Arbitrariness has taken significant steps backwards since those dark times and the contemporary pattern seems to involve discreet initial stages of coaccion and coercion, with persecution less likely to involve blunt cruelty.
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Sin Pelos En La Lengua
Arbitrariness has taken significant steps backwards since those dark times and the contemporary pattern seems to involve discreet initial stages of coaccion and coercion, with persecution less likely to involve blunt cruelty.
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Spring is in the air...
In essence this is a heady mix of people with realistic and unrealistic objectives. There are those seeking redress for a specific set of grievances and those whose purview encompasses pretty much all available grievances; an aggressive completism that is often hard to distinguish from nihilism.
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Miaooooow
In a matter of hours the Lionesses will be released into a Sydney arena where the poor Christians of Castile await.
And so let this be another one of those periodic opportunities to remind everyone of a few facts about this, the Royal Banner of England, aka the heraldic arms of the Plantagenet family, at least before they decided that the whole of France probably also belonged to them.
Technically the felines doing their passing, guarding thing here are leopards not lions. (I know they do look much like lions, but this is one of those courtesy (courtly?) semantic impositions like referring to a person with a penis as a woman.
Also technically, only one of them is properly English. (I'm hoping it's the little girl at the bottom.)
The marque is property of King Charles III. The English FA use it only under special dispensation from the Crown.
And it looks like the Crown can't be bovved to schlep to Australia on this occasion.
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Purge-atory
La Ley Seca is upon us.
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Guatemala Untapped
"Any Government with a genuine programme of reform faces a blank wall, a time-limit, the knowledge that beyond a certain point lies the wilderness...In Europe, a strong Government is one with popular support: here a strong Government is a group of individuals with a common aim and determination, free from corruption and free from the necessity of clinging to office for the sake of the perquisites."Never before in Vietnam has there been a Government with a common aim; for every previous Government has included the sects, and there is little in common between the Caodaists, the Hoa Haas and the Catholics. One doubts, too, if there has ever before been a Government free from serious corruption, and certainly none where the chief Ministers were indifferent to the fruits of office."
Monday, August 14, 2023
Mirage / Durante La Tormenta (2018)
Another enjoyable example of a genre that the Spanish seem to excel at — time travel or what I would tend to refer to as reality transfer.
In this treatment two cosmological storms over Catalunya, separated by thirty years, enable the transfer of information via an old TV which changes the course of events and relationships within a close-knit community.
Anyone who sat through all three seasons of Dark, also on Netflix, will either tut tut or marvel at the levity on display here.
Mirage is for that reason tonally interesting and generally rather successful. This is a movie which features a murder, by stabbing and followed by dismemberment, a suicide by jumping off a tall building and the brutal accidental death of a child, yet somehow retains the a mood close to that of romantic comedy / gentle childhood mystery story throughout.
As in Dark the action is set in a suburban environment in which almost every character has been content to spend almost their entire lives. Indeed the German series flagged this up at one point as a possible loose end which would require tightening, but then didn't.
Mirage features a protagonist in the contemporary stream who appears to have entered from outside and is the only character aware of the changes that have occurred, plus two timelines which are effectively shut down by the telly-messaging process, leaving one to ponder what actually happened subjectively to every other sentient being left behind in these realities.
In the German metaphysical mindbender answers to these sort of conundra gave me sleepless nights. I slept rather well after Mirage.
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Huevonocracy
As I may have mentioned before, widespread corruption represents the ascendancy of incompetence, because all the incentives start to point away from excellence.
Saturday, August 05, 2023
Golpista
A non-Yank's perspective on the Trump indictments...
The first two tell us stuff about the man. Stuff we pretty much always knew. The porn-star payoff reminds us that he's a sleaze. The documents in the Mar-a-Lago loo accusation reminds us that he's a bit of an idiot, and probably corrupt.
But it's the case relating to his attempts to cling on to power — the only alleged crime he committed as a sitting POTUS — that tells us about the state of America and not just about the state of the Donald.
I think western leaders would find a way to work with Trump if he were somehow found guilty in the first two cases and then re-elected. But not the third. A very significant line would have been crossed in the community of western democracies. And I think we have at least one leg over that line now that Trump has been formally indicted.
And it's hard to see how he could fail to be found guilty of conspiracy to deny every other American, no matter which candidate they had voted for, a peaceful transfer of power. Anyone even vaguely paying attention watched him do it.
The whole world is a potential witness for the prosecution.
Thursday, August 03, 2023
Paradise (2023)
Recently released on Netflix: a German made piece of speculative science fiction about a society in which the human lifespan has been commodified, indeed whole chunks of unlived time can be left as collateral for a bank loan.
It's a thought provoking premise, and unlike the movies mentioned in the previous post, pretty much satisfactorily explored in the plot, though I did conclude that it perhaps could have done with the extra narrative space of a TV format. Maybe that's the plan for follow-up.
Inevitably there was a point where I started to consider how a Hollywood remake might turn out. The additions and omissions are not hard to imagine. Some of the darker themes and outcomes would likely be toned lighter. The action scenes would be spruced up.
They would also find it hard, I imagine, to leave so much that is going on in the background of these dystopian near-future versions of Germany (and the Baltic states) without explicit explanation. Indeed, whole new roles would be introduced simply for the purpose of exposition. The central couple would have 'friends' etc.
Tuesday, August 01, 2023
Infiesto (2023)
Infiesto is a town in Asturias that V must have driven through in the early noughties, because we do indeed recall soon after arriving in the next large settlement on the N-634: Oviedo.
So, not perhaps a stop and soak up the atmosphere kind of place. Yet this film set within this old mining community as the pandemic takes a grip on northern Spain has plenty of atmosphere.
That said, the plot is largely televisual and unremarkable, and the drama is only partially redeemed by the context of early-stage lockdown.
Overall I'd have to say that the thematic connections between the end of days mood in the spring of 2019 and the apocalyptic cult under investigation are not exploited nearly as well as they might have been.
Last night we watched a Belgian film on Netflix called Noise which is basically a cure for insomnia. If not deserving of its own entry here, it perhaps is worth flagging up as another example of a European movie with under-exploited thematic potential. It could so easily have been a proper exploration of how so-called influencers are themselves reverse victims of the influence of their follower base, led to do things they would otherwise have no need or desire to do, solely in order to generate narrative in their existence.