Eden (2024)

Ron Howard has a bit of a sideline in dramatising material that has been/could be done as a documentary.

Watching this one is left with the impression that this, however, is precisely the sort of story that needed to be taken up by a European writer or director with a genuinely nasty streak (or the rare American equivalent, such as novelist Paul Bowles.)

Or maybe even someone prepared to do more than half-heartedly hint at the comedy/spoof potential, which is precisely what Howard is doing.

Ana de Armas is constantly twirling around the edge of 'Allo 'Allo! and Jude Law goes full Jack Torrance at one stage when simply banging on his typewriter keys and namedropping Nietzsche and Schopenhauer seems not quite enough.

The premise here is what happens when you decide to live by a set of elevated ideas — in one of those archetypally unforgiving environments — and then a bunch of people with alternative worldviews, capabilities and projects move in next door: Utopia plus neighbours.

Plus some of the worst German accents ever committed to celluloid. Even the actual Germans in the cast are not beyond censure in this respect.

I have to admit I have never really quite understood the appeal of Sydney Sweeney, but hers is the stand-out performance in this film, and arguably this is, after all, her character's story, so it seems a shame that she appears below all her co-stars in the final credits.

Ron Howard has insisted that he was not so much inspired by the 2013 documentary — The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden — as by a family holiday to the islands. This made me recall the remarks of an acquaintance who picked this same archipelago for his honeymoon and found that the Galapagos were not quite the forever sunny tropical paradise that he and his wife had anticipated.

Happy in their (frozen) bubble...

Here we go again with the happy Finns...

If countries like Finland and Guatemala can both figure high up this chart, what precisely is being measured by 'happiness'?

On his recent Scandi-tour Simon Reeve seemed more reluctant to look under the covers in Finland than he was in say Norway. Indeed, if anything he seemed to be quietly in awe of their collective determination to have each other's backs.

The trouble is (or at least one of them is), and this aspect of Finland went unmentioned, is that it tends to score lowest — along with Austria — for race relations in the EU. (viz the European Agency for Fundamental Rights's 'Being Black in the EU' survey.)

It's something of a tenet of American woke dogma that systemic racism is a by-product of slavery and colonialism, yet neither Finland nor Austria are exactly famous for their seaborne empires.

Britain on the other hand, miserable as it may be, is up there with Sweden and Norway when it comes to basic contemporary levels of getting on with other people.

In the 2023 World Values Survey only 5% of Brits objected objected to having immigrants as neighbours and only 2% to having immigrants of a different race.

Sweden scored 3% and 1% here and Norway 5% and 3%. (I'm not sure how these percentages work — like, do they also ask the immigrants about their neighbours?)

Finland's strong national identity seems to come with elements of social segregation.

Yet as always, comparing across data sets reveals complexities. Happiness levels are still apparently robust amongst immigrants in Finland, aligning with those of the natives, which is perhaps a little surprising as many of them will have started life somewhere with less snow and ice.

The happiest Finns I ever encountered were in Leningrad.

Volcanoes and Revolutions

 

I am a bit of a completist when it comes to fiction set in Guatemala.

The most notable exception from my 'dunnit' list being Antigua Vida Mia. I saw the movie, and that was enough for me.

Norman Lewis's 1957 novel is a new acquisition and I am looking forward to it, especially after seeing that positive blurbing by the creator of 007.

Inside the cover the intro continues: 'Lying under the shadow of thirty-two volcanoes, Guatemala is shaken almost constantly by earthquakes and revolutions...'

Rare indeed is the novel about Guatemala which completely eschews the stereotypically problematic aspects of its history. (Even Severina by Rey Rosa is about a woman hueviando books from a little shop in the capital.)

The most notable title of the past decade has been Tiempos Recios by the late Mario Vargas Llosa which is situated unashamedly either side of the 1954 coup.

Lewis on the other hand, noted that while the 'astute reader' would discover certain similarities between the plot of his story and the then recent history of Guatemala, these were to be regarded as 'accidental'.

Other fictional titles tackling the murkier side to this land which I would recommend are El Cojo Bueno by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Cascabel by Arturo Arias and The Long Night of the White Chickens by Francisco Goldman.

While I do believe that El Señor Presidente by Miguel Angel Asturias remains — objectively — the best novel written about Guatemala, my own personal favourite is Up Above the World by Paul Bowles.

He too makes use of the 'un-named Latin American republic' ploy, but if you read it with some basic knowledge of Guatemala, you do know.

On a separate note, I was reminded recently of efforts by various real world locations to claim or disclaim their appearance in seminal works of the western canon.

For instance, there are numerous spots around the Caribbean asserting their selfsameness with Stevenson's Treasure Island, particularly in the Virgin Islands, yet anyone who has read the novel will surely understand that it is not actually set in the tropics.

Then there is the discussion about the country in Conrad's Nostromo. Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Secret History of Costaguana begins from the assumption that Conrad was dog whispering 'Colombia' and sets about reclaiming said nation's history from foreign misrepresentation.

Yet a brief Google search reveals that Venezuela and Guyana also want in on this. For my part, I long ago concluded that this composite had one key component that hardly anyone ever mentions: Costa Rica.

We know that Conrad was there during his days as a merchant seaman. And although Costa Rica has lately been famed for its comparative stability, lack of an army and so on, it didn't used to be — and in fact its nineteenth century history features precisely the sort of factional military putsches with armies marching from the central highlands to the coastal zone, which play such an important role in the novel. (And San José has a big pile of gold in a museum, just like Bogotá.)

Unconventional

Naples '44, and Norman Lewis, then serving as an officer in the British army's nascent security services, records two 'secret weapons' deployed in theatre by the Allies — both with a significant blow-back effect and both arguably deserving of prohibition by the same international treaties which prevent the use of chemical and biological weapons — Islamic sexual psychopathy and southern Italian criminality. 

For the Free French had sent in their North African troops, and this went about as well as the use of Moroccans in Spain by Franco had done a decade earlier...

'At last one had faced the flesh-and-blood reality of the kind of horror that drove the whole female population of Macedonian villages to throw themselves from cliffs rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Turks. A fate worse than death: it was in fact just that...

'The French colonial troops are on the rampage...Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place. Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Isoletta, Supino, and Morolo were violated. In Lenola, which fell to the Allies on May 21, fifty women were raped, but - as these were not enough to go round - children and even old men were violated. It is reported to be normal for two Moroccans to assault a woman simultaneously, one having normal intercourse while the other commits sodomy. In many cases severe damage to the genitals, rectum and uterus has been caused. In Castro di Volsci doctors treated three hundred victims of rape, and at Ceccano the British have been forced to build a guarded camp to protect the Italian women. 

'Many Moors have deserted, and are attacking villages far behind the lines, and now they are reported to have appeared in the vicinity of Afragola to add a new dimension of terror to that already produced by the presence of so many marauders.

'The Psychological Warfare Bureau has been very energetic in its investigations into the crimes committed by the Moors. I wonder if any news of this episode will find it way into the bulletin.'

That sounds all too familiar.

Anyway, 'Let us deal with this...our way' came the response from the good people of the Zona di Camorra just outside Naples. And, sure enough, Lewis reported to his diary on June 4...

'The inevitable has happened with the murder of five Moors in a village near Cancello. They were enticed into a house with the offer of women, and then given food or wine containing some paralysing poison. While fully conscious they were castrated, and then beheaded. The decapitation was entrusted to pubescent boys to prove their worth, but the boys lacked both the skill and strength to carry the task out in a speedy and effective manner. The bodies were buried under cabbages, which were first dug up and then replanted over them in several village gardens, and there has been an undercurrent of sinister merriment in the Zona di Camorra about the prospects of fine vegetable crops in the coming year.'

The black-market activities of the Camorra had been bolstered by an unusual decision taken by the American high command...

'Too many American officers had been chosen to go on the Italian campaign because they were of Italian descent. For this reason it was hoped they might easily adapt to the environment, and this they had done all too well...

At the head of the so-called Allied Military Government was Colonel Charles Poletti, and alongside him is former American mafioso Vito Genovese, in a position of what Lewis describes as 'unassailable power' as the colonel's official advisor and interpreter, from which he has been personally selecting all the key officials in the towns around the city…

'He had been second-in-command of a New York Mafia ‘family’ headed by Lucky Luciano...and had succeeded to its leadership when Luciano was gaoled, after which he had been acknowledged as the head of all the American Mafia. Shortly before the outbreak of war Genovese had returned to Italy to escape a murder indictment in the US, had become a friend of Mussolini’s, and then, with the Duce’s fall, transferred his allegiance to Allied Military Government, where he was now seen as the power behind the scenes. Genovese controlled the sindacos in most towns within fifty miles of Naples. He leased out rackets to his followers, took a toll of everything, threw crumbs of favour to those who kept in step with him, and found a way of punishing opposition.'

The end result of all this is that key supplies that the Allies depended on — such as penicillin — were now easier to come across on the black market than in American military facilities.

And when it came to addressing this increasingly pressing problem, Lewis noted rather ruefully, 'Justice was never seen to be done; and if ever there was a place where it was on sale, it was Naples.'

Scandinavia with Simon Reeve (2)

The second instalment of Scandinavia with Simon Reeve featured one of those set piece eye-openers he does rather well, a visit to a volcano buried and supposedly suppressed by a glacier which seems to be slowly melting away. 

Having already made his point about the historical impact of another eruption on Iceland c1780, with crop failures and famines feeding into the French Revolution, he and his expert companion mooted this potentially cataclysmic collateral impact of climate change...and then departed rather hurriedly from the cave. 

He'd waited until leaving Norway before delivering a proper lament about fossil fuels. 

Though in fairness he had teased an appreciation of the essential hypocrisy underlying Norwegian affluence, comparing them to drug dealers (Pablo Escobar is the one who most springs to mind) who are notably reluctant to indulge in the substances they peddle to willing consumers abroad. 

He did however pause to reflect, ruefully, that we Brits may have missed a chance to be as collectively wealthy and smug about it as this lot over the other side of the North Sea. 

This reminded me that Reeve always seems to have an innate sense of balance in his narratives. (One could even say he has a rather sly appreciation of it.) 

In this he compares favourably with many of other BBC 'treasures', who are often more cranky in their obsessions and less alert to the complexities and compromises going on in the world around them. 

You might say that they take the sensibility of the dinner party with them out into the field, whereas with Reeve there is an attempt to switch the direction of this flow. 

This was apparent in the previous episode when he visited the Sámi people, and it was again obvious here when he visited the boss of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, pressing him on the apolitical, 'bottom line' mandate behind his overall management strategy, which makes it environmentally and in some ways also ethically neutral, placing just 0.02% of this Viking hoard in renewable energy holdings. 

Reeve might have mentioned that over the border in Sweden a focus on faddish eco-investments has been catastrophic for many speculators from the bottom line perspective, but maybe he'll cover that in part three...though I somehow doubt it.

Religion-free religion...

All mentions of the Enlightenment should perhaps come with an intellectual health warning.

Right thinking people cite the E word as if it is blindingly obvious that this late 18th century cultural movement was unimpeachably a good thing.

Yet, as we have lately seen with the liberal progressive ideals that said right-thinking people most commonly espouse today, some of the core notions of the Enlightenment evolved into a dangerous cult...the cult of Reason.

It's not hard to see why, because Enlightenment thinking often involved swapping out the Medieval world's predominant way of conceiving humans and their imperfections with a godless alternative....a religion-free religion, where Nature itself is elevated to near enough divine status.

Whereas previously it was understood that innately flawed and contingent beings like ourselves were engaged in some sort of cosmic drama with the Absolute, Enlightenment thinkers envisaged a more earthly (or at least 'Natural') path towards fulfilment. The idea became that we were not so much born imperfect, but had somehow lost our true selves within imperfect societies. The basic imperative to correct the problem was retained.

Given that this infinity-aspiring imperative was naturally less wishy washy and spiritual, it is not hard at all to see how this replacement for religion might lead to crimes against humanity on an even vaster scale — specifically in the form of totalitarian regimes aspiring to unattainable utopias or at least some kind of standard that is 'out there', but which ordinary human beings in their weakness cannot attain without some robust encouragement.

To be fair, some of the most significant minds of the time anticipated this defect in the programme. One could say that there were two Enlightenments, an upbeat one and a downbeat one. Early members of the pessimist crew were Mandeville and Swift, and they were joined later by Voltaire. It's hardly surprising though that it was the optimists who set us on the path to the gas chambers.

Scandinavia with Simon Reeve (1)

Much enjoyed the first episode, especially the part where he visits that country which doesn't actually exist...Finland. 

At least according to a well documented conspiracy theory which has engrossed a few subreddits. It turns out that this imaginary land mass is actually a secret maritime fishing ground set up as a result of some sort of dodgy agreement between Russia and Japan, and thus anyone claiming to be Finnish — and yes that includes the lovely Sanna Marin and also lovely Valtteri Bottas — is nothing but a crisis actor. 

Strangely Simon didn't mention any of this, but he did take part in training alongside Finland's vast horde of armed extras: military reservists and young conscripts. 

What really fascinated me however was the fact that this country which does not exist may well end up being the only one to exist after the apocalypse, nuclear or zombie, because they possess around 50,000 underground bunkers which, in the event, could accommodate 'almost' all of the 5.6m Finnish citizens. 

There's probably already a list of the suckers who will have the missile-proof doors slammed in their faces with one of those enigmatic grins they have up there instead of chuckles — e.g. Finnish, but with a discreet -ed suffix attached to their names.

The Finland doesn't exist belief system appears to have already experienced a sort of schism, like others we could mention, into one group who adhere to this as literal truth and others who see it as a kind of metaphor for a bigger mystery.

Espandrels

In spite of all the jibber-jabber about perfidious 'ingleses' when it comes to the discourse here on Belize and its territorial apartness from greater Guatemala, long before full admission into the British Empire in the 1860s, that settlement, founded by a buccaneer by the name of Wallace — from which its modern name derives — had been in many ways always something of a Scottish venture, more 'off the books', yet more lasting and ultimately successful than that other one down in Darien.

I was recently struck by this passage from Norman Lewis's A Letter From Belize, which contains his observations from a visit in 1955.

'One constantly stumbles upon relics of provincial Britain preserved in the embalming fluid of the Honduran way of life, and often what has been taken over from the mother country is strikingly unsuitable in its new surroundings. The minor industries, for instance, such as boat-building, are carried on in enormous wooden sheds, the roofs of which are supported by the most complicated system of interlacing beams and girders I have ever seen. One thinks immediately of hurricanes, but on second thoughts it is clear that all this reinforcement would be valueless against the lateral thrust of a high wind. It turns out that such buildings were copied from originals put up by Scottish immigrants, and were designed to withstand the snow-loads imposed by the severest northern storms.'

He went on to say however that while 'The Spaniard took Spain with him. The Briton was always an exile, living a provisional and makeshift existence, even creating for himself a symbol of impermanence in his ramshackle wooden house.'

Over the years I have wondered just how well adapted the 'colonial' style of Antigua might be to Central American conditions.

In modern Spain the nearest equivalent would be the architecture of the cooler northern zones, such as Cantabria. One doesn't come across much 'terraza española' in the south, but this may well be because around the likes of Seville they improvidently hacked down most of the trees in order to build their gargantuan galleons.

The Guatemalan version has a number of perhaps local idiosyncrasies such as cúpolas, campanas and brick vaults all of which can be problematic in the environment: quakes, dampness, exuberant tropical insect life and so on.

Meanwhile, a contemporary visitor to Antigua Guatemala could be mistaken for thinking that the conquistadors built their homes with internal patios so that they could live around courtyards filled with lush tropical vegetation, trickling fountains and so on, but this could not be further from the truth. All the pot plants and climbers are a far more recent affectation.

And so I have been led to wonder whether there might be a kind of reverse colonisation of the building style here, rather like the way the Maya use the steps outside certain key churches around the country (i.e. a bit like the steps leading up to their ancient temples.)

For the 'original' peoples of this land once lived (and many in the most rural areas continue to live) in extended family groups within compounds made up of several single-roomed dwellings.

'The walls of these dwellings are constructed with wooden posts and lime marl (more recently with cement blocks), and roofed with palm thatch or other readily available materials. These buildings are built around an open patio space, usually in the form of a quadrangle, to provide privacy from the prying eyes of neighbours. In many Maya villages, the kitchen is a separate building made of lighter materials, to allow free circulation around the smoky fire. Tools and foodstuffs are often kept in separate storerooms.' (From A Forest of Kings.)

These 'open spaces' surrounded by individualised dwellings sound rather familiar, and were perhaps more likely to contain vegetation than the internal courtyards plotted by the Spanish.

The Roses/A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)

 

Two movies which perhaps deserve to be addressed in tandem, for they each succeed and then somehow fail owing to the pair of leads chosen to front them.

ABBBJ is the kind of project that could never have floated commercially without A-list leadership. But neither Margot Robbie nor, especially, Colin Farrell are right for these roles.

This same combination of commercial viability and artistic failure comes with the choice of two British 'national treasures' to front up an American comedy. (Don't they know that 'national treasure' is actually one of our euphemisms for irritating person?)

However, it is in truth the essential like-ability of this pair of performers and the fact that the screenplay never quite gives them enough reason to dislike each other beyond the core situation of their marriage and its compromises, which ultimately undermines this new adaptation of the novel.

Some way into ABBBJ I started to get this 'I'm watching a live action remake of a Japanese magical realist animation' vibe. So off I went to IMDB and discovered that not only is the director Japanese but the score has been provided by Joe Hisaishi, a contributor to the movies of Miyazagi and 'Beat' Kitano.

I warmed to the fantasy elements, but I feel they would have worked better in an actual Asian film...a film in which the main characters possibly had some rather more interesting episodes in their lives to revisit in this fashion.

In the same grazing of IMDB I also discovered that Robbie is basically Scottish, although she grew up in Australia. Now I can't hear her doing an American accent without also detecting the underlying cadences of what must be her parents' voices.

Frankenstein (2025)

It's gorgeous to contemplate from beginning to end and the entertainment levels are just about comparably unwavering.

And I suppose it deserves a little extra support from us here as it stars the world's second most famous Guatemalan...still, I think, sandwiched between the two Arjonas in that respect.

BUT...

And I know I am going to piss some people off when I say this — some of the same people who were noticeably outraged last week when Nawat Itsaragrisil committed professional suicide via media and Mexican righteous indignation at the Miss Universe event — when I observe that one of the issues I perhaps have with Guillermo's vision is its overtly 'Mexican' sensibility.

What do I mean by this? First of all there is the almost ludicrously stylised representation of European history around the turn of the nineteenth century.

Then there is a tendency — one I also noted in Guillermo Arriaga's recent bestseller Extrañas, set in a largely similar time and place — to add layers and layers of story to the point that they tend to smother the meaning of the narrative.

I have no precise idea why Mexicans like to do this, but I will go out on a limb here — and this is where some offence may be taken — and suggest it is because they all grow up watching telenovelas. (Roman Catholicism may, or may not, also have something to do with this.)

At times I found myself hankering a bit for del Toro's more youthful and budget-constrained output (Pan's Labyrinth, El Espinazo...) for there are definitely moments when it all gets a bit OTT. Those CGI wolves reminded me of the issues I had with Ridley's Gladiator sequel.

And it sure doesn't help that everyone seems to be performing with a pastiche accent...though in the case of Waltz that seems to come as part of the basic package.

I am not an expert on the lore — having only really read the novel and watched the comedy take in Young Frankenstein — but I cannot fully grasp what the writer-director was up to when he re-imagined the other three main human characters in the story. All of them are barely half-realised.

Mia Goth's Elizabeth is a particularly wasted opportunity, given the significance of Mary Shelley and her mum to the women's movement in Britain. In her first scene she looks as if she is going to be a mouthpiece for some interesting perspectives, but we will soon be disappointed and even then, at the dinner table, the most fascinating thing about her is what she's wearing on her head.

It's more easy to understand why del Toro chose to make the 'monster' morally more blameless, and Jacob Elordi's performance is one of the best things in the film. Of his maker, the director said he wanted to show us the kind of emblematic human who could be good before breakfast and bad after it, but I have to say that in the end I found his Frankenstein 'good in places' and not entirely coherent, which is not the same thing.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (2025)

For maybe the first half hour I was constantly thinking 'why am I even watching this?´for it seemed to be little more than a Gen Z update, often quite crude, of an original film with a plot that is almost so simple and familiar that those of my own generation would struggle to forget it even after thirty years.

But then it turns a bit of a corner, throwing in a few surprises, as it oscillates around a range of novel nuances and possibilities, flirting even with what seemed to me to be a mood borrowed from recent bestseller The Housemaid — which is a bit naughty because Freida McFadden's psychological thriller is about to get its own cinematic adaptation starring her of the 'good jeans' and Amanda Seyfried. (They'll have to do something about that ending.)

Here too the final act feels a bit rushed and under-constructed, and throughout the narrative a STOP sign had been portended in a manner that can only be described as Chekhovian, but which turns out to lack the necessary prop pay-off we associate with said Russian author.

 

Ballad of a Small Player (2025)

'Reinvention' is perhaps the key word on the poster below.

As we were watching it the word 're-jigging' popped into my head — a re-jigging of one of my favourite contemporary novels, a result of which a lot of what I took to be the meaning of the story has somehow fallen away.

Lawrence Osborne's literary 'meat' was wrapped up in a complex exploration of how the gambling addict's compulsions might intersect with specifically Chinese notions of chance and the superstitions surrounding greed. In that context the 'ghost story' element makes a lot of sense, which it kind of doesn't here in the adaptation.

'Lord Doyle' tells us that as an outsider in Macau he is a gweilo, a Cantonese slang term for ghost man or foreign devil. Yet ironically in this Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet On the Western Front...) film, not only are all the interesting underlying ideas displaced by visual and performance pizzazz (an odd combo of Wong Kar-wai and Wes Anderson-lite), the native inhabitants of this city have become distinctly ghostlike.

Are extras so expensive over there?

Berger seems to be going out of his way to not duplicate the novelist's fascinating insights into the Macau gambling culture and its clans and outside the casinos he appears to want to limit the number of Chinese people he might show as inhabiting this environment.

This is especially true of the sequence on the island of Samma, here just a home floating in isolation on the sea, but in the book a community (and a cuisine) with which the protagonists are seen to interact.

Screenwriter Joffe has also significantly boosted another non-local character, that given to Tilda Swinton as cartoonish PI Blithe. I can see how this helps avoid the mechanism of flashbacks, but this role seems whimsical and feeds into a finale where Reilly is offered a measure of redemption within a sequence where the film appears to struggle to find a tonally worthwhile conclusion.

So whatever the merits of this movie, and it does have a handful, they aren't the merits of the novel*, and I think this is a good enough novel to deserve more than 'reinvention' by Netflix.

* When first published it was described as one of the best ever English language works of fiction about contemporary China. Berger's film is only very incidentally about China.