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

Julian Assange Loses Appeal

Here it is, fresh off the press. Julian Assange is going to be extradited to Sweden.

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

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

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

The scarier thing for Julian Assange of course is the likelihood that he is then swept to the USA where a Grand Jury indictment awaits him.

Mr Assange's legal advisers are believed to fear that if he goes to Sweden he could then be extradited to the United States, where authorities are considering a range of charges against him over Wikileaks including espionage and conspiracy.

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

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

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

The End Of The SMH As We Know It?

Who'd a thunk the Kiwis were scabs?

Fairfax staff walked out at 5.30pm.

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

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

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

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

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

Hypocrisy Truly Knows No Bounds

...or rather, Hypocrisy they name is Abbott.

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

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

Which is totally motivated by this little bit here:

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

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

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

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

Kind of self explanatory.

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

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

You can't make this stuff up.

'Young Adult'

Spectacle Of Disorder

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

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

Then, along comes this film.

What's Good About it

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

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

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

What's Bad About It

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

What's Interesting About It

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

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

Contempt

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

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

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

Is Beauty Meaningful?

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

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

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

Materialism Is A Salve

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

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

Gen-X, Goes Back

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

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

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

HAP-less In Australia

Household Assistance Package

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

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

'Shanghai'

Let's Re-Live The Nightmare

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

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

What's Good About It

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

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

What's Bad About It

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

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

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

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

What's Interesting About It

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

'The Descendants'

Mother Is Gone

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

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

What's Good About It

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

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

What's Bad About It

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

What's Interesting About It

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

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

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

Evil Father-In-Laws

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

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

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

The Absent Mother

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

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

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

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

The Greek Situation

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

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

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

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

The Budget & The Libs

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

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

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

 

 

 

'The Iron Lady'

Through The Eyes Of Lost Marbles

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

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

What's Good About It

Meryl Streep. It begins and ends with Meryl Streep.

What's Bad About It

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

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

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

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

What's Interesting About It

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

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

Thatcher As Narcissist

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

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

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

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

Austerity, Riots, Smashing Unions

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

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

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

North Sea Oil, Not Policy

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

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

'The Avengers'

Altogether Now

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

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

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

What's Good About It

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

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

What's Bad About It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iron-y Man

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

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

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

Captain America As Anachronism

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

Third Hulk

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

Scarlett Johansson As Scene Stealer

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

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

'Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol'

Are We Still Doing This?

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

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

What's Good About It

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

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

What's Bad About It

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

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

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

What's Interesting About It

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

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

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

Nuclear Arsenal Going Astray

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

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

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

The Kremlin

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

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

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

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

And Now For Something Totally Different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oedipus Wrecks

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

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

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

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

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

Easy Suicides

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

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

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

Sado-Masochism

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

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

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

Absent Parents

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

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

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

The Disintegrating Nuclear Family

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

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

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

Bad Teachers

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

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

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

They Sure Hate...

They Hate the Unemployed

Here's an interesting experiment. A WA Greens Senator is attempting to live a week on $35/day.

WA Greens Senator Rachel Siewert is trying to live on $35 a day in a bid to highlight that the meagre dole was causing jobseekers to be sucked into a cycle of poverty.
Rachel Siewert has $12 in her wallet for the rest of the week.
She went shopping on the weekend and bought some basic food items and toilet paper totalling $53, but if she runs out of toothpaste, she will just have to go without.

This week Ms Siewert is living off the average weekly Newstart Allowance payment in a bid to highlight what she says is a system which makes it even more difficult for job seekers to get out of unemployment.

The $244 she started with on Saturday has quickly been taken up by the essentials.
While in reality, she will remain in her four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the northern suburbs, $125 has been deducted from her budget to pay for the one bedroom unit in Bentley or Armadale, which would be all she could afford on Newstart.

Thankfully for her, the amount has been subsidised down from $185 due to the rent assistance that she would be eligible for as a jobseeker.

The rest of it makes for some painful reading on penny-pinching. Clearly this experiment is trying to highlight this figure of $35 per day.

According to a survey of 500 Australians conducted for the Australia Institute, the amount, when averaged, is $454 a week - about $65 a day.

When 500 people in a separate survey were asked how much unemployed Australians should get from Centrelink they settled on $329 a week, or $47 a day.

But the less-impressive truth is the Newstart allowance peaks at $243 a week - $34.70 a day.

''Most Australians have little idea what unemployed Australians actually get,'' the executive director of the Australia Institute, Richard Denniss, said when releasing the survey results. ''They know what their own cost of living is and they think unemployed Australians should get something approaching it, but they would be shocked to find out what a Newstart recipient actually got.''

The $86 gap between Newstart itself and what Australians believe it should be exceeds the $50 increase proposed by a coalition of business, welfare and union organisations led by the Australian Council of Social Service. ACOSS says the increase would cost $1.2 billion a year.

Talk about disconnect. The first paragraph is interesting. People would budget for themselves $18per day more than they would for an abstract stranger. The second paragraph shows that the real figure the government is comfortable with is $12.30 meaner than what the average person dishes out to a stranger. ACOSS then steps up and tells the government it should do something about this gap but it too is $5-6 short of what people think is required.

There are 379 comments under that article, and it is surprising how many people are scornful of the unemployed for being unemployed, as if the unemployed are unemployed by principle. Clearly conservatives hate people they do not know, with as much hatred they can muster.

Think about all this for a moment. What the hell is it to you really if there were 10, 1000, or 10,000 dole bludgers out there, eking their lives out on 35 or 47 or 65 dollars a day? Especially if you are well off? What could it matter?

Now, conservative people? They want them shamed in public, made to work the most humiliating jobs. Why? One can only presume it is because it gives them some kind of sadistic satisfaction. And there's a mainstream party out there who think this sort of thing is great. The really disappointing part is that the ALP ain't doing much better than the sadistic psychos.

They Hate The Young

Amanda Vanstone had this opinion piece last month which was so odious I didn't bother to read it at the time, but seeing that we're talking about this kind of thing today, I thought I'd have a read and bring it up.

I have no quibble with the investment we make in higher education or in students. I just think that, to be fair, they should have to start paying it back sooner.
The full adult pension, including supplement, is about $19,000 a year. The minimum wage is just under $30,000. So why do we say to students, who get a massive loan at no real interest rate, that they do not have to pay back a cent until they are earning just under $45,000?

Now, if I cast my mind not too far, it is obvious to me that Amanda Vanstone is of the generation that got the Free Education from Gough Whitlam's Labor government and didn't have to pay *any* HECS, unlike the Gen-Xers. She writes a whole bunch of personal anecdotes about how some dude driving buggies in Rome taught her a life lesson but seriously, how can a person who didn't have to suffer the HECS repayments ask this?

The comparison to a pensioner is a spurious apples and oranges argument because pensioners tend to already own stuff, while graduates do not, but it is better for the economy if they spent their money on those things, rather than be taxed as if they did.

The time I was repaying my HECS really sucked. I wad fortunate in that I was repaying it with a job I was trained to do, but it still hurt not to have that bit of money. What it taught me was how difficult it is accept one's education as having a concrete dollar value. But be that as it may, it incenses me that somebody who didn't have that experience thinks that these back of the envelope calculations are sufficient justification to make these ambit, loaded political claims.
It's not just in Australia that the old conservatives are trying to scare off the young from education through taxes. here's an article in The Economist.

AS I begin this post, the president is across town buttering up University of Iowa students with promises to keep federal student-loan interest rates low. The College Cost Reduction and Access Act, a measure from 2007 that, among other things, lowered the interest rate on federal student loans from 6.8% to 3.4%, is set to expire in July. Messrs Obama and Romney both have come out in favour of supporting an extension of the subsidy for student-loan debtors.

---

This sort of giveaway may be good politics, but it's terrible policy. Extending the programme just one year would cost $6 billion. The measure is promoted as a way of making college more affordable, but it will mainly benefit those well out of school, many of whom are relatively well-to-do, mid-career professionals, such as your indebted correspondent. There is a movement afoot to get the government to forgive student-loan debt entirely, and when compared to this, the cost of the scheme to keep student-loan interest rates low looks quite small. Stilll, it's bad policy for many of the same reasons it would be bad policy to forgive student loans.

Look, maybe they're right and it's bad policy, but here's the thing. Wall Street and the big end of town are getting 0.5% interest charges from the Fed. Why is it even remotely fair that students continue to get slugged with even 3.4%, let alone 6.8% in the current economic climate? What makes the students magically immune from the GFC fallout? It's easily arguable the big end of town are far more capable of dealing with tough times through the high salaries and established assets and savings compared to university students - and they're getting 0.5% interest rates!

You wonder about the brains of these conservatives.

They Hate Foreigners

Here's the latest on Asylum seekers.Ever since the 'Malaysian Solution' melted down thanks to the High Court, it's been weathering the storm of bad press and spin ever since. Even so, if the Liberal Party had any heart, they'd negotiate so that the government can do its proposed Malaysian Solution in exchange for being able to do it Nauru Solution when (I'm pointedly not going to bother saying 'if') they get in power.

But no. Tony Abbott has put his kaibosh on any understanding over the legislation and keeps carping that Julia Gillard's government can't stop the boats. Well, no, she can't because Tony, you won't let her. It gets sillier than that with this:

The Coalition spokesman for border protection, Michael Keenan, welcomed the government's response but said the potential for a repeat of the tragedy remained until people smuggling was stopped.

Good God. Have they no shame? No embarrassment? I know one needs a thick skin to be a politician, but this is breath-taking.

Oh, look, there's another boat!

I'm wracking my brains as to when exactly the Liberal Party started playing dirty pool in divisive race politics. Malcolm Fraser as hated as he was in his heyday didn't stoop to such depth and has since departed the party he led. I don't remember a single moment where Andrew Peacock or John Hewson saying anything that seemed unseemly; it really did start with John Howard and somehow he's entrenched it into the Liberal Party culture that it's okay to play subtle dog-whistle race-baiting. There are days I look at Gladys Berejiklian and I think there's hope yet for the Liberals and their acceptance of ethnicity, but most days I feel like the Liberal Party has allowed itself into the company of xenophobes.

In case you think I'm just talking out of my rear end, here's an article you should look at.

Mr Abbott wants to link in the minds of former Howard battlers the asylum seeker issue with a growing population, tapping into community anxiety about urban congestion and water scarcity.

He’ll run these two arguments in parallel, but invite voters to make their own connection with unauthorised boat arrivals and a growing population.

Shadow Attorney-General George Brandis falsely claimed this week that there has always been bipartisan support for immigration, air-brushing from history John Howard’s shameful effort of 1988 to harvest votes by claiming there was too much Asian immigration.

Senator Brandis went on to say that the Coalition wanted a return to the immigration levels achieved when it was last in power, as if this would lead a lower population figure by 2050 than 35 million.  Yet in the last year of the Howard government, net overseas migration was 232,800 – much higher than the 180,000 per annum assumption that Treasury used in the Intergenerational report in arriving at a projected population of 35 million by 2050.

It's chicken or the egg whether the race-baiting politics of John Howard works because the electorate is racist already, or whether the electorate allows itself to give into their inner xenophobe because there are politicians that enable them. Still, the stench of Xenophobia hasn't gone away from modern conservatism, and you wonder how in their god's name they pretend they can have any moral high ground in any of these kinds of policy areas.

News That's Fit To Punt - 25/Apr/2012

Trying To Slip His Peter

This Peter Slipper business for the last few days has been a bit of a joke. It's a scandal for sure, but should he resign?

It's all a bit messy, what with Andrew Wilkie out there trying to get even for the betrayal, and let's not forget the spectre of Tony Abbott as PM on the horizon. If he resigns, then surely it puts an early election on the agenda for the government and of course the chances of the ALP wining that are miniscule.

John Birmingham had this snarky paragraph today:

Allow me to exaggerate. The Gillard government is doing itself more damage than Abbott could ever hope to hand them. I'm not talking specifically about the Peter Slipper fiasco here. I'm talking about everything. Pretty much every decision they have made, every action they have taken since they scraped back into power last time, or arguably since they cut down Kevin Rudd, has been calculated to lower not just the standing of the government of the day, but the standing of the party for a generation. Hmm, I know that was exaggeration, and yet it didn't feel like it.

That pretty much sums up how we're feeling out here in voter land.

If the point of forming government with Andrew Wilkie led to the pokies legislation which they then side-stepped with placing Peter Slipper in the Speaker's chair, then surely all this nonsense is merely a function of a hung Parliament. Somehow I think the electorate is going to demand an election if Peter Slipper is made to resign. It's all so precarious for Julia Gillard.

Gen Y Anger In The SMH?

I've seen all this before in Japan where demographics screwed over Ge-X and they're in a right mess over there. Jessica Irvine has written this thing today - I imagine because the infeasibility of the numbers is hitting home for her, as it hits most others - and it has this tidbit in it worth quoting:

The phenomenon of children resisting the sale of the family home to unlock funds for a parent's retirement, so that the children can inherit the wealth tax-free - otherwise known as the ''nailing granny to the floor'' phenomenon - must also be addressed, possibly through an inheritance tax on housing.
It is true that many young people stand to inherit great wealth in the form of housing. But they'll do so not because of their labours, or their ability to reinvest it productively, but pure dumb luck as to who their parents are.

It is one of those demographic questions that nobody is addressing. If all this wealth is locked up in housing and a good deal of it belongs to the old, then surely there will be more and more of this 'nailing granny to the floor' phenomenon that takes place.

The question is how the aging Baby Boomers will accept the changes to legislation that eases them out of their big empty nests. I imagine with a big 'no fucking way' at the ballot box; which means we can probably chalk up the future to more of this kind of 'nailing granny to the floor' thing. It's the new way of sharing the wealth around across generations.

The post-Bubble is going to be drawn out and traumatic. The slow de-leverage model being carried out by the RBA may end up being just another way to die, only, it will be by a thousand cuts rather than one big stab to the heart.

Bad Press Is Better Than No Press

Kazakhstan has finally admitted the Borat sensation was good for their tourism.

Seems like they finally got the joke.

I Get Asked What I Think Sometimes...

12.8 million For Hugh, Nothing For You

The news this week for film industry types is that Hugh Jackman is going to bring his next Wolverine production back to Sydney. Because the degree of my jadedness - my ad-jade-ment if you will - is at such proportions, I thought I'd just not comment on it until Pleiades brought this little thing to my attention:

You’d have thought that riches to rags story had taught Australian politicians that dumb subsidies don’t work and may have actually damaged the local film industry more than it helped.

Unfortunately not.

Last week the Australian federal government announced $13 million in support for production of Wolverine. The prime minister’s office gushed:

"To attract The Wolverine to Australia, the Gillard government granted the producers a one-off payment of $12.8 million which will result in over $80 million of investment in Australia and create more than 2000 jobs.

"The payment effectively provided The Wolverine a one-off investment package equivalent to an increase in the existing location offset to 30 per cent.

"Without this effective tax offset incentive, the producers of The Wolverine would not have chosen Australia as the location."

"That's just the nature of this government," thundered Pleiades. "It's all about bribing people. It's corruption and bribery that's marked this government."

I'm inclined to believe it's true. What's truly spectacular about this account is that 12.8million can buy you a lot of things in the film industry: development, advertising support, distribution support, publicity. Instead, Julia Gillard's government has chosen to hand this over to a Hollywood production on the grounds that it's going to be shot in Australia. Heck, there are any number of good film scripts out there to be made for a flat 12.8million. When you consider that the annual budget at AFTRS used to be 9million p.a. (I think it might even be less now), you think "wow, they really don't care about the front end of the industry, they only care about the rear end."

They could have done a lot more things with that money that actually helped.

All this is to say that it is incredibly dubious as to what merit there is in throwing this money at Hugh Jackman's production which is already funded out of the Hollywood machine. Now, I'm not taking anything away from Hugh Jackman who is able to do so, but you have to seriously question the ALP government where they really stand with regards to the rest of the Australian film industry. It's nice that some of the crew and special effects houses and post-production houses will get some business coming through, but when it's done, it's going to be the breadline for most of those people again. The ALP government can't be buying temporary jobs like that, they should be trying to re-establish the industry as a industry instead of this public-money-consuming sheltered workshop - assuming they're serious.

Which, they're not. So why am I bothering with this today? Oh yes, I got asked what I thought.

More On The Sheltered Workshop Thing

Here's a more detailed account of what they think they're doing.

Hugh Jackman is returning to Australia to make The Wolverine, his sixth outing as the Marvel character, thanks to a $12.8 million federal government subsidy.

And while billed as a “one-off”, the local film industry has its fingers crossed that the near-doubling of the standard assistance for a big-budget foreign production is a sign of things to come in next month’s budget.

The Wolverine is set in Japan but will be shot at Fox Studios in Sydney between July and December. Hugh Jackman will star and produce. “It’s so great to bring these big movies down there, to keep people working,” Jackman told the Today program from London, where he is filming Les Miserables for Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech). “I just have to say thanks to Prime Minister Gillard, she was instrumental with this.”

Yikes. Sounds awful already. Set in Japan but shot in Sydney sounds a bit like the Last Samurai which was set in Japan but shot in NZ. Nothing wrong with that, just that it looked really weird in many parts. I'm resigned to there being an alternative universe where there is a Japan that is totally on another planet with totally weird things going on. Even so... let that slide for now.

The patent myth - and outright wishful thinking on the part of SPAA - is that this is going to lead to there being more direct input from the Federal government to lure productions to Australia so that they hire Australian crew and talent. The other patent myth is that once this Wolverine Production starts or finishes in Australia that it's going to open the flood gates for more productions to come back through the Fox lot that is mostly sitting dormant right now, thanks to the high Aussie Dollar. When you choose to look at the funding through these two rose tinted glasses, then sure, this $12.8million seems like chump change. But as with the generous amount of government money dropped on Baz Luhrman's 'Australia' , there's nothing that strengthens the industry, nothing that gives it an ongoing mechanism for growth, nothing that allows for the Australian industry itself to grow unless you define the Australian Film Industry as a service industry for Hollywood in which case why are we doing this?

Haven't we been here before with Baz Luhrman's number?

The point is, it's not even good policy to be throwing money at a Hollywood production, just so it comes here to shoot. If they don't come of their own accord, it's proof positive that our service part of the film industry isn't competitive enough. We're either going to be competitive on the world market on our own merits or not. The producers hoping the government's going to make a habit of funding these things are uncompetitive swill, sucking on the government teat wanting more. I'm sorry but years and years of public funding has reduced our film industry to these kinds of producers getting the loudest voices.

On a personal note, I struggled greatly to convince the production for Kamui Gaiden to come here when their main objection was cost - and that was when the Australian Dollar was only 70yen. Had somebody handed even 5million on a platter, it probably would have happened here or NZ instead of Okinawa; but nobody was there to do it because it was during the time the FFC was being rolled into Screen Australia, just before the GFC hit. (And really, it was probably the natural course of things that it didn't happen that way, which was not only my loss but arguably Australia's film industry's lost opportunity.) Still, that was the last straw for me.

It goes back to the problem that the people who want the industry don't know what they're getting; the people in the industry don't know what market they're operating in; and the world really doesn't like in-between-ers, which is exactly what our film industry is.

News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Apr/2012

Entitlement, You Say?

Joe Hockey's out in the UK thumping his chest. He says Australia and the rest of the west need to wind back welfare and  everybody should fend for themselves like they do in Hong Kong. Tony Abbott chimed in to support his Shadow treasurer by saying 'the age of entitlements' has to stop.

The funny thing is, when I see the word 'entitlement', I don't immediately think of people on welfare payments, I think kids in the Eastern Suburbs and North Shore who go to Private Schools and when they hit University, live in those colleges on campus and somehow wrangle fantastic jobs as they come out and scoot ahead in their careers and they all tell you it's hard work and nothing else and why don't those lazy dole bludgers and single mums get a job? - when in fact it's nothing but entitlement for being born to the wealthy.

So colour me Bolshy, if Tony Abbott really wants to end entitlement, he should bring in 100% Death Duties so that nobody gets an entitled leg up by dint of the birth lottery, because that's the worst kind of entitlement that gives way to the vested interest politics of this country. Truly equal opportunity would give rise to a fair and equitable society.

Anything short of that is what I'd call a bit rich, coming from the Tories.

Maggie Thatcher Much?

Meanwhile PM Julia Gillard's been brandishing her bit of Tory logic at this conference.

JULIA GILLARD will hit back at business groups and others demanding interest rate cuts while criticising her government's pledge to return the budget to surplus, saying they cannot have one without the other.

In a speech to be delivered in Perth today, the Prime Minister will say a surplus is a ''fundamental economic imperative'' that will free the Reserve Bank to start dropping interest rates, delivering relief to both households and business.

In remarks that border on pressuring the central bank, she will say that at 4.25 per cent, Australia's cash rate is well above levels in the United States and Europe and there ''is plenty of room for the RBA to move if need be''.

''To all of those calling for rate cuts, you should also be calling for a surplus, not opposing one,'' her speech notes say.

Ms Gillard will say a surplus would facilitate rate reductions and it is also important to start building a ''buffer'' in case the global economy worsens and further stimulus is needed.

I don't know if that really amounts to putting pressure on the RBA. The logic goes that if the Fed gets back to surplus then the RBA has leeway to lower interest rates and that's all she's saying. Be that as it may what she is essentially preaching is the same kind of austerity line for Australia that is being imposed on many a government around the world - even if Australia is the best placed not to follow such policies - and in many ways Julia Gillard's government is aiming to please the fiscal hawks in order to win brownie points from people who would never vote for anyway.

In saying that, I'm not advocating the Australian government be devil-may-care about its deficit, but it seems rather odd that we have this Labor PM putting on a show like a conservative. I can't imagine this kind of position is going to allow her to woo back the old social democratic vote she needs to win the middle.

There are indications that the proposed budget cuts aren't even the best policy given our deleveraging circumstance.

Here are some scenarios if rates fall 1 per cent as a result of budget cuts:

• will households save the extra cash as they are doing now? If so, the government is bringing on a recession which is clearly bad


• will households spend their extra income, providing some relief to the beleaguered retail sector? If so, growth will accelerate which is potentially good and you can expect a rally in retail stocks on this possibility. However, it would be much better to see the newly created economic space filled by expanding exporters


• will households spend the extra income and resume borrowing for housing, causing house prices to rise again? If so, the rate of deposit accumulation at the banks will fall and they will accumulate further wholesale debts in foreign markets. This would also fire up a short term cyclical stocks rally which would include the home builders. But it is very bad in the medium term and would very quickly result in either ratings agencies or the RBA stomping on the brakes


• what degree of downwards pressure will a 1% fall in interest rates place upon the dollar? This is not an easy question to answer. Interest rate differentials are only one of the five drivers of dollar value.  My guess is that such a level of cuts would push the dollar into a new trading range somewhere below parity assuming global growth remained decent, but not much lower. Thus, we’d see a boost in currency exposed stocks and some boost to the export sector more generally.

That's not a nice range of scenarios. And all this is on the offering because Julia Gillard's ALP Government is aiming for a surplus by 2013, as revenues from capital gains shrink and income taxes plateau. As the article puts it, the options are disleveraging hard or taking on more offshore debt. I guess the worst part of it is that other side wants to go even harder whilst also handing out freebies to their target electorate. We're a nation that's given the driving wheel to ethical idiots, moral cowards and sycophants to the vested interests.

Babylon A.D.

Pretensions Of Seriousness

Tonight was time to hit the el cheapo DVD stash. The film that made it on to the screen for a bit of a laugh was this number made a few years ago.

I like Science Fiction movies that have a bit of bone to them. I don't mean just structure, but a philosophical backbone. I know some people like their action movies with a science fiction tinge but I'm more inclined to have it the other way around. Talk about issues and things and phenomena worth talking about, and have the action set pieces carry you through the narrative. Of course unless it's a film based on a Philip K. Dick book, chances are you wont get that - and even when it is based on a Philip K. Dick book, you might get 'Adjustment Bureau'.

Sometimes I think Vin Diesel has the bad fortune of being wired like me when it comes to choosing his projects, but no matter which way you look at the guy, he's an action movie dude and the science fiction thinking part is going to be about fourth fiddle to the punchups and the explosions and the car chase. 'Babylon A.D.' is one of those movies. It yields odd results like 'Chronicles of Riddick' and this movie, 'Babylon A.D.'.

'Babylon A.D.' proceeds like a strange road movie through the near future central Asia and Siberia through Canada into a dystopian New York. Half the time you're wondering where the next action cue is going to hurl the story and the other half, you're wondering what the hell is really going on, hanging out for the exposition to explain some of the odd things you're being asked to suspend disbelief. You could do worse for a Sunday night movie.

What's Good About It

It's a film with some memorable set pieces. The helicopter ride, the cage fight, the submarine that picks up refugees, the snow-mobile chase, and the climactic gun battle. One could do a lot worse than these kinds of set pieces. There are films out there with action so gratuitous you don't ever remember where it was meant to be set and how it hung together with the rest of the plot.

It's also a film that doesn't end with the formation of a family or an orgasmic, big explosion. This is a different kind of Vin Diesel movie.  Thoughtful even. I know, it's hard to believe. But there's an intelligent movie trying to break out of the trappings of a stupid movie that even a studio exec can understand.

What's Bad About it

Same old stoic tough guy impervious to pain mows down bad guys with machine gun fire as he protects a young woman who might be some kind of technological Virgin Mary. I guess if God wrote the bible this way, there might be more people to read it. All the same, it's a film that struggles to shed the trappings of less intelligent movies - but then, it's hard to imagine them casting Vin Diesel as the scientist who is trying to transfuse artificial intelligence in to human babies.

The shaky camera work in the action sequences don't really add as much excitement as it's supposed to. The lighting's a bit boring, and there's really not much mood going on in some of the more talky scenes.

What's Interesting About It

Somewhere in the background of this film is a book which I have not read, which wants to talk about creation myths and the moment in history to come when an Artificial Intelligence is brought into this world, and then gets given a human body to walk around in. last I saw this idea, it was in 'Tron Legacy', an they made  a hash job of that idea too. It seems Hollywood wants to talk about A.I. in terms of pretty girls in distress which might be the sign of the times. Not so long ago it was Haley Joel Osment in a Pinocchio re-run story, and before that it's always been monotone machine voices or HAL. Pretty soon they'll be coming up with Artificial Intelligences that are cranky and middle aged from birth.

There are a few patterns to Artificial Intelligence stories and one of the main ones is the Frankenstein story where mankind creates a monster in the form of an A.I. The other seems to be this kind of eroticised machina where the artificial being is a kind of living sex doll. That being said, we don't get shown a sex scene with the Artificial Intelligence girl, so there is some restraint going on in this movie.

Religion As Framework

It's one of the ironies of science fiction literature that it ends up tousling with issues of faith. I suspect this comes from the long reach of religious doctrine into the realm of metaphysical thinking, but also abstract thinking as well. The fact that the English language is flooded with echoes of religious thought means at some point the stories headed towards the metaphysical and abstract have to wrestle with the religious ideas invested in our language. Usually, this ends up with apocalyptic visions and prophecies of dooms and saviours.

Maybe it is simply the memory of Gallileo and Darwin and how they were attacked by the zealots that makes any intelligent investigation into nature or being in science fiction, a potential flashpoint for these discussions. Bogus theology hangs over the plot of this film like a bad smell, and you wonder if the world is full of people who would much rather choose faith over reason. It probably is.

I just don't fin these theosophically tinged stories compelling. If people want to get really freaked out by the potential of technology, they need to look at Ray Kurzweil's notion of a technological singularity. That one is a lot more compelling if you understand the reasoning - and we're only accelerating towards it faster.