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?

 

Quick Shots 14 Dec 2021

Yikes It's December Already 

Sorry I've been away. I've been meaning to write about a few things along the way but life has a way of just making you do other stuff than just blog. 

Through the 24months of this Pandemic so far, I've been re-mixing and re-mastering stuff. I'll have a new album of songs coming out in March next year. It's all brand new songs - nothing from the dim dark past or back catalog of stuff. But I've also been going back in time and I've gone through the stuff I did over on iCompositions between 2012 and 2014. It's like 50 tracks I'm sorting through as I do other projects so I've been stupid-busy. 

I Got Asked About Hillary Rodham Clinton

I think HRC must have some book coming out because she's started to surface in the media a bit more. She made some post about the speech she would have given if she had won the Presidency. Look, I get it. It was an awful moment not just for her, but for America and the free world. The Donald Trump Presidency was like a populist enema that collectively gave us the shits non-stop for 4years, culminating in the storming of the US Capitol. The shit, so to speak, has been running long and hard. So believe me as somebody who would have preferred not to go through that said shit that a HRC Presidency would have been much more preferable to the shit-fight we went through. 

Be that as it may I think HRC in 2016 might have been the worst candidate the Dems might have settled upon - orthodoxy or not. I know, that in the end Bernie Sanders is just too weird for the Democratic power brokers and that it really felt like it was her turn. And yet she proceeded to lose the Rust belt to DJT, and that was that. There was an inherent problem in sticking a candidate up whose husband effectively sold out the Rust Belt with NAFTA. She couldn't very well get up there and disown and lambast Bill Clinton's Presidency, could she? And in any other election where the Republicans put up a candidate like a Bob Dole or a John McCain, maybe Hillary might have slid by that issue; but of course she was up against a populist monster who managed to successfully mine that exact resentment against 'the elites' - which undeniably, of whom she was one.

So all in all HRC had to be a case of the right candidate, wrong election. 

The question I got asked was whether I thought HRC was right. Of course she was right. But if the question concerned whether it had to be her to save the day in November 2016, we now know that was not the case. And again, I'm not saying this as a Bernie Sander supporter - I'm saying, of all the candidates in all the Democratic Party machine apparatus, they had to insist on HRC as the candidate in the exact election she was the worst candidate to win back the Rust Belt. She was right about America, but she was wrong about the legitimacy of her candidacy. However, I don't think she'll ever wrap her head around that. Because if she did, she sure as hell won't be coming out with some book now. 

Comic Book Movies

I've decided I'm okay with comic book movies. I know Martin Scorsese spoke up against the And then it was Ridley Scott. And then eventually it was Jane Campion who offered up the critique that she just hates them. Okay, if we had any pride as film makers, it would rankle that that such toy fiction - as finely tuned and amazingly honed as they are - would blow away what serious adults are trying to do in fiction. Then it occurred to me we're still talking movies. Movies are populist. If the crowd loves it, then there's probably something in that. As it is, the corporate entertainment machine is trying to make Star Wars films to make lots of money and none of those recent ones have exactly won over the crowds. So whether it's SciFi or comic book movies or serious drama, there's a certain level at which good, is good. And maybe even that kind of bland ordinary unassuming good, is good enough for the crowd.  

The thing that tipped me off to this conversion in my head wasn't Jane Campion telling us how she "just hates them" and me wincing when I read that. It's the fact that I enjoy them in spite of my general blasé contempt for comic book movies. I know it's only comic book stuff where Spider-Man swings from buildings and stops the bad guy. But if I'm being honest - on a visceral level - I'm probably going to enjoy that spectacle much more than 'The Irishman' or 'The Last Duel' or 'The Power of the Dog'. I can guarantee you that these serious movies don't and won't hit an emotional high mark that Spider-Man likely will. And maybe that makes me really anti-intellectual. But if I'm the anti-intellectual for liking Spider-Man over what Marty, Ridley and Jane have got on offer, I would like to posit that maybe they're just pseudo-intellectuals. After all, as Hitchcock put it so eloquently, "it's only the movies!"

Yes, for fuck's sake.