The Swarm / La Nuée (2020)

Director Just Philippot's last feature was about an acid cloud. Here he turns to another, more actively ravenous migratory pest in the air. 

I came across this paragraph on the interwebs after watching this film about a widow who goes a bit too all-in on her locust-breeding farm in southwestern France...

"Locusts are usually solitary, but under certain circumstances, they become more abundant and change their behavior and habits, becoming gregarious."

After an almost painfully slow build-up, the conclusion of this film felt unsatisfying and a little less 'gregarious' than it perhaps needed to be. 

For the above-averagely bug-phobic it will no doubt prove to be suitably disgusting and for a subset also oddly pleasurable on that level, but I couldn't help feeling that at almost every phase, the key elements — character, story, scene, symbolic payload and so on — were being under-utilised. 

Friday 13th

It's almost as if the government here has learned absolutely nothing from 2020. 

This is one of those sequels where the original format is relentlessly re-trod without anything remotely resembling a new idea. 

Curfew after 10pm? That's going to achieve sweet Fanny Adams.

No wonder Dr G didn't appear to want to linger last night over that hospital beds graphic. With over 4000 new cases a day, even from a standing start, the current capacity would be over-subscribed in less than a week. 

And then there was that bloke amidst the posse at the back on the President's right. It was as if he'd been told 'Come dressed for Friday 13th, overall, mask...the works', and hadn't quite understood. 

One of us...

What if we could raise Hemingway from the dead for a single day and send him off to Paris. What would he make of it? Of Havana too, by the way, but especially Paris. 

I remember a trek back to Cambridge in the 90s, several years after graduation, and feeling a sensation akin to a punch in the gut attached to the sudden realisation that I no longer really knew anybody in town. Not a single door I could haphazardly knock on in order to cadge a coffee or a glass of port. 

Back in the day when I was cycling around, bouncing off one fortuitous encounter after another, I'd knock on a random friend's door and sometimes unexpectedly find other mates already in situ within. And memorable conversations would ensue. (Once we had moved beyond the business of gently ridiculing all those not present.) 

This I think is what Hemingway was writing about in the first third of The Sun Also Rises.

That buzz one gets from being 'one of us' — member of a select group within a select group, simultaneously an insider and an outsider in an incredible town. 

That one could show up at a particular place, the sort one could 'stop in at' without prior arrangement, and have a pretty good idea exactly who one was likely to run into. 

In my teens there was perhaps one such venue in London. Around the same time my parents had several. (Drones*...)

I've never really understood all that twaddle about the 'lost generation'. This has always struck me as a mis-read of those chapters, whatever the author himself said in that epigraph. 

As if a bit of 'directionlessness', as a collective, were somehow a bad thing. 

===================================

Hemingway wrote about Notre Dame 'squatting against the night sky'. In what world does a Gothic cathedral squat?

And...

"Someone had put it on the American Women's Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table."

hoho. 

* Some of the reviews of its short-lived replacement were spectacularly drôle: 

"Seldom will you be battered by such a perfect storm of cloyingly cutesy decor, astoundingly intrusive service, utterly abysmal food and extortionate pricing. Not content with beggaring belief, this odious clip joint then hunts out belief and kicks it in the cobblers with a steel-capped toe."

 

 

Roadrunner, a film about Anthony Bourdain (2021)

 

Many countries have one of these, the A-list adventure traveller, through whom viewers get to experience some of the trickier parts of the world vicariously. 

These individuals are often enough perfect specimens of their homeland. We have Michael Palin and Simon Reeve, two individuals so classically British it's almost excruciating. And then there was Anthony Bourdain, at once the bad boy and the ingenu. 

Like the man himself, this post-mortem is both fascinating and a little frustrating. There are substantial and obvious gaps. The fall-out that led to him switching to CNN, the second fatherhood with Asia Argento. 

The film is made up of takes and out-takes from the shows plus interviews with his personal and professional circle, in the main middlingly successful creative types in whose lives Bourdain must have been like a big bright sun, and there are parts where the focus seems to be primarily on their bemused sense of loss and their inability at times to speak openly about some of the key moments without resorting to innuendo. 

Very little effort is made here to step back from this privileged circle and offer something more akin to an independent assessment of Bourdain's life and work. The apparent intimacy of the documentary is more than a little spurious as there is almost no exploration of the existence he was leading when not being followed by a cameraman. 

I love travelling, but I cannot imagine being on the road 250 days out of every year for over a decade. Perhaps the most interesting revelation is that Bourdain had hardly travelled at all before the publication of his first book when he was already in his mid-forties. (I have visited more new countries since turning 40 than prior, but these are possibly not the most important journeys I’ve made.) 

Both the writing and the travelling were things he was in a sense incited to do by others and so he was perhaps emotionally unprepared for these late vocations, which appeared to become both a mechanism for releasing himself from his demons and for running into unexpected new ones. 

And all the while manifesting, in public at least, as a kind of silver-haired, awkwardly tall and nerdy adolescent. 

The silence is ending...

 A significant reunión, held locally at MinGob...

Worst Case Reality

 

Even in Florida hospitals exceeding maximum surge capacity remains a hypothetical, albeit one that is fast approaching reality.

Here in Guatemala however, the worst case scenario is no longer just a scenario.

Perhaps hardly anybody in the developed world will notice, but it can and should alter some of the main inputs into the lockdown debate.

For wherever scenes like this remain a might-have-been, they retain the qualities of an imagined horror that libertarian mouthpieces can describe in terms akin to doom-mongering. 

The jury is still out on whether lockdowns actually work, they scold.

Last year Guatemala enacted strict covid control measures — in effect a partial lockdown — to some good effect, but then lacking the ability to borrow on the same epic scale to compensate the idle parts of its workforce, now seems to lack not only the money trees but also both the political will and the economic capacity to re-impose even the most basic and necessary restrictions, as the virus in Delta form ravages the population as never before.

Still Rising...

Suddenly had the urge to read this again. Fifth time, I think. 

It's a novel that has haunted me throughout the life cycle. It was an early recommendation from my father and he is present within it, in various guises. There really is no other work of fiction that I keep coming back to in this way. 

My original paperback copy; dates back to 1985, sixty years after first publication 

It's kind of intriguing to compare the things I highlighted last time with my current compulsions to highlight. There are still episodes which appear startlingly fresh. 

And it's fascinating to read about a slow, low-information news culture with Google to hand. 

For instance, of the three cafés mentioned in this paragraph, two are 'temporarily closed' presumably for #healthdictature reasons...

"No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde. Ten years from now it will probably be the Dome. It was near enough, anyway. I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Select." (...which remains open.)

Montparnasse is a part of Paris that I remember only rather dimly from my university days. On recent visits I have generally stayed north of the river. 

Never seen the movie from the 1950s and not really all that inclined to. Ava Gardener, an American, strikes me as a possible poor fit for Brett, but then Lady Ashley was always a magnificent caricature of English 'breeding'. 

I realise now that I have formed various impressions of the characters over the years, but the first have undoubtedly lingered. 

Brett was perhaps the prototype MPDG*, albeit champagne-sozzled. 

And although I remember consigning both her and Jake to the category of smug, permanently 'tight', degenerates in the course of my third reading (in the midst my 30s), she will never quite shed that 1980s sloane-rangery — and probably anachronistic — allure,  a textual receptacle full of adolescent yearnings and anxieties.

*Manic Pixie Drunk Girl

J&J is good enough....

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but...

A single-dose, relatively cheap vaccine requiring only basic refrigeration, would have been an ideal solution for countries like Guatemala.

J&J, rather like Astra Zeneca, became the victim of some over-hyped difficulties and very rare side-effects.

One must always remember that the insane people dedicating themselves to misinformation in the US are not all on the Right. There are vaccination OVER-enthusiasts too, and some of these could just not get their heads around the idea of one and done.

Meanwhile, the 2-jab Oxford vaccine (Astra Zeneca) was the victim of politically-motivated negative propaganda via Russia, the EU, even Australia, feeding off anti-British sentiment.

We have been collectively glued to the impact of politics on the pandemic in the USA and not paid that much attention to the geopolitical distortions, in part because they are reported on to a much lesser extent.

Pfizer and Moderna have actively pushed their expensive technologies, adding to the put downs whenever convenient, just as they began to actively feed the rich world's 'booster' anxiety.

Guatemala duly fell for the blatant scam that is Sputnik V. Other Latin American countries loaded up with the cheap Chinese knock-off Sinovac, which is now proving to be of limited effectiveness against Delta and probably other new variants as well.

Of one thing we can be certain, there will be no further donations from the gringos while Consuelo Porras still has a job.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

Flawlessly visceral entertainment from James Gunn. I don't have much to add, for our gobs have been so resoundingly smacked. 

I might just note that if Marvel have given African Americans the Kingdom of Wakanda, DC has responded with Corto Maltese for Hispanic Americans — and no cliché relating to small South American republics has been knowingly left unexplored. ("Is Corto Maltese a real place?" is of course already prominent in the People Also Ask box on Google. Dudes, it’s the casco viejo of Panama City, and even that isn’t a real place.) 

Maybe they ought not to be too ungrateful, as this hardly cheapens what is, overall, an exuberantly and unashamedly nasty production and the irony levels have been set at meta, and then some. 

Stallone voices over a great, thick shark.

Fourth

A very creditable fourth place, which we would have achieved either on this — the official scale — or the one the Americans were using until late-ish today in Tokyo when they won the Omnium then the Basketball, and thus snuck past China. 

We medalled in 18 of the 26 sports we entered.

That Team GB’s final victory came at the expense of the Chinese — along with the way we took one of their Golds in the diving in the first week — is bound to have made us especially unpopular in Beijing right now — almost on a par with sending what remains of the Royal Navy to drift around in the South China Sea.

Low Bar

 

Don't worry...

 

Some counsel from a newspaper during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. "Do not discard the advice of a specialist just because you do not understand" remains as pertinent as ever.

The concluding item would probably be handy for anyone who sat through the press conference at the Palacio Nacional in Guatemala yesterday. 

In short, we are as near to calamity as it is possible to be without things being entirely calamitous. ICU spots at 95% occupancy; case numbers beyond 400 a day, around 60% of these the result of non-critical social interactions. 

The best way to spin the current Guatemalan numbers would be this: out of every ten individuals across all age groups that become infected, nine won't need to go off in search of a hospital bed. 

Of those that do find one, 70% won't subsequently die, an improvement on the 40% equivalent from the early stages of the covid pandemic last year. 

Coffin Clipart — PPT a la Tortrix

In the absence of formal restrictions, the key advice was for Guatemalans to understand the need to desist from all activity which doesn't relate to a 'reasonable' economic benefit i.e. putting food on the table. 

And there followed the now notorious appeal to common sense, even less likely to register here than it did in England. 

Us Brits do however seem to be collectively exploring the joys of introversion to an unprecedented extent, at least according to the latest data from Sage...

I'd been wondering if, instead of the somewhat arbitrary controls we have seen up to now (restrictions on when one can do things like buy a beer or go for a walk), something akin to the 'rule of six' would work in Guatemala — in other words, an explicit limit on the magnitude of social contacts. 

In practice Chapines would probably end up having reuniones of five or fewer members of family or friendship circles, and more times in the week simply in order to compensate.

This week we have started to see worrying surges in case numbers in countries formerly congratulated on the speed and scope of their vaccination programmes, most notably Israel and, on this side of the pond, Uruguay and Chile. (Though the use of Sinovac in the latter may have something to do with this, as it is not believed to be that effective against Delta.)

Midnight in the Switchgrass (2021)

 

The second movie of 2021 that Bruce Willis appears to have sleepwalked through, the first being the even more dismal Out of Death, which was also set in the boondocks. 

To be fair, audiences would also be well advised to set consciousness to low power mode before sitting through this guff. 

Overall it is little more than a showcase for careers that are on the back slope and an artless layer cake of genre clichés. 

Indeed, the killer himself — played by Lukas Haas (forever Samuel from Witness) — presents as an amalgamation of at least three different serial killer archetypes, even though he is supposedly based on Houston's Robert Benjamin Rhoades, a.k.a. The Truck Stop Killer.

La Carpeta De Los Vergazos

 

Things didn't exactly get off to the best start in the velodrome this time, but have taken a turn for the better since. All I really wanted to see was Laura Kenny at her excellent best winning that third Gold in three consecutive Games and thus deservedly becoming our greatest female Olympian. The crashes have been kind of entertaining too. 

Cycling — perhaps the one Olympic sport where the shenanigans (rather like Formula 1 and the Australian version of cricket) are part and parcel of the appeal. 

That the road race last week was won by an Austrian mathmo falls some way short of 'cheating' in the strictest sense, ditto that unfortunate coming together coupled with spicy language in the men's team pursuit, yet might be considered all very much part of the necessary accoutrements.

Speaking of which, when Maurice Garin won the inaugural Tour de France in 1903 — a feat he repeated the following year — he had been supplementing the aerobic effort via judicious use of a train ticket.

The skateboarding has been an interesting new edition. It too features that  compelling mix of physics-defying excellence and fairly frequent mishaps, leading to the 'shedding of skin'. (The determination of some not to don protective padding of any kind sat somewhere between admirable and crazy.)

'Backside Air' — who knew that there would be Olympic medals available for that?

The format possibly needs some tweaking. It would be churlish of me to moan about home advantage after London 2012, but the Japanese took it to the next level here. In the women's (girls'?) park event the three Japanese girls and our half-Japanese girl were in a different class to all the other competitors, which led me to speculate that they might have had a lot more practice time on the park. 

The men's event came as something of a relief as it was a) won by someone who appeared to have put puberty in the rear view mirror and b) there were no locals amongst the finalists. 

It will be interesting to see how the skateaboarding shapes up in Paris. Fewer under 13s and over 40s would possibly be ideal. And maybe the Brazilians will have realised that this is a quadrennial elite sporting competition and not just a cool party. 

Sky Brown says she wants to represent Team GB on a surf board as well. The waves on the Seine being what they are, the Paris 2024 surfing competition will take place in Tahiti, so she might struggle to compete in both that and the park skateboarding at the next Olympics, by which time she will have reached the grand old age of sixteen. Her brother Ocean, aged nine and already the proud owner of a six-pack, might also be there.

The scoring has been purposefully calibrated so that the women know just how much they have to improve to catch up with the standard in the men's competition. The gap is currently significant, but will surely be closed at future Games not set in Tokyo. 

The BBC commentary, one middle-aged man in a loud shirt over-emoting over teenage flips and someone who sounded disconcertingly like Ozzy Man were perhaps optimal for the inaugural Olympic meet, but going forward, a bit more youth and perhaps more restraint, would be preferable. 

Maybe they were over-compensating for the lack of a crowd, which should not be such an issue in 2024. Fingers crossed. 

Keegan Palmer's Gold in the park skateboarding led to Australia briefly overtaking Team GB in the medals table, but with one day to go there's clear air between us once again, thanks in no small part to a truly wonderful horsey in the Modern Pentathlon. 

We need to be wary of the not-Russians still as they have amassed more disappointing second places than us, but there's no shame in ending up behind them, especially as they tend to have a virtual asterix next to many of their medal-winning performances. 

I suppose that one of the reasons I enjoy this sporting cycle so much is that in my head I am British first and English second. The football always comes with a dose of doubt and self-examination. But the Olympics, with their (slightly) more muted tribalism and xenophobia, gel more closely to my own sense of national identity. 

Riders of Justice (2021)

 

Take a look at that poster. If  'deliriously wry' seems ticklish, then this movie will probably work for you. 

I was almost put off by Dr K's reviews until I remembered his track record on comedy. Danish humour is like a niche version of British humour, in much the same way that Geordie is a niche version of TV English or indeed like Danish hooliganism, aka Roliganism, with its emphasis on well-mannered stoicism and, oddly enough, still a very close relation. 

Calmness is perhaps under-rated in contemporary comedy. 

Here the Danish sense of humour is at its most deadpan, with a clear emphasis on dead. There's quite a lot of violence, in the main served up by Mads Mikkelsen's Afghan vet Markus, who is set on a trail of vengeance for the high probability murder of his wife. 

And it is this lack of absolute certainty that permits director Anders Thomas Jensen to play with the tonality in a manner some may find just a bit too much like discordant clamour and commotion. 

When Another Round was finally released to British cinemas a month or two ago I was reminded by the delayed critical appraisal just how wonderful it was and how these days I'd be truly happy to watch pretty much any movie with Mikkelsen in it. 

Here, once again, he forms part of a quartet of would-be subversive middle-aged males, this lot even more frayed around the edges, an unlikely relay team with a tendency towards lane violations...rather like the movie itself. 

Rarely has hacker culture had such a (dead-pan) deliciously wry comic re-appraisal...

Jungle Cruise (2021)

All the talk prior to release was about how the famed Disney ride and this new movie deriving from it, would be re-imagined in 2021 to iron out a few of those narrow-minded, xenophobic stereotypes it has carried around since launch in 1955. Luckily, for now at least, the Germans are still fair game. 

There have been some sniffy reviews, but we both enjoyed this, immensely. Many of the best children's movies also manage to entertain the adults, as adults, but the success of this one is perhaps the way it can remind the more middle-aged members of the audience of what it's like to be thoroughly amazed...as a kid. 

The Jungle Cruise was the first ride I went on with my father at Disneyworld in 1980. Yet to some extent I had already been on the journey, in 3D, courtesy of my #1 toy...

There are some obvious reference points for Jaume Collet-Serra's film. Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Mummy, The Lost City of Z — and, at a significant stretch, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. 

Yet clearly, most of the above themselves refer back to the sensibilities of features and serials belonging to the era before commercial air travel — such as 1934's Adventure Girl, shot in part here in La Antigua — where the ludicrous stereotypes are an element of the enduring charm. 

And from my own childhood, the lost realm scenario was memorably visited in 1965's She, based on the 1887 romance novel by Sir Henry Rider Haggard. 

A full re-imagining of these tropes to "reflect, not only the best in storytelling but also the values and rich diversity of our world” — as Disney's current batch of imagineers have put it — surely runs the risk of a de-imagining. 

In order to remain relevant and interesting, this part of the modern world's mythology needs to remain both guilty and innocent — rather like the conquistadores represented here: guilty of everything the woke world knows them to be guilty of, yet also wide-eyed, there be dragons innocent, led on simultaneously by boundless greed and fevered imagination. 

And on the seventh day...

Data released by the CDC in the past few days seems to suggests that amongst so-called 'breakthrough' cases — double-jabbed individuals who subsequently show up as covid-positive with the Delta variant — the initial viral load is broadly similar to that detected in the un-vaccinated, though this drops off sharply after six days. 

This would suggest that although the vaccinated are at less risk of hospitalisation and death, they remain, under certain circumstances, a risk to others. 

Tokyo has seen a surge in covid cases which may turn out to be at least partly Olympics-related. Yesterday the city reported 3058 new cases and the infection rate in the Japanese capital now stands at 88 people per 100,000. 

I have taken a pop here before at the Japanese for vaccinating only a third of their population prior to the Olympics, but have felt greater exasperation regarding the substantial number of US athletes who showed up unvaccinated. (It would be easy to forgive the locals for regarding this as near-criminal behaviour.) 

The irresponsible attitudes uncovered by this survey in June are truly astonishing...

Australia, population c25 million, is reporting fewer than 200 new cases daily and has a similar number in hospital at any one time, yet major urban areas have been under strict lockdown recently, and Sydney looks set to remain so until at least the end of the month. 

Like the Japanese, the Aussies have defaulted to insular self-protection over rapid vaccination, a situation exacerbated by an apparent inability to make up their minds about the safety of the Astra-Zeneca shots. 

They have also seemed to be inhibited — in a manner somewhat familiar from the UK — by a donkey-in-chief and a federation structure where healthcare decision-making has been devolved to the component parts. And then there's the fact that quarantine hotels are a bit like beached cruise liners. 

Meanwhile, in the past week Canada has swept past Israel and the UK into Gold medal position in the vaccination Olympics. And they were well behind for most of the race.

Olympic Moments

My Olympic moment of Week 1 in Tokyo was the unlikely victory of Austria's Cambridge mathmo-grad Anna Kiesenhofer, achieved by refusing to conform and, if one is to be honest, by being completely forgotten by everyone else. 

Week 2 undoubtedly got in its own wonder moment early — one that will be hard to beat in a lifetime of Games. 

With one felicitous suggestion Mutaz Essa Barshim guaranteed himself so much more than a Gold medal in Olympic mythology, and made one tall Italian a very happy man. 

Talking of Italians, their new 100m Champion had been heralded pre-race as a transitioning athlete. It came as a relief that this did not refer to one of those matters about which one is no longer entitled to an honest, fact-based opinion, but merely the circumstances surrounding Lamont Marcell Jacobs's birth in Texas — so I was quite unprepared for the almost comedy Italian accent he deployed in his mixed zone interviews, which turned out to be even less expected than his triumph.

Parallel (2018)

Christopher Nolan-lite is definitely becoming a sort of sub-genre, partway between sci-fi and horror, more of a niggly brain itch than an actual brain tease. 

In Parallel a group of millennial app developers discover a portal to the multiverse in a hidden part of the home they share. The concept is almost immediately understated to death when they discover that their limbs disappear into a full body mirror: "That's weird". 

And then I had a premonition that they were about to quote Arthur C. Clarke, which they duly did. And that very selfsameness between high level magic and tech is part of the problem with Parallel, because in terms of elucidation (and philosophical exploration) we never progress much beyond that initial note of humdrum strangeness. 

Our four friends have soon figured out that through this particular looking glass lies a multitude of 'alts' — parallel worlds where time runs slightly slower, which conveniently allows them to overcome their immediate predicament, an impossible deadline. 

Thereafter they turn to other ways to develop themselves personally and professionally, in the main by ransacking the intellectual resources of these mirror worlds. 

Although many of the more intriguing possibilities are left unexplored (or at least evaporate almost in the very moment they are revealed) by the end, the action has donned a cloak of confusion worthy of a more stimulating screenplay. 

The UK: A Quiet Place?

Writing today in The Morning for The New York Times David Leonhardt notes how cases have fallen in places like the UK and India, observing that the virus is "more mysterious than we often admit". 

While he does allow that "much of the ebb and flow of a pandemic cannot be explained by changes in human behavior" he doesn't let go of the one assumptions perhaps preventing him from appreciating what is happenig right now. 

One or two caveats about the UK. It has vaccinated a far larger proportion of its population than the US and has antibodies present in over 90%. The recent drop in case numbers may in part reflect a surge extending in the younger working population beyond the capabilities of the current test and trace system, which is at least partly voluntary. 

But the key thing is this: from an evolutionary perspective covid-19 has no interest whatsoever in hospitalising and killing us. On the contrary, all of our early responses to its spread have tended to reduce its overall opportunity because we a) isolate b) end up in ICU and/or die and c) vaccinate.

So, it responds with Delta, the 225% more infectious version of itself. Delta meets the double-jabbed Piers Morgan and what happens? He goes to Wembley, gets infected and has monster sneezing fits. Bingo, covid has its lifestyle back. 

All it wants to do is reproduce. It is the closest thing in biology to one of Richard Dawkins's selfish genes. It is most definitely not like one of those aliens from A Quiet Place that wants to chomp off as many noisy human heads as possible. 

In the UK it is close to becoming endemic, which will mark the end of the so-called pandemic, locally at least. 

The problem for countries like Guatemala is that while Delta may allow covid to spread elsewhere in ways that no longer provoke such drastic human countermeasures, a more infectious variant 'ripping' through an under-vaccinated population with under-funded healthcare and all sorts of endemic co-morbidities could have truly shocking consequences. 

And for the next few years we may find ourselves in a world where covid is endemic in some regions and resiliently pandemicky in others, with crossover variants providing headaches for those responsible for the setting the travel protocols. 

Maskless

The other night I dreamed I was in a crowded place without a mask. Seems like it is the new showing up at school in my pyjamas. 

This week I've been trying to get hold of a copy of this French comedy which has been showered with praise and awards at home — but the appeal for me comes at least in part from the title, with its suggestions of seasonal topicality...