Marxism is a dialectical system, which on some levels means that it is more interested in where we have been and where we are going than where we are at now. (Sometimes emphatically so.)
Monday, October 28, 2024
'Missing Context'
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Monster (2023)
Kore-eda Hirokazu is my favourite director working in world cinema today, and all the finest qualities of his work, particularly when working in Japan and and with child actors, are on display here.
But not his writing, because the screenplay was produced by Yûji Sakamoto, most noted for his plays, television scripts and song lyrics.
Its episodic structure, featuring three re-treads of the same temporal ground, will have people reaching for their Rashōmon comparisons, but these are not three separate, subjective interpretations, but rather alternatively-skewed re-tellings, blending some things we've seen with things we haven't, with an adjusted mix of protagonists, central and support, seemingly with an objective of adding a bit more murk even as some clarity gradually emerges.
Within this tripartite structure, the narrative is a little disjointed with perceptible gaps that deliberately disrupt the experience of flow between scenes.
All this means that, on some levels, Monster feels a bit like hard work.
It certainly didn't help that in the version we watched, the hard-coded subtitles were a little off. It wasn't so much that the language was inaccurate, just that it was rendered came across as mechanical and affectless, and I'd imagine that the precision and tone are very important to this Cannes Best Screenplay winner. (It also took the Queer Palm in 2023.)
We also felt there were a few cultural references that went flying past us, and the ambience of urgent unfamiliarity was perhaps accentuated by the setting, around Lake Suwa (in Nagano prefecture), characteristic of a form of Japan one rarely comes across in the movies.
Freed from the need to tell the story with words, Kore-eda is conspicuously devoting himself to the visuals. He calibrates the colour palette in a manner I've not seen done before, which is both fun and a little distracting (one has a sense of being bombarded with details, foreground and background) and some of the scenes have that exquisite, ethereal quality which one tends to associate with the hand-drawn animations of Miyazaki — complemented by the equally diaphanous final score of the late Ryuchi Sakamoto.
Is Monster worth all the heightened attention (and sensibility) it appears to require? Resoundingly yes, I would say.
(For the record, one reviewer on IMDB commented that the 'monster' of the title is Japanese society and its mores. This is very much NOT a horror movie, but there does seem to be an underlying premise at work in the story that this society can sometimes function as a hall of mirrors, making it that much harder to make observations without perceiving malformations which are not really there.)
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Half Empty
One of the reasons that the Democrats have failed to smother the threat of Trump seems rather more obvious to me than to them.
They relentlessly take the Donald at face value. In doing so they place him in the same bucket as maybe half of his supporters — so when the Democrats call him a dictator, these folk say "hell, yeah!"
Meanwhile, the remainder of his supporters more or less hold onto the idea that what he says on campaign is just the idiot fodder necessary to carry the swing states and that, once elected, he will do what the big business, libertarian elites want him to do and not the MAGA-hat morons.
Some of this lot are (rightly) scared that perhaps, after all, it's not so straightforward to read Trump this way. But the Democrats are doing nothing to address this potentially mythical "just pretending' version of Trump. Instead they relentlessly mock and/or fear-monger in response to the flow of the "just what it says on the tin" rhetoric, which somehow provokes them into this permanent pattern.
Essentially this means that their riposte to all the scary nonsense is only of interest to his base and they take it as reinforcement, the part of scary that's a thrill ride.
It really doesn't matter that Trump should be taken at face value if enough highly educated, successful individuals think he shouldn't be. They vote, they influence, and their position needs a counter-position.
Harris’s strategy of calling Trump a fascist is precisely calibrated not to win over moderate Republicans, however counter-intuitive that might seem.
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Toxic Instruction Manuals
You can argue, with little exaggeration I believe, that the distinguishing feature of the Quran compared to the other holy texts of the Abbrahamic desert delusion, is that it functions more or less explicitly as an instruction manual, at the collective level.
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Sherwood, Season Two
As with Shōgun, it was hard to appreciate just how good the second season of Sherwood was until the last few episodes had run.
The
slow build works differently here though. James Graham begins by
setting up a series of adjacent narrative bubbles populated with
well-defined characters. This makes the initiating drama feel a bit like
a British working class soap opera. Quite soon however adjacency
becomes intersection, at first in a manner which feels a bit arbitrary,
but once the major themes are applied, and the various deeply 'torn'
characters have stated their inner conflicts, it all starts to feel that
much more satisfying, rather like a classical play.
There was a stage where it appeared to be a blend of the original Sherwood with Roberto Saviano's Gomorra...in a good way.
My
one serious objection was perhaps the presence of Robert Lindsay, a creepy left
wing extremist playing a creepy right wing extremist. The overall
effect was more creepy than I really needed. (With hindsight I suppose
we now realise that when we watched him in Citizen Smith, we were
laughing AT him and not with him.)
The
story also tiptoes (I think necessarily, but nevertheless usefully)
around another issue: are individuals with learning difficulties always
innocent, and does the visibility of the cognitive impairment affect our
judgment on this matter?
There were enough loose ends at the conclusion of part six to suggest that we will yet be treated to a third season.
Dual (2022)
The 'futuristic' conceit here is that the dying can provide comfort for everyone that cares about them by having themselves duplicated.
The replacements then have a short period in which to 'imprint' on their originals. Karen Gillan's character Sarah, faced with terminal illness, opts for this process, and the indebtedness it implies, but from the outset there are some imperfections in the replication, minor defects are that are nevertheless taken as significant improvements by Sarah's mother and partner.
And then all of a sudden Sarah is no longer dying, and the law only permits one version of her to persist.
Sarah is clearly not especially good at life, but believes it is worth fighting for anyway. Her double possibly possesses the personality tweaks necessary to be a bit better at it, but the duel (a word I think has been cunningly camouflaged in the title) will ultimately undermine her more self-confident approach.
Dual is billed as 'Science Fiction', but like the scenarios in the novels of José Saramago, it isn't really, for this take on cloning is less of a projection of technology, and more of a fable where the key anxiety might well be social: life in Finland (where it was shot), or at least a society where everyone seems to be interacting in an affectless, deadpan fashion, on the edge of abject misery.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
War and Violence
I will not actively support the War in the Middle East or any other war or armed conflict for that matter.
Regardless of the underlying motivations, all violence enmires the partakers in a lasting debit of evil which can never be offset. Once these things are done, there is no undoing them — committing any kind of evil in the name of good is an ethical compromise one is obliged to regret on some profound level, regardless of circumstances.
However — and this caveat comes from my own life experience of growing up in peacetime in a household with parents and other close relatives who had not been given much choice in the matter, around a generation before my own birth — when a group of people constituted as a national group with a clear collective identity and the impulse to live freely and fairly, are faced with the existential threat of hostility from a neighbour who consistently expresses that animosity in a broadly anti-liberal, fascistic, annihilation-centric fashion, such being the situation of both Ukraine and Israel today, I will not criticise their urge to self-defence (or even their chosen methods), at least not without checking the baggage of my own peacetime privilege at the cloakroom beforehand.
As a child, my instincts were essentially pacifist. But these ideals were time and again tested by the facts of recent European (...World history) and I found myself having to compromise, mentally. Not the same compromise of the person who actually pursues uninhibited violence as a means of self-defence, but enough to know where I would stand should I ever face the same situation as my immediate forebears.
I would still be encouraging myself to constantly evaluate the terms of that compromise, based on my understanding that evil is in a sense always more lasting than good.
Lopsidedness
Each of the key libels the deranged Left levels at Israel has been fabricated in order to impose an inverted logic on one of the significant features of a century-old conflict between competing nationalist aspirations which, in combination with others, render it existential from the Jewish perspective.
These are the essential pair...
‘Genocide’
Not only does this represent a fairly deliberate appropriation of Jewish historical experience and a reworking of the ‘blood libel’, it rather crucially diverts attention away from an obvious lopsidedness in the conflict: Israel has had the means to commit genocide and has not*, its enemies have demonstrated their genocidal tendencies at every available opportunity, they have only lacked the means.
Hence this war has always been an existential struggle for Israel, for the Jews can only really end it by submitting to national dissolution and genocide, where by contrast, the Palestinians could end it almost right away by taking a territorial deal in return for recognition as a nation state and an end to all hostilities.
‘Apartheid’
This is one of the most pernicious, and not just because it suggests that Jews themselves are beholden to a retrograde, racist ideology.
Those who use it have to be aware that non-Jews in Israel benefit from civil and political rights which Jews could never enjoy in a Muslim-majority country, no matter how weakly fundamentalist.
Should there one day be peace, with Jewish and Arab states living alongside each other, it will still remain likely that there will be far more Arabs in Israel than Jews in Palestine.
This is another critical disparity at the heart of the conflict, because it underpins the very need for a state where Jewish safety and self-determination is preserved, and also explains why the ‘right of return’, which Palestinians have refused to surrender as part of any peace agreement, poses such a significant threat to the population of Israel as currently constituted.
* Even if they have tried, they have failed, for the population of Gaza has increased by over 2% since October 2023, with 50,000+ live births according to internationally-recognised statistics.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Columbus Day II
In effect, he's one of those long term assimilators that the Mayan indigenous resistance would likely have singled out for punishment.
As I mentioned in part one, the first Iberian arrivals in this hemisphere came with a package of intentions and plans for the future. Religious and secular motives were often intertwined and difficult to unravel, both then and now, yet it had always been an abiding feature of European Christianity since the religion had been adopted by Constantine, that the majority understood on some fundamental level that a separation of the things of Caesar and the things of God was not only possible, but desirable — and the Maya appeared to have grasped this concept when they started cherry-picking which parts of forced Europeanisation would need to go.
Columbus Day I
Ignorant of the historical narrative beyond the report which had landed on his or her desk, the Reuters hack responsible for this topical piece for 'Columbus Day' appears to have concluded that the evidence now points to the Admiral having been Spanish rather than Italian, which was almost certainly not the case.
Anyway, the basic finding of the study, that Columbus was a more or less closeted Sephardi Jew, has always been an open secret (though not of the Keir Starmer sort.)
But the repressive policies of the Catholic monarchs targeting both Muslims and Jews, seemingly led the latter to reach the conclusion that they rather urgently needed a new homeland abroad where no one would expect the Spanish Inquisition.
The Substance (2024)
V also griped a little about how extreme the finale became. I didn't mind that so much, but it did whiff a bit of one of those OTT endings that emerges because the writer has not quite encountered a more elegant manner to wrap things up.
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
Speak No Evil (2024)
Tuesday, October 01, 2024
Killer Heat (2024)
Monday, September 30, 2024
Who's baking the cakes?
Safe Havens
It has deliberately occupied the southern zones where these two objectives can be served, along with an area of the northeastern border with better access to Syria and its peculiar Medieval-Modern mix.
Those who obsess about the West Bank rarely trouble themselves to ponder the displacements that have occurred here.
Identities and Loyalties
The closest thing to an absolute truth is that anyone who could believe in any such thing represents a 'social problem'...at best.
Medieval Moderns
Wolfs (2024)
Friday, September 27, 2024
Ancestsoz
There are a few things that ought to be obvious to any student of history (...but which are apparently not.)
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Exposed
From some of the stuff I’ve been reading it has become absolutely clear that if the Israelis had just carried out a cunningly targeted strike against a fleet of invading aliens dead set on destroying human civilisation and then eating anyone left over, there are plenty of people out there who would right now be raging against them.
As an information gathering tactic ‘Grim Beeper’ has not only opened a lid on Hezbollah and its noxious network in Lebanon, it also seems to have successfully baited and exposed many of the individuals elsewhere who have more or less camouflaged their anti-Jewish hatefulness (and/or Islamist indoctrination) behind the constantly equivocating ‘progressive’ rhetoric of Palestinianism.
And for some reason this particular incident, against a truly unpleasant corps of militants that are non-core to the conflict and represent a violent repudiation of the key values which many of these commentators appear to live by — an incident they might easily have just ignored — has fully disengaged their brains and scrambled their moral compasses.
You can't really be an anti-fascist who hates to see bad things happen to fascists. This would be like shedding tears over a defunct Dalek in Doctor Who.
Yet this is what the above-mentioned fools have been up to for eleven months when it comes to Hamas, because they have at least partially re-imagined and doggedly re-packaged those exterminators as heroic resistance fighters.
But Hezbollah? Try the same trick with them and the moral high ground becomes a spot with the un-surest of footing.