Quick Shots 28/Mar/2022

When One Out of Three is Bad

We're into well over a month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A lot of it hasn't gone the way some people expected - namely that it has gone on this long. The fact that it has gone this long seems to indicate it has not gone as Putin and company had hoped, so in one sense it means Russia has already lost. At any point in time you can analyse that Russia strategically could be winning, be in a stalemate or losing. Of the three, only winning can lead to a political win. Losing is bad, obviously but it is this condition whereby they are in a stalemate which gives the most political view that Russia is losing. So out of the three, 2 out of 3 give rise to bad political outcomes for Russia. Only winning can lead to a better political outcome for the Kremlin. Because we are not there, or there yet, depending on who you ask, we have conclude that Russia is losing the politics as the war is beginning to harden into a stalemate. 

The hurdle for winning for Russia is as high as it is for Ukraine. Ukraine has to remove all the invaders to have resounding win - this is a flat out mathematical problem. Russia has to remove the current Ukrainian government, and then install another, and hope like hell the international community accepted the new government in Kyiv. This, looks unlikelier by the day. So a protracted stalemate is in essence the expression of the limits of Russia' power and ability to impose its will on Ukraine and the world. 

The question then is just how long is this reality going to take to sink into Vladimir Putin's thick skull? 

The problem for the West is that Putin is so set in his views that reality checks are just going to bounce off his pre-formed prejudices and preconceived notions (and I didn't mean that sentence to be so alliterative). The sanctions, as severe as they are alleged to be, may take weeks and months to make an impact on Russian political thought. The war grinds on every day, costing USD 20 billion a day for the Russians. We think something has got to break,  but so far Putin has resisted common sense reappraisals of just what his war has wrought, and how badly it is going. For the record, if it were me playing a strategy game on a computer and it was going this badly, I would quit the game, reboot the machine, go back to the last save and not invade. Of course Putin has no such options - he has to live with the consequences of his bad decisions just like everybody else on the planet. 

We kind of hope he puts up the white flag soon. 

Long Comic Book Movies

The trend for blockbuster movies is more length. I finally got to watch 'Spider-man: No Way Home' and was amazed at the 2 hour 28min opus. It felt quite long. Then I watched Zack Snyder's 'cut' (That cut could be a misnomer) of 'Justice League' and this thing runs for 4hours and change. It is a lo-o-ong motherfucker of a movie. Honestly, that was like 3 90minute movies crammed into one. 

It's not necessarily a good trend but you do feel like they delivered quantity if not quality. 

I've long complained about this barrage of movies based on comic books. I've also complained ab out the people who complain about movies based on comic books. At this point in history of cinema, it doesn't much matter. The world has changed, the demographics have changed, and there is no sensible discussion about cinema going on anywhere any more. In light of that, I kind of think I'm okay with more Spider-man movies, and less so with Batman. They'll make more of both but I do have the option to put the Batman movies to the back of the viewing queue. At the end of the day, one's own taste is everything in critical analyses.

Slap Seen Around The World

Even if we hate watching the Oscars and don't watch them, we got to see Will Smith slap Chris Rock. Chris Rock's joke did seem a little tasteless - but then Chris Rock is a guy who talks some serious rude language in his own shows so compared to that, it was tame. I don't think it warranted being slapped on stage by Will Smith live to the world. Props to the man he didn't even go to feel his cheek after the slap. He kept his show biz face going and kept it together without major recrimination. I gotta say Will Smith looked worse in that interaction. He might have won the Oscar but he sure lost me with that act. 

Question

If Russian soldiers sick of Vladimir Putin have a mutiny, would it be a Putiny?

 

Movie Doubles - 'Gravity' & 'The Wolf of Wall Street'

It's Oscar Season

I watched 'Blue Jasmine' recently. The brouhaha that erupted from Dylan Farrow's open letter put me off doing an entry on it but I have to say it was typical fare from Woody Allen. Cate Blanchett is in top form playing a hysteric and deluded person but these kinds of characters aren't that rare in the Woody Allen oeuvre so...

Anyway, the Oscars have come and gone and that's meant a bit of binge viewing the nominees. I may as well try and see if there's something to be said in mashing up these two films. 'Gravity' of course has been the highly praised hard sci-fi movie of the year that even the toughest there's-no-sound-in-space crowd can embrace happily. 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is the adaptation of Jordan Belfort's book about brokers who sold penny stocks to the rich. They're both very interesting films - much more so than 'Blue Jasmine' - so here they are.

Spoiler warning!

Victory of Verisimilitude Part 101

Much of the praise and criticism of 'Gravity' has centered around whether the experience of space and space walking and surviving in high orbit is anything like what is presented. The praise comes from people who are sick of Star Wars and Star Trek characters exploring space without ever going EVA in heavy spacesuits to brave the non-elements of no atmosphere, no perceivable gravity. The critic s of the film have pointed out how unlikely it is to venture to the ISS from the shuttle orbit, that it would take considerably more energy to get there than what is left in the propulsion of the  suit. Still, you have to marvel at how naturalistic the portrayal of 'null-grav' and the constraints of working with spacesuits. Is it really like this? Some have suggested it is not as dexrously possible in real suits with real gloves.  Even so I think this is the first space movie where I've felt the fear of heights staring down to the planet surface from on high.

'The Wolf of Wall Street' similarly goes in hard for brute realism. The language, the deals, the anxiety and the adrenaline of selling the market to itself comes over like a tidal wave. The film takes particular delight in explaining the ins and out of the various drugs consumed and the sexual adventures attempted. The film actually give flesh to the Talking Heads song 'Wild Wild Life'. Interestingly enough, Matthew McConnaughy's performance in his cameo appearance as the elder stockbroker invokes 'American Psycho' so perhaps this film can be seen as the continuing narrative of the 1980s Wall Street onto the 1990s. Just as it is hard to gauge just how close to the reality it gets with 'Gravity', 'The Wolf of Wall Street' has a good deal of sense of reality.

Maybe this kind of obsession over verisimilitude comes from Oliver Stone and his movie where he brings in consultants for every little detail he needs knowledge - and of course Oliver Stone directed 'Wall Street'. Both films are like triumphs of production design and props departments. The eye to details that come and go in both films are astonishing. In 'Gravity', the international Space Station looks exactly like the modules are supposed to with even the Kibou  science module done exactly as it looks. 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is like a time capsule for a catalogue of luxury goods. Even the lingerie frills look period-accurate. It's simply astonishing how far both films go. The sheer weight of detail forms the compelling picture of verisimilitude.

Space Age Gender, Wall Street Sex

'Gravity' has something in common with 'Alien'. Of course 'Alien' hardly had 'artificial gravity' in the Nostromo so the amount of floaty 'null-grav' shots in 'Gravity' tell us how far filming techniques have come. The way 'Alien' would have been written with artificial gravity would have been to save what would have been astronomical costs and simply get on with the drama. The elegant camera-choreographed movements of Sandra Bullock's Dr. Stone, floating through the chambers of the ISS and then the Chinese satellite are a tour de force of contemporary shooting technique. the fact that she does it in tight, minimal underwear is evocative of Ripley's underwear moment in 'Alien'.

All the same, 'Gravity' can be summed up as an update of 'man versus nature' narrative, except that it's more like 'woman versus environment'. Amy Pohler made the gag at the Golden Globes that the film shows George Clooney would rather drift off in to deep space than form a meaningful working relationship with a mature woman, and it's sad to say there's some truth to it. Not so much as applying to George Clooney, but to the fact that it's the film about the moment a woman has to get up and do the work and survival routine in space all on her ownsome.

Is this a big deal? Who knows. There may well be an astronaut of the future who says she was inspired by Sandra Bullock in this movie. That story is yet to be written - but it does seem like this film gets rid of  the guy to put the woman on the spot, and the guy gets sent flying off into deep space because it's the greatest complication for the female character. It hardly seems like a big moment except when you look at the unreconstructed, unedited abject sexism of the Wall Street culture in 'the Wolf of wall Street' where not only are women objectified, they compete hard to be the most desirable object because there are no other stakes. The breakdown of prices of prostitutes and what you get for your money is so brutal you come to realise we live in some kind of two-zoned society.

There's one zone of society that works towards equality and emancipation and egalitarianism, and there's a whole other zone where everything is so reified by money that social structures and ethics and morals and culture just don't mean a thing. 'The Wolf of Wall Street' loudly proclaims everybody can be bought, and in that narrative universe it is mostly true. The people who cannot be bought - like FBI agents and the government officials seem to be highly anomalous aliens who are deeply dishonest to their own needs. In fact, it's is very strange to try and reconcile these two zones while desires can be met through money. It's even arguable that the government and its agents are a kind of hypocrites that functions through being incredibly dishonest (or simply repressed) about their transaction to do with desire, pleasure and money.  Stripped of moral meaning, we're led to view the human circus in 'the Wolf of Wall Street' as a tableau of indecency.

When you watch the two films together, you really wonder if society has come a long way; or perhaps not. Perhaps there are two zones to this world and only the deft can inhabit both with a straight face. Maybe that's why there's so much drugs in 'The Wolf of Wall Street'.

Gangs Of Wall Street

I've been thinking if there was a director better suited to handling this material than Martin Scorsese. The reason it surfaced as question for me was because I kept seeing echoes of 'Goodfellas' and 'Gangs of New York' in this film. (If Robert DeNiro were still in his prime in his 30s, he would have been magnificent in 'the Wolf of Wall Street'). The film even follows on from the concerns of 'Casino' which closed with the lament that Las Vegas was now owned by the bankers.

This film occupies a spot in Scorsese's filmography that documents life in New York City often as a crime-infested mirror to Woody Allen's ouevre  of comedies. The pertinent question to be asked is perhaps is that what is to say the gangsters and psychopaths often portrayed in Scorsese's films aren't more prevalent than we think, and that perhaps a good deal of the world's problems could be sheeted home to these psychopaths with gangster culture running so much of American capitalism.

The other observation to be made is that it is good to see Scorsese has a lot of energy for making very energetic movies. He's certainly not slowing down to make things more comfortable.

Space Shuttle, Wherefore Art Thou

In the olden days, best and brightest minds would go to MIT and then find jobs with NASA. This changed around the time of the Reagan administration and more and more of the smartest graduates would go work in banks writing algorithms for making money. This of course led to the creation of things like mortgage bonds and futures derivatives, and these things in turn led to the GFC. Had they gone to NASA instead of Wall Street we might have lost a few more shuttles but we might not have created such disparity in wealth in the world.

NASA  of course has ceased to fly the Space Shuttles because of safety concerns. It's quite strange to watch 'Gravity' where the film opens with the demise of a shuttle due to orbital debris. NASA is charged with doing something, but its current mission is really unclear, so the film seems to be a metaphor for the way NASA stands at the moment - that is to say, the Shuttle is dead, the ISS is something just to hang on and the Chinese space program is the only one doing anything. I'm personally not encouraged by the Chinese space program. Especially after the Jade Rabbit probe packed it in on the moon on the third day, living down to the reputation of  'Made in China'.

In some ways 'Gravity' seems to point at a time in history - now - where NASA has been reduced to a distant patter on the radio, and when the situation is really critical, somehow recedes into the darkness.

American Progress

Because NASA have indeed receded so far from the front line of mounting manned missions, 'Gravity' makes you wonder about technological progress. It appears American technology is far more adept at creating the illusion of space exploration than actually doing. it. It would be because so much money has been spent on the technology of special effects, it is probably easier to make a person look like they're doing space exploration realistically than actually sending somebody into space to do indeterminate 'research work'.

The irony of this is tremendous. 'The Wolf of Wall Street takes great pains to explain that stock prices and money are virtual things compared to cash. The ephemeral nature of a deal being expanded to having its own transactional value independent of the deal has essentially created today's world.

Similarly, American capitalism is at such a point that there is so much money to be made trading derivatives than equities or bonds. Indeed, high-speed trading and dark pools combined can be seen as American capitalism racing off into a dark world with very little transparency. The US governments of the last 30+years have a lot to answer for in how things have worked out.

The Allure of Pennystocks

It's only mentioned ever so briefly but the main instrument through which the characters of 'The Wolf of Wall Street' enrich themselves is pennystocks and their volatility. Much like Milliken and the junk bond trade, there is some serious money to be made in the volatility of cheaper stocks. The problem with all of them is that you never know if the volatility represents an actual market or a couple of other speculator spinning the wheel. It's an inspired move to shove pennystocks towards the wealthy because the potential returns on junkbonds and small caps  have been shown to be more than a portfolio of bluechip stocks. But the trick is always going to be which pennystock is going to represent the future and figuring out which ones are going to stay dogs and playthings of the speculators. That takes a lot of time and research - and these things are not available to the average Joe Schmoe and Mrs Schmoe.

Naturally, there is an information war going on between the broker and investor. The more and better the information one has, the better one has a chance of making sound decisions. Jordan Belfort and hi company essentially wade into their clients head with a bunch of bamboozling sales pitch and ambush them into buying stocks they might have never opted to buy on their own cognisance.  If stockbroking is a dodgy business to begin with, you sort of wonder how the SEC let this practice flourish for as long as it did.

Watching the film, it occurred to me that if Jordan Belfort and company had stayed with selling their pennystocks to ordinary mom and dad investors instead of the rich, they might have never brought down the SEC and FBI on their backs. It is suggested very strongly in the film that it is complaints from the rich and powerful who inadvertently lost money to 'Stratton and Oakmont'. it might have gone for much much longer if the victims were just ordinary moms and dads, and therein lies the very scary thing about American capitalism and its lax regulation. It really is a everything goes until you step on the powerful toes.

 

I Hate Awards Shows

The Oscars Particularly Suck

My gal loves watching the Oscars, which is fine by me, but I can't sit through these things. I think I was a kid when I quickly got over them. I think I sat up late watching to see if Star Wars would get best picture back in 1978. It sure as hell didn't. Kid disappointed. A few years later I sat up to see if 'Blade Runner' would win in its one category: Production Design. It didn't. It got beaten out by 'Gandhi', which was the 'worthy' film that year. For crying out loud, one of the most important pieces of Production Design of ALL TIME got beaten by a movie that essentially just had huts in India in it. No offense to India, but it's a crap choice - and nobody is talking about 'Gandhi' being an important work of cinema today, so we can all say that was an utterly crap moment in the long history of utterly crap moments in what we know as the Oscars.

So it was then that I got it firmly in my head that there's a whole bunch of idiots in The Academy' that line up to hand over Oscars to films not on merit or achievement but a more ethereal, indescribable, intangible worthiness of theme. You could make 'The Dark Knight'  and make $533m at the box office, but hey, the worthy films are big costume dramas based on true stories or important novels. It's great if it has a Holocaust story, because uh, a certain demographic feels compelled to hand out awards to those films that make sure the the NAZIs continue to be portrayed as the ultimate psychopathic evil on the planet. Nobody makes a film about Stalin's gulags, let alone hand out Oscars for those. Where's the love for the other oppressed peoples?

But it's even stupider, dumber, sillier and crazier than that. Spielberg's best films for me are things like 'Jaws', 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', the Indy Jones movies. I think most of the movie watching world of the last 30 years would agree with me whole-heartedly. Did he get an Oscar for those? No. He got to be a billionaire through those, but he gets an Oscar for 'Schindler's List'.Now, I'm happy for Mr. Spielberg, but it's so condescending and patronising you wonder which planet these people inhabit.

Martin Scorsese, who has to be one of the most important directors of ALL TIME didn't get his Oscar for best director for 'Taxi Driver' or 'Raging Bull' or 'Good Fellas' or 'Casino' or 'The Last Temptation of Christ' or for that matter 'Gangs of New York'. No, he got it for his effort in directing a remake of a Hong Kong movie 'Infernal Affairs', as 'The Departed'. How fucking warped is that? Why didn't they just give him the lifetime achievement award instead, and save themselves the embarrassment?

Apart from the bad viewing that it is every year, the way the Academy votes is like a drunken hypocritical sentimentalist with no sense of proportion and context. It's as if they're not seeing and hearing the same films as the rest of the damn world. The truly crazy thing is that this thing is the pinnacle of all Awards ceremonies and Awards shows. How could I ever bring myself to watch this stuff?

Heath Ledger Wins Posthumous Oscar

Good on ya mate! You're missed already.