Battle:Los Angeles (2011)

I'm sure at least one person has noticed that the blogging here has been rather low-intensity of late. It's not something I feel the need to apologise for, as I've been back in Blighty for the past few weeks assisting my mother with her move, and I suppose something had to give.

Now, I have managed to catch a few flicks, and one of these was Battle: Los Angeles, described by Roger Ebert as "noisy, violent, ugly and stupid", which made it sound like just the sort of thing I could use to unwind after a frustrating afternoon in London.

The set-up is fairly simple: a bunch of warlike ETs with some powerful, yet essentially conventional armaments, have landed close to coastal cities the world over and have begun an attempt to establish multiple beachheads because, we are told, they want our water. Standing against the invasion (of Santa Monica at least) is a group of grizzled US Marines under Staff Sergeant Nantz, played by Aaron Eckhart, a man who, on a previous tour against a more low-tech enemy, led his men into a non-specifically sticky end, and was planning to head off into retirement the very day the H2O-craving aliens turned up.

So, what you have is an opportunity to see America's fighting man behaving in an almost ridiculously gung ho fashion on the burned out streets of LA, and it's alright to scream ooh-ra at the screen every time one of the characterless 'bad guys' disappears in a shower of goo, because they are covetous invaders rather than insurgents. (er..)

What are the implications of all this? Are we to assume that America no longer really cares who it's fighting as long as there's someone out there to help preserve its militarist values? Should we think that this is really how America would prefer to see its antagonists, as entirely without face, without honour and without the potential for sympathy that comes with being an underdog in relation to US might?

Anyway, this is one of those ludicrous films that entertains (a bit) through sheer absurdity, but no amount of disorientating combat action can obscure the fact that the experience of this small unit of marines is possibly the least interesting way this particular scenario could have been beheld by a cinema audience. (But then Skyline did manage to present us with another highly underwhelming group of people from whose point of view to take in the destruction of LA.)

Michelle Rodriguez is clearly not especially worried about typecasting.

Grade: B (-)

The world gone bananas...again

The quake and tsunami in Japan last week left me shocked and saddened, but the subsequent focus by the western media on the nuclear incident to the exclusion of almost all other stories has made me properly angry. How much easier it was for them to film foreigners queueing up to leave the country at Narita International, than tackle the issues facing the locals who have no choice but to remain: such as humanitarian aid and social reconstruction?

It's clear that in today's world, there are few institutions that anyone is willing to trust and that right at the bottom of the trust pile sit politicians and scientists. (Ok, maybe bankers and oil company executives are in the mix too.) You might think there's good reason for this, but consider also that they have less of an clear-cut commercial incentive to manipulate us than the 24-hour media outlets.

We may not trust them all that much either, but they have enough of a trust advantage over officialdom to make it worth exploiting — for in spite of the fact that we keep on falling for their scare stories (Mexican flu...), it's still so much easier for us to believe that experts, elected officials and corporate spokesmen are deliberately keeping us in the dark, than it is to wise up to the fact that the global media have been conspiring to keep us all shit scared.

In this case the scientists were out there with real information from quite early on, but the news channels chose to ask oncologists in a different part of the world — or even their weather man — how the 'fall-out' from the Fukushima plant was likely to pan out.

In the west of England, where radon gas is emitted naturally, around 1000 extra cancer deaths occur as a result each year. Has the French government made plans to evacuate its citizens from Exeter? Non.

It's difficult to be sure how many people have died from radiation-related causes since the melt-down at Chernobyl in 1986; I've seen estimates ranging from 1000-9000, but whatever the actual total, it's considerably less than the 25,000 we can assume have died in the same period in Devon and Cornwall.

And if we are to trust the scientific experts just a little bit, the reactor at Fukushima simply cannot experience the same sort of catastrophic radioactive emission as that which occurred at the Soviet plant, and come what may, the particles emitted in the steam won't pose a threat to the population of Tokyo.

I'm currently getting more radiation from the 4 or 5 bananas I eat every day than anybody in the exclusion zone around Fukushima. And yet yesterday I watched a Mexican news piece on how salt was selling out across China and you just knew that a given proportion of viewers would respond immediately by rushing out to buy some salt.

You'd think that the big worry to emerge from this whole appalling disaster would not be whether nuclear fuel is safe in the long term, but what would happen if a quake of that magnitude were to take place directly in front of the bay of Tokyo where 36m people live.

Wednesday was the most irritating day to watch either CNN or BBC World. All told nothing significant happened, either in Japan or Libya, and so the 'Breaking News' mood became rather strained and the speculations rather flimsy. Highly paid reporters who must have been starting to feel a bit like the cast of Two and a Half Men over in North Africa, were briefly allowed back on our screens to report on the slow advance of Gaddafi's forces on Benghazi.

But back in Japan Emperor Akihito showed up on TV, an event that we were duly informed was 'rare', which apparently meant that we were to draw the direst conclusions from it. The New York Times led the way that day in imputing the whole mess to something endemic in the Japanese/Asian way of political leadership; warnings unheeded, information distorted, actions delayed — clearly expecting us to have forgotten both Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon blow-out.

One also has to suspect that organisations like the Guardian and the BBC are to a significant extent staffed by people who like to revel in stoking up emotive narratives which cause massive commercial damage to everyone except themselves.

Now, forget everything I just said and answer me this: why are the senior members of the Japanese government all starting to dress in ugly blue boiler suits? Could it be that they're just about to take refuge in their secret underground bunker? Either that or the tsunami washed up a paca-style container full of old M&S clothes which had been floating around the Pacific for ages like all those rubber ducks .

Hysteria alert

"2.51pm (11.51pm JST): The main focus on this new blog so far has been on the nuclear situation, which is in some ways understandable as it's the most fast-moving and unpredictable element of the story, four days after the main quake and tsunami. But it's worth reiterating – as I tried to in this morning's blog – that a far greater humanitarian crisis remains."

Perhaps surprisingly, of the western media sources I have been following, the Guardian has been the most irresponsible in stoking up anxieties surrounding the Japanese nuclear incident with repeated use of emotive terms like meltdown and catastrophe. If this was all going on across the channel in France I suspect they would tone down the red alert hysteria and take a bit more time to present real, qualified information.

But then perhaps I ought not to be that surprised, because they do seem to revel in the chaos such reportage appears to cause in the world's financial markets.

There's something almost apologetic in the (above) post made earlier this morning, as a rather belated attempt is made to redirect at least part of our attention back to the humanitarian issues.

With the western news media in a flurry of nervous energy, which might in part be attributable to the sense that their two month-long breaking news stint might be about to flag a little, and the Japanese media inherently more vague and reluctant to either inflame or attribute blame, it's hardly surprising how many confused and worried people there are right now in Japan and beyond.

The Live Blog format for online news has many positives. Whereas CNN or Fox can only present highly edited versions of amateur video clips, a journalist presenting footage garnered from various social media sources can leave it to the reader to decide whether to 'invest' in the full version.

The best of the live-blogging hacks have access via their own contacts and networks to so much more (and more varied) information than the rather paltry collection of 'experts' that a 24-news channel appears able to rustle up at short notice. The BBC were relying yesterday on the suspect testimony of meteorologists for example in order to get a sense of how far and in which direction the 'fall-out' (again, not an ideal term) was likely to travel. The trouble is that the Japanese crisis live-blogger isn't watching a finite football match where the action is fairly continuous, and in many cases the inevitable lulls are being filled with either undigested rumour or fairly wild speculation.

Norwegian Wood (2010)

Knitwear notwithstanding, Ahn Hung Tran's interpretation of Norwegian Wood was a big disappointment. I remember that during our viewing of his last flick, I Come With the Rain, we kept thinking Hey that's a nice shirt...oh, how cool is that wallpaper...my God this film stinks..

And although this production is perhaps a whole magnitude less stinky, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to write it off as one big cinematographic toss-off; and that's coming from someone who swoons at the mere mention of Wong Kar-Wai's masterpieces, In the Mood For Love and (even more so) 2046.

I'm also a total sucker for romantic suffering on celluloid; I even welled up a bit during The Time Traveler's Wife. But here I really struggled to connect with the character's story and ended up feeling as cold and dry as Naoko's ladybits, frankly.



In truth, this has probably been my least favourite of Murakami's novels. Yet I do recall enjoying it and that it featured one or two of his standard tropes, which have been excised from this adaptation. (A deep, dark well for instance.)

Most Guatemalan girls of a certain age remember the much-loved 70s Japanese anime series Candy, which ran and ran on local TV for several decades. In it, the eponymous heroine is beset by a choice of blokes, some fey some a bit earthier, who in effect represent not just different masculine archetypes, but also alternative life choices. Ahn Hung Tran has turned this story into a boy's-own version of Candy, with the central male protagonist Watanabe struggling — rather passively it must be said — with his female options, the two principal ones distinguished by the fact that one looks about fourteen while the other speaks as if she were fourteen.

When a novelist writes in the first person I really do think they are latently communicating to all potential screen-scribblers something along the lines of "hands off my text!" Murakami's narrators are generally rather becalmed and socially-disconnected characters, and while their yielding, apathetic perspectives work well enough dramatically from within, once you step outside them with your HD camera, you end up with a subject whose moping inertia becomes less comprehensible and an active source of lifelessness.

As with I Come With the Rain some scenes really do work, but surely I can't be alone in suspecting that Ahn Hung Tran, unlike the author of the source book, has markedly finite talents as a story-teller.

Grade: B

Presunto Culpable (2008)

In Mexico you are guilty unless proven innocent.

This I already knew from my late night viewings of Preso en el Extranjero on Discovery. Although I know I may yet live to regret it, I am, as a result, inclined to imagine it would still be preferable to be involved in a tussle with the Guatemalan legal system, than that of our northern neighbour.

Let's look at some of the key stats that came up in this intriguing documentary. 95% of Mexican trials result in conviction. In fact, the trial is often little more than a rubber-stamping of the 'file' produced by investigating officers. If they don't choose to interview witnesses relevant to the defence, their statements don't go in the file.

92% of convictions involve no physical evidence whatsoever. In other words witness testimony is paramount. And 90% of defendants never see either a judge or an arrest warrant during the process.

78% of convicts are fed and supported by their own families, so the state doesn't really have to face up to much of a financial penalty for jailing innocents.

Two young and clearly affluent young Mexican lawyers made this film over the course of three years to expose what they see as the fundamental weakness in their nation's criminal justice system. The general story is told by focusing on a particular case, that of José Antonio Zuñiga, convicted of a gang homicide in 2005. Spotting that his defence lawyer in the original trial had been using a fraudulent photocopied license, they secure a retrial, but unfortunately the original judge is back for the sequel, and the circumstances are hardly what anyone brought up in the English system would recognise as court of law anyway.

Zuñiga was picked up by the cops near his PC-repair stall and although several people are willing to testify that they saw him working there all day, one witness, the victim's cousin Victor Reyes Bravo claimed to have seen him doing the deed around 3pm. Or at least he did on the third attempt, having produced two earlier statements featuring another gang leader as the pistolero.

One of the most bizarre aspects of the re-trial process is the almost face to face exchange of accusation and counter-accusation made by Reyes Bravo and Zuñiga (from behind bars), the words enunciated slowly and then repeated by the judge. V likened it to some strange school drama.

With contraband versions of this documentary outselling major Hollywood productions at stalls much like Zuñiga's own, and Mexicans flocking to their local Cinépolis to watch the formal discomfiting of Reyes Bravo, the witness himself has attempted to have the film banned across this hemisphere, because his privacy rights were violated when the re-trial was recorded. As of yesterday the ban was at least temporarily overturned on the grounds of freedom of information, and it would seem that the big local multiplexes had never got round to removing Presunto Culpable anyway, such was its screen-packing popularity.

It struck us that the real villains of the piece, at least as far as concocting the file on the original case, losing identikit sketches etc. was concerned, were the investigating officers, and the three we see in 'court' are straight from central casting. At one point the chief detective suddenly turns to camera and makes a not-so-veiled threat, along the lines that if anything should happen to him as a result of this little documentary, se chingaron cabrones. The judge, frankly also a bit dodgy of aspect, smiles nervously and points out that the remark is hardly relevant to the cross-examination.

Nevertheless, the film's one truly jaw-dropping moment occurs when the defence has completed its brief summing up and the judge asks the prosecuting attorney to close her case, at which point she states offhandedly that she's got it all on a diskette and she'd rather not say anything actually out loud. Zuñiga is permitted to challenge her on this and asks her what grounds she has for believing him to be guilty. She chuckles nervously and replies "Porque es mi chamba". (Because it's my job.)

After the retrial had concluded the judge and the prosecuting attorney wrote up the report minus almost everything that the defence attorney and the witness said in cross-examination, and so the fact that Roberto Hernández and his wife and producer, Layda Negrete were around to document proceedings on camera does seem to have been crucial to the eventual outcome.

It's been a year of are they/aren't they documentaries and there were times here too where we wondered whether it was only the cops who had been up to a bit of manufacturing. Hernández and Negrete appear to have extraordinary access to the accused (both inside and outside his cell during the re-trial for example) and their presentation of the defence case is also not without its flaws. For example, they tell us how long it would have taken Zuñiga to walk to the crime scene as if it's a given that he could not have used motorised transportation and although they do tell us that the victim was not known to the prisoner, they appear to dodge the question of his relationship with the other two individuals tied to the murder.

You can follow the campaign behind this excellent film here. Apparently there is a deadline of 2016 for a change in the Mexican constitution allowing for the presumption of innocence, but the government has also recently acquired the power to detain people without prosecution for up to eighty days.

Grade: A-

Dude, my $800 tracksuit...

FOX News has been showing plenty of images of Japanese people behaving in a 'dignified' and 'civilised' manner in the face of almost unimaginably catastrophic conditions and in so many cases, personal tragedy. What you don't see so much of is raw footage like this, of spoiled Americans acting like complete dicks.

This lot obviously hadn't been in Japan long enough either to know that the first instinct of the locals in a disaster scenario is not in fact to steal one's shit, or to know what a tsunami warning siren sounds like. (I don't think it means leave your rooftop position and head down to street level immediately!)

"Cloverfield all over" it might have been, in which case capturing the moment so that future generations can enjoy the clips saved on the mobile phone retrieved out of one's cold, dead, hands, was a potentially selfless act...but it's probably a better idea to conserve battery power. One kid did however seem to think the situation through and judiciously held on to his banana throughout.

Cuaresma under way...

The first Lenten procession of 2011 in these parts. This year I'm going to miss most of Cuaresma and all of Semana Santa, though I'm not really going to miss it, if you get my drift.

Death and the Idea of Mexico: Claudio Lomnitz (4)

Modern historians have a lot to thank Karl Marx for really. Not only did he provide them with not one, but two suggested explanations for the underlying course of history, but also — rather less obviously, because the impact has been felt across the political spectrum of academia — he popularised dialectical thinking, which suits the sort of commentator who likes to deal in coherent paradigms rather than potentially more disjointed facts and ideas.

So you might — as I did — come to Lomnitz's book expecting to find a comprehensive answer to the question 'what is it about these Mexicans and death?', but instead what you get is a response to two alternative and largely competing previous answers to that question.

Undergrad historians, typically one step removed from original research, learn this trick early on. So-and-so said this, but so-and-so said that, and so my own interpretation is either going to be a gutless hedge (aka "fence sitting") or an attempt to create some new and distinct synthetic third position using bits of both.

Faced with a dense literature on the Mexican death-obsession falling into two broad churches — that it descends from pre-Colombian roots in either ancient Mesoamerica or medieval Iberia — Lomnitz contends that it was in fact the cataclysmic meeting of these two cultures and the need to re-establish the hegemonic order after the holocaust which resulted in an apparently unique nationalisation of the death-cult in Mexico.

There is much that is compelling in Lomnitz's argument, but there are always going to be gaps when your answer to a specific question is essentially a response to earlier viewpoints. For instance, my friend Antonio in Brazil believes the candy skulls on sale at the start of November in Mexico must somehow descend from Aztec tzompantli (skull racks), for if there wasn't something very specific in the native culture squished by Cortés and co, why would Mexicans be any more death-obsessed than the rest of Latin America? Lomnitz's hegemonic whiplash argument can only provide the most indirect sort of parry to the thrust of Antonio's intuition.

And frankly, the greater issue for me is that I did not pick up this hefty volume in search of a sociological history of the Days of the Dead in Mexico. I really did want a comprehensive answer the question 'what is it about these Mexicans and death?' — one that delved a bit more into popular psychology and its localised peculiarities for this, at least as far as the topic of mortality is concerned, is my current topic of greatest interest.

Little Big Soldier (2010)

"In a wok the eagle and the chicken are both just meat."

It's the third century BC in the epoch just before the kingdom of Qin unifies China by force and the armies of Liang and Wei have just met at Phoenix Hill and annihilated each other. There are two survivors, a conscripted Liang farmer who has played dead, and his wounded captive, the Wei general, who turns out to be heir to the throne to boot.

The farmer/deserter wants to cash in on the General, whose high camp younger brother and mounted henchmen are pursuing him in order to finish him off. The two men seem poles apart, but come draw closer as they toss around their notions of the honourable death.

Jackie Chan has apparently been kicking this idea around for two decades and bizarrely originally saw himself in the straight man role.

"It's a comedy, right?" V asked me as the armies lined up in epic style at the start. The answer is a qualified affirmative: you are never quite sure whether you are watching a serious action movie or some sort of romp. Tense and quite brutal scuffles are suddenly inflected with comedy and the tale ends on a note of melodramatic pathos, that is in a sense also a kind of punchline. Anyone but the mature Chan could have got the balance wrong here, but he's perfect as hapless shirker who also carries a strange aura of weary depth about him.

Grade: B+

Coco casi chamuscado...

It was his birthday...lucky dog!

Tron Legacy (2010)

Given how remarkably original the 1982 film was, it was startling to note just how derivative this update was determined to me. This isn't just an homage to earlier graphics chips and a pre-grizzled Jeff Bridges, it is acutely conscious of so much that has happened since from The Matrix to the Star Wars prequels. Tron himself has morphed into a kind of Darth Maul, Boba Fet hybrid who gurgles like a Predator. The less said about Michael Sheen's impersonation of night club empresario Zuse the better..

As a sound and light show Tron Legacy is often utterly captivating, but whenever the dramatic tension appears to be building up some steam, and the objectives being pursued by protagonists and antagonists alike have come into sharper focus, the writers dump us back into immobility, usually via the kind of low-energy dialogue that had me wondering whether even Shia LeBeouf would have made a more charismatic lead than Garrett Hedlund.

One is acutely aware of missed opportunities on almost every level. The set piece games are great, but seemingly gone in an instant. Just when we think we're up for a really cool martial arts sequence, it's over. Flynn senior starts spouting some orientalist profundities about perfection...which turn out to be stillborn.

As ever, Jeff's presence is probably worth the ticket price for those who can't get off on effects alone, but his performance here is somewhat benumbed by the presence of his digitally-rejuvenated yet facially-impliable doppelgänger Clu, who bears a disturbing resemblance to some sort of CGI Baldwin brother.

Grade: B(+)

Haunting

Drivers familiar with the roads in the south west of France will have come across these grim sentinels. On many of these highways are an almost ever-present reminder of the location and severity of fatal accidents.

One wonders how crowded the roadsides around the capital here (say in Villa Canales) would be if Ex-Prez decided to erect a cardboard stiff to mark the passing of every bus driver taken out by the maras.

On last night's evening edition of Noti7 it was a full ten minutes before we got to a story that wasn't about armed attacks on Guatemala's buses. The last and perhaps the most appalling didn't even involve extortionists; instead it was what appeared to be a road rage incident on the Reforma in the capital's smartest district, Zona 9. After a brief altercation arising from razones viales, a man on a motorbike (I'm actually assuming it was a bloke) took out a pistol and fired into a yellow school bus packed with young students, wounding the driver twice in the abdomen.

Transcription

In fits and starts I have been transcribing my 1999 diary this year. Reading and typing more or less simultaneously, this has made for a thoroughly engrossing interplay of memories in the mind and on the page with the limited bandwidth searchlight of the conscious now.

Before I went 'e' in 2003, my journals were occasionally patchy and certainly less verbose. Yet it isn't the density of observation that makes this such a jarring assemblage of both high and low-res memories. Re-treading this daily path now can sometimes feel like hovering above a recollection. There's a new dimension to the remembered experience: a fluffed-up context, now enhanced by an appreciation of the sequence of events which were to follow.

On other occasions contrastingly, it is like being plonked right back in the tunnel, with all the implications for vision that implies. Instead of reliving the moment 'in the round', I am suddenly right back on the spot, and all the stresses and anxieties, the guilt, the uncertainty, and of course, more occasionally, the surreptitious sniggers, are back in the emotional foreground. And then there are those truly disturbing passages of text which result in no flashbacks whatsoever.

I picked this year ahead of alternatives, because superficially at least, I recall it as a twelve month period packed with big ticket moments, including a trip to Cornwall with John to witness a somewhat overcast yet utterly mesmerising total eclipse and an incident-packed business trip to Barcelona in the late summer, where I was put up by the client in a 3 1/2--star beach hotel in Calella, surrounded by inflatable dolphins and people with beer guts and tattoos. And that was just the children. (Apparently the bigger, better-prepared Pharmas and the world's extended community of opportunistic cardiologists had bagged all the rooms at the Hotel Arts etc. in Barcelona proper.)

And of course for the portentously-minded, the whole year was one breath-bated lead up to the big party of December 31 — which we experienced memorably here in Antigua — and the package of uncertainties heralded by the new millennium. (No doubt many of the same fretters will have been counting down frantically to December 2012 of late.)

Yet as I proceed sequentially, the wood of the larger meanings has tended to fall from view behind the trees of, well, tedium. How many exhausted early nights I had, how many silent wallowings in the hot tub, weekends lost to VHS sessions taking in all the regular shows we'd missed Monday to Friday.

'99 was also the year after the twelve months before in one important respect: it represented a new dawn for us after selling our baby to a NASDAQ-listed company and, as we returned from our post-millennial excesses, we were keenly aware that we were going to have to be accountable in ways that had not seemed all that important before...and that there were going to be factions forming around the office where none had existed before.

We now had a CFO for the first time, and the weekly Monday meetings she insisted on were where these new realities would play out most most uncomfortably. Former shareholders, recent option holders, and the newbie salaried employees would all have significantly different interests when it came to the now heavily-overseen financials and other matters relating to domestic governance.

Even our foreign masters would be torn: for on the one hand our numbers fed into their quarterly reports and they had their own issues with holders of different kinds of paper (not to mention the Russian default and a very volatile tech market), but on the other hand, the better we did, the more they would have to fork out in the medium term as part of the earn-out agreement.

They were also still snarling from the realisation that our pesky Norwegian managing director had got the better of their array of expensive lawyers who'd missed the clause which permitted a significant portion of our eventual windfall to be based simply on the passage of time and not on performance over that same period.

My former partner, the aforementioned wily CEO, took me for one of those serious strolls amongst the religious martyrs buried in the St George's Gardens boneyard in Bloomsbury. These were exciting times, he enthused, but some of the old guard, the dilettante amateurs such as myself and a few other notable members of the founding few who had managed to get such an implausibly elevated seat at so many corporate tables, might experience the coming year like suitcases which, not especially well tied down, tend to fall off the rickety bus as it picks up speed.

He was of course delivering a message, one that would allow him to step back behind the Doric columns as the knife thrusts were delivered into my back and belly. But this ominous chat morphed into a discussion about what I could do to become more obviously central to the new order; nothing less than a suit of armour forged from rejigged responsibilities — I was to become kind of knowledge gatekeeper and librarian on the side, with a visible role in keeping all my colleagues up to speed.

This was perhaps my first full exposure to the phenomenon I would later be able to recognise almost instantly as 'an initiative'. These are internal company activities, often quite rational and laudable in themselves, which are doomed to at best partial completion/success, because the main reason for undertaking them is to be seen to be doing something. After a further decade in the communications industry I would be under no illusions as to how endemic they tend to be therein.

Anyway, I am now up to March in the diary and many of my potential assassins are themselves little more than a folorn collection of open suitcases littering the highway behind. It had come as a relief to me that the first generation of potential usurpers had discovered that it was they who were not especially well strapped down on the roof. (I have a lifelong knack for simply outlasting my enemies.)

But the very nature of the new media industry meant that the flow of Johnny-come-latelies would continue to surge until the crash came three years later. If the first lot were creative professionals and experts who resented our rather non-specific abilities, the second wave was a collection of pathologically networking, palm-greasing and bean-counting suits, and once they had established their quorum within the firm — and we had thus returned to the pre-buy-out economics where overheads did not appear to have to be matched by revenues — the night of the long knives did finally come for the founders.

We had equity, they had options and no remorse. The CEO went several months before I did. Those who remained had perhaps 18 months left before the bubble burst and the new American holding company shut the whole thing down.

The American (2010) / The Mechanic (2011)

These two deserve to be treated as a pair. Both are (perhaps unnecessary) retreads of the lone operative genre, Statham's new vehicle specifically a remake of a Michael Winner movie from 1972 starring Charles Bronson, while Clooney's feels like a remake of Le Samourai, but apparently Anton Corbijn vehemently denies ever seeing it. Both men have to kill someone they care about, both are 'good with machinery'.

In a sense The American is an oddly-named movie, because where it differs most starkly from The Mechanic is in its European arthouse heritage.

Clooney plays Jack/Edward, a warrior-gunmaker in service to a grizzled, but otherwise low-key Rome-based master called Pavel. Forced to flee the frozen north when — we can surmise — his cover is broken, Clooney comes to Italy in search of new instructions.

Strangely reluctant to use mobile phones, he will only contact Pavel from phone-booths once in the same country as his master. Pavel tells Jack/Edward not to make contact with anyone, but soon he is breaking up his solitude by sharing mealtimes with the local priest and trysts with a hooker called Clara.

Crucially Pavel also told Jack to make himself scarce in the town of Castelvecchio, but on arriving there the locals seem to give him the heebie geebies, so he drives over to the (presumably) nearby town of Castel del Monte, also situated atop a substantial hill.

Now, unless I got the wrong end of the stick, this decision, which I somehow expected to have more plot significance, results in Jack/Edward doing quite a lot of driving between the two towns throughout the movie — making for some footage which is all very beautiful and scenic, but leaving less time for Corbijn to show us how his relationship with Clara flowers into love and less time for dialogue with the priest; which is a pity, I thought. (Much of the tension hangs on the trust-ability of the hooker, but I was rather hoping that the priest would also come under suspicion. At one point he reminds Jack/Edward that he had told him that he was bad with machinery and I distinctly recalled that it was Pavel not the priest to whom that remark had been directed.)

Clooney delivers a measured performance, sometimes a little too placid, but most often highly suggestive of the character's inner control in his workshop which, outside of it at least, is being steadily eroded by a need for human contact and some justifiable anxiety about the various shadows tailing him. Just the thought of what would have happened if Corbijn had instead cast Jason Statham in this role was enough to convince me of the centrality of Clooney to this movie's power to engage.

The mayhem here is on a much smaller scale than in The Mechanic, but pushes credibility even further. How can such a small town support such a large bordello, and a body count of more than one? Where are all the old ladies wandering around the streets at night, or at least twitching their curtains? That said, the car chase at the end of The Mechanic is one of the most pointless ever put on celluloid.

If Clooney probably downsized his pay-cheque to go European, Statham was in turn was no doubt pleased to have finally upgraded himself from the European B-movie scene into a more substantially-funded Hollywood flick. The problem here is that, even though many of us find Statham bizarrely charismatic on screen, the producers here have not trusted him to carry a more expensive movie on his own, and have thus saddled him with Ben Foster as a particularly unloveable sidekick for the duration of The Mechanic. (viz Jacky Chan's earliest crossover films.)

When the lone operative is betrayed by his bosses, he can either track them down one by one and kill them all, as Statham does — leaving room for the sequel he has traditionally squeezed out of his roles — or he can follow the standard Japanese model and die in the process, or, as I seem to recall in Boiling Point (or was it Sonatine?) blow his own brains out having run out of betrayers to kill. It wasn't hard to guess which way Jack/Edward's path lay.

By the way, I think all forms of religious/folkloric/St Patrick's Day processions should be banned from the last act of thriller plots.




The Mechanic, Grade: B

The American, Grade: B(+)

On Evil

In her keynote speech at TOC on February 11, Margaret Atwood observed that every tool has three sides, sharp, blunt and dumb.

The first two are available for good and evil uses respectively, while the dumb side delivers the almost equally prevalent effects we associate with the stupid and the banal. So, she added, a hammer might be used to build homes for refugees, to murder your neighbour's baby, or to accidentally blacken your fingernail.

Now, if I were a 'Christer', this is one of the explanations I would tend to deploy to account for the existence of evil in a created world, for a world with hammers that could only be used to build homes for the needy, would be a very different world to the one we actually inhabit, and a much less ethically-engaging one for sure. The potential for evil is, if you like, an inevitable part of the payload of good; in this world at least.

Norwegian thinker Lars Svendsen recently tackled this most elusive of concepts in his book The Philosophy of Evil. Rather like Niall Ferguson and his 'killer apps' for successful civilisation-building, Svendsen locates four different kinds of evil action:

Demonically evil acts - where one does evil for its own sake (whatever that may be).

Instrumentally evil acts - where the evil is done for a greater goal, not necessarily a good one either, and where the act is recognised as evil by its perpetrator.

Idealistically evil acts - where something bad has been mistaken for something good, and...

Brainlessly evil acts - rather self-explanatory this one, but controversially Svendsen thinks this kind of evil is best exemplified by Adolf Eichman.

This handy taxonomy externalises the issue somewhat, identifying evil acts independently of the mental (and moral) states behind them.

In Meno Plato argued that evil always resulted from ignorance, for who would actually want to pursue something they themselves did not perceive to be subjectively good?

That evil is a mistake — the kind made when one ignorantly confuses building a house for the needy with brutal murder with a household tool — strikes me as a flawed position.

Just last night I was reflecting on two individuals I know here in Guatemala, cousins in fact, who both seem to have a persistent tendency to behave in a nasty way to their fellow travellers on this planet, often in a manner that ends up harming their own cause.

While this last observation might support Plato's position, the key difference I can detect between these two people, is that the 'evil' in one — interestingly, the one more universally recognised as a bad egg — strikes me as predominantly the result of a particularly ropey upbringing, whilst the 'evil' in the other, appears to stem from something deeper, and therefore somehow more evil, in the bloodline.

Of course, this takes us back to the old nature-nurture antimony. I have no more ability than the next person to pry these two biases apart (more on this in a forthcoming post), but the idea of an evil state of mind that is somehow instinctual, certainly bothers me more than one that has been learned, or indeed simply manifests itself occasionally as a result of a disturbing lived experience.

Quaking

News coverage of this week's events in Christchurch, NZ has been fairly traumatising for us, especially for V, who lived through Guatemala's great quake of 1976; a 7.5 at a depth of 5km, which resulted in 23,000 deaths.

Earthquakes of 6.3 magnitude or thereabouts are quite a regular occurrence here; in some recent years we have experienced several in the same year. Much depends of course on the particular movement pattern of the tremor and from the footage we've seen from New Zealand, the Christchurch quake was doing some pretty scary things with liquid.

Still, one expects there to be some fall-out in the near future over building regulations there, because the two big office blocks to come down (and the hotel which is now listing) appear to have been too flimsy for a region with seismic tendencies.

Our house is comparatively tall and this scenario remains a nagging fear for us, even though we did what we could to strengthen walls and foundations during the construction phase.* We have agreed that we really ought to have our emergency maletas packed and ready near the easiest exit at all times. The first thing V suggested putting into hers was her iPod, and I had to point out that that would mean she couldn't use it all the other times that we weren't buried under a pile of cinder blocks.

* The foundations (cimientos and zapatas) go down to 1.5m and there are other anti-seismic features in the main walls, which have special foam joins designed to absorb and deflect some of the forces which could otherwise cause the whole structure to wobble as a whole. The rather worn copy of the blueprints above was the one used by the maestro de obras on site. Here's hoping that the house holds together a bit better than its plans!

The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

I was sixteen and had finally acquired what you might call a social life — in other words regular weekend activities involving members of the opposite sex — when it was suggested by the gatekeepers of said activities (the girls) that we should all go to see Richard Gere in the 1984 film version of The Honorary Consul at the Kensington Odeon.

While it might in some ways have been a girl's film — thanks in no small part to the now familiarly naked torso of Mr Gere — but Greene's novel is essentially a man's book, a book about men making their way within a culture of machismo, men belaboured with the memories of dead fathers (and in some cases dead great grandfathers), men that frequent the local brothel in search of so much more than 'relief', and men willing to suffer poverty and pain in the pursuit of a vocation, be it politics, literature or the right measure of whisky.

It's not hard to see why Greene was so pleased with this late work. It's less tortured and tortuous than The Power and the Glory — Catholic guilt-lite if you like — and yet possesses a depth which it wears rather lightly as he cloaks it in the shiny outer-garment of a first rate thriller plot.

At least until the last 40 pages or so where it morphs into a rather dismal cassock and the Catholic trauma comes to the fore in this final, less worldly section, most particularly in the person of 'Father' Rivas, sadly little more than a cipher for Greene's own battle with the notions of hope, sacrifice and sin and a God who ought to be pitied as well as worshiped.

It's all a bit over-egged, but I did like the exposition of a God in need of redemption: "I believe God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain," León suggests to Eduardo at one stage when the game is almost up. (Take note too of Aquino the Marxist's position: "Of course God is evil. God is capitalism. Lay up treasures in heaven - they will bring you a hundred per cent interest for eternity.")

Anyway, as I recall the movie was of course a lot more interested in this plot than it was in character. I hadn't seen a Richard Gere movie before this one, so had little in the way of expectation except that I'd been told to expect some cooing from our female companions. I couldn't say he was at all mis-cast as 'cold fish' Eduardo Plarr, but from what I remember now, Michael Caine didn't quite achieve the nuanced performance of Fortnum that Greene's text calls for.

I've had this first edition hardback copy for many years, since the day I found it on my father's bookshelf. He denies ownership and we have concluded from the name signed on the page inside the cover, that it must have belonged to a long passed friend of my mother's who rather foolishly opted to lend it to her.

Finishing the job Reagan started...

David Cameron today became the first western leader to head out to Egypt in the hope of discovering who's actually in charge.

My father was based in Cairo back in 1946 and was following the coverage of the recent uprising somewhat avidly. He told me how he dated an A.T.S. girl stationed at a large British army barracks beside the Nile, which appears to have since been demolished to make way for the Nile Hilton.

The British were deeply unpopular in Egypt at the time and the atmosphere was, he reports, "always unpleasant" except when you were in a shop trying to buy something. Just about all the soldiers and soldier-ettes posted out there had heard one possibly apocryphal story relating to that particular barracks: one night two squadies were attempting to return to base quite late in a taxi and had the misfortune to show up outside the gates just as a fairly ugly political demonstration was passing. The Egyptians turned on the British soldiers and began to assault their vehicle in an attempt to extract them. The sentries behind the gates stood and watched, because they had no authority on the other side and no instructions to intervene in such circumstances. Suddenly a young A.T.S. girl emerged from the barracks, picked up a sten gun and fired indiscriminately into the crowd. The two soldiers were saved, several Egyptians died...and there is no word in this tale on the fate of the taxi driver.

Meanwhile, it looks like Gaddafi is bombing his own capital, Pinochet-style. Let's hope this doesn't work out for him. (Some of his pilots are rumoured to be defecting to Malta...)

I remember once having to refuse to work on a brief from an organisation operating within the Libyan government aparatus. I called up the colleague who had emailed it me and explained my reasons — partially rehabilitated or not, Gaddafi is an odious turd and I missed the Lockerbie bombing by 24 hours. In fact the plane I was on had the other half of the ill-fated group of students from Syracuse, who were flying home a day earlier.

Had I read the brief, she asked, because this development body was not in fact part of the regime. I had read it, I replied, and had understood that the general gyst of it was to convince people around the world that said organisation had nothing to do with Gaddafi — a notion which had clearly already taken hold spontaneously in the mind of my colleague without much in the way of budget being spent on it.

*That said, I remain convinced that it was more probably the Iranians and Syrians who brought down the Pan-Am 747 and that the blame was shifted to Megrahi for rather cynical 'diplomatic' reasons. I also believe that Amanda Knox is innocent (of knifing her friend at least), but do not generally subscribe to conspiracy theories!

Toughest Place To Be A....

Last night we watched the first episode of a new BBC three-parter in which various UK professionals are sent out to foreign locations designated as the toughest places to pursue their chosen careers.

Angie Dymott, the Welsh paramedic from Cardiff, handled herself very well during her posting at the Estación de Bomberos Voluntarios in Zona 11, especially as she had never seen a bullet wound before.

Aside from the usual cheap shots about corrupt cops and politicians and the now standard rather throw-away exposition of the relationship between Guatemala's recent past and present, this was a well-made programme. We particularly liked the way Angie got to stay with both the affluent volunteer in his walled 'compound' and the more humilde salaried bombero who resided in a small house with his large family in the pubelo of San Cristóbal.

Overlooking this location, which Dymott thought more typical of a quiet Guatemalan 'village' (in spite of the fact that it was patrolled at night by armed vigilantes) is Ciudad Peronia, where two rival maras, Los Metales and Los Caballos have supposedly reconciled. Even the bomberos seemed reluctant to accompany the Welsh paramedic on her fact-finding mission up the hill where she briefly spoke to an ex-gang leader who has now found God and drives a bus: perhaps not the best career choice for someone looking to get out of 'the life'. The interview was cut short when the gang's current intake passed in several vehicles revving their engines.

Archie, her first mentor, took his charge to the extraordinary Fraternidad Cristiana auditorium, which she clearly found moving. He's a full-time marketing executive who gives up some of his weekend to work with the Bomberos Voluntarios, and although his first dead body apparently gave him a sleepless night, his present attitude is clearly more desensitised. I quote my cousin Philip on this, as he was the one who flagged up to us the imminent broadcast of this documentary:

"She was totally shocked on the first shout when her mentor told her to forget it. He was handling it, breaking into smiles and grins, almost reveling in the power of life and death. No, there is nothing here to save, he's been shot five times, he's dead. She had to accept it and give up her conditioned response; we have to try something."

Next week it's the turn of bus driver Josh, who must be thanking his lucky stars that they sent the paramedic to Guatemala, while he got to go to tough it out on the streets of Manila.

To A Mountain In Tibet

My impression is that most westerners who dabble in Buddhism are essentially secular in outlook and not really seeking the big hit of revelation — though you might say that many of them do so in the context of a certain nostalgia for the numinous.

Colin Thubron's new book, To A Mountain In Tibet sounds like a fascinating read. I was intrigued to hear him state on a R3 pod this morning that historically Tibet has been one of the world's most violent societies, long sporting a standing army in excess of 200,000 soldiers and that many of the previous incumbents of the position of Dalai Lama were either murdered or themselves implicated in murder.

Thubron indicates that the era of the First World War represented the high water mark of western cultural mystification of Tibet, coinciding with the moment when Europe was bleeding its old certainties most profusely.

I recently heard the authors of All Things Shining define secular outlook as one which, while not rejecting religiosity, is not only tolerant of competing viewpoints, actively encourages individuals to adopt as many of them as they might feel comfortable with.

As well as a set of disciplines for the suppression of the self in everyday capitalist existence, Buddhism offers a deeper spiritual heritage for the post-modern notion that the best case scenario for the hereafter — full preservation of the individual persona in the hereafter* — is also the least satisfying from a rational viewpoint.

* Though I grant this might not be such a satisfactory end result for the damned.