2012/05/31

News That's Fit To Punt - 30/May/2012

Julian Assange Loses Appeal

Here it is, fresh off the press. Julian Assange is going to be extradited to Sweden.
But his lawyer Dinah Rose, QC, asked the UK Supreme Court court for two weeks in which to consider the judgement and possibly to request that proceedings be re-opened as she believed part of the judgement was based on a legal question that had not been raised during the hearing and which she had not had a chance to argue on. She said this related to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

The court gave Mr Assange a stay of 14 days on the extradition order so that Ms Rose could make the application. Mr Assange did not appear in court.
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n a majority decision of five to two, the judges decided that the European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden asking for Mr Assange's extradition was legal and should be enforced.

If the court does not allow its proceedings to be re-opened, Mr Assange's only other legal avenue would be the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. If that court should agree to take his case, he would be allowed to remain in the UK until the hearing.

The scarier thing for Julian Assange of course is the likelihood that he is then swept to the USA where a Grand Jury indictment awaits him.
Mr Assange's legal advisers are believed to fear that if he goes to Sweden he could then be extradited to the United States, where authorities are considering a range of charges against him over Wikileaks including espionage and conspiracy.

American authorities link him to the case of US Army Private Bradley Manning, who faces court martial over 22 alleged offences, including "aiding the enemy" by leaking classified government documents to Wikileaks.

UA prosecutors reportedly believe that Private Manning dealt directly with Mr Assange and "data-mined" secret databases "guided by Wikileaks list of 'Most Wanted' leaks.

Nothing there we don't already know. Anyway, we should mark the moment where Julian Assange lost his appeal to be extradited to Sweden.

The End Of The SMH As We Know It?

Who'd a thunk the Kiwis were scabs?
Fairfax staff walked out at 5.30pm.

The move came as hundreds of journalists from publishers Fairfax and News Limited met with union officials at stopwork meetings today over ongoing concerns about jobs in the industry.

Fairfax plans to move the mostly sub-editing jobs from newspapers in Newcastle and Wollongong to Fairfax Editorial Services in New Zealand.

At 7pm, the company issued a statement saying it would continue to publish as usual and was disappointed at the decision to strike.

Well, that's dramatic. Of course it kind of makes sense in the way that all jobs can be out-sourced on some level. If I may, I would  submit that this is a bad decision. The moment you out-source a part of your business, it's a commitment towards a shorter corporate memory and opening the door to a potential nightmare in prcocess failure. A simple example might be Foxconn who, at arms length from Apple managed to do considerable harm to the Apple brand.

On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable to think that Kiwis can provide the same service as sub-editors in Australia with a much lower cost. If Fairfax thinks these are totally fungible processes, then you can understand how this is happening. Perhaps we as the public should be grateful they didn't send it to India or the Phillippines like the Telcos do it.

Hypocrisy Truly Knows No Bounds

...or rather, Hypocrisy they name is Abbott.
The government moved to gag the debate and Mr Thomson, who has always voted with Labor since being exiled a month ago, instead joined the other crossbenchers who, on principle, never support a gag motion.

The Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, and the manager of opposition business, Christopher Pyne, made for the doors but Mr Abbott was ordered back by the Speaker, Anna Burke, because it was too late to leave. His vote was counted.

Which is totally motivated by this little bit here:
The opposition does not want to ever accept Mr Thomson's vote, fearing it could create a precedent in which it may have to grant him a pair in case he takes extended leave from the Parliament, thus negating any numerical advantage it would achieve from his absence.

Mr Abbott has also been demanding the government never accept Mr Thomson's vote, claiming it is tainted.
Sitting in his office while the numbers were being counted,

Mr Abbott told the National Times Labor should refuse to accept Mr Thomson's vote just as John Howard used to refuse the turncoat senator Mal Colston's vote by having a Coalition senator abstain.

He said the Coalition would never be trapped into having to grant Mr Thomson a pair.

Kind of self explanatory.

This Craig Thompson affair has been pretty awful for the last 2years. it won't go away because the Coalition - in their retarded bully minds - think that if they can get Craig Thompson to quit, then there would be a by-election and hey presto, they get that seat and with it the government. What they don't seem to get is that the destruction of Craig Thompson's life through trial by media, as engineered by the Coalition, is going so far into questionable territory that it would taint an in-coming Coalition government for a long time. If Tony Abbott is  willing to do all this to an individual to get his way, then how safe can any citizen feel in this country?

It is true that the allegations against Mr. Thompson are pretty vulgar and scandalous (if you have that turn of mind) but so far charges have not been laid. Yet it is also true that Mr. Abbott is trying to turn Parliament into a kangaroo court and the execution room where death by public opinion is the sought means. His position goes from total disapproval of Fair Work Australia because it favours the unions, but a 100% acceptance of its findings against Thompson after a four year inquiry, during which while it was going on, he used the ongoing investigation as an example for how bad Fair Work Australia was.

You can't make this stuff up.

2012/05/22

'Young Adult'

Spectacle Of Disorder

There is a weird strain in American culture where popularity is somehow a validation of personal worth. If you stop to think about it rationally, it is clear that there should be no correlation between a persona's popularity and talent, unless popularity itself is a talent. But being the world's oldest continuing democracy, we might be missing the point in such analysis because clearly the most popular becomes President.

Nonetheless for those of us who reside outside of America, it strikes us as incredibly strange how so many movies about the rites of passage of youth portray the struggle to disentangle the nexus of popularity and personal worth.

Then, along comes this film.

What's Good About it

As movies about journeys back to the old neighborhood go, this one has a fresh angle to it. It is told from the point of view of somebody who was the bitchy prom queen who has become somewhat successful in life. The usual trope of this story runs in a way that the protagonist goes back to confront the Prom Queen, but not this time. It's the disastrous homecoming for the Prom Queen, complete with self-narration disguised as a work in progress of a novel within the story.

Charlize Theron puts in a fearless performance; it's a performance that is as every bit as fearless as her Oscar-winning effort in 'Monster', but in this one she adds an incredible amount of nuance to her character through delicate dissection of her minutiae. It is like a vicious character assassination of somebody but we don't know who the model is for this splendid character. You won't forget Charlize Theron's Mavis Gary any time soon; and in this instance Theron's penchant for playing miserable people pays off big.

The directing is concise, and the script is mercifully direct and uncomplicated. Theron's character Mavis is the train wreck, and we watch as she and her stupid plan come apart. We squirm through so many scenes in this film as we witness the horror of this character study. It's a tour de force.

What's Bad About It

As comedies go it is nice and black, but sometimes it loses its tone and harks to a more boozy and broad style. They're not the good moments. The film is much better when it deals with the excruciating minutiae of Mavis' narcissistic personality disorder.

What's Interesting About It

This one is one of those rare films where everything about the character in question is deeply fascinating. As a study of narcissistic personality disorder, there might not be a better film. In Mavis, we have a character who has been told how important it is to be beautiful and popular, slowly discover that the complexity of life and the task of finding happiness have nothing to do with these things.

Towards the end of the film, she comes close to having insight about her unhappiness, and her condition, but ultimately she brushes it aside when she gets a re-boot from the community that produced her. The irony is so rich.

Contempt

The interesting thing about Mavis and her popularity back at school is that even in adulthood, she returns this popularity with contempt. Where this contempt comes from is a bit of a mystery because when we meet Mavis' parents, it is clear they are well meaning ordinary people. Somewhere along the way, this character learned that what popularity requires in return is contempt. It's an interesting study of stardom in America, because in this film it is axiomatic that contempt is actually the first weapon of the popular against the populous.

Theron's Mavis is never gracious, never apologises for her transgressions, and dismisses everybody she encounters with this withering contempt. There is hardly any self reflection as she plows whatever shred of human interaction she finds in the street, back into the cheesy fiction she is ghostwriting. It is a surprise she finds time for Matt, the crippled guy she once worked hard not to notice back at school, but this is perhaps through her character fault of alcoholism.

Of course, the question is why the populace accept this contempt? Or do they simply ignore it? It's actually one of the stranger things about American society.

Is Beauty Meaningful?

Frank Zappa famously observed: Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. He also observed, rather ironically and wryly, that Beauty is a pair of shoes that makes you wanna die. Mavis spends a lot of time on a weird arc of waking up looking terrible, to dressing up for the occasion to achieve maximum beauty she can muster. The point of the beauty routine of course is to bag her man, but it is abundantly clear that this beauty regimen is way in excess of context.

The whole routine of doing makeup, dating, drinking and then having a one-night-stand encounter does not take her to the place of happiness which validates her. So this prompts her to go on a mission to get back to where she was once happy. Except, the film pretty much spells out that this beauty she works up to does not lead to love nor truth nor wisdom nor happiness.

What good is it then? The answer according to the film seems to be that beauty of in of itself is its own reward, just as truth is truth, love is love, wisdom is wisdom; all independent of one another with no linkages. If Plato were around to watch movies, he'd probably be offended by this one, because the anti-idealism runs pretty hard in this film.

Materialism Is A Salve

Like an ointment we put on a wound, the film makes a case that the only thing we have to go on in this material universe is materialism, but it offers no answers about how that could lead to any kind of emotional fulfillment. The endless array of beauty goods forms a metaphor for the gaping emptiness in the heart of the American Dream. Even success can't validate Mavis because she wants her success to make her happy. Yet, it gets pointed out to her that she has more things to make her happy. The film is great because it doesn't back into a maudlin sentimental position; it sticks to its ironic guns and gallows humour with the ridiculous counsel at the end.

Still, the film is totally cognizant of the emptiness at the centre of this maelstrom of materialism. Mavis wants happiness to be something she can hold and handle, like her dog. She wants happiness at her beck and call, even though she cannot even begin to describe what actually makes her happy. She never stops to consider that it is state of mind, and therefore cannot be captured with the seduction of her old boyfriend.

Gen-X, Goes Back

When Mavis goes back to Mercury Minnesota, she is attempting to regress to a previous point in her life where she felt vindicated. There is something deeply disturbing in the way Mavis characterises her mission as a rescue mission to save her beau from a longtime ago, from the confines of a town she despises. Her contempt is not shared by other human beings, and when she discovers this, she is most perturbed. The resulting self-loathing is actually endearing in a strange way.

The film has echoes of other films where the past is traced over with unsure footsteps - half of John Cusack's film catalogue seems to echo this impulse, but this film is actually an antithesis to such excursions. In many ways it has more in common with the bile of 'Greenberg' starring Ben Stiller than say, the slanted irony of 'Hot Tub Time Machine' or 'High Fidelity'. This film wants to go beyond the wry irony of remembering the Gen X coming of age. It wants to tear it down and set it alight. It's brazen, fresh and liberating that way.

I guess we're getting to the point in history where Gen-X nostalgia is becoming a kind of new stomping ground. What's interesting is the degree to which self-loathing seems to be a part of the Gen-X Goes Home movies. Compared to the Baby Boomer classics like 'The Big Chill' or 'Peggy Sue Got Married', the Gen-X movies about going back seem to be about self-loathing at the centre of our being. The past is couched as an impractical hindrance in this film; an obstacle for the soul. it's a very long way from the affirmation found in 'The Big Chill'.

2012/05/15

HAP-less In Australia

Household Assistance Package

A few weeks ago I went to a focus group and it turns out it really was the government trying to suss out how to gauge their ads for the Household Assistance Package. I tell you, it was Hilary Hilaroid and the Hilarities; they asked what they thought of various words. When they said 'packages', I told them it reminded me of male genitals. After that, they stopped noting my input. I see that somehow they ended up using the word, in spite of my good advice. :)

At least they say "Millions of Australians... instead of "Six million Australians..." - That was sensible of them.

'Shanghai'

Let's Re-Live The Nightmare

Shanghai on the eve of World War II has been done in quite a number of films. It's the big setting in 'Empire of the Sun'; the opening sequence in 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'; as well as a more serious and sombre 'Shanghai Triad'. As between-the-wars romanticism goes, there's something very dark and depressing about the whole setup. Gong Li has of course been in both films. Unlike Paris or Berlin between the wars, Shanghai between the wars was decidedly the product of European colonialism, and so the Chinese people get to play parts where they are the oppressed. One imagines it must be a masochistic joy because most instances show how evil the Japanese are in their concession.

I'm not disputing they weren't - It just seems odd that they don't want to talk about what else happened in the other concessions, and why there were concessions. In any case, I might be the worst person to be watching this film.

What's Good About It

Chow Yun-Fat's long past it, but he's in it; and I'm a fan. John Cusack looks really past it in this film but he's in it. Ken Watanabe's in it and he's always interesting. Gong Li is long past it too, but she's in it. The cinematography is moody and noir.The production design is quite good.

Ken Watanabe plays a guy called Captain Tanaka. Pay that.

What's Bad About It

Nothing that happens in the film is of any real consequence. About halfway into the film, you think John Cusack's character is potentially uncovering the planned attack on Pearl Harbour, but he's not. He's tracking down the opium addicted wife of a Japanese officer. It's a pretty pissy little pay off for all the elaborate running around of all that shooting, punching, and stabbing.

The film is a bit of a chore to sit through for such small stakes. It doesn't offer enough fun to be a movie-movie and it doesn't offer enough to chew upon for it to be an interesting film.

The action is boring, the special effects are dodgy, the dialogue is a bit arch, the characters are a little dull, and all too much like stock characters bumbling around. Nothing fresh, nothing new, nothing interesting.

Plus I'm sick of seeing idiotic Japanese soliders. The soldiers weren't the dumb ones. It was the staff officers attached to line officers who were the particularly dumb ones.

What's Interesting About It

How can they make such a bad movie out of all these good ingredients going in?

'The Descendants'

Mother Is Gone

Only last week I finished watching 'I Am Mita, Your Housekeeper' and the identical theme pops up on screen in the guise of this movie. In this film, mother suffers a great head injury off screen and ends up in a coma, and awaits death. The rest of it is how the family deals with the aftermath amidst some complications that may be unique to Hawaii.

Anyway, spoiler alert on this one, more than usual. The story is so internal, it's hard to discuss it without talking about the plotting.

What's Good About It

The characters are really strong in this script and so there' a feeling that the actors just have to lean on the words in the script. As American as it is, there is a strange exotica thanks to the story being set in Hawaii, which is oddly evocative in a way that many films about less filmed locations of other parts of America might not be. What it evokes is the constant whiff of other people having a whale of a good time on holidays while the locals toil away with their daily lives in their shadow.

With the constant threat (if you will) of leisure and entertainment lurking everywhere, there is a sense in these characters that they have to fight this vibe all the time.

What's Bad About It

Some of the settlements in the film are a little too pat. You expect there to be even more fracas but the film closes rather gently. There were more conflicts that could have been brought to bear given the setup. It's a shame because it seemed really fertile, and in some ways it pales in comparison to what goes on in 'I Am Mita, Your Housekeeper'.

What's Interesting About It

The most interesting aspect of the film might be how it grasps at how ephemeral things are. Youth, beauty, love, yearning, all these things get shown as grasping at the ephemeral nature of existence. If a film like 'Greenberg' struggles against it, this film actually embraces this grasping as a part of life. It's not entirely clear why this family is falling apart except it is the mother who let the family drift from her - She let go.

As the film progresses we find that the outwardly expressed angst reflects a deep sense of loyalty and heartfelt pain of betrayal. The elder daughter who starts off looking like the teenager from hell  turns out to be the most loyal family member who stands tall by her father. Her friend Sid, who looks like a casual dufus turns out to have insight into the pain of loss and grieving, and even he brings meaning to a family that is left fractured by the mother's affair.

The process of picking up the pieces leads to a confrontation of sorts, but there is no deeper meaning to be gleaned.

Evil Father-In-Laws

Robert Forster plays a hard-ass father-in-law who scolds and berates George Clooney's Matt. He blames the accident in a roundabout non-logic way, on Matt which is not only totally unfair, but misses the essential point that his daughter lacked the important virtue of loyalty in her marriage. This echoes greatly with the ranting father-in-law from 'I Am Mita, Your Housekeeper'. It seems an inevitable plot-point from the plot device of a mother passing away leaving a family in the lurch, but both these father-in-laws go hard at accusing their sons in laws.

Where this film differs greatly from the Japanese TV drama series is that Matt is dedicated to his family and extended family, to a superhuman degree. We see him holding responsibility not only for his immediate family but for an extended tribe of people who want to sell a large parcel of land. Everybody wants input into the decision, and everybody wants to know what he's going to do. It turns out he wants to do what is best for the land, because he alone can see that the land and the extended family are part of the same loop. One cannot be without the other. If he sells the land and everybody cashes out, the extended family will disappear as well.

In that light, the irony is deeper when the father-in-law tells Matt what a bad son-in-law he has been. It's anything but the truth.

The Absent Mother

The other curious mirror is of course how the oedipal story plays out in the absence of mother. As sure as day light, Matt fixates upon the man with whom his wife had an affair. He cannot tear himself away from the mission, because he is moved to find this man and metaphorically kill him. As a result of this adventure, he ends up being closer to his daughters, who are able to be closer to him without the mother.

It's all very Freudian, but the film makes sense. One of the best scenes in the film is when Matt confronts his friends to get information out of them about his wife's lover. Matt is rightfully angry, and he will not be deterred by politically correct discourse - he demands the truth. But the truth only comes to him from the man because the man understand the Freudian mission.

I suspect the film is emotionally satisfying because it plays beautifully to such mechanisms in our psyche.

2012/05/11

News That's Fit To Punt - 10/May/2012

The Greek Situation

The elections held last weekend in France and Greece tell us a lot where things are going. Where they're going is not to a better place but to more chaos and turmoil. The French have kicled Nicolas Sarkozy out of office, and installed a Socialist President who will wind back on the austerity and aim for growth. The Greeks have not only hung their parliament, they have sent in extremist parties who promise to junk the deal made by the previous government.

What nobody is saying is how magically this growth is going to manifest for France and at the same time cut back on France's deficits, let alone how the Greeks are even going to be able to form any kind of government to deal with the impending drying up of funds.

One sympathises with the ordinary Greek voter - sold down the river by their politicians years ago, they now have nobody to turn to but the extreme fringe. This is kind of how the Nazis got a foothold in the Weimar Republic back in 1933, 4 years out from the crash of 1929. Not that the Greeks are about to re-arm and invade the rest of Europe, but we can see the rise of the extreme parties in Greece as a kind of history repeating. This is how it goes.

In the short term, this is leading to talk of Greece leaving the Euro. The laughable thing is that polls in Greece reveal they don't want to leave the Euro. So if we're to get this straight, they don't want to pay back money they owe, but they want to keep all the benefits from being part of the EU. I can really see that one working....not.

The Budget & The Libs

Wayne Swan brought down a predictably beige budget, claiming a $1.5b surplus. The basic gist of this year's budget is that a lot of high income earners are going to have their perks cancelled. Tony Abbot predictably jumped up and called it 'class war', which is inflammatory rhetoric, but I don't know if Tony Abbott knows of any other kind. I don't normally talk about the budget every year, but I thought it was worth mentioning that along with Joe Hockey's notion of entitlement, it's a bit rich of Tony Abbott to call this budget 'class war'.

There's a deeper problem with the conservatives even reaching for the term - as their American brethren do - because if there really is a class war, then it means there is a class system operating in our society. Forget the myth of an egalitarian Australia, if Tony Abbott is saying there is class war being waged by the ALP, then that sure as hell means there is a class system in Australia, and that the Liberal Party approves of this class system and would like it to continue undisturbed.

So, without being as inflammatory as Tony Abbott, is this really what he wants us to understand when he uses the term 'class war'? That Tony Abbott thinks there is a class system in Australia and that it is a good thing and by logical corollary, egalitarianism is not something the Liberal Party support? I tell you, Occam's razor says the simpler explanation is no, he's just an idiot.

 

 

 

2012/05/08

'The Iron Lady'

Through The Eyes Of Lost Marbles

I don't get the people who hero-worship Margaret Thatcher, I'm afraid. Okay, yes, I'm a leftie but I'm also decidedly not British. It shouldn't matter to me; nonetheless there is this deep detestation for the Baroness Thatcher, for she is simply alienating. And I don't blame the people who still want to spit on her name and are waiting for her to die so they can go desecrate her grave. Such deep resentments and hatreds and grudges tell me that with her, the cons far outweighed the pros.

So... what to make of a film about her time in politics?

What's Good About It

Meryl Streep. It begins and ends with Meryl Streep.

What's Bad About It

The whole darn film is built around the reminiscence of a Margaret Thatcher who has lost her marbles. The bits where we watch her dawdling about and being an Alzheimer patient are actually pretty boring. her hallucinations of Denis who is dead, are pretty boring and offer very little in terms of information. If you like to know what the world of a alzheimer patient looks like, this film may or may not be your cup of tea.  However, as biopics go, it's light on information. As a film that's about a state of a mind in decay, you wonder if it had to be about Margaret Thatcher.

Also, the blending of the historic footage and the drama is badly done. They just don't match. As a result, all those scenes of bombs and riots are even more tragic today than then.

The tone is pompous, the pace is all over the place, you never feel settled in to the story, and we all know what the story was so there's really nothing new or exciting in this film. It offers very little insight into Thatcher or her marriage to Denis Thatcher. Oddly enough, we're not that curious about it, so it doesn't register as too big a problem; but it is. We don't exactly know more of her after the film - it is more that we're reminded of her and her place in history.

I felt very sorry for the Gen-Xers in the UK who grew up with her as their Prime Minister. The 1980s were a major drag.

What's Interesting About It

People on the right probably think this film is a character assassination of sorts, but as a centre-left kind of guy this film strikes me as Right-ist Hagiography. Even in her best moments, you can't but think of Margaret Thatcher as this eternal ideological warrior, and it sickens you to the pit of your stomach. She's not even nice to her family in this film which is neither here nor there - her daughter has denounced the film, but I would too if I were portrayed by Sophie from the Peep Show. Nothing against the actress, but hey, have you watched the Peep Show?

Anyway. It's probably not a film that's going to tick too many people's ideological boxes.

Thatcher As Narcissist

It goes without saying that many of the people who attain great success and high station in life have a very different view of themselves to what we might consider ordinary people. One of the things I've grown a distaste for is meeting successful people and getting a whiff of their positive self-regard. In most instances, it comes across as this awful kind of vanity. It's easy to imagine this positive self-regard is comically out of kilter with Margaret Thatcher, but the problem with the Streep portrayal is that it makes this seem like a virtue.

What gets her to the top, in this movie and in real life was her total rejection of any compromise. And for some reason this allowed her to be the successful Conservative politician that she became - but! and here's the thing - she's basically an inflexible, uncompromising extremist. the whole persona as well as career was built on "good enough for me is good enough for you." She carves out a rhetorical position that feigns empathy, but she just wants it all her way, or it's the highway.

In some ways, she's progressive, making a case for a place for women in politics against these conservative men. Yet she didn't extend this charity to women on the other side of the House - which underscores her own sense of exceptionalism. the progressive idea of women having a place in politics applies to her more than it applies to other women.

Her highest tone rhetoric sounds fine and dandy, but wasn't she just a big bully and apologist for the ancien regime of the UK? So regardless of her personal story of overcoming sexism in the conservatives to rise to the top, isn't it futile for Meryl Streep to be sugarcoating one of history's big bullies?

Austerity, Riots, Smashing Unions

As I was watching the historic footage, it occurred to me that those riots were a result of Thatcher running her own 'austerity' program as soon as she came to power. It reminded me an awful lot of Greece, which is undergoing some immense financial difficulties. Still, Thatcher came to power when inflation was running at 18%. If we are to be fair we have to give her her due.

It makes you think you need a kind of Thatcher to smash through one set of vested interests. It's not as if Tony Blair or Gordon Brown ever turned the tables on the vested interests for the rich end of town. If anything, it reminds us of John Howard and his Work Choices legislation aimed at breaking union power in Australia; which presumably was modeled on Thatcher's time as Prime Minster because he certainly jumped to it quickly as soon as he got majority in the Senate.

In the context of the post GFC churn of bailouts and austerity measures that constantly seem to need more remedies, Thatcher might have thundered no to the bail outs even if it hurt her own party with her own constituents. It's hard to imagine her not reaching for the heaviest austerity measures. She would have been far more divisive than David Cameron or Gordon Brown.

North Sea Oil, Not Policy

The big myth of Thatcher and Thatcherism might be that all that cutting and confrontation and shutting down of mines and breaking unions and fighting for a Poll Tax made the UK better through the 1980s, but it's not really the full story. The greater contributor was the discovery of oil in the North Sea - which was taxed at 90% - that contributed to the coffers of the state, and allowed the UK to come out of its epoch of 'Stag-flation'. Now there's a lesson for Julia Gillard right there: Gillard shouldn't be scared of taxing the miners as hard as she can.

In any case, Margaret Thatcher was the beneficiary of good luck more than most Prime Minsters of the Twentieth century in the UK; but it's also true that it's better to be lucky than good sometimes.

2012/05/07

'The Avengers'

Altogether Now

This has been without a doubt the biggest build up since the Harry Potter movies and Lord of the Rings kicked off in the market place in the same year. A revamped Hulk, Two Iron Man movies, a Thor movie directed by Kenneth Brannagh and a cursory Captain America, they finally made it to the starting line having only lost Ed Norton along the way. The remarkable cast threaded together by Samuel L. Jackson appearing as Nick Fury in all these movies has included Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, which might be a record of sorts.

It opened last week in the USA and immediately vaulted to the second largest opening since the last installment of Harry Potter and has eclipsed just about every superhero movie ever made including the highly esteemed Christopher Nolan's Batman second Batman movie.

The film is like one long fevered geek-fest with scant respect for physics, logic, and rationality, but it all hangs together and goes so fast you don't have time to ponder anything. Just, take it all in baby and cogitate afterwards.

What's Good About It

If you like the big hamburger-with-the-lot meal set with the drinks and fries super-sized, and like adding some high-calorie, low-health dessert on the side, ...this is your movie!  I admit, I do. This movie is not a meal at the Michelin three-hats restaurant. And as burger-with-the-lot movies go, this is most excellent. Clocking well over two hours, and it's still not enough. You stumble out of the cinema with a giant adrenalin rush like you've had three cans of a caffeine drink.

The action is thumping, the scenes are resplendently colourful, with the patina of the best comic books thrown at the screen. Captain America's blue with white and red trim against Iron Man's red with gold trim oozes Americana in the way Detroit motor show does, but also comes a long way from Christopher Reeve's Superman with its brazen post-industrial, post-cyberpunk design.

What's Bad About It

There isn't a teaser after the trailers like there was with the Iron Man movies.

Okay, it's a guilty pleasure to so throw yourself into something so devoid of intellectual challenge. This is not the film to look for it, but you do think after a viewing, "have I become so dumb that this film gives me so much pleasure?"

It's a film with such a strong delineation, there is no real nuance to savor. Black is black, white is white, Red White and Blue are Red White and Blue. I guess it's appropriately bold ad simple but even allowing for it, this is pure comic book rhetoric dressed up to be a movie. It's about as deep as a puddle left behind by rain on a summer's day. in that sense this is nothing like the second Christopher Nolan Batman movie.

What's Interesting About It
We live in an age of comic book movies that are so extravagant that they eclipse most other attempts at entertainment. Take for example the Mission Impossible IV movie I gave a crit on only yesterday. That would have been a top effort by a studio back in the 90s, and it even had some heart stopping suspense in parts of it. It's a good movie, but it's got *nothing* on the extravagant action in this film. in turn, this film makes 'Mission Impossible IV Ghost Protocol' seem a lot more mature than it it really is.

Now, Mission Impossible in its fourth movie is also a property that comes out of television and it has some sort of cultural weight to it, but thanks to Tom Cruise's mishandling of the franchise, that cultural weight is blow away by the cultural weight of these comic book movies. When you think about it, some of these characters have been knocking around earning more and more story and market place power in comic books since the 1960s. It's arguable that the most important characters in fiction would equally include Hamlet, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and Spiderman. The question is, which of the Bard's characters has Spiderman knocked out to be in the top 100? Prospero, maybe?

Marvel's got a lot more stories to tell before it exhausts itself, and if this film is  any indication it's going to keep smashing Hollywood product at the box office for some time yet.

What's Hollywood going to do about this? Or has it given up developing its own franchises?

Iron-y Man

Marvel has  a beautiful way of giving us heroes who are also deeply flawed as human beings. It contrasts greatly to the DC stable with their emotionally controlled characters Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. batman has been making the most  mileage in the movie market place for DC, but that has been by pushing the aspect of Batman being wound a little too tight. None of DC Comics' main heroes come with things like emotional baggage, hangups, and personality issues like say, Iron Man.

Robert Downey Jr. has been adding his nervous twitches on to the weird quirks of Tony Stark, who at the core is the Tin Man in Oz. (Hulk then must be Scarecrow without the brain and Nick Fury just might be the cowardly Lion). If Iron Man was a kind of extended metaphor for the American Military Industry Complex, then in this film he is clearly as he carries a nuclear weapon across dimensions through a portal. The MIC invites enemies because it is mischievous in nature.

If he didn't exist, there wouldn't be so many conflicts. As it is, he gets into a lot of adventures for our entertainment.

Captain America As Anachronism

Captain America is always going to be a troubled character in any time outside of the 1940s. Marvel have milked this effect for years but when you finally see it on screen, all you feel is a weird sadness for a guy who is never going to go home and is destined to fight for America until something very well kills him. It's pretty bleak. If the Marvel movie that brought him to the big screen was a bit light, then this film only pushes that memento only slightly forwards, but Chris Evans' portrayal of the character adds a great deal of angst. The funny thing is, I don't remember angst as being part of Captain America.

Third Hulk

Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner is actually an inspired bit of casting. He brings the right amount of quiet desperation and earnestness to the role. not that Ed Norton was bad as Bruce Banner, but Mark Ruffalo brings a lot more pain and less callowness to the screen. Bringing the Hulk to the screen has been tough for Marvel. They did one with Ang Lee directing and starring Eric Bana which was a great 'film' but a terrible 'movie'. It had so many nuanced performances and stylistic explorations but it definitely was not what the doctor ordered. The Ed Norton installment was a better movie but still lacked any semblance of having an emotional high. Maybe it was good that both those iterations got left in the dust with the casting of Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner. I wouldn't mind seeing a stand alone Hulk movie with him.

Scarlett Johansson As Scene Stealer

I know she wanted to be in the Avengers as Black Widow and so they wrote her in extensively but, I could have done with less of her this time around. Considering the villain this time is Loki, they should have spent more time on Thor. Instead we're treated to 3 long sequences where she is beating the crap out of Russian interogators, avoiding getting killed by the Hulk, and beating up Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye.

It's interesting what she likes playing. There's 'Lost in Translation', a raft of Woody Allen pictures, 'Iron Man2' and now this film.

2012/05/06

'Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol'

Are We Still Doing This?

Threat: Nuclear Armageddon. Saviour?: Tom Cruise. Some tall buildings off which he will hang in some sweaty-palm moments interspersed with gunfire and martial arts punchups. Ready? (I'm over it, baby.)

The fourth installment of Tom Cruise's pet series is actually better than the previous installments. It's actually a bit of a surprise. None of the previous films were terribly compelling before but this one raises a pulse. I dubbed the first one Mission Improbable, the second Mission Imbecile, the third Mission Improvisational but this one actually earns its Mission Impossible moniker properly.

What's Good About It

It's a feature of these movies that they always have some hairy aerobatic thing off the tops of tall buildings. The one in this one is actually impossible and exciting. The worst one was the one in Sydney (we can all blame Nicole Kidman for that one). The weirdest one was the one in Shanghai. Anyway, it's good in this one exactly because it's so outlandishly impossible.

Going stronger on the teamwork thing is better in this film; even better that the third. They also left behind Ving Rhames who only makes a cameo, but in turn the unit seems sharper rather than know-it-all.

What's Bad About It

The actual mechanics of what holds the plot together is pretty weak, complicated and in need of a lot of exposition. At it's core, it's a bomb that needs defusing, but somehow this turns into a re-run of the "Cold War Going Hot" threat. I know in real life Putin's a bit of a dick, but we're really too far distant from those days to feel the threat. Even when a nuke is flying through the air headed for San Francisco, it's not terrible threatening. If the Cold War was well over in the first movie made back in 1996, then 15-16 years on, this movie is just not that immediate.

I also think the mode of action movies has moved on significantly since 1996, what with the rash of superhero movies and LOTR trilogy and other assorted excitements. The kind of action going on in this film just looked old - and not even 'cool retro' old, but tired and old. In short, it's outmoded and antiquated.

They flip a couple of cars in the stunts this film. They flip a whole city-load of cars in 'The Avengers'.

What's Interesting About It

I'm surprised Tom Cruise wanted to go another round as Ethan Hunt. These films have a weird dynamic because the original TV show was about teamwork while the movies have been about Ethan Hunt, the super agent that can solve most any problem on his own. Every film has some kind of team, but the team never quite gels because there's not enough screen time to do that kind of work because everybody knows it's all about Tom Cruise playing Ethan Hunt. He's his own worst enemy when it comes to these films.

To put this into perspective, a movie where Tom Cruise plays the smiling leading man and wins the day sort of started in the mid 1980s. He sort of put an end to it with 'Vanilla Sky', but it's been pretty weird since. The bloom of youth is gone, but also the charm of his 30s are long behind him. He looks haggard in this film. He can still do the stunts but the martial arts bits - never his forte - looked really s l o w.

I'm sure he feels like he's up for it. I just don't think his fans would agree.

Nuclear Arsenal Going Astray

The polemic of the rogue nuclear weapon has been around for a long time. 'Goldfinger' is built around a plot to irradiate all the gold in Fort Knox. Had they stuck around for a decade, the need would have disappeared because Nixon ended the Gold Standard and therefore the necessity to keep that gold in Fort Knox. Kubrick's  'Dr. Strangelove' is all about a rogue Bomber with the bomb which would go on to trigger nuclear Armageddon and Mutually Assured Destruction, and of course that one gets through. It happens a lot in cinema history.

It is easily arguable that there is actually a tradition of these films. The best of the bunch for me would be 'Crimson Tide', where the protocols for firing nuclear weapons from a submarine get a good working over, while 'Broken Arrow' provided us with a glimpse of how prone the world is to such scenarios if insiders were at play.it's not as good, but it has the bare bones down. Activation codes. Acknowledgements. Security clearances. Protocols. Keys on chains and colour coded lanyards. Numbers on the screen in that old style computer font counting down.

This film reruns the insider scenario without really explaining how this fictional IMF is part of any government. So the film proceeds with the problem without adequately explaining how the problem came about - but expects the audience to cotton on quick and therefore not ask too many questions. It's really interesting that a film proceeds on that basis, without it being a parody or satire.

The Kremlin

Back during the Cold War, we never got to see what went on in the Kremlin. These days, they're inviting Hollywood into film there, so we get an eyeful of the place in this film. I don't know if they really have those underground tunnels or even corridors with red carpet, but safe to say the ballroom and courtyard got a good showing.

It goes to show how far in the past the Cold War is these days. Even all this speaking in Russian on the screen in Hollywood movies is a new development. Tom does it, Simon Pegg does it, at one point the subtitles come up in Cyrillic alphabet and then swap over into English. Scarlett Johannson is doing it in 'The Avengers', Vin Diesel was doing in 'Babylon A.D.'; speaking Russian on the screen is all the rage.

It's as if Russians are the new best friends. I guess they would be if they're inviting film crews in to the Kremlin. I guess Sting was right all those years ago, they love their children too.

2012/05/04

'家政婦のミタ' ('I Am Mita, Your Housekeeper')

And Now For Something Totally Different

Today's entry is about a TV drama series from Japan. 'I Am Mita, Your Housekeeper' that aired late last year in Japan.

I rarely watch TV dramas. I kind of get dragged to it kicking and screaming and walk away form the set when the scenes get too maudlin, sentimental or dragged out in anyway so that they can stretch the content out to get to the commercial breaks. I hate the feeling of not enough content to make up the time as opposed to the too much content squeezed in to the allotted framework you get in good movies.

So I was naturally very sceptical about seeing a show about a housemaid in Japan that garnered 40.4 ratings in Japan for the climactic episode. That's right 40.4%, for a drama. It's unheard of in most parts of the world. This is why I sat down to take in all 11 episodes across this weekend.
I think it did my head in.

What's Good About It
The show is an indictment of a kind of social dream that has gone totally wrong. The nuclear family and myths of the "my-home" and even social cohesion are thrown into the blender for pulverising critique. The early episodes are a stand out in hitting society exactly where it hurts.

The characters are worked out in fine detail and the story spirals out of control at exactly the right way because of the way the story is knit together. It's very good writing. Some of the performances are fine, others are not as good but it all pulls together to keep the rather wild fiction going.

What's Bad About It
It's not as if this series didn't have the moments of groan-inducing sentimentality and tearful pleading.

Technically, I also hate the way Japanese directors cross the line of action just to get a different reverse angle - and it keeps happening through out this series, but it's nothing isolated to this series. I hate the way characters suddenly appear in a scene just to cut to the chase because it may be convenient for the story but it strains credulity when it need not.

They also keep recapping key moments from earlier episodes and by the end of the series, you just want them to get on with it rather than recap those moments.

What's Interesting About It
First, there is the psychological study of the family in a downward spiral. It is like Freud's Oedipus Complex going out of control and unchecked, as well as Electra complex and a more obscure thing called the Ajase Complex.

The series starts with the aftermath of a mother's suicide as a family struggles to deal with their emotions of rejection and dejection. It is into this context that a housekeeper arrives, and the housekeeper is as emotionally unresponsive as the Terminator. It then proceeds to build domestic drama upon domestic drama by dissecting the family members and their emotional vulnerabilities.

As hard as it is to imagine, the unfolding saga builds up a great deal of intrigue, and emotional complexity. The series in many ways an indictment and is no wonder that it garnered the ratings it did.

Oedipus Wrecks

The Oedipalised emotions of the males in the family have tremendous force in this story. Firstly there is the father who has been having an affair with a coworker. It is revealed that he asked his wife for a divorce which led to the wife's suicide. Once his affair is found out, his daughter then exposes it to the company with predictable results. The father keeps claiming that this woman is the only woman he has genuinely loved - and not his wife - because he was never certain of his feelings for his wife. Later on, he tries to rekindle his affair, only to find out the man who replaced his post at work has also stolen the woman. The ensuing humiliation is like Freud played out large.

The elder son who is in middle school becomes intrigued with Mita to the extent that his libido drives him to ask if she would do anything on command. She responds by saying that she would do anything within her power. He demands they fuck. She asks, "how would you like to do that?" He demands she first disrobe - and she is totally willing to have sex with the boy. It doesn't quite come about because the eldest daughter walks in at the nick of time to stop it from happening.

Again, it is Freud played out large. The repressed eroticism constantly threatens to boil over. You sure don't see this stuff in 'Desperate Housewives' because America's not ready for this - but Japan is fine with this stuff. It's bewildering.

The younger son is in sixth grade. He has to write a paper "in appreciation of mother"; even though he feels abandoned by her apparent suicide. The housekeeper Mita encourages him to write about the mother as if she died of an accident and express his fully blooming Oedipal-ised emotion.

The daughter is perhaps in a deeper problem because at once she is drawn to her father and then is betrayed when she finds out her mother ave committed suicide over the affair. In the absence of the mother, she asks Mita to kill her. It's all Freudian once again when the children kick out the father and are left with the housekeeper to look after them.

Easy Suicides

Another layer of disturbance lies in how easily the characters choose death. Not only has the mother committed suicide, the elder daughter and father both try to die in the course of the series. Even Mita herself tries to kill herself in one of the later episodes. Death is everywhere, but most improbably it is because people are so willing to contemplate suicide.

One wonders if Japanese narratives naturally tends that way or whether this readiness is a function of a growing dysfunction of this era. In each instance what drives these characters is a deep sense of embarrassment that is disproportionate to what their real offenses might be. Throughout the series, the characters back away from suicide as they gain perspective - but while they lack any perspective, it makes for some harrowing viewing.

There's so much suicide in Japan because suicide itself is seen as a kind of available option for kids. They jump off buildings, leap into trains, hang themselves, they kill themselves in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons that most people would see as trifling. My own view of it is that there is something about Japanese schools that hem the kids in so hard in the name of discipline when in fact they are grossly violating the human rights of the kids they have in their care - but more of that later.

Sado-Masochism

The dour, seemingly selfless Mita persona gradually reveals itself to be a kind of masochism. The more we learn about her, we realise she too is labouring under a disproportionate sense of embarrassment and shame, and this drives her to the ultimate submission - she will do anything and everything that is physically possible, if ordered to do so. In parts of the series, this is milked for some humour, but in a overview sense, it is disturbing how she may well fit into some kind of sick fantasy. The infinitely pliable housekeeper who would submit to anything, can bring out the inner sadist in a lot of people.

As if to prove this point, once Mita takes on the role of 'Mother', she flips the switch and becomes an emotional sadist. She feeds the children less, demands more discipline from them and tells them that they are inadequate. She becomes the disciplinarian sadist towards the children; and as an audience we watch this with a great deal of pleasure because she brings out the inner sadist in us all.

What's interesting is that in Mita, we find parental discipline and the sort of discipline you find in S&M porn sitting side by side. As viewers, we enjoy Mita disciplining these spoilt kids - but you have to question what that pleasure means. I felt oddly uncomfortable with how enjoyable these scenes of putting the shoe on the other foot were.

Absent Parents

The film spends a good deal of time exploring the relationship between the father and his in-laws. What is apparent is that the father seems to have no parents of his own who are in the picture. That he has suddenly appeared into the world uncertain, and was made a father by his late wife; all of it vaguely against his sense of self. On that level he is Gen-X to a tee, but the series goes one step further: his children throw him out of the house and make themselves parent-less, just like him.

What is blindingly obvious is that problems of this family do not start with just the father or the mother, but sometime in the distant past before they even met; and I suspect this is why this series managed to reach people in Japan. There would have been many people who saw themselves in some way as that character.

True to the traditions of Japan, he is trying to put together the form of a caring father, but he does not know what it means or how it manifests itself in his life, even after having fathered 4 children. I imagine this aspect of the story would have hit Gen X in Japan pretty hard. The absence of proper adult supervision created a generation of lost men and women, all with the emotional maturity of three year olds.

The Disintegrating Nuclear Family

The way the father keeps retreating from responsibility is quite disturbing. If there is one character that much of the drama can be pinned upon, it is the father. Yet he constantly shows himself to be not up to any substantial emotional challenge, and spends a good deal of the last 4 episodes apologising to everybody.

While there is a tradition in Japanese film and TV of portraying the nuclear family as somewhat suspect, I don't recall an instance of the repudiation running this deep. it makes the making up of the family towards the end oddly unbelievable. In many ways, what is most interesting is exactly how the family spirals out of control.

In a sense it's not even the father's fault that he comes into adulthood incomplete. The adults that brought him up essentially yelled at him (as his father in law can't resist doing) and then vacated the arena of adulthood for him to simply step in. Armed with very little capacity to handle his own emotions, let alone expectations of others, he proceeds to vacate the lives of his children as his parents must have done before. As a likely explanation for why there is so much of this sense of social discontinuity is going on, it's not a bad one. A peak rating of 40% suggests  a lot of Japanese viewers agree.

Bad Teachers

The younger son's teacher is a miserable man. He basically lets the bullying in his own classroom go on and pretends that it doesn't exist. The sad truth is that there are way too many teachers like this in Japan, and they're all protected from scrutiny by the social consensus that a teacher is a better class of human being.

Similarly, the aunt to the kids who is meant to be a physical education teacher is also a total and utter nincompoop. Schools and teachers come off really badly in this series, I suspect because there is now a total breakdown in trust in both the educational system as well as the educators.

It still makes for painful viewing because you those types of teachers exist, making kids lives miserable all over Japan, and they wonder out loud why there are hikikomori kids. The Japanese educational system has a lot to answer for, when it comes to those traumatised kids. For years, commentators have been wondering what they're doing wrong. What they really should be doing is totally re-envisaging how they do education. For a start, those classrooms look like something from 100years ago, and stop cramming 40 kids to a class. They really need to see how the rest of the world does it; and they should sack all those children-hating sadistic teachers protected by the Japan Teachers Union.

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