2015/12/26

'Spectre'

The Joy Of Repetition

I watched a whole bunch of Bond films at the cinema (as opposed to on TV or video) starting from 'The Spy Who Loved Me' through to 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. It was just the done thing, and Bond movies are alway excellent value for entertainment, even when they're bad. And some of those films were real stinkers.

Roughly, I caught the second half of Roger Moore, both Timothy Daltons, and the first two of Pierce Brosnan. And I was done - or so I thought. There was something about a Rupert Murdoch parody played by the guy who played Sam Lowry in 'Brazil' (Jonathan Pryce) having a submarine base and a bunch of gun-toting flunkies that made the implausible go into total stupidity. I could take an over-the-hill Moore in 'View to a Kill', it was awful but I kept going; I could take the low-octane 'Licence to Kill-you-through-boredom' , and I kept going even then; but I drew the line at 'Tomorrow Never Dies'.

It's really been a credit to Daniel Craig's efforts that I've gone back to watching these things at the cinema. When I think about it, I've gone four in a row with Craig now, so really I just missed 2 of Brosnan's efforts in that string of Bond movies. So I remain a valued customer even after the clunker that was 'Tomorrow Never Dies'.

That being said, these Daniel Craig Bond movies have been something else to what came before. There's a lot more grit and less fanciful sadism, they're less jovial and jaunty, and more motivated with quiet brooding anger than a detached kind of nonchalant killing. The word professionalism invokes a certain image of being a secret agent, but these Bond movies have repainted that picture. It actually looks painful to be James Bond.

Anyway, before I go into the nitty gritty, here is your obligatory spoiler alert. If you hate spoilers, don't read on.

What's Good About It

It's a big movie. A heck of a big movie. Every bit of the mooted US$300m budget is on screen. The production design is spectacular - one can only dream of having that kind of lavish budget to spend on things looking so good. It's lit and shot well, it's cut well, the staging of the action is effective and punchy, and the overall aesthetic is of its time. What happened with Bond films of the 80s and 90s was that they slipped behind the times and the lighting would look flat or the effects would look chintzy or the edit would be languid. Next to films made by Steven Spielberg and James Cameron back then, Bond films looked tired and old. This thing looks every bit as polished as any front line action franchise right now, only more luscious and rich.

It's also good to see the bad guy with the name Ernst Stravro Blofeld finally makes an appearance in this incarnation of Bond. It's been a long time since Blofeld was the bad guy. He hasn't been around since 'Diamonds Are Forever'. It's also good that he's played by Christoph Waltz, an actor of considerable villainous charm. It's an excellent bit of casting. Blofeld's absence could partly be explained by just how much of the arch-villain schtick he embodied. Let's not forget, the version played by Donald Pleasance is the entire source material for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. It's exciting to see Bond go up against his old foe, so to speak. In some ways this is what the Daniel Craig Bond movies have been building up to over three films.

This is also the first time we see the rest of Bond's office go into the field at once. It's interesting because it re-grounds James Bond into the institution of government, and as a government agent instead of the seeming one-man lone-wolf agent we're used to seeing.

What's Bad About It

The film feels structurally uneven. It feels like it has 2 third acts. The first is all too brief and too easy, the second, more convoluted but oddly garbled.

Also, this business of Bond being a rogue agent is getting a bit boring. He saves the day so often you'd think the government would understand that Bond temporarily going rogue is the risk they take in even hiring the man, let alone sending him out to do missions. The trope where the government is shutting down the Double-O programme or the MI6 is also getting old. Politics does cast a strange shadow over these Daniel Craig Bond movies, but it just seems gratuitous that the government would want to shut down a highly effective programme even if they had global surveillance tie-ups.

There could have been bit more of Blofeld. As it is, we only really see him at the first turning point about 30minutes in for the scene at the Rome meeting, and then he's absent until late in the second act that feels like a third act. Otherwise it's clues that paint an incomplete picture that barely hints at an unexplained past. Considering the story is a lot more personal than previous incarnations of Blofeld, Waltz is on screen all too briefly.

Lea Seydoux is a bit weak as an actress. There's something a bit blank about her that you don't quite believe her character. I'm always suspicious of casting choices where somebody in their mid 20s plays a specialist medical professional. You just don't get to be those without turning 35. Even ignoring that factor, there something a bit amiss about her performance, most likely because she's not a native English Speaker. I kept wincing at the uneven-ness of the performance.

What's Interesting About It

If the Bond film is anything to go by, our reflected paranoia about terrorism is actually out of control. This has manifested itself in the surveillance state that is now the UK, but also around the world, there seems to be this growing surveillance. Against this context, Bond has to go to some obscure places, or places without such surveillance to prove his worth.

Bond definitely doesn't (and probably can't) work in places where the threats are real. He can't infiltrate ISIL, he can't go work undercover in places like North Africa, Middle East, the Subcontinent, and East Asia. Strangely, as globalisation advances, the potential for Bond to go undercover keeps eroding to the point where in this film he isn't an undercover spy, he's defining himself as an assassin. That is to say, the Double-O programme is a state-sanctioned assassination bureau whose distinguishing feature is the "licence to kill". Maybe it is, but this brings strange ramifications.

This creative decision skews the action out of espionage where the roots of Bond movies lie, towards a more brutalist Hollywood conception of action. Daniel Craig's Bond has ideological pinnings closer to Steven Seagal movies of the 90s than say, Timothy Dalton Bond movies. It's the old "You might be a bastard but you're our bastard. Go rogue as long as you kill the bad guy" brief.

Consider for the moment that back in the Sean Connery Bond era, Bond would don makeup to look like a Japanese guy (!) to go do undercover espionage in Japan. Or the lovely moment where he kills a guy in the lift in 'Diamonds are Forever', swaps the ID with his victim and tells Jill St. John's character that he just killed James Bond. The Daniel Craig Bond doesn't pretend to be anything other than James Bond when he kills 2 other assassins and then shags Monica Bellucci.

Brothers

It's interesting that Blofeld's back story melds into this Bond's back story. Blofeld, it turns out is foster brother to James Bond. Thus, the four films together takes shape as more of a feud between two men, even though James Bond was not entirely aware that this was what was taking place. It's interesting that to make it personal, the backstory had to be changed into one that denotes fratricidal impulses. Doubly more so because Austin Powers had this area pegged when in the third instalment of that franchise 'Goldmember', it was revealed that Austin and Dr. Evil were brothers. Take a bow Mike Myers.

The Challenges Of Character Realism

The Bond franchise oscillates between character realism and then lighter laughs, depending on the Bond actor. So Connery was a character realist back in the 60s when spy movies were a rage; Moore was a lighter comedic Bond in the 70s and 80s until he wore out the tropes; Dalton was an attempt to go back to a character with gravitas; and then Brosnan brought about a breeziness and TV-honed casualness that echoed Moore. The franchise has gone back to character realism with Craig for four movies now, but the strain is beginning to show.

One of the great challenges of the Bond franchise is staving off the psychopath label from Bond. If Bond is running around the planet exercising his licence to kill too liberally, then he becomes less distinguishable from his foes. after all, what kind of crazy person kills so many people and then carries on a life as if he's a normal citizen? It was particularly apparent with the Brosnan Bond because he had the highest kills of any Bond per screen time, but offered the most light-and-breezy Bond of the lot. If the cognitive dissonance wasn't going off in the directors' and producers' heads, then surely the audience was getting alienated by this problem.

The absence of character realism for Bond leads to the rest of the film becoming less real. At one point I'm led to believe Bond was driving an "invisible car", in one of the Brosnan Bond films I didn't watch. An invisible car! I mean, you know... I'm kind of glad I missed that at the cinemas.

Daniel Craig's Bond has been tackling this problem across four films. With his portrayal, Bond actually feels the weight of his kills. He doesn't quite care for all his victims individually, but the mounting body count wears on his conscience and drives him to drink. In the four films, he's walked away from the job twice. He even admits to a drinking problem in this film. The state of the character is slowly evolving in a way that he was never allowed to do in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

This choice has brought about a very interesting Bond but it is clear he is nearing the finish line. If Bond can - inconceivably - die, then it would be on Daniel Craig's watch. It would be as tragic as Kirk or Solo dying, but for once it would make sense. It would also bring the cycle of films to a meaningful conclusion, a completion of mission that all the other Bond films combined, never possessed or could attain.

We're A Team!

Over at the 'Mission Impossible' franchise, another spy genre off-shoot from the 1960s, Tom Cruise has been ruling the roost and making it more Bond-like in that the hero action centres on himself. It was worse in earlier films, but lately he's been backing off from hogging the screen time - he's been actively sharing it with Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg. They've been making it look more like a team-effort which is more in the spirit of the original TV series, which is a good thing.

Similarly with the evolving Bond, they've managed to develop Q, M, and Moneypenny so that they are doing more spy-agency-like things. It has the benefit of showing these kinds of protagonists as being part of a functioning social set, even if that social set is made up of other spooks. It contextualises the actions as work. What's more telling is that it shows just how obsolete the Bond figure has become. In the old days of 'Goldfinger', Bond had to fight the bad guy in front of the ticking bomb and disarm the bomb himself. In this stage of civilisation, the equivalent of the bomb is embedded in technology in such a way as to need hacking - so it is Q who ultimately hits the switch that saves the day. More realistically, Bond couldn't have done that bit.

Bond, at that moment in the story, is diverted on to a mini-adventure of his own where he has to save the girl from a collapsing building, but it's hardly the same thing as saving the world from surveillance hell. Call it, the villain-twirling-his-moustache-at-the-rail-tracks moment. Because we're invested in Bond, we feel it's a big deal, but under rational analysis, it's actually nerdy-geeky Q and ever-responsible-and-loyal bureaucrat M who finish the big deal. It is as if the film itself is admitting that even in the tallest fantasies, the limitations of one person are such that they cannot overcome institutionalised evil. Maybe it's a big step back for hero action movies, but it just might be a big step forwards for our understanding of the surveillance state. It's not going to get undone with a flourish of the pen in legislature or a judicial decision in some high court.

 Bond's Euro Anxiety And Buying British Bonds

The Daniel Craig Bond movies have concentrated more on a European threat more than anything else. He isn't facing off against Russian agents in this day and age, and he can't go undercover in other ethnic groups, so naturally Bond's villains have come from the ranks of Europeans. It is probably not surprising given the overall anxiety in the UK about its place in the EU. These Bond movies vividly illustrate just how deep the unease run in the UK about the European Union as a project - it is with great suspicion and distrust.

As the last vestige of the Great British Empire, Bond is more icon of a flag-waving Cool Britannia. With its roots in the 1960s, it has something in common with Mods and the Who with their Union Jack draped garb. The anachronism is further magnified by the nostalgic fetishisation of Aston Martins and period English vehicles. The whole point of the Bond movie is to brand Great Britain, and continue to bear that standard in the mass consumer market place. The endorsed goods come hard and fast while everybody gets around dressed to the nines. It's a weird continuum where nobody looks bad or dresses bad. Great Britain needs to keep the branding going lest it sink in the flood of goods coming out of Europe.

I have to say the product placement in this one was just a bit much.

2015/12/24

View From The Couch - 24/Dec/2015

Kim Jong-Un And His Hydrogen Bomb

As these things go, maybe it's not as hysterical as it sounds, but Kim Jong-Un recently said North Korea has a hydrogen bomb, and is able to stick it on the tip of a Rodong rocket and fire it into Washington DC. Amazingly, this didn't make the news in Australia because it's the kind of thing I tend to notice in the headlines.  It might have been missed because Reuters' headline was already tinged with scepticism. Experts think it is unlikely:
In Washington, the White House said it was doubtful that North Korea had developed a hydrogen bomb, but said Pyongyang remained a threat. 
"At this point, the information that we have access to calls into serious question those claims, but we take very seriously the risk and the threat that is posed by the North Korean regime in their ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told a regular briefing.

The U.S. State Department repeated a call on North Korea to comply with its international obligations and abandon all nuclear weapons.
One sort of wonders what the dictator is up to, but it's all kind of kooky how he wants to get the wrong kind of attention at this juncture. In response to this claim, Xi Jinping shut off oil supplies to North Korea, which is unheard of when you think about what it might mean. It tacitly indicates China is ready to disown its old communist bulwark ally; or it may mean nothing especially because oil has collapsed down to US$35 a barrel, and seems to be the ubiquitous commodity - North Korea can buy it cheaply elsewhere. It's really hard to figure out how much this would even corner North Korea. When all the European banks closed off business with North Korea because of sanctions, they simply moved on to using African banks for international settlements. Much like ISIL, it is proving hard to completely shut off the supply of cash to the rogue state. Too many entities seem to be able to profit from dealing with the North Koreans.

Anyway, it's a nice thought on Christmas Eve that Kim Jong-Un has his nation working busily with a plan to blow up the world. He really is like some Bond villain.

Turkey, Russia, Oil

The business of that downed Russian jet by the Turks is turning into a drama of sorts. It goes back to the ISIL thing where the Islamist insurgents are selling oil on the black market. Buying this oil at next-to-nix is none other than Turkey, which then on-sells it for a tidy profit, even with prices crashing to US$35/barrel. As it turns out, the man running this operation out of Turkey is none other than President Recep Erdogan's son.

Sometime back at the the G-20, Putin pressed Erdogan about this issue. Erdogan denied all of it. Apparently Vladimir Putin pressed pretty hard, asking to make sure Recep Erdogan's family weren't in on the ISIL oil deal, and Erdogan still denied it.  So Putin ordered his airmen to go bomb all the lorries carrying oil out of ISIL held territory which resulted in hundreds of these oil trucks getting blown up in Syria. As it turns out, these trucks were mostly Turkish trucks. So Erdogan got upset and green-lit that attack on the Sukhoi. Basically, there was no invasion of Turkish airspace.

Since then Russia has closed off all trade with Turkey, which basically amounts to about half of Turkey's exports.Turkey for it's part is staggering towards more armed conflict with Russia, which is kind of insane because Turkey's nuclear deterrent is NATO. What's worrying about this is that the relationship between the two nations is pretty much naked power politics in the style of the 15th century, just with modern equipment. All this leads me to think that west will likely rue the day they let Turkey into NATO. A war could start on the eastern end of Turkey, and NATO might be drawn into this stupidity by dint of the alliance.

It would be especially galling if it happened as Turkey kept dealing and cash-funding ISIL.

On The Low Low Oil Prices

Jeez, the ACCC must be pretty dumb. If you ever needed evidence that petrol prices at the pump are fixed through collusion, you only have to look at the prices at the bowser and the oil prices by the barrel. Crude oil prices have gone from US$120/barrel down to US$35/barrel. That's roughly a third to a quarter. If the petrol stations and suppliers were genuinely competing, the prices at the bowser should proportionately go down to about 40-50cents per litre. The fact that it hasn't tells you all you need to know. It doesn't go down because they're not really competing, and if they're not competing, the only answer is that they're colluding. In short, these companies are pocketing the difference and not passing it on to the consumer. What a joke.

Anyway.
I saw this interesting account of fossil fuels and their future today.
Why and how coal (and oil) is and will be produced at a loss has been neatly explained by the Australia Institute's Richard Denniss
"Imagine you owned an ice cream van parked by the beach and your refrigerator broke. No matter what you paid for the ice cream, you should sell it for anything you can before it melts. Some money is better than no money. 
"Now imagine that you owned billions of tonnes of coal and you thought that in 20 years time new technology or new global restrictions meant you might not be able to sell it. We have heard for decades how Australia had 'hundreds of years' worth of coal, but now we are trying to sell it in a few decades. The green paradox says that talk of future emission reductions can cause an increase in current coal production. Indeed, global coal production has risen 50 percent since the world first agreed to reduce emissions in 1992." 
Dumping coal (and oil) on the market keeps renewables expensive, but it also provides the incentive to make renewables cheaper. There are very good arguments for governments to invest more in renewables research than just subsidising the existing quality of solar and wind projects.
And that explains why the Coalition Government is going to make sure the Adani mine goes ahead in Queensland. It's anti-democratic and breaks a whole bunch of environmental protections, but the promise of 10,000 jobs in North Queensland has essentially convinced this government that this is somehow going to be okay.

Yet if you look at it from the ice-cream truck simile, you can see why there's such a rush. If Australia doesn't sell off as much of its fossil fuels before it becomes totally unviable, we would be leaving too much money on the table. Greg Hunt isn't really a Minister for the Environment - he's kind of a spokesperson for the Government that addresses the environment as an issue, but doesn't do anything that might remotely be perceived to be standing in the way of corporate profits. He's somebody who is not terribly serious about his job or its title or what it means. He's a careerist pulling down a ministerial pay-packet, pretending to be doing something. He's about as effective as Tony Abbott was as the Minster for Women, and more's the pity. 

This reminds me... Way back a long time ago, I was a young person working at the parcel pickup service of Grace Brothers. The groceries would come up in numbered tubs and we'd hand them out to the customers with the tickets. On certain times of the week, like Thursday night and Saturday morning, they would come in droves, and leave their car engines idling in the driveway. The fumes would be terrible. Just terrible. At this time of the year, the car queues would be 20 cars deep all idling away, and the air was unbreathable. I would dry retch all night long after working some of those shifts. 

Eventually we complained to management asking them to install a powered vent or fan. They demurred. So we called the union, who then organised somebody from the EPA to take measurements. The EPA dude turned up on a Monday morning when there was hardly a vehicle in the whole shopping complex car park - and declared the air was safe. We told him he was there at the wrong time, and that he should come back to when it was peak fumes. He said no, because that would be a biased reading. We were ropable, apoplectic with rage. What was the point of the exercise? He shrugged and said they were the rules, and went back and reported everything was fine. So, management weren't protecting us; the union wasn't really protecting us; and the government wan't protecting us. It was pretty sobering. If you ever wonder why I have occasional bouts of political anarchism, it's from experiences like these. 

I relate this, just to share with you the sense of hopelessness in expecting the government to do the right thing when everybody working for the government, whether elected offical or employed, is against doing any such thing. Folks, they really don't give a shit. Oh, and there's no question that  the ACCC are idiots

2015/12/22

Sepp Blatter Deservedly Gets His Own

Some Kind Of Justice

This blog's had a very dim view of Sepp Blatter and FIFA for a long time. It goes all the way back to the 2006 World Cup. 28th June 2006 to be exact wherein a crappy ref decision allowed the Italians to slot a goal and go through to the next round of the finals. It was a tough loss on the back of a terrible referee decision, that even Sepp Blatter thought was a bad call. Somewhere along the line I found the disconnect between the obvious problems of refereeing international games, the way the World Cups are selected and staged and how the money flows amounted to one big conflict of interest with Sepp Blatter at its heart. Amazingly, this wasn't (and isn't) some kind of blinding insight, it turned out to have been fairly commonly accepted information about the modus operandi of FIFA.

The thing is, Sepp Blatter looked too comfortable with all these problems. And usually, the best way for me to understand just how bent these practices are, is to imagine the commissioner of the MLB doing the sorts of things Sepp Blatter has been accused of doing and how unseemly that would look. Would Rob Manfred or Bud Selig before him do...? What would that look like and how would the scribes respond? I'm not saying baseball has better administrative practices (although probably does), but unlike the premier Euro and Latin American sport, it is followed by a fairly critical press that parses everything. FIFA an Blatter in most part looked way out of step, even a decade ago.

I think that's about where this blog parted ways with football. There are other entries since, but really, that 2006 World Cup and its aftermath killed me. Even more than the Red Sox comeback in 2004 which also killed me - but not enough to hate baseball. That being said, bad referee calls are part of sport. The road to hell is paved not with good intentions but umpiring decisions. What really browned me off was Sepp Blatter's cavalier take on it, which amounted to how he doesn't care what the punters think in the outer outposts of football fandom. Especially places like Australia. Which is insulting because a lot of people have put tremendous amounts of effort in to make football have a place in country with 2 variant rugby codes and AFL.

The logical retort to that has been to say I will care no longer for the product you are pushing. I have many other more pleasing options for spectator sport without the aggravation of FIFA and its sport. And that's how it went down with me. Next to the Olympic Games, the most ethically vexed sports aren't the one-time steroids-addled baseball or cycling but the ethically bankrupt football.

As for Sepp and his FIFA cronies, they ended up on the FBI's radar after the dodgy World Cup choice of doing one in Russia. Worse still, there was the failed campaign by the FFA to invite the World Cup to Australia that lost to Dubai, which also cost $40million of our tax payers money in what can only be described as bribes. Yes, worse than the IOC and its 100 or so voting members, the FIFA votes comes down to 23 people, and you can't tell me they're not corruptible or collusive. Where exactly does 40-odd million dollars go in lobbying 20-odd people but inevitably into their pockets?

Clearly the US Federal Government thought FIFA was dodgy and has since pursued them mightily, which has resulted in this bit of good news: Sepp Blatter and his head flunky have been banned for 
8years from the game.
ZURICH: Sepp Blatter says he will appeal against his eight-year ban from football to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. 
Blatter also insists that he still views himself as FIFA president despite being banned for eight years by FIFA's ethics committee on Monday. 
Speaking at a news conference, Blatter said: "I fight for me and I will fight for FIFA. Suspended for eight years for what? 
"I'm sorry as president of FIFA I'm this punching ball." 
Blatter and Michel Platini were each banned for eight years by the FIFA ethics committee in a stunning blow for world soccer's most powerful leaders. 
FIFA president Blatter and his one-time protege Platini were kicked out of the sport for conflict of interest and disloyalty to FIFA in a $US2 million ($2.79 million) payment deal that is also the subject of a criminal investigation in Switzerland.
Blatter's FIFA career is ending in disgrace after more than 17 years as president and 40 years in total with the scandal-hit governing body.
Great. He's going to be a rogue President of FIFA. That's like Rob Manfred taking bribes to rig the amateur draft, then getting banned from the sport like Pete Rose but still insisting he's the commissioner. It's that weird. Clearly he didn't resign like he said he would when the FBI started investigating FIFA. Anyway, it's nice to see them get some cold hard justice served up to them.


2015/12/20

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Spoiler Alert

You'll see it. I know.
But If I'm going to write anything more in depth than, yeah it's great ra-ra, then I'm going to have to talk about what happens in it.
So you've been warned. If you're the sort that hates spoilers, come back after you've watched it.
You've been warned, fair and square.

Nostalgia On Steroids

The people streaming into the cinemas were dudes my age and a bit younger (which makes them firmly GenX) with their brood of boys and their teeth-gritted-smiling spouses. Not having kids of my own it struck me that this was one of those generational handover moments that are usually lost on me because I don't have kids. But these dudes were there to share in a moment from their adolescence and childhood with their own kids.

The little kids came dressed as Jedis and Stormtroopers; the crowd had a buzz, but it was a tired kind of buzz. In some ways it is 10 years too late. The prequel Episodes I-III had botched things in such a way as to necessitate a better Star Wars experience, but the crowd felt muted. The anticipation was more like exorcising ghosts. The Gen X dads looked like they'd given up hope on some level.

But they were still there, going through the motions. This, after all, was Star Wars. There's always a new hope in more ways than you can imagine.

What's Good About It

It's a good thing when a product lives up to its billing. I'm not sure I'm about to label it the best Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back - though it just might be - but it did have the kind of pumping frenzied action that some of the prequels managed to have while delivering more of the flavour from the older films.

The new characters are good. They're engaging and interesting in new ways, and that is what you want.  The old characters grace the screen in a way that reminds you of the past, but that past is so distant. It's like a faded memory that underscores the scenes we see. It's a bit like making new friends at an older age. You're unsure of the value of the new friends because your old friends are so precious already; but the thing is that new friends are just as likely to be precious to you, and so you warm to the new characters very quickly.

The directing is very workman like. It's not very interesting in of its own. Compared to the 70s cineaste meandering vision of the original, this film is much more succinct and to the point. Normally I wouldn't say this was a good thing but in this instance it was a god send because there was a lot of story they had to get through. They weren't going to make a visual breakthrough kind of cinema here; JJ Abrams set out to make a Star Wars movie with the mood of the old ones, and that's exactly what he did.

The visual styling was consistent with the earlier productions, and that added great tangibility to the story; that is, tangible in the Star Wars milieu. But then these days the Star Wars milieu is a cultural space we all share. We know what it's supposed to be and this film landed its shot right in the middle of that zone. It gets more than a pass or a credit, it gets a distinction.

What's Bad About It

Maybe the film is too loyal to the original sources. Having gone to great lengths to recreate the feel of the old films, it then goes on to duplicate the emotional beats of the old films. When you consider that Episode I The Phantom Menace already did that, you get the feeling that the Star Wars universe is a lot smaller than originally imagined in 1977. The tropes keep getting repeated and you keep thinking "Oh God, couldn't they think of something new there?"

The film's first act is on a desert planet. Not Tatooine, but for the love of God it was hard to tell one from another. A droid is on a journey across the sands. It meets a young person about to set off on an adventure. The Storm Troopers come looking for the droid... and so it goes. One beat after the other, every one of them can find its equivalent from the original films. The order is shuffled, but it's the same box of chocolates. Not only was JJ Abrams risk averse about finding new emotional cues, he slavishly recreates a pastiche of the old films with a new skin. This might resonate with the new, or stimulate the nostalgia in the older fans but it felt tired. Tired as the Gen-X dads that queued to watch this thing.

But you know what? It's not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. One hopes the next episode does something different. Like, really different. As it stands, this one was 'A New New New Hope'.

What's Interesting About It

I won't go into how Star Wars is such a huge cultural project all of its own. It has become a sort of cultural myth making which is trans-generational. It is like the creative industry is building the equivalent of the Babylonians inscribing 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' in cuneiform on tablets - a cultural monument - as an expression of who we are as a people. If real aliens should ever show up, we might show them Star Wars movies to explain our myths and what motivate us. It's getting to that kind of emotional investment for the audience as well as the film makers.

At the same time, it is as if the adults who made adult films have all vanished. This is what we have - the kids have taken over the toy store. I know I complain about this a lot, but this is the legacy of the first Star Wars. We live in that kind of world now; another Star Wars movie isn't really making things worse by a great deal.

Harrison Ford Is A Bastard

And here we get to the big spoilers. Again, if you hate them, go away! Don't read on!

In the lead up to the film, Harrison Ford has been doing a number of interviews. He's looked strangely chipper and incredibly accommodative in answering the questions about returning to the role of Han Solo which launched his extraordinary career as leading man. For a man who's had great disdain for "Han Yoyo" as he calls his iconic character and loathes being drawn into conversations about Star Wars, he's been congenial. Now we find out why. Han Solo dies in this film, thus releasing him from future obligations to the franchise. No wonder he looked so happy. Worse still, it is so drastic a death, he knows exactly how it would have gone down with the old fans. Like a lightsaber right through the heart. And so we come to understand his jovial mirth in all his interviews. It was a "so long suckers, and take that you nerds and geeks" smile.

He may find that his sense of release is short lived.

The Oedipal Complex Reigns Supreme In The Star Wars Galaxy

Of course, this film being 'A New New New Hope', Solo's death retreads Obi-Wan Kenobi's death/transformation from 'A New Hope', but also the "I am your father" scene from 'Empire Strikes Back'. Solo is killed by his own son-turned-villain. Yes, it's a shock. It's a shock precisely because in the first iteration of this Oedipal struggle, we were unwitting on-lookers with Luke; in the second iteration we were with Luke and unwitting participants; in this iteration we are fathers being slain by our own children. And therein lies the true horror of this death. We grow old, we die, none of this is to our choosing, none of this can be controlled.

The Oedipal complex simply isn't about our desire to have sex with our mothers, it also necessarily includes the homicide of the father. Anakin slays not only Obi-Wan, he also slays the Emperor. Luke confronts Darth Vader/Anakin knowing it is his Oedipal Complex Destiny to face him but gives in and says "I am not like you"; which enables Anakin to say the same thing to the Emperor but in Anakin's case, kill him. And so Kylo Ren - named Ben after Obi-Wan - kills Han Solo.

It is a sobering moment. It would have hit the old Gen X crowd hard. A lot of them looked dazed and confused as they stumbled out of the cinema, unsure of what they had seen with their broods of boys. What they saw was the emotional destiny awaiting them: on some metaphorical level, their sons will come and kill them, so that they may become adults. It's an uncomfortable thought that is going to fester. Maybe for that alone, this film might come to be viewed as important in the future. It is as if the film is telling us that we have to give up something of ourselves if we want something better.

The Petulant Teenager Who Will Come To Kill Us All

The major criticism of the prequels was just how underwhelming the character of Anakin Skywalker was, as it played out across three films before he made his haphazard transition into being Darth Vader. There is a tremendous disconnect between the grandiloquent and stoic Darth Vader we see in episodes IV through VI as voiced by James Earl Jones, and the petulant teenager with low emotional quotient and low self-control. If the turgid romance and the strange emotional torsion we see is enough to turn Anakin into Darth Vader, it seems more trivial than grand. And so rightly or wrongly the prequels get a hiding from the fanbase. With each passing year their esteem grows lower.

Yet, here we are with this film giving us an even more petulant and emotionally immature son who has chosen the Dark Side.The petulance of which is tinged not just with the Anakin Skywalker sullenness but also a wild Han Solo impulsiveness that manifests in thrashed equipment. And by thrashing, we mean with a lightsaber.

So this is the villain we get to replace Darth Vader, and he is more pathetic than Anakin Skywalker. The new bad guy Snoke who sits on the throne like the Emperor of old looks bigger than the Emperor but not necessarily smarter. Even with the dramatic slaying of Han Solo, you wonder if Kylo Ren has enough substance as a character to carry the next two films as the villain. The grandson of Darth Vader is more, Darth Mature.

Oddly Unromantic

In the last year, I sat down and tried to do the Machete order. In case you don't know, the Machete order is 4-5-2-3-6. Drop The Phantom Menace, and spare yourself the Ja-Jar Binks experience as much as possible.

I got through episodes 4 and 5 without a problem, but by the time I got through 2 and 3, I was too fatigued to watch 'Return of the Jedi'. Still, one of the most distinguishing features of the earlier films is the deep romanticism underpinning the action. They're deeply moving films that yearn for the eternal beauty in things, as Andrei Tarkovsky would have it. They're great films as well as being great movies. In turn the great fault of the later films was how unromantic the whole exercise became. Somewhere between the early 1980s and early 2000s, George Lucas had lost any sense of romanticism as a director. Keep in mind this is the same director of 'American Graffiti', which is another film imbued with romanticism. It is pretty hard to figure.

On some level the story of the 6 films in the order of production mirrors how George Lucas lost his romantic streak as a director and essentially became a kind of evil emperor presiding over Lucasfilm.

It is therefore a little sad to see JJ Abrams given the reins of the film, only to deliver a film that is oddly short on the romanticism as well. Maybe it's the distance of time; maybe it's simply the way we are now, but this instalment is decidedly prosaic in the same way that Episodes 1 through 3 are prosaic. It's really not that interested in the eternal yearning and existential wonder.

On the other hand there is a commendable political correctness about the whole enterprise. It is no longer a boy's club going around doing boy's own adventures. The demographics of space is not white people and weird tentacled aliens. There are many ideologically proper things going on with this film, but it never escapes the problem of being unromantic. There is no yearning for the eternal beauty. It doesn't strive for the force, it just sort of picks it up. It doesn't reach out to deeper meaning, it sort of finds it prepackaged and ready to consume. And I know I'm not saying this because I'm now old and bitterly cynical - I'm saying it because the franchise is old and bitterly cynical without the romanticism.

I'm curious to see what else happens now with the franchise, but in some ways I'm going to dial down my expectations. They're going to be fun little yarns, but they're not going to stretch out to the depth of space in search of meaning. It's kind of where we've all come to, so we may as well accept what is being offered for what it is. We grow old, we die, none of this is to our choosing, none of this can be controlled. So let's just say, may the Force be with us all.


2015/12/16

View From The Couch - 16/Dec/2015

ScoMo Is A Different Kind Of Economic Animal

The MYEFO has come out and well, Scott Morrison isn't exactly cutting everything in sight. Yes, he's cutting some things, but he's vowing not to chase the fall in revenue down
Scott Morrison has learnt well from Joe Hockey, Chris Bowen and Wayne Swan.
The best thing to do when revenue is collapsing is to let it, lest it bring the economy down with it. 
As he put it: extreme measures would have placed "a hand brake on household consumption and business investment growth" and unnecessarily threatened emerging signs of economic momentum.
That's pretty contrary to the Coalition diatribe about debt only months ago, and as enacted in two disastrous budgets under WTE Joe Hockey. It must be that at heart, we're all Keynesians now, as the saying goes. 

It also shows that the Turnbull Government really is a different beast to the Abbott Government, at least on an operational level. A simple question of "what would Tony have done?" yields images of a cigar-chomping, axe-wielding WTE Joe. Instead, he's telling us it's not going to be austerity all the way down. I don't want to praise Scott Morrison in the least freaking bit but you have to hand it to him, he's not reacting as one would have imagined from his turn as minister for turning back boats. 

I have to admit, I'm a little surprised. On another level, I think I can see we're heading towards ZIRP a lot more than raising interest rates. As it turns out, it's really hard to get the market off the easing bias. Who'd a thunk it? 
Which leads me to the next thing... 

When The US Fed Dons Wolf's Clothing

This is weird when you reflect back to the utter chaos of the GFC at its height in August 2008. The US Fed is about to raise interest rates by 25bps sometime this week or early next year. Indeed, the speculation is that they have to do it this month because there are no more months beyond December and they committed to doing it before the year was out. So, logically, it's this month. The countervailing view is that the situation is so dire and the High Yield bond market is collapsing so fast, the Federal Reserve Bank would have to be crazy to pull the trigger. 

The fact of the matter is, they didn't pull the trigger when it was benign back in October, so we were left asking the question, if not then, when? If things get precarious enough, the FRB is going to have to think about easing again in no time, which means they'll back at ZIRP in a matter months. It is as if Wall Street is permanently addicted to having cheap indefinite credit and anything else makes it fatal to the whole financial system of the planet. In other words, nothing structural has been fixed since the GFC, that caused the GFC. The risk factors are right back up to where they were on the eve of the meltdown. 

And still, the language from Janet Yellen has been that they're going to raise rates because things are going so much better now. Goodness, it's hard to think all the way back to Paul Volcker in the 1980s. Would he have hesitated? No not a chance. 

On a more local note, the anticipation of the move has created ructions in our own equity market in Australia. It's very strange:
"Amazingly enough it hasn't been priced in. It really is quite extraordinary," he said. "Perversely we may see markets rallying on the back of it once we have some certainty about what the central bank is doing in the US." 
"It's all around these issues regarding sustainable, stable commodity prices and whether we get a decision out of the US Federal Reserve," said Mr Lakos.
Chris Conway, head of research at the Australian Stock Report said while some traders were dipping back into beaten down stocks, the overarching vibe was one of caution. 
"We don't expect any large moves ahead of the US Fed decision on Thursday morning (Australian time), with no-one ... willing to take on too much risk or place any big bets despite the outcome being largely expected," he said. 
"We also expect some volatility immediately after the decision but hopefully, once everyone has processed the result, markets calm and we rally into the end of the year."
So shares got oversold in the last 48hours because everybody suddenly remembered that Janet Yellen was possibly/probably going to go for it with the interest rate hike. Which means that if and when it gets announced, shares are likely to bounce back from 2.5year lows. Like I said, this is really weird. 

China Crisis On The Brew

Nobody's really talking about it in the mainstream news but, China's economy's actually on the ropes. How do we know this? Pretty simple. When China was going great guns, commodity prices were up. For commodity prices to hit the skids this low, this hard and for this long, means China's really run out of puff and can't turn the commodities into economic growth. The collapse in demand for iron ore and coking coal is more than telling, it's both a white flag from China and a red flag for the Australian economy.

In that spirit, here's a story that you might find explains a lot of things.
Several local officials in China's Northeast region sought to explain dramatic economic drops in their areas by admitting they had faked economic data in the past few years to show highgrowth when the real numbers were much lower, Xinhua News Agency reported on Friday. 
"If the past data had not been inflated, the current growth figures would not show such a precipitous fall," one official was quoted as saying. 
The report cited several officials in the region who acknowledged they had significantly overstated data ranging from fiscal revenue and household income to GDP. 
Three years ago Liaoning province's GDP growth was reported at 9.5 percent, but its current figure-over the first three quarters of this year-is just 2.7 percent. Jilin's growth was reported at 12 percent three years ago, but its current rate is 6.3 percent in the same period.
That right there is your confirmation. The Chinese figures have been worse than rubbery, they've been fraudulent. Not only is the commodity boom over, we're in uncharted waters as to exactly what the hell is going to happen next in China when all the debt racked up to fake the demand to fake the growth comes home to roost. So if you're inclined to believe this week's offical statement about strong industrial production and retail sales in China... sure why not? Let's all take that blue pill from Morpheus' hand. 

2015/12/13

View From The Couch - 13/Dec/2015

Deporting Permanent Residents Has Got To Stop

This is a new kind of human rights abuse - except they tried this shit ten years ago and it backfired.
Mr Bolvaran, who turned 42 on Thursday, came to Australia as a one-year-old when his family fled the Pinochet regime in 1974 and lived in the country since.

During his time in Australia he met and fell in love with Rachel Delucia, with whom he has three sons, two of them under the age of 10.

But his life in Australia was not always so idyllic, as Mr Bolvaran freely admitted.
He fell into the wrong crowd, racking up a petty criminal rap sheet that included drug possession and stealing.

Unfortunately for Mr Bolvaran, who lived in Brisbane on a permanent resident visa, he got caught up in changes to the Migration Act that saw visas cancelled if the holders were sentenced to 12 months or more in prison. 
Those legislative changes have proven to be a sore point between New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, given the number of Kiwis affected. 
Mr Bolvaran, who could only speak limited Spanish and had no family support network in Chile, was deported last month
"I miss my kids … It's my birthday and I miss the hell out of my boys and my partner," he said.
"I'm so far away from her and everyone. This is where I was born, but I'm lost here. I don't know what to do with myself." 
Mr Bolvaran was jailed in July after he pleaded guilty to a string of offences, including drug possession, possession of a knife in public and receiving tainted property.
After serving time in the Brisbane Correctional Centre at Wacol, Mr Bolvaran was transferred to Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney to await deportation.
It's terrible policy. First of all, it metes out a second punishment to the time served. Obviously the punishment doesn't apply to a citizen, so it means there are de facto two sets of laws for the people of Australia: one for the citizen and another that is far more destructive and punitive for permanent residents.

It also makes the Criminal Justice system merely a partial criminal justice system and the Department of Immigration gets to punish somebody for the same crime, a second time (i.e. forget "double jeopardy") just based on their visa status.  You wonder how the esteemed judges feel about that, should it ever be brought in front of them. If a government body that wasn't the judges handing out legal punishments, you'd think judges might "take a very dim view of that sort of thing". I'm sure it violates something called "the Separation of Powers". Hmm... let me think now.., yes, yes it would.

If the punishment is meant to be a deterrent for crime, it's not going to work because it targets a socio-economic group that is likely not to come in contact with the information. None of the cases that have been reported on the issue show that such legislation has any deterrent for criminality. It's imaginary, and prejudicial.

What's worrying is that the ALP are saying they're in lockstep with the government when it comes to this astoundingly stupid legislation. This make you wonder just how good a mind these idiot politicians have, when even a legal novice like this blogger can spot the obvious legal problem with enforcing such bad laws. So much for Shadow AG Dreyfus being such a legal eagle. The thing that make your citizens and permanent residents really lose faith in government as an institution, is when it gives bipartisan support for bad laws.

This is a bad law. Somebody needs to challenge it.

Wrapping It Up In Paris

It would appear that Paris meetings to deal with climate change ended successfully. Maybe 6 years of even more extreme weather events persuaded more governments. In some subtle way, this is what has happened in Australia over the last decade. There are holdouts who still believe that climate change is not real or a UN conspiracy, or has stopped, but in most part the middle of the electorate thinks it is real enough and needs to be dealt with.

Of course, the Paris Summit and its global climate agreement has nothing in it that is binding or demands accountability, so it is a little bit like everybody agreeing to a wishlist for Santa, and if everybody's good, we'll get global warming under control.

When you think about what happened at Copenhagen in 2009, and how it led to the demise of Kevin Rudd, followed by massive infighting in the ALP government, and the subsequent denialist stupidocracy of the Abbott Government, only to see the return of Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party mere 3 months ago - and therefore offering some hope of serious climate policy - it's been a terrible, terrifying, 6 years.

It's 6 years of missed opportunities; it's 6 years of stalled investments; it's 6 years of more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere that could have been restrained; and 6 years of having to live with people who have utterly unscientific views about climate science and having to argue with them as if they had a leg to stand on or had any intellectual merit. The 6 years of extra arguments, extra discussions, extra politicking, extra effort, all makes me feel faint when I reflection it. And this agreement merely gets us to a starting line that might help us get on top of the challenge.

And with Greg Hunt as the minister for the environment still, I have to say I have absolutely no faith that we'll get anything done.

More Budget Cuts To Come

We are - on the whole - way too complacent about the Australian economy. Especially with the collapse in commodity prices for iron ore, nickel, and oil, a lot of our major export earners are suddenly hitting the wall where they can't be profitable digging stuff up form the ground. If you wanted proof the mining boom was well and truly over, then look no further. BHP of course is taking a double punch because of the dam bursting in Brazil, so its shares have slid down from $25 to $17. The resources sector has been in a two year retreat, but lately it's becoming a nosedive.

Clive Palmer is suddenly running around looking for line of credit to keep his nickel refinery going, and that's obviously because of the collapse in nickel prices. All of this decline in income has now shown up with diminishing revenue for the government. This in turn is going to mean the Coalition Government's favourite thing, more budget cuts.
The Treasurer's task of finding spending offsets will be made more difficult by a sharply worse picture on the revenue side of the budget, which has been hammered by plunging commodity prices and stagnant wage growth. 
Leading economists believe the government will be forced to reveal a worsening of the budget deficit of between $33 billion and $39 billion over the next four years. 
The grim picture was a focus of Mr Turnbull's talks with state and territory leaders on Friday. The Council of Australian Governments' joint communique warned of "emerging budgetary pressures across all levels of government, particularly in the health sector".
On Sunday, Mr Morrison said MYEFO update key forecasts to present a "realistic outlook for economic conditions moving forward". 
"As was demonstrated by the recent National Accounts data, our economy is transitioning from resource investment led growth towards broader based growth," he said. 
"Part of this transition involves dealing with the challenges of lower commodity prices and a declining terms of trade from their historic peaks in the wake of the mining investment boom. 
"The government will continue to restore the budget by controlling expenditure and supporting policies that grow the economy. The budget will not be restored by increasing the overall tax burden on Australians."
So says ScoMo. A lot of this stuff killing revenue is outside of the government's control. Yet the fixation with budget deficits will mean there will be a fresh round of razor gang activity but really, they'll probably find they have to spend the money anyway. It's like the domestic violence thing. The Abbott Government cut $300m out of domestic violence related expenditures. Turnbull has had to go back out and spend $100m. When it's all said and done, he'll probably have to spend the other $200m anyway, because there were probably very good reasons that $300m was earmarked for the program.

If you think it through from a historic perspective, at this point in time these razor gang exercises in austerity are redundant, if not futile. Certainly since the second budget of the Gillard government, there's been significant cuts to government programs. Add 2 of the Coalition's own efforts and you'd have to say 4 years of cuts would have been pretty deep. It's very visible that the Federal Government is running pretty lean these days. What the government has to do is get more serious about tax reform

The problem is, it's not a government that likes wage rises, seeing that they represent the employers' lobby. All the talk of raising revenue has been around raising the GST, another regressive bit of policy-talk. In that sense it's a government of vested interests that won't talk its own constituents down from their fighting-a-class-war posture. It would rather just hand over the bill to the wider community and be proud they're trying to balance the books. It's only 3 months or so of Malcolm-In-The-Hot-Seat but this government is looking sclerotic already. When the slowdown hits the wider electorate, and it will, I doubt Malcolm Turnbull is going to stay so popular.  




2015/12/08

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/Dec/2015

The Nile Runs Deep Here

That's the thing about Tony Abbott - reality has no bearing on his thinking. This led to many a comedic moment. One certainly does not wish him back as Prime Minister, but he was always good for a gag. And so today we learn that he thinks that he would've beaten Bill Shorten's ALP at the next election.
Tony Abbott has fired a broadside at the plotters who brought him down, defiantly declaring he would have led the Coalition to a victory at the next election. 
The comments came in an interview in which he flagged an intention to stay around in Parliament; called on Malcolm Turnbull to spend a week in an Indigenous community each year; advocated a more robust defence of "superior" Western values in the struggle with Islamic extremism; and said his first budget was fine.
As they say, pigs may pilot A-380s into Heathrow high on acid.
Uh... no.

Yet, that's not the most crazy thing in the SMH today. It's Lord Monckton, king of the climate change denialists who thinks Abbott's Prime Ministership was cut short thanks to the UN.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott was brought down because of his anti-global-warming views and would have pushed back against plans to form a world government at the Paris climate summit if still in the job. 
These are the views of leading sceptic Christopher Monckton who, in an interview with Fairfax Media, also said Australian institutions such as the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO were being examined by "a formidable team of scientists and lawyers" for possible fraud over manipulating their climate data.
There's stupid, and then there's utterly retarded, and then you have Lord Monckton who thinks there is a global conspiracy surrounding climate science. And of course, he likes Tony Abbott, anode course he thinks it's a big plot with Malcolm Turnbull colluding with the UN - led by Ban-Ki Moon - who rolled Abbott to bring in a world Government when the easier explanation is that the UN had absolutely nothing to do with it. Malcolm didn't need Ban-Ki Moon's bidding to roll Tony Abbott, he just needed Tony Abbott's outlandish incompetence to open the door. 

Seriously, this wasn't the Dismissal. It was a routine party room coup. Abbott & Credlin were nutty-stupid. They had to go. Any suggestion that it went deeper than the 30 losing polls in a row needs to come forward with documented evidence. 

The Point Is To Fuck Upwards

An old bit of advice I heard in LA had it that the point of working your way up in life is to fuck upwards. If you can do that, you'll find your career on the rise. 

I don't know, it's harder to do than it sounds. But then there's Joe Hockey who clearly fucked up, and for his troubles is going to America as Australia's Ambassador. Hockey says had he stuck around in politics, he would have been consumed with thoughts of vengeance. 

If he's saying politics beat him, then he's saying he fucked up; and now he's getting a golden handshake. That sure sounds like a form of fucking upwards to me. 

This Is Not My Beautiful House

Ah, tax reform. Music to the ears if you're a certain kind of bureaucrat. Martin Parkinson, our top mandarin thinks this is a 'Once In A Lifetime' opportunity to enact tax reform.
Former treasury secretary Martin Parkinson has warned that Australia's living standards have started to fall and the country has a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity to pursue serious tax reform, which must touch all levels of government. 
Dr Parkinson, who was recently hired as the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, says he likes the leadership styles of British Prime Minister David Cameron, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and NSW Premier Mike Baird because they treat the public like "adults" when explaining the need for tax reform. 
He says Malcolm Turnbull has a similar style to those leaders, and we have a good chance of getting serious tax reform in Australia with him as leader.
At a certain level you'd think that Malcolm Turnbull has a cult of personality going. 
Of course, what he's proposing to do is to raise the GST

At least they are considering widening the GST base, which would actually be preferable to raising what's in place. People get snarky about education being included in such a package but really, if people are willing to pay $28,000 p.a. for a private school education for their kid, that looks like something that should be hit with a GST to make things fairer. Especially in the context where the Federal Government does dole out money to private educational institutions, and won't stop this inequality-increasing policy. I'm sure all the politicians who send their kids to private schools would put the kibosh on such a move, so it's not likely, but yes, tax those private schools properly.
And tax the churches. And the businesses owned by the churches... 

2015/12/07

It's A New World Of Cinema

Australian Film On The Comeback Trail

It's taken 10years since the pit of despair leading up to the GFC, but the Australian Film industry seems to have turned around this year. I remember that pit, and long time readers would remember just how bad things got. Since then, the direct investment into film by the government has been rolled back substantially, while the high dollar knocked out the service industry side of the Australian Film Industry, but just as some flowers bloom in the desert at some point, Australian films had a bumper crop this year.
This has been a record year for Australian movies, which have collectively taken $84 million at the local box office, or 7.7 per cent of the total. That's the biggest result ever in raw dollar terms, and the best share since 2001.

What makes it truly remarkable is that just a year ago the local industry looked to be in terminal decline. 
In 2014, Australian movies accounted for just 2.4 per cent of the total Australian box office. Only once since 1977, which is as far back as the Screen Australia database goes, has it been lower; the 1.3 per cent share in 2004 makes that Australian cinema's annus horribilis. 
What's more, last year's result ($26.2 million) came on the back of a poor 2013 as well ($38.5 million, 3.5 per cent share). Had it not been for The Great Gatsby ($27.4 million), 2013 would have been a complete disaster.
You have to give credit where it's due, though it's hard to say just where it goes exactly
One of the reasons some of last year's Australian movies failed at the cinema was that people were given scant opportunity to see them. A week or two on a dozen or so screens with scant marketing barely counts as a release strategy when you're up against Hollywood movies on 500 screens with saturation advertising. But that's the fate of many an Australian movie. 
Those that cut through this year, though, tended to benefit from a wide release and hefty promotional spend. The Water Diviner went out on 299 screens, Oddball 289, The Dressmaker 384 and Mad Max: Fury Road a Hollywood-sized 542 screens. 
A wide release means a distributor can target their campaign around a narrow window of time, maximising bang for buck. Shane Jacobson did such a sterling job talking up Oddball it's doubtful anyone in Australia didn't know at least a little about the film by the time it hit cinemas.

But it takes a certain kind of product for distributors to have the confidence to go wide: an appealing story, star talent, good production values. This year's batch ticked those boxes, "but you can't reverse engineer it", says Screen Australia chief Graeme Mason. "If the distributors are spending millions of dollars – literally – putting it out there, they're not going to do that unless they see something commercially appealing in it."
So maybe it wasn't necessarily the quality, it was the marketing spend that backed a more palatable crop of films. In any case, you take any sign you can grab. Maybe there is a case to be made that Australian Cinema is at long last on the comeback trail. 

Paul Byrnes Still Sucks (Sun Still Rises In The East)

I find Paul Byrnes a terribly condescending moralist, mostly because his film cries in the SMH are more moral analyses than actual film crits. And so, he made a moral judgment about Sylvester Stallone and his films years ago, but for some reason he was moved to admit he was wrong about Stallone.
Stallone turns 70 next year and maybe this is a good time for me to apologise to him. For a long time, I thought he was just a meathead, like some of the characters he invented.
When I started writing about movies in 1984, he had become a poster boy for the American right. Ronald Reagan himself declared that Rocky was a Republican. Stallone had already made Rockys II and III, and he had done the first Rambo film, First Blood – which was actually pretty good. In 1984 he was paired with Dolly Parton in a country musical, Rhinestone Cowboy. Some wit declared it the meeting of the two greatest racks in show business. He was becoming a joke, but a very successful one. 
I think now that I was wrong. It's not just the phenomenal box office of his combined films, although that is a lump (more than $4 billion in grosses, adjusted for inflation). Stallone has had a major impact on the way movies are made now – in the way action montages are put together, the speed of the editing, the use of music. He has had an impact on how Americans see themselves, reaffirming their sense of right and might; he has redrawn the Hollywood map in terms of longevity, although he has had plenty of helpers there – from Eastwood and Schwarzenegger and all the other action has-beens who won't die, most of whom turn up in Stallone's Expendables franchise, another phenomenally successful Stallone idea that defies all notions of good filmmaking.
Ugh. Did you see what he did there? He's apologising for being wrong but still puts the boot in. You sort of wonder on what grounds the film critic has been endowed or earned such moral disdain for the practitioner - any practitioner - let alone Sylvester Stallone. I'm not a big fan of Stallone, but I've never held him in contempt or this low in a moral judgment sense. More so, I just don't get the impetus to give this mea culpa just because 'Creed' shows Stallone is still a decent actor given the chance. We knew that long ago, all the way back when the the original 'Rocky' came out. It's not some new discovery or revelation. 

If he's been dissing Stallone all these years even though he knew Stallone was a perfectly fine leading actor all this time, it strikes me as the height of intellectual dishonesty to mount such an apology. Paul Byrnes finally saw a movie with Stallone in it that he actually liked - and felt embarrassed enough to write an apology. It's truly pathetic. 

2015/12/04

Shirtfront And Strange

The Prevalence Of Psychopathy In Politics?

Peter Hartcher concluded his 5 parts series on the Abbot Government today. Just as Sarah Ferguson's documentary about the Rudd-Gillard ALP government was painful in retelling every turn of that story, the narrative never giving us respite from the misery, Hartcher's account sinks us into pondering some fairly basic human problems. Namely, just what kind of people are we sending to Canberra to represent us? Try this section for size:
Turnbull commonly told colleagues that Abbott's capacity for self-delusion, his lack of comprehension for the feelings of those around him, showed that he was "basically a psychopath". 
Turnbull had been described by an earlier Liberal leader, Brendan Nelson, as suffering "narcissistic personality disorder". Now it seemed the narcissist was calling the psychopath crazy
It makes you wonder just what kind of people our democracy selects to rule us. Accepting Brendan Nelson's diagnosis of NPD for Malcolm Turnbull requires a grain of salt. It's the kind of diagnosis he might have read about, but it's hard to imagine his clinical experience dealing with and diagnosing people with this condition. Similarly, Malcolm Turnbull's diagnosis of Tony Abbott as a psychopath is equally - if not even more so - suspect. If we are to believe such diagnoses, then combined with the account at one point that had Kevin Rudd was a psychopath as well, 4 out of the last 5 Prime Minsters would have to have been pathological.

Again, if we are to believe such armchair diagnoses, that is.

Still, one does wonder about the mental health of some of these people. The hardened heads and hearts of the likes of Bronwyn Bishop, Eric Abetz, and Kevin Andrews ; the utterly outlandish Cory Bernardi; the moral permeability of Philip Ruddock; and the cloud-cuckoo climate change denialism of Barnaby Joyce; all of these people make you wonder about their mental health. They look clinical. Yet there they are, sitting in government. None of it looks too far from the British version of the 'House of Cards' on the crazy stakes. It's understandable then that even though Julia Gillard cut a whole bunch of areas, she boosted mental health expenditure. She probably had a look around her and thought it best.

As you can see, it's easy to bandy about easy labels and pretend the other person is wilfully wrong-headed because they're somehow clinically crazy. The truth is, it's a lot more complicated than that, and you can have seamless high-functioning psychopaths and socially inept non-psychopaths alike, though it has to be said the political options for the latter are severely limited. If Tony Abbott was indeed a high-functioning psychopath - like a Gordon Gecko type, - it appears that we're not talking about a terribly high ceiling for the "high"part of high-functioning. After all his tack record is what it is: not very good with a side order of shit. If indeed Malcolm Turnbull is NPD, it appears his government is starkly lacking in the kind of drama queen moments that usually surround NPD people. As tempting as it is, it would be quite the overreach to be branding these people with these diagnoses.

Still, Occam's Razor says the easier explanation for these people and their behaviour would be that they're completely bonkers.

Looking For A Comeback? That's Insanity

Tones is still in parliament. Which in some minds means he's still around if anybody needs him to have another shot.
Abbott's now celebrated attendance at one of Peter Dutton's "Monkey Pod" lunches, replete with a cake baked by "Peta", suddenly makes sense in this light. It suggests the ex-PM's confidant remains utterly pivotal to his future in politics. 
It's Peta who is "keeping Tony in the game", says a sympathetic MP. "She believes he can make a come-back probably more than him and is pushing him to it."
How crazy is that? How insane would that be? Consider this for a moment: Kevin Rudd was able to contemplate a comeback exactly because he was one of the most popular Prime Ministers of all time. He could appeal to the electorate. Malcolm Turnbull was able to consider staying on and eventually coming back against Tony Abbott because he was enormously popular - exactly in the way Tony Abbott was not. Tony Abbott's unpopularity was of such historic magnitude, the nation was quite glad to be rid of him. The nation is still asking itself how it got itself into such a compromising situation the way married men who attend bucks nights ask themselves afterwards. It was equal parts tawdry, seedy and sad.

You could argue that after their demises, the nation and its electorate missed both Rudd AND Turnbull, so much so it fuelled their comebacks. The only people to miss Gillard are a certain brand of Leftists that need lots of badges to describe: unionist, Catholic, female. The people who saw industrial laws as more important than the ETS, the people who while voting for the ALP didn't want marriage equality and professional academic feminists. Similarly, the only people who miss Tony Abbott are a certain brand of the right that also need lots of badges to describe: anti-unionist, Protestant, white-male-entitled. The people who see the destruction of the working class bargaining power as being more important than actual economic policy, the people who hate gays and don't want them to be normalised into mainstream society, and a certain kind of entitled white male reactionary that thinks they're a persecuted minority.

The roughly two years of Tony Abbott's time as Prime Minister was an anomaly where a candidate for the hard right was able to wrest control of enough points of leverage to thrust himself into the middle of politics. He was nobody's idea of an ideal candidate except for the small minority on the hard right that wants to live in a world of Victorian era prejudices. There were simply too many compromises to put him in the middle in the first place, and so it unravelled with each and every stupid decision, each and every stupid gesture, each and every stupid move.

If Peta Credlin thinks the Abbott souffle is going to rise once more, she's got rocks in her head. Then again, she sounds like a mental health case too.

My Pet Theory About Tony Abbot's Mental Health

I know I've said this before but it's brain damage from his Oxford Blue boxing days.


He didn't guard, he flailed. And got hit a lot. He looks pretty concussed to me, as in he looks like somebody who took a lot of punches to the head.

2015/12/02

View From The Couch - 03/Dec/2015

The Shambolic 729 Days Of Abbott

Some time earlier this year, I simply gave up with Tony Abbott. He was doing and saying crazy stuff, and you could only really chalk it up to stupidity day after day. If you search this blog for 'stupidity' you will find it coupled with Tony Abbott at an ever increasing rate during his tenure as Prime Minister. You were left shaking your head most days and then you noticed your neck muscles were getting well toned because thanks to the Prime Minister, you were shaking your head so much. Now that he's gone, it seems redundant to be jumping all over his tawdry miserable execrable record, but Peter Hartcher is doing a five part series over at the SMH.

I was going to leave it until he was done before I wrote anything about it, but each day has brought fresh misery with its revelations. Here is today's revelation:
Malcolm Turnbull was nothing if not forthright in telling Tony Abbott his shortcomings. On one occasion, Turnbull found himself in an Adelaide pub drinking beer with a group of workers from the Australian Submarine Corporation.
Abbott, the workers told him, was an idiot. 
Of course he isn't, Turnbull replied. The man is a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics from Oxford University. He's actually very bright. 
The argument went back and forth for a bit till one of the ASC crew delivered the line that ended the argument: "If he's not stupid, why does he keep doing stupid things?"
Other ministers might have kept such an exchange discreetly to themselves. But Turnbull took it straight to the prime minister. 
The communications minister related the anecdote. He told his leader that it was important to explain things to the people, not be limited to slogans.
Yeah, yeah mate, was Abbott's response. If he was annoyed, he didn't show it. He certainly didn't heed the advice.
There are some disturbing points in that exchange that do need remarking. It is of course a universally accepted point that Tony Abbott did stupid things. The onus was on Malcolm Turnbull to explain how such stupid things weren't actually stupid - a feat he would not attempt - or the appearance of stupid things in fact obscured deep thought. He clearly could do neither because on some level, stupid is as stupid does, and just as a rose is a rose is a rose, stupid is stupid is stupid.

So Turnbull had to go back and tell Tony Abbott that anecdote; which is striking in its boldness, but also tinged with a surprise, a Eureka moment. Amazingly, we're told Abbott for his part was dismissive - "yeah yeah mate" - but also incapable of seeing how he looked to the world. Either he was dismissive because it came from a political rival and therefore he waived the message, or his narcissism was so strong that the anecdote simply did not register as a problem.

The other disturbing thing is Turnbull's defence of Abbott's intelligence rests upon his credentials. That surely a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics could not be stupid. Surely somebody with such credentials was actually very bright. We understand that Turnbull is very bright, and has been known to the world as being bright for a very long time, and he too is a Rhodes Scholar so he probably drew some kind of equivalence and assumed Abbott had to be bright. Maybe not as bright as the great Malcolm Turnbull, but certainly bright enough to be at the same table talking politics.

Today, we know that Abbott's Rhodes Scholarship had much more to do with political and ideological inclination than actual academic merit, so it would actually destroy the argument mounted by Turnbull that somehow the credential of having been a Rhodes Scholar was proof positive that Abbott was "very bright".

It doesn't exactly reflect all that well on the bright Malcolm Turnbull, that he even mounted the argument because what this tells us is that Malcolm Turnbull sees things in very categorical, broad terms. This is a man for whom the Ruddean 'programmatic specificity' would be an anathema. It also shows Malcolm Turnbull has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance. That is to say, he can see Tony Abbott doing stupid things, but because he is aware of Tony Abbott's academic credentials, he is willing to pretend the stupid things are not stupid, and somehow there is a political program worth defending. But it takes an ASC worker to point out that stupid is in fact is as stupid does; and when this short-circuits his cognitive dissonance, he can't help but try to place the cognitive dissonance back onto Tony Abbott who is incapable of feeling the very same cognitive dissonance because he's actually politically stupid.

I point this out, not to further dump on Tony Abbott, but to point out the degree to which politicians operate under such cognitive dissonance, and what that might mean for policy. George Orwell's explanation was that through propaganda, politicians can argue white is black, truth is dead, ignorance is strength and so on. Reading the excerpt above, it seems far more likely that politicians argue white is black, truth is dead, and ignorance is strength simply because they are unaware of their own cognitive dissonance. The propaganda is merely a subsequent phenomenon.






The Mythic Catastrophe Of Government Debt

Taro Aso's Version

Japan's government is deep in debt. Some are claiming this is catastrophic, if not today, some time soon. Taro Aso, the Finance Minister for Japan - former Prime Minster and manga aficionado - begs to differ. In fact there's a video of him explaining why, that dates back to 2010. It's interesting so I'll try and pick the eyeballs out of the little lecture.

Basically, everybody's jumping up and down about government debt. What nobody stops to consider is just to whom the government of Japan owes this money. The answer is simple, it's the people of Japan. If you have any loan book, you'll have a column for debts and column for credits. So on one side of the ledger the Japanese government is borrowing, say 100yen, and then on the other side there must be somebody correspondingly lending that 100yen.

Now, people might disagree and say they don't hold any national bonds for Japan, but actually, they do. They put their money in the bank, and the bank then has to either invest or park that money somewhere, and it turns out, they buy national bonds of the government Japan. And it all happens in Yen.

As for the Banks, they are in their essence simply money-lenders, so if they don't lend out the money deposited to them, they're not going to make money. Unfortunately nobody's borrowing in Japan. There's roughly 30Trillion Yen = AUD$300billion each year of the money, looking to be invested with nowhere to go. And if it doesn't get invested, you get deflationary pressures from the money not getting invested - so the government borrows it to stave off asset deflation.

So yes, the government has borrowed a lot, but the lenders by and large are the people of Japan. Something like 94% of bonds are held by Japanese people, and the rest by foreigners. And even those people are buying those bonds with Yen, so 100% of government debt in Japan is in Yen and no other currency. This is in stark contras to Greece, where only 30% of Greek government debt is held domestically, and it's all denominated in the Euro and not a domestic currency. Greece thus puts out 70% of its government debt to be financed by international markets, who in turn don't trust the Greek government so the going interest rate for their bonds sits at (in 2010 figures) 13%. By contrast, Japanese bonds are going for a return of 0.9% or so, which means Greek debt is going around with 13times more risk.

Even if the debt comes due, the Japanese government can simply print the Yen and pay it. If the money was owed overseas in foreign denominations, the story would be different. It's a totally different kettle of fish to Greece, according to Taro Aso.

How Much Of This Applies Here?

This is the interesting bit. How much of Australia's Government debt is issued in foreign currency? One imagines the international market version is denominated in the US Dollar, so if the AUD goes down, it gets harder to pay back the government debt. Even so, in a pinch, the Government of Australia could just print what's necessary to pay it back. If the debt is enormous, then presumably this would lead to a currency collapse, but in most part nobody's going to be calling all the debts at once, and the RBA knows exactly how much money there ought to be in the market place to the extent as to know what the currency price should be, or whether printing that money is going to usher in massive inflation or not, as the case may be.

So even if government debt in Australia were to reach, say, 100% of GDP, it's probably not going to be the same as the Greek government's debt situation. And because it is more like 20-odd% and not 100%, there probably isn't a case for making the kind of fuss the Coalition made in opposition and then during 2014 with their fateful budget. Which is all an elaborate way of saying, all this fixation about government debt that the Coalition keeps using to bludgeon the ALP is a load of bullshit.

Not only is Australia not in any kind of debt crisis as the Coalition alleged at the top of their lungs this decade, even the debt we have is not going to have the kind of dire consequences for us as private sector debt is going to have. If the Coalition government under Tony Abbott had had a shred of decency and intellectual honesty, they would have formulated policy to tackle the ballooning private sector debt instead of banging on about the government sector debt. After all, if there are savings there looking to be invested and the government doesn't utilise that money, it contributes to a deflationary pressure on assets, as per Taro Aso 's lecture.

As things stand, the Australian Dollar is stubbornly high by the RBA's estimation; money is flooding in to Australia, buying up property and commercial assets. It's hardly the picture of currency collapse. People want 'in' on the Australian economy as it is. The constant banging on about the government debt essentially exposes the Coalition as inferior economic managers, who will necessarily hurt the Australian economy through their policies that always centre around cuts. You'd certainly wonder if this government actually understood what it was dealing with when it talks about government debt. One wouldn't advocate endless stimulus packages, going deep into the red like the Japanese government has done in the last 25years (it isn't necessary), but one probably shouldn't be fretting about the debt level when there are other things to worry about like a looming economic slowdown.

Twenty-Five Years, No Recession

This leads me into this weird anomalous state of affairs, of what's been happening for twenty-five years. There is a whole generation of people walking around Australia who have never experienced a recession. Back in the 1980s, Australia spent half its time in a recession of one kind or another. There are many explanations for how this came about, one of which is the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy and our role in supplying that demand; but also the cumulative effects of the macro-economic reforms and deregulation that unleashed the massive growth in the domestic economy as well as the enormous impact of IT on productivity.

If you look at any one of these elements, we're not likely to get them again. So, if you think about the slow down and change in China's economy, the limits of deregulation, and the limits of IT-induced productivity growth, we're not likely to see the same sort of stretch going forwards. That would indicate that at some point we'll be back to the 1980s scenario of a recession every few years, and by then we'll well be wondering just how lucky we got when we had 25years of uninterrupted growth.

It really is hard to see where the next big growth engine is going to be. Some have suggested India, but India is wilfully avoiding the kind of manufacturing-&-export led growth that east Asian nations have undertaken. They've gone straight into developing a high tech sector based on computers, IT and services. This means it is unlikely to duplicate the Chinese scenario for Australian commodities exports. Both the Gillard and Abbott governments banked on housing and construction as growth engines to take over after the mining boom but it ignores that constructing buildings or infrastructure isn't a growth engine for an economy in of itself. If anything, it's a recipe for sending us back to boom and bust cycles of the 1980s.

Of course we could get lucky again and have another mining boom. It's hard to see who would fuel it, but we tend to get lucky that way - hence our self-inflicted moniker, the lucky country - but the problem remains that we don't really have a good plan for when the luck is not there. When the luck is not there, the Federal government is going to have do a lot more than run around talking about government debt; we've seen how austerity in down times simply does not work. If anything is likely to lead us to being like Greece, the obsession with cutting government debt at all costs just might be the path that leads us there.

Blog Archive