Seven Feet of English Ground

The Viking era was previously thought to have ended on September 25, 1066 when the invading army of Harald Hardrada, blond, XXXL, saga-tastic King of Norway and claimant to the English throne was defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge (Gefeoht æt Stanfordbrycge) in the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Undoubtedly a more fun battle narrative than Hastings — and not just because we won this one — it is often dismissed as little more than the amuse-bouche to events related in the Bayeux Tapestry.

Back in the winter of '83 I visited York and did a little side trip with my father to 'Battle Flats', the supposed site of this last great Viking denouement.

In truth nobody is entirely sure where it went down. The bridge itself, spanning the river Derwent was made of wood and no archaeological trace of it has been found. Detectorists have not uncovered any tell-tale clusters of weapons buried beside battered skeletons. But the designated location seemed appropriately bleak that morning.

Hardrada had sailed across the North Sea with a host of 7000 keen Scandinavians. They then performed the ‘RO!’ up the Ouse, capturing the city of York/Jorvik.

He was joined there by the English King’s disaffected younger brother Tostig Godwinson, who had been stripped of the Earldom of Northumbria and was aggressively chippy in the age-old manner of royal second sons.

Harold's response was to march his army up north in record time, catching the Norwegians by surprise. They covered 185 miles in just 4 days.

As the two hosts gathered either side of the river, a loan horseman is said to have ridden across the bridge and approached the Vikings for a bit of pre-violence diplomacy.

He offered Tostig his old titles back in return for changing sides. Tostig then asked what might be on the table for his mate Harald, and the rider famously responded...

“Seven feet of English ground, as he is taller than other men.”

Well, that was how Snorri Sturluson tells it. According to Henry of Huntingdon it was only six feet of English soil.

As the rider departed, Harald asked Tostig if he knew this fellow with a heap of attitude ‘That was my brother Harold’, Tostig replied.

The contest did not start especially well for the English. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that a giant Norwegian armed with a Dane-axe prevented the English from crossing the bridge. (I think we can all picture this particular bloke, but anyway, we now have AI...)

He is said to have systematically cut down forty Englishmen, but one was eventually cunning enough to float himself under the bridge in a barrel which enabled him to skewer the Norwegian human barrier with his spear.

The Vikings then did their low block (parking the bus?) shield wall thing and the battle raged for several hours, but after Hardrada took an arrow in the neck and Tostig was also cut down, it seemed like game over.

Yet ‘extra time’ ensued. 

Hardrada’s prospective son-in-law, Eystein Orre, back guarding the ships, launched a counter-attack which Norwegian tradition refers to as ‘Orre’s Storm’. They briefly slowed the English advance but eventually succumbed after Orre himself was slain.

 

Doubts over the back four...

At the time of Starmer's 'sacking', the most salient issue in British governance has been Defence. 

This may turn out to be vaguely coincidental, but the interest of both Putin and Trump will have been piqued.

And it reveals one of the key quirks of British democracy, as when we go to the polls in roughly half-decade cycles, this particular matter is rarely at the very forefront of the election chatter, for we are then in the process of electing our local representatives and the composition of Parliament and only on a somewhat secondary level our national leader — yet we do somehow all retain the notion that an essential part of his or her job description is protecting us from the threats that the Defence budget is expected to address.

Trump has gone on record to say that Sir Keir is a 'nice man' but...windmills.

Andy Burnham will become PM two days before England win the World Cup.

'By Mutual Consent'

We have arrived at the point where a change at No10 is about as noteworthy an event as a switch of manager (coach?) at Stamford Bridge.

At least at Chelsea there does always seem to be a more honest and earnest debate every time about whether the whole problem goes a lot deeper than the person with the high viz, high stresss role at the top.

I suppose Starmer has actually suffered a fate similar to Arne Slot at Liverpool e.g. he ought to have had a bit more 'in the bank', but was ultimately undone to a greater extent by the erosion of his bond with die-hard supporters, rather than results on the field which, whilst not great, were not entirely calamitous.

It's not so much that the fan base fell out of love with him as that they discovered that they had only really cared for him when he won. There’s a certain kind of personal aura which will bleed out more readily.

And it just so happened that a seemingly very attractive alternative had just become available...

Burnham is an Everton season ticket holder.

Hard Coded

Islamic antisemitism will take some beating...especially if we look away from its roots. 

Each new generation of committed Muslims is exposed to a series of supposedly sacred texts which contain multiple antisemitic references. 

There is no direct equivalent in the other two 'desert faiths' in part because they came earlier and there were no Muslims around to hate on while the key books were assembled. This is one reason why all the 'Islamophobia' whataboutery whenever antisemitism is discussed in Britain is a bit of a red herring. 

Now clearly it is possible to be a Muslim who has no issues at all with Jews just as it is possible to be a Christian that's completely fine with homosexuality. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that millions of people in these belief systems lean on scripture in order to condone and sometimes also preach bigotry. 

Or indeed that the Quran has a load more horrendous and explicitly dehumanising things to say about Jews than the Bible does about gays. ('Apes and pigs', 'apes and swine' etc. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:65–66, Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:60, and Surah Al-A'raf 7:166). 

In disparate other sections Jews are described as 'cursed'.

Beyond the Quran itself, there's that 'Gharqad' Tree Hadith, included in the Hamas founding charter, which exhorts the Islamic faithful to go out and murder any 'hiding' Jews they might locate. 

This is representative of is one of the key issues I have with all forms of scriptural religion in the wider sense: one can do all sorts of things that may work to change the balance of attitudes across society, improving people's willingness to live together in peace (which often means not taking everything so damn literally!), but those texts with imagined supernatural authority simply never go away, and there never ceases to be a danger of relapse via a return to the letter of the ancient word...which always appears to benefit from protections that other parts of the culture and the conversation clearly lack. 

(Meanwhile in the US, CAIR is pursuing actions against children who share AI-generated memes connected with nonsense tunes on Roblox which they deem insulting to Muslims or their beliefs. Baffling double standard?) 

The sheer Imbecility...

Like, 'if this bunch of fringe nutjobs are anti-zionist, anti-zionism can't be antisemtism, cannit?'

Yet one can't just plug into this isolated aspect of another group's extremism: Neturei Karta openly fraternises with Iran and Hezbollah.

Here in Guatemala we have Lev Tahor, a highly comparable sect of ultra-orthodox, ultra-insular Jews disowned by the mainstream, and by Israel.

They too are rigidly anti-zionist, yet they are also into forced underaged marriages plus denying education to girls and have been repeatedly investigated by the authorities here for child neglect/abuse and kidnapping.

If I were to amplify just one aspect of their worldview — that a Jewish state must not be permitted to exist before the Messiah shows up — conveniently ignoring other aspects of their beliefs and practices, I would surely be outing myself as some sort of morally-deranged moron.

But many on the Far Left, aka 'wokerati', fully engaged by a set of modern human-rights infused doctrines, are seemingly fine with sidling up to cultish clusters whose motivations are wholly theological and apocalyptic.

And this is precisely why so much hate has been enabled by their public demonstrations. They have accepted as fellow travellers fundamentalisms which are far more committed, uncompromising and ultimately serious than their own.

Collaborations with contrasting forms of militancy of questionable compatibility have never worked out well in the longer term for progressive movements and are anyway deeply damaging to the coherence of their cause.

And it goes without saying that the appropriation of Jewish voices, fringe or otherwise, in order to ziz zag around charges of (the oldest) chauvinistic prejudice, can not only be negligent as outlined above, it is also by nature unprincipled and probably further indicative of the very prejudice it is apparently seeking to camouflage.

Mind the Gap

For the first time in recent memory I found significant empty spaces — retail and restaurant — on almost every block along Quinta Avenida in Playa....gaps which are less Madonna than Mike Tyson.

One has to presume that the economy is now facing challenges from the sargassum inflow, plus the wider international awareness of it.

Nowadays Playa is a city of over 300,000 inhabitants. Coming in from the NW one gets a sense of just how vast the place has become on that side of the 307 highway.

Tourism may not be the essence of all these people's daily lives, but like the sun's rays on planet Earth, it is certainly the starting point of everything.

When I first came Playa was little more than a collection of thatched huts around the dock. in my lifetime I have had no other experience of such a place becoming a major urban sprawl.

V has compared it to a game we used to play in the noughties called Tropico in which, as a bemedalled dictator, one was tasked with developing an palm-lined island as fast as possible without creating the sort of unrest which would likely lead to one's downfall. The rounds were set to a background audio track of the endless TAP TAP TAP of construction work, and for years that was the essential soundtrack of PDC.

Around the turn of the millennium Playa had around 40,000 inhabitants. This, in my opinion, was probably the ideal moment to visit, an insight which cohanits with the more general notion I hold that in general the five years either side of 2000 were the best time to be an independent traveller in one's twenties in Central America.

The earlier period of my own experience had some obvious downsides of its own. For a start, below the Yucatan most areas were an active war zone until the mid to late nineties.

But perhaps the greater inconvenience was one of communications. There were hardly any phones — and I mean landlines, let alone mainstream online connections — so keeping in any kind of touch with the outside world was a complete chore.

I loved Antigua back then, but it would be fair to say that there was not much on offer in terms of basic entertainment and catering infrastructure for foreign visitors around town.

By the turn of the century this had hit something of a sweet spot, not just here, but also up in Playa, which was entering its heyday as the Saint Tropez analogue of the 'Mayan Riviera'. It was hard to imagine just how badly over-commercialisation would subsequently bodge things up. There really are but a handful of destinations in the region which have continued to improve in terms of overall experience since around 2010. (Mérida being the most obvious one.)

And if one wanted to get from place to place, the ADO network (and related terminals) was starting to take proper shape. Transportation had generally been a lot more iffy in the previous era.

The problem Playa now faces is that the annual sargazo plague is worsening year on year and it coincides neatly with the traditional peak periods, such as Spring Break.

Herod(s)

There's almost a surfeit of Herods in the story of Jesus.

The Biblical tale locates Christ's birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who ruled over all of Israel at the time.

This aspect of the timeline is extremely awkward for Luke's Christmas story, which features Romans and a census operation which in turn requires Joseph, supposedly a descendant of King David, to hurry back to Bethlehem (his own and David's hometown) along with his pregnant wife, in order to be counted — at a moment rather like Easter here, where everybody shows up simultaneously and there are not enough hotel rooms to go around.

Some elite liberals are inclined to characterise this extremely inconvenient situation as akin to being 'a refugee'. But as the devout Catholic author GK Chesterton (OP) once remarked: 'An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.'

Anyway, it is fairly safe to assume that during the time of the ministry and 'rebellion' of Jesus, Herod's son Herod Antipas was the relevant Jewish ruler, but not in Nazareth in Lower Galilee up north, then a fairly mixed society of Jews and Greeks, where the 'Nazarene' was most likely actually born.

By this time the Romans had assumed direct control of a significant part of Judea and so were in a position to start with their census nonsense, but it is very unlikely that they would have needed everyone to suddenly rush back en masse to their birthplaces in order to conduct one.

There's one more Herod for us to worry about: Herod Agrippa, a nephew, who had St Peter imprisoned and did away with the apostle James, aka Santiago, an important figure for the citizens of Antigua, believers or otherwise.

As a Gallilean, an area outside of direct Roman control, Jesus was not at first handed to Pilate after his arrest, but instead to the middle of the three above-mentioned Herods.

This one wanted his captive to perform miracles for him on demand and when this didn't happen, he decided to make the self-proclaimed Messiah a Roman problem, for the circumstances were more visibly and dangerously political than religious at this stage for the King and his subject community.

Right now getting the EFF out of here is exactly what Antigua's roughly 1.3m extra inhabitants — such is the annual population superabundance for the 7-week stretch of Lent and Holy Week — are accomplishing, albeit gradually.

Any foreign guests still lingering inside the Casa Santo Domingo who haven't yet done so are probably wishing that they had.

Send Help (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

Let's not be instinctual ostriches...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How it works...

 

THIS is how it works.

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

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

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

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

For the key questions are these:

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

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

Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die (2026)

 

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

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

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

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

A common enough delusion...

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

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

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

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

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

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

What might have been gained...

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habermas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

― Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

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

The Krankies...

In the 'good old days' of Westminster there were two main aka traditional parties, plus a third, the primary purpose of which was the opportunity it provided to register a protest vote, usually, but not exclusively, between general elections.

This 'spare' block in Parliament had its cranks, ideological and regional, but they were never really at the forefront of the proposition, so 'floaters' could do their floaty thing without self-recrimination for indirectly endorsing complete nonsense. You weren't an insurgent, you were like...cross.

The new format which appears to have taken shape over the post-Brexit period resembles that which emerged, albeit briefly, in Spain almost a decade ago, whereby Crank Left and Crank Right appear to have their own dedicated political silos offering the opportunity for something more than a mere temporary tantrum.

The conclusion would almost have to be that Labour is now bollocksed.

Its three main cohesive collective voting blocks — pompous, self-consciously upright metropolitan elites, culturally-marooned white working classes and communities with an imported antediluvian mentality — are now leaking away steadily towards a set of alternative candidates that offer them a credible chance for acting out their distinguishing chips via the various mechanisms of the state.

Labour could dump Starmer, but would likely end up looking like one of the other shrieky newcomers...just with extra baggage.

And all this while the other traditional party, the Tories, is basically still on life support.

All that really remains to be seen is whether, in the context of a general election, the ambitious premium-crank parties will in some way cancel each other out.

The chances are though that 🇬🇧 is heading towards something more like the extremist flip-flop chaos of Spain rather than the (usually) more dignified coalition regimes of say, Germany or Denmark.

Shelter (2026)

The Stath is still out there...making 'uplifting' Stath movies, with no signs of decrepitude and decline. And so all is well with the world.

The Stath is a tried and tested formula, and Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Angel has fallen...) has successfully carried forward what he must have gleaned from those preparations of the Gerard Butler recipe.

The dish has to be immediately unmistakeable as an authentic variant of the archetype, nothing too groomed or gourmet, like a cheeseburger at Claridges, or beyond the paradigm, like Jamie Oliver's 'take' on ceviche.

And what we get here is in fact a proper lesson in how 'derivative' can act as a spur to very pleasant sensations, chuckles even, rather than yawns.

One can practically play a form of Bingo as this entertaining pattern of checked genre boxes plays out.

It's been a while since I've visited Canary Wharf, so maybe they do now have one of those louche underground night clubs where a swarthy underworld boss lounges on sofa on a dais beside the dance floor. This scene was the kind that more usually appears in movies set in Paris, but the precursor which spontaneously appeared in my mind's eye was the club fight in Lethal Weapon. (Having the 'crack squad' all self-identifying with the same bold fashion statement was a nice added touch here though.)

I was also reminded of my one and only brush with the British security services, which began right there in Cabot Square one evening when we were calling Guatemala from a Mercury payphone on the north side of this open area. According to media reports the next day what happened that evening was that a group of IRA terrorists appeared with intent to place an explosive device and were chased off by brave private sector security guards. That is not in fact what happened, but anyway the next day the person we had been speaking to here in Guatemala had a follow up call from the anti-terror bods. It's nice to know that they dot their Is and cross their Ts.

One last major selling point for Shelter: William Francis 'Bill' Nighy gets to give us the dark artist at the summit (though a bit off piste) of MI6 that we was surely born to play.

Mercy (2026)

Set in one of those near-generic near-future gone awry environments which you would probably hesitate to describe as 'speculative', Mercy does have one or two interesting observations to make about the potential use of AI within a justice system — though for plot purposes these have been shackled to the need for an all-encompassing 'public' cloud which offers zero protection for personal privacy, plus a really quite ludicrous imposition of time pressure.

For this set up to work things have to be paced 'just so'. By this I mean the director needs to be able to throw a given quantity of detail at the audience such that they will likely remain satisfied even if they really only take in c80% of it, and the action must propel itself forward in such a way that nobody really has that much time to ponder some of the sillier conceits on display. (Or indeed dwell too much on the overall predictability.)

I have to say that Timur Bekmambetov came through for us in these respects.

Rebecca Ferguson is excellent again, because another of the tightrope walks here is the projection of empathy in the simulation, entirely through facial signals.

It did make me ponder whether AI judges like Maddox might even be a good thing here in Guatemala. In a case in which I was involved a couple of years ago one of the witnesses for the defence (who was not actually a witness at all) claimed to have had a clear vision of the events from a window at the front of a house here in Panorama.

The way that the audiencias are structured here makes it very hard for the 'other side' to point out discrepancies in a timely manner, but an AI judge would probably have immediately detected and commented on the complete lack of windows on the exterior facade in question.

Exit 8 (2025)

I went into this Cannes crowdpleaser unaware that it is a video game adaptation. This belated knowledge adds a substantial gloss to my impressions of what worked here and what didn't. 

The game concept is experimental and sparse. You are trapped in M.C. Escher’s take on the Tokyo Metro. You must traverse the loop (at least) 8 times, attentive to any anomalies which would require you to turn around and reverse your personal flow. 

Kawamura has clearly thought hard how he could embrace the minimalism of this conceit while at the same time extracting a maximal amount of metaphorical meaning, all within a cinematic packaging that never goes easy on the eerie. 

In the movie making trade transitions from a first person source to the third person perspective are often irredeemably lossy, at least in my experience. 

Here it generally works, as we are presented with one key protagonist ('The Lost Man') whose personal crossroads threatens to become an inescapable cycle and although his crisis and sense of existential traped-ness is not one that I might immediately identify with, the film does carry the apparently universal intuition that we are often inclined to settle into life's loops, and perhaps need to be looking out for those missable (and un-missable) anomalies, which will show us the way to move ahead more fruitfully.

I particularly enjoyed the use of Ravel's Bolero — beginning and end — as a kind of musical emblem of a spiral with a sense of progression.