Send Help (2026)

V loved this movie, almost every moment of it, entirely unperturbed by its tonal wobbles.*

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian was way more censorious, stating that Sam Raimi, a horror genre native, must have felt obliged to dish out periodic goriness which served no real purpose within the narrative.

I pondered this for a while and have concluded that these moments are amongst Send Help's strengths not weaknesses, probably also necessary for a mainstream movie like this to land its chosen and slightly outrageous ending.

Hollywood likes to hedge its bets these days with audience worldviews, so Linda from Accounting/Strategy and Planning can be read as either a bunny boiler or as a vengeful rather than vindictive feminist revanchist. That this ultimately works is down in large part to a really outstanding and memorable performance from Rachel McAdams.

* May also be worth mentioning that she is usually turned right off by projectile vomiting and hasn't seen Triangle of Sadness.

Let's not be instinctual ostriches...

This is overall a very well-considered and structured piece tackling a complex issue.

It does however repeat an all too familiar liberal fallacy: the imaginary or wishfully-thought level playing field. e.g.

"If you’re someone who is against all forms of worship in a public space then fair enough – but don’t single out one group."

It's not even so much a fallacy as a failure to think. WHY NOT single out one group if all groups are not in fact the same...beyond being, in this instance, religious or ideological groups?

Some religious groups are more externally orientated than others. Islam is one such. And after a very brief period of persecution at the start, it became one of the more recognisably aggressive of the 'traditions' with regard to non-adherents. Christianity in contrast took roughly 300 years to really start murdering heretics and unbelievers.

How relevant these peculiarities of the belief system might be to the modern world and British society in particular is at the heart of the complexity of the issue.

If we extend our concern from religion to other forms of delusional ideology, Nelson's Column has been the UK's ground zero for their large gatherings for some time now.

How ought we to compare men praying to a far more diverse group of anti-vaxxers and crackpot conspiracy theorists?

When England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich in 2001 V and I hurried to Trafalgar Square to join the celebrations, which were irreproachably joyous — at least at first — but the longer we stayed the more we noticed a 'sectarian' drift in the proceedings with the singing and chanting addressing certain political matters, foreign and domestic, in strident, often unpleasant tones.

So maybe here you have your level playing field, not between harmless public spirituality, but between discreet groups in society who use Trafalgar square as a microcosm of the whole society around them and demonstrate therein how shouty — and shout-downy — they would really like to be in the wider public context…like governments that use airport security to show us their ideal MO.

We have to match our desire to be tolerant with an appreciation of the composition of certain groups which choose this space to reveal the drift of their political sociability. Crowd management in Trafalgar Square, a few thousand people in one small part of the capital, can be a canary in the coal mine.

It's a performative space and many of the performances are demanding to be critiqued.

How it works...

 

THIS is how it works.

You can hate a foreign government without this hatred taking over your entire political personality. 

You can hate a foreign government without hating the people ruled by that government, by consent or otherwise, but if you consistently apply different standards to the behaviour of that government than others, you will inevitably reveal something which deserves a probing searchlight: is your hatred fundamentally discriminatory and in a sense fundamentalist?

You may believe that you can hate or demonise virtuously. This may be possible. 

But whether you think you can unfailingly separate good and bad hatred personally is not the issue (nor does it matter at all if you can find a few members of the foreign nation in question who seem to hate in the same way that you do.) 

For the key questions are these:

— Of all the people worldwide (there have to be millions) whose political personality has been overrun by this particular hatred, how many of them are truly hateful in the old school, deeper, highly toxic way? (I would suggest that the majority would fail the simplest of purity tests. Check the comments of a post like this.) 

— Does your version of this hatred, however ‘above board’ it might seem according to your self-examination, inevitably feed into a dogmatic discourse that actively foments twisted ethnic animosity and sporadic acts of violence, much of which is only tenuously linked to the matters which have driven you to hate the foreign government? 

Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die (2026)

 

Yet another one of those movies that is simultaneously quite smart and quite dumb.

Charlie Brooker may have something to say about some of the smart bits (they’ve not only pinched a few of his ideas, but some of Black Mirror’s cast members as well) — and he won't be alone.

For this is also one of those mid-budget, detached IP releases that finds it needs to be lightly yet pervasively derivative across the board, as if aware that audiences now need constant twinges of the familiar in order to compensate for the absence of franchise.

These don't ever result in an experience that is simply dull or just shamelessly second hand or uninventive. It's fun, but has self-imposed limits.

A common enough delusion...

Believing that you can be virtuously Anti-Zionist without being an antisemite is a common enough delusion these days.

It's a bit like being one of those anti-feminist blokes who insists he isn't a misogynist. Taking a committed and discriminatory stand against the aspirations of a distinct group in society to which you do not belong ought to set off alarm bells inside almost any 'progressive' head, but it frequently seems not to. 

Anti-Zionism as a set of tenets was first fabricated behind the Iron Curtain as a way for ideologically-befuddled materialist-atheists to vilify Jews in a more secular fashion. 

The key elements of the world's oldest hatred were retained, almost on a wicked trope by wicked trope basis, but crudely camouflaged so that they might appear somehow detached from the age old bigotry which had engendered them. 

The Collective Jew is recognised as a people for the purposes of this covert-racist and suppressive dogma, but simultaneously denied any of the usual positive consequences of this identity, beyond this new form of fabricated distrust leading — with near inevitability — to demonisation. 

The Anti-Zionist is like a crouton bobbing around in the soup of demented hatefulness. Sure, you might have started out all crisp and untainted, but the longer you stay there the soggier you are going to get. 

What might have been gained...

The Anglo-Norman chronicler Henry of Huntingdon paused roughly halfway through his book The History of the English People 1000-1154 to address the humanity of the year 2135. 

In science fiction literature this is generally not a great time to be on planet earth. Though in some cases we have already vacated the premises.

Henry’s message to his contemporaries was however that the end of the world was probably not as near as they might have been anticipating.

He served as Archdeacon of Huntingdon within the bishopric of Ely, up until his death c1157.

Like his father, he was a married priest. Clerical celibacy was only just being enforced by a reformist papacy keen to prevent the loss of church property through inheritances.

(When they tell you that it exists as an imitation of Christ's undivided heart, blow a raspberry.)

No Map

Over the years I have grown a little wary of initiating any discussion primarily relating to global affairs with Americans. (I'd probably need to carefully qualify this caution as relating to 'many' Americans, but down here this usually segues into 'most'.)

For years we had a neighbour from up there who was patently well-read, intelligent and broadly receptive to other opinions, but just minutes into any debate would start mentioning something clearly very significant to him called the 'New World Order' or NWO.

A populist conspiracy culture seems to run deep in the American psyche whichever end of the spectrum one is dealing with. Maybe they find their surfaces are sometimes so monotonous that they must constantly be looking beneath them.

But this is not the essence of the problem. This is more broadly the use of matters outside the USA as a fairly primitive filter for whatever fairly rigid and tribal perspective they have on matters inside the USA. You might think you are discussing global affairs with them, but in reality you almost never are.

Before their minds have boarded the mental flight beyond the international border, they have usually abandoned any attempt to pack any kind of analytical flexibility for the journey.

So, if the domestic politicians they don't like are in any way involved in global affairs, whatever they are involved in must be a practical and moral morass. And vice versa. And if their politicians — appreciated or unappreciated — are not substantially involved, is it even happening?

An extension of this projection, is that foreigners in general appear lack any real agency of their own. Their actions, and the needs driving them are as of children. (The exception is Israel, typically seen as little more than a malign extension of whatever is already darkest in America's own apparent conspiracy against the world. It's the only occasion when they consider that their own POTUS might not be the ultimate puppet master.)

And any foreign politician who in any way pushes back against an unloved domestic one is immediately heralded as some kind of lionheart, no matter how big a muppet they might actually be. (viz Petro in Colombia, Sánchez in Spain.)

On some levels this is worse than trying to converse with people wearing those distorting ideological googles, because a US passport often seems to add an extra 10-stop filter.

It’s not that Brits aren't ever like this, just not all the time.

There's no question that we spent several centuries treating the world as our plaything, yet today we are more of less capable of talking about large parts of it without mentioning members of our own government in every sentence.

As such we can appreciate a play of forces 'out there' in which we are mere spectators, tempted to actually see...or at least more readily comprehend on some intuitive level that beneath whatever mask we might habitually apply to the map, there is beneath it a face written over with complicated features laid down by historical experiences — a 'road map' to a life which is other.

Habermas

Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, had a lot of interesting things to say, even if many of these tend to sound a bit like the text on motivational posters in a German office.

Anyway, here are some nuggets which shone at me...

"One never really knows who one's enemy is."

"One cannot lead a war against a network if the term war is to retain any definite meaning."

“The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.”

"Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities."

"Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems."

“Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.”

“A 'post-truth democracy' [...] would no longer be a democracy.”

― Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

(And one from the tea room: "Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.")