕鯨廃止が認められなければ国際司法裁判所に提訴するとしていたが、事実上それを前倒しした形。その点について赤松農相は「豪州も秋に総選挙があり、労働党政権は厳しい。そういうことも多分、背景にある」との認識を示した。

The minister for Agriculture Hirotaka Akamatsu said they disagree with it, that they'll fight it at the IWC meet and also words to the effects of "look the Labor Party over there have a tough election coming up later this year so they have to do what they have to do."

Here's some differing perspective from New Zealand.

New Zealand says it won't consider joining Australia's international legal action to stop Japanese whaling until diplomatic efforts fail, because going to court is a risky move.

The Australian government announced on Friday that it will initiate action in the International Court of Justice in The Hague next week.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key told reporters that New Zealand would stick to a "diplomatic route" with Japan over the issue.

"The legal opinion we've had is that court action may or may not be successful, but it's certainly far from a sure bet," Mr Key said on Friday.

"The reason we've gone down a diplomatic solution is not because we're afraid of a court case but because the advice we've had is that it's more likely to be successful.

"In the end, if that diplomatic route is unsuccessful then New Zealand will make a decision about whether it's going to join Australia in the international court of justice.

"It doesn't mean we wouldn't join Australia if the diplomatic solution has been extinguished."

Mr Key said the court process could take years and would be a risky move.

"If they go to court and they lose there are real risks here so that is the whole point," he said.

"That's why if we find a diplomatic solution it might be a lot better than a court case that we could lose.

"If we thought a court case was clear cut and easy to win then obviously that might be the fastest way to do that."

It's interesting that New Zealand is taking this position given that it is one of their citizens and not an Australian citizen sitting for trial in Tokyo over the recent Sea Shepherd actions and altercations with the research whaling fleet.

Meanwhile, here's more from the IWC itself.

Monica Medina, the U.S. commissioner to the IWC, told reporters at a briefing that the Obama administration cannot accept the commission's current proposal, which allows the hunting of too many whales. But Washington is willing to continue talks to see if a stronger accord to protect whales can be settled at the IWC meeting in Morocco, she said.

Medina, who's also a principal deputy undersecretary in the Commerce Department, said: "The IWC is fundamentally broken and must be fixed." Negotiators recognize that whaling continues despite a moratorium.

"The idea would be to cap that whaling and to get it under the IWC's control so that it can be monitored," she said.

The chairman of the IWC, Cristian Maquieira, said at the briefing a successful deal next month could bring international whaling under IWC control -- something that's not happening now.

"The negotiations will be very, very complicated and very, I suspect, intense, but I do look forward to a positive outcome," Maquieira said. "I'm optimistic that we will arrive at some understanding."

He was careful to note that the IWC proposal is only meant to spur negotiations -- not to be a final agreement. "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed," Maquieira said.

I think they're being coy. Whaling by Japan, Norway and Iceland during the last 25 years has always been under IWC control as such. What's really being negotiated is numbers and really, at the end of the day, that's what the commission is supposed to do: broker numbers. If talks at the IWC fail again, I guess the world will be watching the trial in the Hague. Joys of joys.

Reading Doxa, Seeking Episteme

Grist For The Mill From Burqua-Lurkastan

During the last week I made reference to the growing Burqua debate in Australia and pointed how disturbed I was how vehemently self-declared Feminists were coming out infavor of banning them in the name of ... oh, I don't know, let's be old-fashioned and call it "women's lib". Even somebody with a high profile as Elizabeth Farrelly had this hostile article denouncing the Burqua in Australia.

Who knows the difference between ethics and morality? Belgium does, for one. Technically, there's not a lot in it. The dictionary makes ethics and morality synonyms, each relating to our cumulative attempts to tell right from wrong and act accordingly.

Aristotle's Ethics examines what it means to be good; for him, and many thinkers since, ethics and moral philosophy are one.

In everyday life, though, we tend to distinguish on a public-private basis. ''Morality'' tends to imply a code that is personal, often sexual and, just as often, religious in origin. ''Ethics'' meanwhile, denotes a public and generally secular amalgam of these values. The baked crust, if you will, atop the pie. Hence talk of professional and corporate ethics, ethical investing and, of course, ethics taught in religion's place in schools.

The St James Ethics Centre's chief, Simon Longstaff, argues similarly, defining ethics as ''a conversation . . . [on] the question, 'what ought one to do'?'' Moralities, he says - and he stresses the plural - are the voices in that conversation; one Jewish, one Christian, one Hindu, one Muslim and so on.

Ethics, in this sense, come into play where there is conflict between moralities, or between rules within a morality - as when the truth imperative cuts across kindness.

I present that bit because it had me gagging on my morning coffee this week. The fact that Aristotle thought ethics and moral philosophy are the same, does not necessarily make it so. Now, I like Aristotle (in comparison to the political Fascist Plato), but that is simply as fallacious a position on ethics as the geocentric model of the Universe. The fact that other thinkers after him followed in his tracks, doesn't make it necessarily so.

Be that as it may, she then stumbles to where most contemporary people agree about ethics, where she says "ethics comes into play where there is conflict between moralities or between rules within a morality (sic)".Her precarious conclusion is thus "as when the truth imperative cuts across kindness." What the hell exactly does she mean by that?  One assumes she is arguing that kindness shouldn't count when we're looking for the truth. Philosophically, that would be true, but it seems to me if she's ultimately talking about the burqua, I don't see how she can sustain any conlusion on her part is acting in the interests of truth and the truth imperative while the burqua supporter is not.

It's a relatively simple logical point. Either she is going to make an investigation of truth in something which is falsifiable - thus achieving epsiteme (knowledge) or she is going to arrive at an doxa (opinion) based on some largely personal observations. I don't want to bore the reader with epistemology 101, but what I am gagging on Elizabeth Farrelly is trying to set up an argument where her conclusion is going to be true, while the burqua defenders are  going to be *wrong* for not having her version of the truth.I might add, that she is not talking about a black or white issue like say, science. She's talking about a cultural practice of people she does not have full knowledge thereof.

The startling three paragraphs thus ends with this:

Democracy pivots on the universal franchise; the presumption for each individual of a public identity, as well as a private one. To cover someone's face in public, to reduce them to a walking tent, is to declare them lacking such identity, destroying any possibility of their meaningful public existence. It is, literally, to efface them.

To hide the face is to hide the person. As Shada Islam, Europe correspondent for the Pakistan paper Dawn, wrote last week, most European Muslim women have little patience with the burqa or its wearers, seeing it as ''a sad process of self-isolation and self-imposed exile''.

And while you could see even exile as a personal right, it does directly contradict a public duty, the duty of public presence. The morality of identity-erasure may be (barely) acceptable, but the ethics are not. Brave little Belgium.

And I am left shaking my head. Farrelly believes that Democracy is being undermined by people who choose to cover their faces because the effacement contradicts the public duty of presence. If ever there was tortured logic, I can't readily recall one ad tortured as this. There is nowhere in the notion of Democracy that everybody must maintain a public face as well as a private one. Let's be frank, she invented it for the purposes of her sophistry. Such a notion actually robs the legitimacy from people who are advocates for privacy.

It might be a surprise to Ms. Farrelly, but Democracy also covers the notion that should a person choose to remain intensely private, that person would and should have the right to do so. That person does not owe their neighbour or a stranger or Ms Farrelly their face. They simply do not.

Then it gets worse. In what follows this section - the Shada Islam quote - is mere opinion (doxa) as well. It's one person's stinking opinion, based on hearsay, without any statistical or empirical substantiation. It would hardly count as something in the service of the "truth imperative" as Elizabeth Farrelly claims.

The logical contortion Ms Farrelly applies to get there - even in an Op Ed kind of column is fundamentally dodgy. In fact, it borders on a non sequitur when she goes from that notion then to morality versus ethics, and then praises Belgium.

I'm sorry, but it doesn't make any bloody sense, and pretending that it does is a lie - an out and out untruth! One suspects Farrelly knew, which is why she wrote the first bit above to bolster her own claims to being able to come at an ethical decision (as opposed to a moral one),  and then punch out a conclusion that says it would be unethical to let muslim women wear burquas in public.

Only in the twisted-logic world Elizabeth Farrelly lives in.

The Punch Says Back Off

Just in case you're wondering, I'm neither female, or muslim. but I totally, totally agree with this article here. It's really well written, I recommend it thoroughly, but I'm going to cheat and cut to the chase:

By denying Muslim women agency, we miss out on seeing their resilience, strength and passion.  When I tell people that I’m an Iranian Feminist most people assume that my fervent passion for defending women’s rights came from witnessing the way the government oppresses women in Iran.  That’s not the case.

I’m not a feminist because I witnessed first hand how bad things could be for women.  I’m a feminist because I had the privilege of watching women fight for their rights without compromise.

Seeing photos from the Green Movement to reform Iran shows this – at the forefront of most protests are women, donned in hijab, fighting not to have it obliterated but for their right to choose whether to wear it.  If the hijab isn’t a hindrance in fighting for democracy, freedom and basic human rights then its certainly not a barrier against playing sport.

In the end I want the sisterhood to acknowledge that I can control my destiny, not despite my religion, family or place of birth but because of them.

I want them to celebrate my achievements not tokenise them.  I won’t accept anything less than a unqualified acknowledgement of my agency, power and ability to make decisions in regard to my body and my life.

I know it strikes a lot of people as weird, but I totally get this argument. I have no issues with this line of thinking. I'm not a feminist, I'm just some un-reconstructed male-chauvinist-pig passing by the topic each day, but I have to say I find the feminist support to ban the burqua to be a kind of cultural imperialism and a very patronising position at the expense of people who should at least be given the benefit of the doubt, and those people really should be shown the same kind of tolerance and acceptance these very same feminists demand on behalf of asylum seekers on boats.

Q And A Excerpt

I'm Shocked, Shocked I Tell You

Got a heads up about this today. Check out this transcript for a moment:

TONY JONES: No, I want to see if there’s someone on the panel who might defend Sarah Palin, and let’s go to Malcolm Fraser, first of all.

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, could she become president, yes.

TONY JONES: Well, she could run against Obama and she could theoretically win.

MALCOLM FRASER: Look, European economies fall over the edge. That drags American down again. American economy is going worse, in spite of Obama’s - you know, I’d go to America and vote for him 1000 times and risk prosecution for voting too often to try and keep him there. But if the world economies really go down the hill...

TONY JONES: You didn’t do that when you were in government, did you?

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, it depends who you ask about. But the - it’s not impossible that the Republicans could win next time around. I would have thought that there is a 50 per cent change it should be the Republican nominee and I’m absolutely terrified at the thought.

TONY JONES: Peter Carey...

MALCOLM FRASER: It would be a madness for everyone.

Wow. I know people who swear they thought Malcolm Fraser was the devil and a fascist way back when he was in power, all over that 1975 Dismissal thing, but the same people are now shocked to hear how attuned Malcolm Fraser is to their current points of view. I know he'd mellowed and found himself at odds with John Howard, but this is quite a shock.

Then, there's this bit, which really had tongues wagging today:

TONY JONES: All right, let’s hear from Peter.

PETER CAREY: I keep on thinking about the role of the medial generally in this and how the media is always so continually hysterical about people lying and not telling the truth. And if I really think there’s a big problem in our society today, it’s that the media is not telling the truth to people and they know what it is. If you really want to know what’s happening the world, you go out and get drunk with journalists and they will tell you what isn’t in the papers. So they’re living - these guys are living every day with the reality of a proprietor, say, or a corporation who owns them will not permit them to tell what they know to be true. So, okay, this guy lied. He’s not a good person because he did it but I think the hysteria is about a bigger, bigger issue, which is we are not being honestly reported to. And if there was, you know, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but...

MALCOLM FRASER: But they knew he didn’t.

PETER CAREY: Yeah.

TONY JONES: They knew he didn’t, you say?

MALCOLM FRASER: Yes.

PETER CAREY: Yes.

TONY JONES: You mean the Howard Government knew he didn’t?

MALCOLM FRASER: It should have. I think the British Government did, the American Government did and the Australian Government should have.

TONY JONES: Okay. Well, I could pursue that for quite a while but we actually have a question in the audience. In fact, it’s directed specifically to Malcolm Turnbull(sic). It comes from Paul Sherrington. Malcolm Fraser, I beg your pardon. Did I say Malcolm Turnbull? I’m so sorry.

MALCOLM FRASER: You just took 30 years off my life.

You get the picture. Tony Jones was so flustered by the assertion by Malcolm Fraser that the Anglophone governments of USA, Britain and Australia knew there were no WMDs in Iraq prior to going in, that he called Fraser Turnbull - but think on that remark by Malcolm Fraser for  a moment. No WMDs. John Howard knew, and in Malcolm Fraser's opinion, he should have known better. No WMDs.

UPDATE: Malcolm Fraser Quits Liberal Party

Over night, we find that Malcolm Fraser in fact quit the Liberal Party.

Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser has quit the party, allegedly over a belief it has tilted too far to the right.

Mr Fraser resigned in December, shortly after Malcolm Turnbull was turfed as opposition leader over his support for emissions trading, The Australian Financial Review reported.

He allegedly told friends his replacement, Tony Abbott, was "all over the place" on policy and disliked the racist overtones adopted by the party in the debate on immigration.

Mr Fraser, the prime minister from 1975 to 1983, confirmed his decision to quit yesterday, saying the party was no longer a liberal party but a conservative party.

Although he failed to elaborate, he has recently been critical of the coalition in the media, particularly over its stance on the Israeli passports affair.

He has previously criticised the Liberal party for becoming one of "fear and reaction" and says it is now unrecognisable as the party he joined more than 50 years ago.

The Australian Financial Review says his final decision to quit was made after he became increasingly concerned with the conservative direction of the party.

I'm still shocked, shocked I tell you! Isn't that like Ronald Reagan quitting the Republicans if only he were alive? Or Margaret Thatcher quitting the Conservatives if only she still had a mind? Jeebus Creepus. The Libs have tilted far to the right if Malcolm Fraser can't abide it any more.

NSW Looking Through A Glass Onion

The Walrus Wasn't Paul, It Was Gay!

This week's scandal for the NSW Government brought us the uneasy spectacle of Transport & Roads Minister coming out of a gay sex parlour in Kensington. Why the public need to know that David Campbell - aka 'the Walrus' - was never adequately explained by Channel Seven who initially ran with the story that it was an abuse of ministerial privilege to drive the minster's car to a brothel, but quickly dropped that angle when it came to light that yes, he is allowed to drive his vehicle wherever he likes.

Just as promptly, David Campbell quit his minister's job before the news broke, although it's really not the kind of scandal one would expect to be a scandal. Channel Seven's news desk is now alleging that a man who keeps a second life as a gay person needs to be outed if they are a politician. One imagines this might have some serious repercussions if people decided to live by that code.

Indeed, there have been some tawdry moments and affairs from the NSW Labor Government but one thinks that David Campbell as an in-closet married man actually constituted a scandal so much as lurid sensationalism. I for one thought we were way past the point of being scandalised by the notion of anybody being gay. Apparently Channel Seven's news desk is still living in the mid-twentieth century. I mean, we live in a time when everybody knew Ricky Martin was gay, a decade and a half before he came out, and nobody even batted an eye-lid when he did.

All the same I guess our society will always run on the "You Fuck One Goat" principle, which essentially makes idiots of us all.

Here's an article in Crikey sent in by Pleiades that sheds some light on the motives of the people who broke this non story.

There is also a factional dimension. Walters lost his job in September 2008 after the strategy unit was disbanded under Iemma’s successor Nathan Rees. At the time, Campbell was part of a group of ministers, including Meagher, that had moved against Iemma. While his girlfriend stayed on, the former premier’s treachery had left Walters without a gig.

After joining the Daily Telegraph in early 2009, Walters was accused of giving his lover preferential treatment, which just weeks before had pilloried Meagher with headlines including ‘GRIM REBA’.

David Koch picked up on this obvious conflict this morning, producing this amazing exchange on Seven’s Sunrise:

Koch: “Yeah, Adam, he [Campbell] has led a double life. Let me play devil’s advocate here: yes, he should apologise to his family, there’s no doubt about that. But is it a hanging offence? People make mistakes … to be polite you were involved in a similar situation when you worked at state parliament …”

Walters: “Very briefly.”

Koch: “… with a minister and things like that. Private things happened. So, should they have to resign? Yes they’ve got a lot of explaining to do to their family, but shouldn’t it be left at that?”

One Seven insider told Crikey this morning:

“Adam Walters is the last person who should be throwing stones. He has three children to three different women, and is unable to keep his own penis in his pants.”

Walters, who is paid $250,000 a year by Seven, has also been accused of attempting to protect his journalistic integrity by cloaking the headline-grabbing same-sex elements of the story in a sub-plot over Campbell’s use of a “ministerial vehicle”. But as premier Kristina Keneally remarked this morning, ministers routinely use their ministerial vehicles for private tasks, including picking up the kids from school.

This Adam Walters sounds like a real keeper. Somebody should *out* where this guy lives.

I was watching 'Wag the Dog' last night thinking, if this were the President of the United States of America, we'd be going to nuclear war right now. As it is, it's only the NSW Transport&Roads Minister. We should count ourselves lucky we live in the venal state.

Whatever Works

Spoiler alert. All my film articles need spoiler alerts. If you haven’t seen this film and spoilers piss you off, then don’t read on. I’m not very sparing that way.

Woody Allen’s Intimations of Mortality

Seeing that I made a comment about Ridley Scott in his decline phase as being not as good as Woody Allen’s I thought it might be an idea to check in with the auteur of angst comedy to see where he has landed.

This one took me a little by surprise. Woody Allen’s always talked about death and his immense fear of dying, but this film is the first time I actually felt this fear was not a neurosis but actually a real problematic for Allen. He’s getting old, he has to think about the inevitability of his own demise; and while he probably doesn’t care too deeply about his own legacy, we get the feeling that the reason he doesn't want to die is because there is so much in life he actually loves and wishes not to leave behind. Paramount in all of life for Allen, is love itself.

What’s Good About It

The rapier wit and cutting remarks are alive and well in Woody Allen’s world. This film is filled with misanthropic classic one liners and putdowns. The sarcasm is priceless and casting Larry David to play the older man pays off in bundles. For once we are freed from the lines being delivered by the Woody Allen persona that he has built up over 40-odd movies, and instead having them delivered by somebody who has been playing misanthropic monsters with panache.

The set up follows on from some of his other films where an older man takes up with a younger woman, but in this film Woody Allen makes no bones about the fact that we should be uncomfortable with it, even if it is something that the people in the story come to accept rather readily.

In fact, the characters in the story come to accept all manners of things about themselves that you would not expect them to accept. Through out the various moments of transformation that befall the characters, we get a glimpse into what a truly recklessly liberal mind can think up. On some level it reminds us of the kind of social critiques mounted by the Marquis de Sade, but without the sexual violence. Woody Allen sees our sexual mores as largely circumstantial, like coin-tosses by God (except he's not there). It’s a radically mean thing to say, but it’s very much worth saying.

What’s Bad About It

Maybe Woody Allen has written and directed too many films and is easily bored, but lately he doesn’t seem to be interested in proper plotting. He knows what he’s interested in, so he goes headlong into playing out those scenes, but the narrative in this film is so loose and haphazard, it makes you wonder if he cares about the conventions of drama any more.

The story is ostensibly a narrative told by Boris Yellnikoff, and yet there are whole swags of the story that should be unknowable, even to a genius. Then, when the story gets a little complicated, Yellnikoff simply narrates away the structure of the problem. The problem with this is that it then becomes exposition and the exposition is a lot less interesting than seeing.

It’s easy to see that Woody Allen’s chewed off more than he can handle with this story. There’s the story of the girl from Mississippi who comes to New York and ends up marrying an older guy; but there’s also the story of her mother who comes to New York and experiences a sexual awakening; followed by the girl’s father who comes to New York and shakes off his repression to come out. They’re all fairly big stories, but Woody Allen isn’t interested in the emotional arcs, he’s interested in the weirdness of these stories, so he cherry picks the weird bits and narrates his way over what really needs to be dramatised.

The end result is a film that hangs together on Boris Yellnikoff’s description, and while the descriptions are funny, the film might have been funnier if Allen had bothered to dramatise those moments too.

What’s Interesting About It

This film comes exactly 30 years after Woody Allen’s classic ‘Manhattan’. ‘Manhattan’ of course is a story about a 40-something guy who comes to terms with his own feelings for a 17 year old girl. This film is arguably about Woody Allen finding a way to finish that thought to its natural conclusion. ‘Manhattan’ is touched by a deeply romantic view about love and relationships and interpersonal ethics beyond conventional morality, it ultimately rests on the bittersweet hope that Woody Allen’s character Isaac Davies can keep being the man for Tracy, the 17 year old played by Mariel Hemmingway. The sentiment is dripping at the end of the film.

By contrast, ‘Whatever Works’ is remarkably anti-humanist and anti-sentimental. In the intervening 30 years, Woody Allen seems to have lost the taste for pleasing people with the fairytale ending. He knows that audiences won’t buy the fairytale ending coming from him any more. Instead he lets slip his misanthropy and turns that into a circus of bad behaviour that all gets celebrated.

You could do worse than to watch these 2 films back to back, just to observe just how much Woody Allen has given up, so to speak.

The Young Women

There's a long string of really interesting young women in Woody Allen's film starting at Mariel Hemmingway, that goes through barbara Herschey's character in 'Hannah and Her Sisters' and then Mira Sorvino in 'Mighty Aphrodite', and Scarlet Johannson in 'Scoop', and finally to Evan Rachel Wood in 'Whatever Works'.

It is as if these young women not only play the object of desire as well as the yearning for lost youth, but foils for the nasty things Woody Allen has to say about American womanhood - things that a proper feminist would say are misogynist but are so damn funny when you see them on the screen. Keep in mind Mira Sorvino won her Oscar on the back of her performance as porn star and hooker Linda Ash in 'Mighty Aphrodite'.

In each outing where he has these young women in his stories, he has become increasingly hostile as well as downright insulting. The Melody character played by Evan Rachel Wood in 'Whatever Works' is almost unforgivably stupid if not but her vast capacity to absorb the patter of Larry David's character. It's comic, but also deeply accepting of Boris' foibles. Woody Allen's persona-character is always lecturing and hectoring these characters to become better read, better educated and more savvy, but these women always find some side door out of these character projects. You sort of wonder if Woody Allen goes through his own life running this kind of enlightenment project on all the young actresses with whom he works.

The Enlightenment

That being said, one of the thing that sets Woody Allen apart from all the other film makers is that he is interested in the enlightenment. He wants people to be better informed, more tolerant, more accepting and widely read if not simply, wiser. I don't think Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg or David Mamet have such concerns in their films. Other film makers perhaps are after the sublime experience, but Woody Allen is more interested in analysing what a sublime experience might be.

It reminds one of the old joke that there are two doors; One says it goes to heaven. The other says it's a door to understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the existence of heaven. There is a queue of Germans, lined up at the second door. One imagines Woody Allen is at the end of the line, hoping to catch a glimpse of God - not that he wants to believe in him at all because it would entail to much guilt and superstitious activity.

If there is one single thing that Woody Allen has got going for his films is his belief in the Enlightenment. It is why even in his decline phase his films actually have a topical intensity. This is something special because it's not like you see Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe championing the enlightenment, those guys want to talk about freedom from tyranny and oppression. It's a nice cause but everybody believes in those. Who really believes in the Enlightenment enough to go to bat for it over and over again? Woody Allen sure does.

The George Costaza Loop

In early episodes of 'Seinfeld' there were moments where George Costanza played by Jason Alexander might have been a light re-run of the Woody Allen New Yorker persona. This quickly showed itself to be otherwise as George indulged in more and more despicable and deplorable schemes in that show. They were funny but also darkly nihilistic. It seemed George was in fact a totally different kind of animal to the Woody Allen persona, except Woody Allen went through a transformative period where he split up with Mia Farrow and took up with Soon-Yi Previn and the whole facade of the Woody Allen Persona's moral dimension was ditched.

In the 1990s, Woody Allen went on to make some hilariously self-deprecating, almost masochistic films - all the while denying he was writing about himself - an with each outing the Woody Allen persona would become more despicable, more deplorable. It was running parallel to George Costanza. The pinnacle of these films was 'Deconstructing Harry' where he dismantled any moral high ground from his Woody Allen persona, in exchange for some really barbed wit insight about how society deludes itself into thinking it is so moral. Harry was every bit as destructive as George Costanza.

What's really interesting in 'Whatever Works' is how Larry David who inspired the George Costanza personality becomes the mouthpiece for the post-Soon-Yi scandal Woody Allen, we have a character of such monstrous misanthropy and contempt, it's shocking and abrasve. Not only is what he is saying disturbingly nihilistic and brazenly contemptuous, the manner in which he says it is equally sardonic and dismissive. It's quite a combination.

Going Out Of The Window

Woody Allen has been working with the motif of somebody leaping out the window to commit suicide for some time now. 'Melinda and Melinda' is centered around it; In 'Curse of the Jade Scorpion', Betty Ann Fitzgerald played by Helen Hunt attempts such a suicide; in 'Crimes and Misdemeanors', it is how the philosopher chooses to go out; and so does Boris, only to physically land on his next love.

Woody Allen must live with temptation a lot because his other references to suicide methods are scattered, but he consistently comes back to leaping out of windows. It might be some trope that he keeps coming back to but he has also staged this moment in one way or another, quite number of times now so it seems it is more than some recurring leit motif in his work. It's probably more like a distilled essence of his thoughts on suicide.The power of sublimation of course is that he keeps making movies instead and claiming his on-screen persona has very little to do with him in real life. He's got it really good.

Robin Hood

Free Tickets Hooray

Long time reader Bugle handed me some free tickets to the cinema so off I went, rushing to see Robin Hood. I am so grateful because really, it's a terrible thing to fork over money for a film that you suspect is a bit of a stinker.

So Bugle, thank you where ever you are for the tickets, they were most appreciated!

What's Good About It

It's sort of interesting and it's kind of entertaining. If you're into meaningless diversions, this film is for you. It's probably not the film to watch and take seriously after 'Come ad See'.

Mark Strong is good as the bad guy. He's making a lot of mileage playing bad guys and dark heavies lately. Sort of doing the Jason Isaac role from 'The Patriot', so to speak, but he has a much more brooding screen presence. It's one of the best thing going in this film.

The combat scenes at the beginning are interesting. It's always cool to see medieval siege action on the screen. This might be even better than the stuff Scott mounted for 'Kingdom of Heaven'.

The 'stylish medieval' is also quite good. The recreation of the Tower of London sitting on the Thames as Robin arrives back is also very well realised on screen. Not too much with the glossy makeup or the rich fabrics in the wardrobe. There's a lot of fine eye for detail filling out the edges of this film. It's worth it just to watch this stuff, forgetting the story - which I guess is damning with faint praise.

Also, 2 geese do some waddling action in 2 shots and the cuts match. It's pretty impressive that they got the geese to do that.

What's Bad About It

Russell. Cate. The script. The music.

I probably should go into it with a bit more depth but I feel so bad doing it. These superstar vehicles are a terrible danger for the director, but they're worse dangers for the superstars themselves. If you cast a big name, you're committed to using them for s certain amount of screen time so you end up generating meandering subplots and lousy narrative sections just to make space for their presence.

When Cate Blanchett's Maid ('Mad'?) Marion turns up on the beach dressed as a black knight leading a pack of kids on Shetland ponies, the film is fully groan-worthy. Some people are saying Cate Blanchett steals the show. In my opinion, they gave her too much stupid screen time instead of giving those moments to something to make more sense out of the meandering lugubrious story.

What's Interesting About It

Now that we've dealt with the good and the bad, it's thankfully time to deal with the ugly and interesting; and surprisingly there is much of interest in this film by comparison to that which is good or bad. It's a very strange film that way.

First off, this is the second time Ridley Scott is dealing with the Crusades. While 'The Kingdom of Heaven' was rather bombastic and mixed with a dose of orientalism, the Crusades in this film are more prosaic and much less romantic. In a blunt way Ridley Scott's imagining of the Robin Hood story tries to encompass the complexities of the Norman Kings of England, especially with the passing of Henry II and into the reign of Richard I the 'Lion Heart'. The depiction of Elanor of Aquitaine and Richard's brother John is nice, and almost segues off the 1968 classic 'The Lion in Winter'.

You wonder if all this is really necessary to talk about in a movie about Robin Hood, but Scott and company belabor the point. And belabor they do as the story winds its way through the background to the Magna Carta; the film manages to wind its way through the events surrounding Phillip II of France's attempt to invade England. Now, this is where the fiction takes over from history because what really happened was the Phillip II of France actually sent his son, who landed in Kent and marched on to London unopposed.  The colossal whallopping on the beach we see in the film has no historic basis. The question then is, why did they have to come up with this stuff?

It's quite bizarre because the French disembark on Dover with boats that resemble the ones used in WWII to land in Normandy. The picture quickly loses all credibility to realism but what can you do? It seems really unfair that the picture presents so much historic stuff, only to retreat into fantasy land, using the excuse that Robin Hood after all is a fictional character. If you ask me,it's cheating.

Max Von Sydow

One of the treats in this film is the presence of Max Von Sydow. Yes, I know I recently said he sometimes phones in his performances these days, but he is and always will be the Knight Sir Antonius Block - the original disenchanted knight who returns from the Crusades - in 'The Seventh Seal' for me. This time it is this fine venerable Swede who gets to play the donor figure to Russell Crowe's Robin Hood - which is a re-play of Richard Harris' Marcus Aurelius in 'Gladiator'. Yet, almost lost in the mists of time also is Max Von Sydow's turn as King Osric in 'Conan the Barbarian' who is a sort of donor figure to Arnie's Conan. I kept thinking, this is so strange how Max Von Sydow keeps on giving to these Hollywood heroes. The distance between King Osric to Sir  Walter Loxley is actually longer than the distance between Sir Antonius Block  in 'The Seventh Seal' to King Osric. I just thought I'd mention that.

I also forgot to mention, he also played another donor figure in Dr. Liet Kynes in David Lynch's 'Dune' staring opposite Kyle McLachlan's Paul Atreides. He also plays Frederik in 'Hannah and Her Sisters' by Woody Allen with the classic Line: "They always ask about the Holocaust 'how could it have happened?' when the real question should be asking is 'why doesn't it happen more often?'"

I mean, really, Max Von Sydow is the gift that keeps giving if you're a Hollywood movie hero. He's so typecast but I never feel bad about seeing Max Von Sydow on screen. I realised during his scenes that I am in fact a besotted fan. It's a little embarrassing, but it was interesting to me.

The French As Bad Guys

Movie French  in these medieval England movies are always so damn sinister. They have goatees and brood and plot to take England. In reality most of the Hundred Years' War was fought on French soil. But the anglophone world keeps making these movies where the French are on the receiving end of much cinema-humiliation. Having seen 'Henry V' and the various Joans of Arc, I sort of wonder why the Anglo Saxons are so paranoid about the French. Even in the Normandy landing, it was the Anglophones landing on French beaches.

The French - bless their frog-eating souls - can't be simultaneously the most sinister forces in medieval Europe as well as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. There are any number of these movies where the medieval French get a good beating. Why the heck did they have to beat up on the French in a movie about Robin Hood? Why couldn't the bad guy be the Sheriff of Nottingham and be done with it?

I can only put it down to the the perverseness of the English.

Doing the Robin Hood Thing

Still, you have to love a Robin Hood movie. There's something fundamentally suspenseful with letting fly an arrow and waiting for the moment it pierces the target that makes good cinema. The Kevin Costner 'Prince of Thieves' Robin Hood was also awful, awful kitsch but it did have the essential beauty of letting loose with an arrow. Who remembers arrow-cam, where the shot travels with the arrow, straight into the target?

Considering it is Robin Hood, I was a bit surprised at how seldom Crowe's Robin Hood let loose with an arrow. Instead, this film sees him on Horseback, hacking away like he did in the first battle sequence in 'Gladiator'. It's as if both Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe missed the point of the character, in pursuit of some bogus realism that doesn't matter. Robin Hood is an archer, damn it, not a centurion!

Also suspect was how the whole film is couched as the beginning of the Robin Hood legend when in fact it sells the legend downstream for a bunch of political claptrap. The Robin Hood thing is best summarised by this parody here. If Rusty's not willing to wear the green tights, is he even doing the right movie, I ask you.

The Australian Thing

That being said, and with all that was tossed out with the bathwater, it was curious to see two Australians on screen playing Robin and Marion. It kind of felt like a bastard menage-a-trois lovechild between 'Gladiator', 'Braveheart' and 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'.

It would have been enough to make Errol Flynn proud. And we know how much there was of Errol Flynn's pride.

More seriously, the weirdness of the performances of Messers Crowe and Blanchett are such that you wonder what exactly they thought the narrative mode of the film might be. The lovingly method-acted gruff gutteral grunts of Russell Crowe clashing awkwardly with the highly mannered mimesis, minted in the halls of NIDA performed by Cate Blanchett simply looked positively weird.

Through out was the ol' Aussie love of realism come hell or high water, so much so that Russell Crowe walked out on an interivewer who insinuated his accent might have been less than authentic. Lighten up Russell, you're playing the medieval equivalent of a comic book character for fuck's sake.

As for Ms. Blanchett, this was the first time I thought her acting was so mannered I couldn't see the character at all. I just saw the doyen of Australian actresses doing *something*, but I had no shot at getting the character.

Misplaced Realism

Did you ever meet a guy who wanted to compare Superman and Mighty Mouse and then would insist Mighty Mouse was a cartoon and therefore no contest for Superman? This film has that sense of appeal to realism about it. Authenticity and an eye for detail is nice but misplaced realism is as bad as playing a major key tune with an insistent minor key bass line.

Yet, you can just hear the director demanding more and more period authenticity for things 1215 AD. A mug here, a table there. All the while I kept thinking if any of this was making the story of Robin Hood richer, or not as the case may be. It's one thing to make a history picture and going for authenticity. One really wonders if such a posture was necessary in doing a Robin Hood movie. It's troubling in the same way the successive 'Batman' movies seem to take on more and more moral-philosophical quandaries. Do we really need these trappings of pseudo-seriousness in order for us to enjoy our fiction these days?

On Ridley Scott

All of this brings me to Ridley Scott. I don't think this man fulfilled his early promise. I don't think he's really made an excellent film since 'Alien' and 'Blade Runner', and this film is probably on the bad side of his score sheet.

I don't know what to say because I keep watching his films in the hope I'll see something as profound as 'Blade Runner' but I'm also sick of being disappointed. I get more joy watching Woody Allen sliding down the other side of the hill than Ridley Scott in his decline phase. Woody Allen to his credit still had 'Match Point' and 'Curse of the Jade Scorpion' in the last 10 years. If it's 'Gladiator', 'Kingdom of Heaven' and 'Robin Hood' for Ridley Scott, it's actually a little sad. Maybe my expectations are too high.

Still, there are days that I think his brother Tony is making more interesting films in the last few years. Ridley Scott's big films in the last decade and a bit have been more bombast than spectacle and his technical excellence only betrays the degree to which his films are ponderous affairs. The problem with 'Robin Hood' is that it's better than any old crud, but it's not good enough to rival his best work. it just sits in a zone of arbitrary action for the sake of arbitrary action.

Another point to be made is that he's beginning to repeat himself a lot, and it is more than just his signature stylings that pop out. There are mini-sequences in the climactic battle scenes that are reminscent of shots from both 'Gladiator' and 'Kingdom of Heaven'. There are the repeated motifs of absent father figures and brothers in conflict, which incidentally are also in 'Blade Runner'. Maybe these are deep-seated themes that stem from his childhood or are infra-psychic structures that come out in his narratives. I would be interested to see if he can break free of his own tastes a little more, but this is an unfair ask to an artist who has made some true classics of cinema.

Theory And Method

Conversations With The Smart Crowd

I was talking to Dr. CC at the launch of 'Glissando' and the conversation turned toward just how you teach something like creative writing. He was trying to offer up a method of shaking ideas loose on a regular basis to get past the inner censor that stops the creativity from flowing, and he sheepishly offered that there was no real theoretical basis why such a method should work.It seemed rather incongruous coming from Dr. CC who is always so forthcoming with eloquent theories on most things literary.

As with all these things, people who work in creative ares all necessarily develop methods of doing things but they don't necessarily connect to literary theory. Professional people who work in screen writing all have methods for producing requisite pages for the screen but they're not directly related  to any theory on screen analysis. This phenomenon is actually quite common were the theory of something is actually grown apart so much from the method of something that the theory actually doesn't offer much except more censorship of ideas.

This got me thinking about my time way back when at AFTRS and it struck me just how much time we spent on critical theory of analysing the screen a posteriori to the production but spent so little time developing a method of film making. There were many practitioners at hand whose brains you could pick but nobody was offering a comprehensive view of the method(s) to film making. I imagine it is still the case that they teach way too much theory and not enough method.

That is all 'in general', but I do want to offer something that might be of interest. Having a method is likely going to bail you out of trouble more often than having lots of theory. Whatever the creative area you're working in, it's worth having at least 3 methods to address the triangle of needs: Cheap, Fast, Good. It's true you can only have a combination of 2 out of 3 in the triangle of Cheap, Fast, and Good, but in undertaking any project you should have a method for doing it Cheap-and-Fast, or Fast-and-Good or Good-and-Cheap. The vast majority of creative projects will at least ask of you to take one of these options, and therefore it is of great value to have a method for doing something at least 3 ways.

Come And See

Been A Long Time

Back in the day, one of the most traumatic films you could watch about the experience of World War II was 'Come And See' directed by Elim Klimov. This wasn't just any movie about the war, this was a film so graphic in its portrayal of the Einsatzgruppen - the SS paramilitary death squads - and their hideous modus operandi during their campaign in Byelorussia.

The first time I even heard about this film was in the late 1980s when a friend of the family told me about with much excitement. He described to me the climactic montage, which hardly made any sense because I don't think he understood what he was trying to describe, but it sounded really good. Later on, when i finally saw it, I understood it as well as the shear intellectual excitement of the family friend who just had to tell me all about it.

The film has a way of staying with you forever and for a long time I've wanted to get hold of this film on DVD so I can just watch it again and digest it; see if it matches up to the way I remember it.

What's Good About It

My old film school Screen Analysis teacher used to like talking about misc en scene and sense of place. Well, this film is dripping with a sense of what Byelorussia is like and the sorts of life they had in the 1940s as the Germans came in. As a Soviet era film, the film works through some interesting technical moves as well as a dialectical montage towards the end.

There is plenty of good old social realism to go around as we survey the Byelorussian village and roll around in the mud and laves, dance in the rain, as well as wade through the bog with the main character. The film conveys a fantastic tactile quality with the images on the screen, which later on turn to freak you out. It's got good directing and cinematography and you're never at a loss to understand the situation.

In one sense, the film remains a high watermark of films made under the auspices of the old Soviet regime even while Klimov may have struggled greatly in convincing the Soviet powers-that-be to let him make the film. It's an immensely ideological work as well as a very prosaically - almost pedantic - film that sets out to show what the Einsatzgruppen operation would have looked like. Put it this way, it's nothing like an American movie. This thing was not made to entertain you. It was meant to seer into your very consciousness the frightening terror and horror of the war on the Eastern Front.

What's Bad About It

It's been a long time since I've seen this film and I've possibly had too much time to digest the film. Watching it on DVD for the second time in my life had nowhere near the impact as seeing it the first time. Oddly enough there were whole sequences in the film that I'd forgotten about towards the beginning that are really tedious scenes to set up the central action of a boy going to war.

I probably shouldn't say it's bad as such but in the this viewing, I felt tedium. This is bad. Or maybe I'm just craving for more action on screen, but at the core of it I think Klimov is disinterested in what interests the audience, but very interested in what interests him. This results in a film whose emotional arc is so jagged that the crucially traumatic scene seems to pass over the main character early on all the while leading on to the church burning. It's an odd choice as to what Klimov wants to show up close and what he chooses to only glance at.

It's also not clear what happens to Glisha, the girl. I wasn't sure that the victim of mass rape actually was Glisha or the young mother who escaped from the church, leaving behind her child and then carted off on a "pack rape truck". The screenwriter in me sort of went, "hang a minute, what is this denouement?" The director in me actually went, "hang a minute, this is worth establishing, if you're going to be so prosaic about he rest of the war crime activity?"

What's Interesting About It

Quite by coincidence I saw this article in the Economist. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll see a spirited exchange of opinions as to whether Russia could have beaten NAZI Germany on its own.

I have no doubt that what the Russians endured in fighting NAZI Germany was much worse than anything else her allies had to live through. That's just the fact of it. The Einsatzgruppen didn't exactly tour an occupied New York or Washington DC, hunting for Jews and Romani and commissars. The film paints a fairly stark portrait of that very struggle by partisans facing off against the might of the German war machine.

What's interesting about it today is that in light of all the things that happened in the Balkans with their death squads and death camps, the film has actually lost something of its power through the intervening years. The two Gulf Wars by the two Bush Presidents have also changed the nature of how wars are conducted to the point where it seems quaint that the Germans would bother to round people up and burn them in a church. The contemporary American simply sends out a tomahawk cruise missile or carpet bombs a whole city.

Film As Ideological Artefact

Elim Klimov struggled mightily to make this film. I can't understand why, but then Tarkovsky struggled mightily to make his films as well. The Soviet film production approvals committee were apparently against making obscure films or difficult films. They wanted that old social realism, which of course goes back to Stalin. Stalin probably wasn't interested in the entertainment value of film but he sure was interested in propaganda value, so he wanted Soviet cinema to be the perspicacious to the extreme.

Now, I can understand Tarkovsky running into some flack with films like 'The Mirror' but Elim Klimov is nowhere near an obscurantist director as Tarkovsky. Watching the film today, you can get a pungent dose of the Soviet Realist school of film making. You just can't miss it. 20 odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Perestroika, the ideological garb of the film stands out more today than perhaps it did in 1986. The film it reminded me of the most was in fact Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will'. Maybe these films are mirror images of one another - one film about the glory of NAZI Germany, Klimov's film about the absolute hell it created. In other words, as fine a film as it is, today we can see it for the propaganda film it was.

Which is all the more reason why I wonder why Klimov struggled so much. He was certainly pitching fastballs high and inside just as he was meant to.

The Mosfilm Legacy

We used to get a steady diet of Mosfilm stuff at AFTRS. Such heavily ideological works as 'The Cranes Are Flying' and 'Alexander Nevsky' would get a screening and the student body would all sagely nod and say how wonderfully moving these films were. They're great films and I'm glad they got made, but to get them made, these film makers had to twist themselves to the yoke of Soviet ideology. You'd think AFTRS thought Mosfilm productions were the way to go in cinema.

In a world of global commercial cinema with America at the epicentre, it's very quaint how AFTRS was feeding this stuff to its students who would have to write essays about a deeper cinema. I dare say it contributed greatly to unrealistic expectations about the craft as well as the business. I think this strand of thinking has influenced the funding bodies that took on these graduates as its assessors and film bureaucrats. It has collectively contributed to the decimation of the Australian Film industry in the 1990s as well as the 2000s. It is as if the film bureaucrats who came out of AFTRS essentially locked up the film makers of this country in a church and burned them all down.

I remember piping up at the time 'Terminator 2' came out and asking how these Mosfilm films stood in relation to a US$120million action spectacle. I got frowned at and ridiculed, but really, where is Mosfilm now? On the other hand, Arnie's the governor of California and James Cameron did 'Avatar'. Looking back on it now, it seems really quaint that so much value was put into studying Mosfilm movies.

I like 'Come And See', but it fills me with a weird kind of angst that has nothing to with its content.

Lovely Bones

A Sunny Trip Through Death

Peter Jackson can be a very strange film maker. He makes the immense 'Lord of the Rings' Trilogy which set a new bench mark in visionary film making, certainly for fantasy genre films and then turns around and says what he really wanted to do was do a remake of 'King Kong' and does exactly that. A glance over his previous films show that while he is an excellent film maker his strengths are in areas of film that draw on genre fiction. He's good with horror and suspense, and is particularly strong with characterisation when the imagination is involved.

One of his most interesting films to date is 'Heavenly Creatures' which coincidentally introduced a wider audience to the young Kate Winslet. He also produced the recent oddball film 'District 9' which had all the tropes of an American science fiction film, but performed with the vernacular of South Africa.

The man clearly knows what he's doing, so it would be crazy to do a double take on his choices, but it has to be said a movie based on a book set in the 1970s about the victims of serial killers in the afterlife is an oddball choice. You can see what drew him to the project but it's still very strange.

What's Good About It

One of the refrains here on this blog is that I like 1970s period pictures, whether it be 'Frost/Nixon' or 'American Gangster' or 'The Ice Storm'. There's always a hint of a society in upheaval and I am greatly sentimental about the time in history for the promises it held. I was rather disappointed by what followed, but the 1970s for a brief moment showed a glimpse of something that quickly disappeared in the 1980s.

There are lots of good things about this film apart from the period setting. The directing, the acting, the pace, the narrative are all very good. The production design is particularly good. Stanley Tucci is once again a standout. That dude is simply amazing.

What's Bad About It

The casting of Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz doesn't work for me. Neither does Susan Sarandon as the ditzy chain-smoking grandmother. It's not that they're bad, but in this instance the familiarity of their faces kept detracting from the story. Clearly this was an unconventional story so the sense of reality the audience could invest in was finely balanced. The thing that continuously dipped it towards disbelieve were the familiarity of the superstars.

Also, the hair. 1970s hairstyling should be coarse. Long, yes, but men should have coarse hair. Some should even have matty hair. Everybody looked like they showered twice a day using gobs of conditioner and blow-dried their hair, which is so post-New Wave and Duran Duran. I'm probably attuned to this because I recently watched parts of 'Bullit' and the whole of 'Thunderbolt and Lightfoot' and kept thinking wow, the hair on all those people looks so matty and coarse! Aah, the way we were!

What's Interesting About It

Peter Jackson must be the rare man who can make a story about a serial murders of young women by a psychotic serial killer, and turn it into a sunny uplifting move about death and loss. As such, he should be put in the genius category.

Does The Story Even Make Sense?

The story makes sense as some kind of emotional arc dealing with dying if you only knew you were dead, and there was an afterlife to sort it out. It's not quite a ghost movie because she doesn't really affect the outcome of anything, although some characters remain convinced of certain things. The story isn't about how she comes back as a ghost to help the living uncover her murderer. She doesn't come back as a ghost to exact revenge. The whole story that takes place in the in between world after Susie's death actually doesn't really impact on the living, but it's the space from where she narrates the story.

It's such a strange story when you stop to think about it, but you only do so when the whole thing has finished. I'm not sure the story actually is the story it presents itself as, although I'm not sure if that is quite the right take on it.

What's Othello Got To Do With It?

One of the bit references in the film to another film is to Lawrence Olivier's version of Othello. This was made particularly poignant because Susie's first and last love is an Indian boy who signs his love letter as The Moor. It's peculiar because Othello is possibly one of the most vexing of Shakespeare's plays today, and it is compounded in this instance by the blackface Lawrence Olivier putting in a particularly camp performance. I've seen the aid film and it's a morbid kind of torture to sit through.

Still, seeing that race relations get referred to obliquely in the text I have to confess it is one of the better moments in the story, which goes back to the book. It also goes back to something about the 1970s when such crossings were far more feasible on a personal level. I have to say the world has backed off that one significantly since then, while making profuse excuses about backing away.

The Mercury Wrinkle

Commercial Whaling Will Drive Some Crazy

A better argument against whaling, rather than anything the current Australian government is mounting might be mercury poisoning. This report says that people hailing from a town that thrives on the whale harvest had mercury counts at 63ppm which is in excess of the WHO's own line of 50ppm.

Some people were even found with mercury counts as high as 139ppm, and the Health Department in Japan has issued a warning against eating dolphin more than twice a month. Mind you this is a widespread problem through out the fisheries world. A lot of carnivorous fish such as shark, marlin and swordfish have high concentrations of mercury, as do things such s killer whales.

Most of the mercury in the ocean actually comes from coal fire. And Australia's main export is coal. So maybe Australia should continue exporting coal to add mercury to the sea so that the whales are too poisonous to eat. Go Australia!

News That's Fit To Punt - 06/05/2010

More Chaos in Athens

Overnight, the situation in Athens got ugly in a hurry.

Greece stands on the ‘‘edge of the abyss,’’ President Carolos Papoulias has warned, after a day of often violent protests against brutal budget cuts and tax hikes left three people dead.

As a general strike - called to vent public fury at the planned measures to avert national bankruptcy - paralysed the nation, demonstrators tried to storm the parliament and hooded youths hurled petrol bombs at stores and businesses in central Athens.

Police said two women and one man died at a branch of the Marfin bank which caught fire after rioters broke a window and threw Molotov cocktails inside.

They're certainly fighting in the streets over the austerity plans. The grief is pretty serious while people are worried "the contagion" will spread over Portugal, Ireland and Spain. Portugal and Ireland are relatively small but Spain is a much bigger problem. Yet the international bonds traders are circling all this in spite of the big IMF deal because they just don't buy the notion that the Greek Government will be able to pull their austerity plan together, let alone implement it. Just look at what's going on in Iceland and its terse negotiations with England. The Greeks really could make this worse by defaulting.

In one of the earlier iterations of the story today I saw a photo of mass of people carrying placards. My first instinct for a caption was "Wogs out of Work". Then again I thought the headline a few days ago said Gordon  Brown was in trouble for calling a woman bigtoed. "What's wrong with having a big toe?" I wondered. I had to do a double take to realise he said bigoted. I imagine if I worked for 'The Age', I'd be sacked by now.

From Russia With Weirdness

I don't know what to make of something like this.

He said he saw a "semi-transparent half tube" spaceship on his balcony. He then entered it and met "human-like creatures in yellow spacesuits", The Moscow Times reported.

"I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of the ideas," he told the television program host.

He had told The Guardian the aliens took him to "some kind of star".

"They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist."

What has got his Russian political peers suddenly agitated after all this time is whether he let slip any state secrets and whether there is a proper procedure for dealing with aliens.

Andrei Lebedev, a State Duma deputy, was apparently moved by "holy terror" at Mr Ilyumzhinov's claims, and yesterday wrote to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev asking him to launch an investigation, the Times said.

He was concerned about whether Mr Ilyumzhinov's brush with the spacemen affected his ruling of Kalmykia and whether they might have tried to get him to divulge state secrets to them.

Mr Lebedev also wanted the Russian leader to clarify what guidelines officials were to follow if they were nabbed by aliens.

It's amazing what people will have problems with when somebody says they've been abducted by aliens. State Secrets? They're worried about State Secrets?

Is Australia Burqua-Lurkastan?

In one of the deleted scenes from 'Team America', Spottswood says words to the effect that he let his racism blind him. It wasn't the camel jockey towel heads of Derka-Derkastan but the slanty-eyed chinks of North Korea led by the evil Kim Jong-Il all along.

This article has the same kind of pungent offensiveness to it. The problem of course is that it's written by an Australian Senator and he's serious.

Put simply, the burqa separates and distances the wearer from the normal interactions with broader society.

In my mind, the burqa has no place in Australian society.

I would go as far as to say it is un-Australian. To me, the burqa represents the repressive domination of men over women, which has no place in our society and compromises some of the most important aspects of human communication.

It also establishes a different set of rules and societal expectations in our hitherto homogenous society.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

As an avid motorcyclist I am required to remove my helmet before entering a bank or petrol station. It's a security measure for the businesses and no reasonable person objects to this requirement. However, if I cover myself in a black cloth from head to toe, with only my eyes barely visible behind a mesh guard, I am effectively unidentifiable and can waltz into any bank unchallenged in the name of religious freedom.

Little wonder bank bandits in the UK are now becoming burqa bandits.

The same can be said for any number of areas where photographic identification is required. How many of us would ask for the veil to be dropped so we can compare the photo with the burqa wearer's face? I suspect the fear of being called bigoted, racist, Islamaphobic or insensitive would prevent many from doing what they would not think twice about under normal circumstances.

I know that there was some robbery committed by people in a burqua. Even allowing for that particular misuse of the item, it's really not a reason to go all hostile on a religion is it?

All the same, the article got me thinking about how the western world must look like to these muslim. What do blonde bikini babes look like to these people? It must be the height of immodesty to be sure. And here's an Australian politician calling out these women telling them that what they wear for the sake of modesty is wrong and that they should expose themselves to the same degree as the immodest people. It must feel like they're being asked to walk the streets with the equivalent feeling of having their nipples exposed, just because it is the custom in Australia.

I'm not a muslim but even I can imagine that far. Why can't a Senator of the Australian Parliament? I mean really. Going after muslim women and their traditional garb out of your own fear of the Islamic terrorist is weak, weak, weak. A truly free society does not fear the burqua.

That being said a truly free society does not get angry at 'South Park' either.

All Greek To You?

It's All Greek To The Greeks Too

This business of the Greek debt crisis is a bit disturbing. Markets are all lining up to kick Greece's rear should it default on its debt. The markets around the world slid today as people anticipated that the Euro Bailout would not be enough. Here's an article that just adds fuel to the fire.

A nationwide general strike has gripped Greece in the first major test of the socialist government's resolve to push through unprecedented austerity cuts needed to avert fiscal meltdown.

Protest fever swept the country with public transport paralysed, ferries not leaving the docks and air traffic grounded as unions went on the warpath against the latest wave of spending cuts and tax hikes.

Hundreds of thousands of civil servants kicked off the protests on Tuesday and a group of about 200 communists also stormed Athens Acropolis, unfurling banners reading "Peoples of Europe, Rise Up."

Wednesday's walkout, the third general strike in as many months, comes as the government races to push the austerity drive through parliament, looking to its comfortable majority there to pass the package on Thursday.

Greece's main unions were to mass in central Athens at 11am (1800 AEST) before moving through the streets of the capital in protest marches.

They're really angry in Greece because of the austerity measures to come and there's nothing that can cause demonstrations than taking away perks and entitlements; especially if some Socialist Government is going to do that, then you're sure to see much anger.

The fury of the Greek protests are quite intense. Just reading the description above, it reminded me of the passage in Thucydides covering the aftermath of the failure of the Sicilian campaign. At least that event had more drastic consequences for the city of Athens. The Spartans would eventually go on to press their advantage an defeat Athens in the Peloponnesian War.

So who are thr Spartans this time? I think it might be the Germans. Yes, the Germans who have to shoulder the most of the bail out costs and they're watching these demonstrations on the streets in Athens thinking, "hang a minute, these Greeks want our money AND keep pulling down those perks and entitlements that we don't get, that they couldn't afford in the first place?" You can imagine Angela Merkel is getting an earful on that.

The Economist had this take:

Although the move to ban short-selling steadied Greece's stockmarket somewhat on Wednesday, the chances of the country defaulting on its debts were still perceived by the bond markets as high. Spreads on Greek government bonds (the risk premium compared with German bonds) reached a 13-year high as investors worried that the proposed rescue plan for Greece could stall. Talks between Greece, the European Union and the IMF got under way last week.

Greece was initially seeking up to €45 billion ($60 billion) in emergency loans from euro-zone governments and the IMF this year, the first chunk of which will be needed by May 19th, when the Greek government must refinance a €8.5 billion bond. But as the crisis has worsened it has become clear that Greece could need much more. On Wednesday it was reported that the EU and IMF were preparing a package worth up to €120 billion over three years—if so, the biggest sovereign rescue yet attempted. Nevertheless, even aid on this scale might only postpone an eventual default, if Greece's economy fails to grow faster than its debt pile.

Investors do not seem convinced that euro-zone governments will be able to muster the political will to hammer out an agreement. Germany, as the largest euro member, is vital to any effort to save Greece, but it is wavering. German public opinion is firmly set against dipping into the public purse to help the profligate Greeks. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, is in a tight spot. If she agrees to extend aid quickly to Greece a voters’ backlash back home may send her party crashing to defeat in regional elections set for May 9th. But if she sits back and watches Greece slide towards default, the contagion is sure to spread rapidly to other, bigger EU countries with debt problems—Mrs Merkel could then end up being blamed for triggering a far worse conflagration across Europe, including a fresh banking crisis.

A fresh banking crisis? Oh great. Here we go again