'Melanated Sister'

Colourblind casting, even in a supposedly fact-led docuseries, is often to be commended...at least when adequately buffered from nationalistic and racialistic point scoring. 

From a 'neutral perspective' this newsworthily controversial example is no sillier than Welshman Taron Egerton playing the Dutch-Indonesian lead in Tetris recently. 

 

The problem seems to be however that it reportedly comes with a provocative Afrocentrist soundbite, plus the fact that most Septics will not begin to appreciate even the upper layers of this issue.

 

Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from one of Alexander’s generals via some very resolute in-breeding, and so Greek, no hang on a sec, Macedonian. (Cue tedious Balkan bust up).

The Ptolemy clan didn’t marry out much, even affairs were conducted within a very select gene pool, but let's allow that she conceivably may also have been just a tiny bit Egyptian, whilst not forgetting that the Arabs were later, medieval entrants onto the continent, invaders and colonisers, so we are left to conclude that there might just have been some Coptic optics (most honkytonks: huuuuh?). 

 

That most unfortunate term ‘African American’, used typically as a euphemism for schematicised racial polarities in the US, inevitably initiates a form of invisibility for many indigenous ethnic groups on that continent. 

 

The director of the series has only gone and made this oh-so-explicit with her tactless and gobsmackingly patronising comments following the inevitable fall-out on the Nile: “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister?...I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that.”

 

Oh deary dear. So now the only authentic way to be African is to look like someone descended in the main from black Africans from the western side of that continent? 

There is a bit of a backstory here, because for much of the late twentieth century African American counter-culture appeared to admire and lean towards the Islamic identity of North Africa, but has since turned a little more lukewarm on the matter. 'African Americans' are nowadays more likely to be found asserting their birthright to be as culturally insensitive and blithely ignorant as any other sort of American. 

 

Right now there is a superficially progressive tendency for ‘African Americans’ (presumably Rami Malek does not identify as such) to seek out historical narratives beyond the Atlantic slave trade and the struggle for civil rights as a wider source of pride, yet there is obvious potential there for exporting cultural distortions and simplifications which are inevitably going to rile North African peoples for whom ethnic frictions often run deeper and are in a sense more ‘live’ than Netflix/Hollywood is ever going to allow for. The detail is never superfluous…but try convincing that lot. 

 

And observations from series director Mahmoud al-Semary such as "Why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter," are unhelpful at best given that perhaps the more pertinent issue is why people apparently need her to be black, for that is the more obviously counterfactual position. 

 

Anyway, let’s face it, how could this role ever be cast today without setting off a chorus of complaints?
 

That said, if you make a historical documentary about someone else's history and offend them, you surely need to show a modicum of appreciation of how their discomfit might not be fully explainable within your own models of skin tone biases.

 

I guess the best ever representation of this Queen will remain the one in the Asterix books, pointy nose and all.

 

.

 

 

 

Ghosted (2022)

For most discerning viewers Dexter Fletcher's romantic espionage comedy for Apple is likely to end up in their top 5 terrible films of the year. And yet, they are unlikely to find that have been as entertained by the other four.

The critics have been tearing into this movie. Much has been made of the lack of on-screen chemistry between Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.

In truth the Cuban-Spanish actress has been given a bit of a hospital pass by concept, character and dialogue (plus a quease-inducing Cuban refugee backstory) though she could have learned her lesson from that cameo with 007.

But at least she appears to be trying. Evans flickers in and out of zombie transition and he's one of the producers.

All Rather Moot

Somewhat urgent village gathering in the moot hall beckons this week...

1) Why was a pleasant little green space in front of our property dug up for an expensively useless well, when most longer-term inmates of this facility were already aware that any water sucked up out of that hole would be inadmissible for domestic use? Who’s budgeting for the upkeep of our new, white walled zoo with its resident white elephant?

2) Why is our home now surrounded by three separate sets of CCTV cameras courtesy of TIGO? Who’s watching these streams and can we access them if necessary? Will they discourage the anti-social activities of our neighbours? (For example, one presumes that certain members of the local law enforcement community will find a new venue for their vehicular orgies).

3) Why do the men in purple and green fatigues fill the potholes with cement and depart laden with sacks of heavy minerals, like Pedro de Alvarado and his larcenous louts on the Noche Triste?

 

Emily the Criminal (2022)

I would have given this **** but it shed half a * at the last, in part because the epilogue is all right, but in a sense a little too all right.

Anyway, I much enjoyed it and I'm going to have to say why I enjoyed it beyond the fact that I tend to like pretty much everything Aubrey Plaza is in, and that is going to involve a small spoiler.

There's undoubtedly a well set up expectation here that this is going to be a movie about a young middle class woman who experiments with the fresh-off-the-boat criminal underworld and gets in over her head, and let's just say that writer-director John Patton Ford successfully subverts it.

And it's worth adding that Theo Rossi is just as much a good reason for watching this movie as the ostensible star.

 

 

Aftersun (2022)

This is an extraordinary piece of film-making, one that would be a strong recommendation to just about anybody with an interest in the ways in which profoundly emotive stories can be told in this medium. 

 

In her BAFTA-winning directorial debut Charlotte Wells gives us what she has described as an emotionally autobiographical recollection. 31-year-old Sophie reconstructs a holiday in Turkey spent with her father Callum, twenty years previously. 

Superficially rather inert dramatically, the film is an extraordinary amalgamation of available emotional connections which I suspect not everyone will pick up, at least not at the same magnitudes or distribution.

The cleverness of the film's construction lies in the way Wells has superimposed two streams of retrospective awareness — Sophie's direct memories of the holiday as she experienced it in the late nineties with a host of small details often at the fringes of the action which suggest the ways she has since digested the meaning of things that she witnessed or perhaps later imagined. 

From apparently trivial and disjointed moments we are led to transmute from these materials our own version of an implied bigger narrative, with even the lyrics of the songs on the soundtrack reinforcing this alchemy.

As suggested above, viewers will I think tap into Aftersun's wells of joy and sadness in accordance with their own emotional biographies. I could write a far longer piece on the reasons why I got an especially hefty dose, but then the review might become a little too personal. 

I would point to the fact that the times I felt closest to my own father during my early childhood were those when we only had each other for company, particularly during the mornings on our holidays in Spain.

I'm also sure I've mentioned before a fascination with any story set within a hotel, and I discovered here an association with another (albeit emotionally distinct) coming-of-age drama, Éric Rohmer's Pauline à la Plage (1983), an evocative, light-hearted film which sparked my adolescent interest in European cinema.

 

 

 

Hunger (2023)

'Is it good because it's expensive or expensive because it's good?'

This is one of the key questions overtly leveled at the audience of Hunger, a dark and stylish expose of the Bangkok foodie scene...along with 'what is the true price of that hunger to be recognised as special?'.

The head chef as anti-hero operating on the edge of societal norms has become a familiar archetype in the past decade. Lately we've had Nicholas Cage in Pig, Stephen Graham in Boiling Point and, of course, Ralph Fiennes in The Menu. Like the Mozart of Amadeus, these men are celebrity geniuses awkwardly dependent on the patronage of an often dumb and compromised elite. 

Chef Paul (Nopachai Chaivanam) has lifted himself up from a position where, as a child, he found himself licking caviar off a kitchen floor, to be the most sought after kitchen tyrant in Thailand. 

He runs a centralised culinary business called Hunger, but his main trade appears to be catering for extravagant private events: parties thrown by socialites and cryptocurrency moguls barely out of adolescence and those spicy social broths consisting of politicians, the military and law enforcement. 

An unlikely new recruit onto the Hunger team is Aoy, played by the altogether longer-named Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying. She has been discovered operating a wok at her family noodle shop by Chef Paul's underling Tone and, clearly gifted with a natural talent for frying, soon has to establish herself on the team by perfectly flame-cooking the most expensive, thin-slice cuts of beef (A5 Wagyu).

Chuengcharoensukying is a former model with possibly the most beautifully-encased eyes I have ever come across, and in this film it's these work well in combination with a series of sudden jetitas that tweak her facial muscles, thus projecting her see-saw journey between gratification and consternation in this unfamiliar world. Crucially, Aoy arrives at a moral compass moment around the midpoint.

Her boss has come to see himself as above the law and above taste and yet recognises that the only way for him to escape prejudice is to twist it to his own ends. And even as we see that, on some levels, his pandering to the rich can benefit the poor, he firmly believes the notion that food can be made with love is the sentimental excuse of those mired in poverty. 

Aoy is the bearer of a hand-me-down recipe for ('cry baby') noodles which embodies a clear counter-argument. It's clear that director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri ultimately wishes all the decent folk amongst his audience to ultimately understand that they'd much rather consume a dish prepared by Aoy than Paul. Indeed, he reminds us of his previous gigs in the horror genre almost every time Paul's morsels are consumed.

Beef (Netflix)

 

Like most of its leading characters, Lee Sung Jin's Beef is full of flaws and it takes a while to appreciate these as more endearing than downright annoying.

There was enough entertainment value alone to keep us going through to say episode five, (where things start to properly take off) but I did ponder whether the killer Netflix algorithms had been stirred by completion rates. Anyway, my doubts largely stayed in Vegas. 

The protagonists and their secondaries are complex and yet subtle individuals and they all seem to need a bit of narrative space to properly calibrate within the story. (V was led to speculate whether they had a full roadmap for the story when they started out.)

One of the aforementioned flaws is that the quality of the writing for dialogue fluctuates and is sometimes at its weakest in the most crucial moments. Not really a spoiler, but the ending is disappointingly ambiguous in its ambiguity. I suppose there might just be a follow up to this 'limited' series. 

 

I remember how South Asians forced their way into the televisual mainstream in the UK in part by playing up to stereotypes — sometimes a little worryingly — and there have been signs of a similar phenomenon in the US as East Asians seize their moment in both film and TV. 

 

I think I can also see a pattern in Netflix shows in which we come across female characters who have achieved wealth and status in America via an activity which would barely scrape them a living anywhere else  e.g. ‘Plant Lady’ — though Amy here does seem to know how to survive in the dry wilderness, more or less. 

Here however this does ultimately seem to be part of the existential enigma under examination along with the essentially corrupting and self-hatred inducing nature of the Californian variant of material aspiration.

 

 

Escape the Matrix

 

I’m not a huge fan of these, but this one definitely gets a pass.

 

 

Bukowski's Bar (@cafebreriaelpendulo on Calle Hamburgo) will also on request provide — ungrudgingly — a slickly emplasticado, beautifully designed visual guide to their food and drink offerings. 

I remember the first time I was refused a paper menu. It was in Manhattan, mid-pandemic, and I pulled my best hapless tourist routine, and as there really weren’t many outsiders in New York at that time, they duly sympathised with me and located a slight tatty old list of their victuals, complete with pre-inflation pricing.

But then, last year I was again refused a paper menu in Colombia, along with some pompous posturing. This was almost a walk-out moment, yet I was detained by the challenging assertion of the waiter that this was somehow MY problem to resolve.

I’m not some sort of slavering luddite. I established myself in the field of technology, but that also means I have a few opinions around appropriate use.

As a traveller, I know how hard it can be to keep a single device charged during an active day right through to dinner time without juggling opportunity costs i.e. do I shoot that video or is my tummy rumbling a bit too much already?

 

And in this particular city I anyway lost my roaming privileges for extended periods.

Beyond these perhaps personal gripes, there are some other matters at stake here. If I were a dad I believe I would resent the implication that I could not so easily regulate my offsprings’ use of connected devices at dinnertime. (This works the other way a bit too: the etiquette of dining out was imposed on me from a very young age, yet once I had been seen to absorb it, I was permitted a degree of independence, such as my own menu, which I valued.)

And then there are some rather obvious usability issues. In their latter years I watched my own parents struggle with large print tabloid-format menus. And even at my age I am yet to find a QR-accessed presentation as easy to navigate intuitively as any printed one.

And let’s face it, Colombia, along with Guatemala and Mexico recently showed themselves incapable of competently coding and deploying a fully-useable online health verification form for all visitors — and this against a backdrop of what I would describe as an overall decline in consideration for accessibility and usability across all Web platforms in the past decade or so, but with mobile a particular offender. (I reckon el Feis insensitised us all to terrible interface design.)

 

Anyway, try this wooden one out. First one takes a nostalgic trip back to a late 90s landing page and then, if Comidas y Cenas are selected, one reaches a barely readable PDF presentation of the printed menu. 

Fallen Column

 

I do not believe in ghosts, palmistry, John Cage, love or God > Gore Vidal, former resident of La Antigua Guatemala.

 

He lived in the house next door to the ruins of El Carmen. 

 

Anaïs Nin visited him there at a time when he was laid low by a near fatal case of Hepatitis A, picked up, he claimed, from eating from pots in the market. (Possibly in front of what is now the Cooperación Española, but before the big quake of '76, the parque central was also still used for stalls.)

 

In the 40s, visitors to Vidal's house reported a single fallen column from the convent lying across the entrance to his living room, which guests had to navigate around.

All of Antigua

In my recent post about El Manhattan you might have gathered how one might have struggled to find anywhere even remotely resembling a zona viva in Antigua back in the eighties — I mean, just how effortlessly did the city's single 'hot' nightspot transition into life as a supermarket? 

It wasn't until the early nineties that Antigua started to reinvent itself as a playground, the key drivers at first being the potential players from the capital, but soon the tourists were also taking their assigned role, particularly as the number of Spanish schools began to contract and a less serious sort of visitor started to predominate. 

From the very first day I came here it was clear that the life in Antigua had a strange underside or undersides. (Viz the 'retired' goose-steppers that used to gather for lunch at Welten.) What has changed over the years is the make-up of these semi-sequestered shadow worlds. 

In the early phases of transformation the old conservative elites remained resolutely dug in and the new commercial would-be elites, also mostly Chapines, faced off against them across a still very perceptible No-Man's Land. Yet, as with almost all unfilled spaces in Antigua, this was soon chocka with random people, many of them outsiders.  

As time did its thing with the generations, the battle lines became even more blurred as the younger members of older families became more overtly commercial in their instincts. 

At some point a bizarre new subculture emerged, consisting of individuals you might think would struggle to attain even a level of passable mediocrity in any other environment, but have somehow risen to the top of Panza Verde society — or at least that's how many seem to see it. Chefs, painters, writers, lawyers (oh God, the lawyers), restauranteurs, architects etc. 

On the face of it this should be a largely harmless phenomenon. That's how I saw it for quite a while, but then the nocuous personal experiences started to stack up and I began to peer a bit deeper at this apparent anomaly. 

When you have a well-connected clique of individuals with a strong yet largely delusional sense of personal authority, there is untold potential for detrimental behaviour. 

Maybe delusional is the wrong word, because I think it is clear that many of these people are in fact broadly aware that they could not behave the way they do anywhere else and this must be stoking the temptation to act like a dick. 

Anyway the effect of all this is that there are now multiple groups of joined-up individuals here who think they own the place, so the old model of straightforward polarity between old and new money, upcoming and past it, has to be set aside. 

Which brings me to a slightly tangential matter.

One of my mother’s favoured prefixes to any highly subjective opinion was “All of London"...with its implied mass collective reinforcement. 

 

My response was typically an eye-roll much like this…

Only very occasionally did I bother to point out that we were living in a city of around ten million people.

In effect, “All of London knows...” meant that a small subset of those she regarded as belonging to high society possessed some sort of privileged knowledge. 

 

Of course, only a subset of this subset were leading what might semi-subjectively be regarded as significant lives, such that the uncounted remainder of the city's population might have needed to care about the contents of their heads.

Anyway, a phrasing which seemed patently absurd in the UK capital back then is far more jarring in its Panza Verde equivalent, even in reference to what is overall, a significantly smaller concentration of human beings.

Nevertheless one does hear it and — even more face-plantingly — it is sometimes uttered in English: "All of Antigua...",  by non-natives who have assumed a sense of ownership and status here, often of the sort outlined above. 

My take on this is that the best one can really hope for here as an individual immigrant is to be known for one's essence. e.g. "he's a good bloke". Any craving for, or projection of, a greater significance is borderline pathetic and likely to be socially undesirable.

Inside (2023)

A movie, in which a man is almost obliged to treat another man's valuables (so very valuable...) as things of no value, a situation we may have come across before in numerous post-apocalyptic treatments, but here instead we have an art thief, a character called Nemo with a real sense of the lasting value of art, trapped inside a sort of high rise personal museum and thus subjected to an individual end of the world outcome.

 

We were both absolutely riveted from beginning to end, yet afterwards when I sought out some corroboration on the interwebs instead came across a slew of fairly sniffy reviews. 

Undeterred, I reflected that much of this reminded me of sections of the critical response to Triangle of Sadness. I am not sure if this is an American thing or a Millennial thing, but there appears to be a novel orthodoxy out there which requires any story straying into social critique to come sparkling clean about where it stands on ‘rich people’ or controversial cultural issues in general. Ambiguity is fully cancel-able.

The complaint is framed as an exciting premise that the writer and/or director somehow under-exploited. For sure, various directions in which this particular situation might have progressed are explicitly teased, yet ultimately left implicit. What's wrong with that? 

Also, if you observe the art in the background, much of it has this same hard-to-pin-down quality, and one must always remember that the now notorious metropolitan elite which creates the value here, however opposed to the status quo and pro social justice they might be, have never had any desire to see their sophisticated world sacked and burned by barbarians. So the digs at Ruben Östlund's insider-satire leave me thoroughly undaunted. 

I think I may have been recently guilty myself of wanting another visually stunning yet ultimately indefinite movie — Infinity Pool  — to be the film I might have made myself given the basic idea scribbled on a napkin. That's just silly.*

Anyway, Inside is a firm recommendation, a rare one-hander that finds interesting and not too absurd ways to overcome the limitations established by the single character in constrained circumstances conceit. And Willem Dafoe has become the embodiment of must-see-cinema in the US.

 

* We might however have preferred that just as Nemo had an electronic window on the outside world, that the outside world had a way of looking in on him. That said, not showing what he could observe with the telescope was a masterstroke.

 

 

 

Mestizaje

 

Chetumal 

Mestizaje, the officially-sanctioned method for biologically blending European and American bits in these parts, would arrive as something of an afterthought. 

For the first Spaniards to show up on the peninsula, indeed anywhere in what is now Mexico — albeit via the misadventure of the 1511 Valdivia shipwreck — were fattened up in cages and ritually eaten by a ravenous Mayan cacique.

All but two that is, for a pair of them escaped and found shelter with rival chieftains who seemingly saw them as more than a source of sacred protein.

One of this famous duo of survivors, Gonzalo Guerrero, went properly native and has since earned himself the dubious honour of being the subject of an endlessly “in production” biopic entitled Maya Lord, to be directed by 2012’s Roland Emmerich.

The other, Jerónimo de Aguilar, a man of the cloth, bumped into Cortés on Cozumel 8 years on and became a key part of his mammalian ‘babel fish’.

This two factor authentication system started with La Malinche — forever the sour aftertaste of Mexican miscegenation — who would translate Náhuatl into Mayan for the would-be conquerors, and then the recovered priest duly provided the crucial second stage of the process, rendering Mayan into Castellano.

Chetumal 

Tongue-tied

​Although I communicate textually in English pretty much every day, all day, and do still tend to think that language, in the six years since I was last in the UK, significant opportunities to speak English, at least with other native speakers, have dried up a bit...and when they do occur — such as in Belize last September — the conversation typically commences for me with a worrying sensation of impending jaw malfunction. 

Glaring Ghosts

Back in the day Antigua was full of small bookshops selling rather small books, many of which were about its famous fantasmas. 

It was then possible to speculate that the city belonged to its disembodied inhabitants, the rest of us just passing through. Nowadays of course, if any ghosts remain, they must have moved out to special gated communities laid down on the fringes, and will tend to limit their time spent haunting the historical centre...avoiding Antigua at the weekends, heaven forbid, so to speak.

It's been one of those weeks when I have been attentive to our own ghosts, in particular to the frankly absurd number of people of our acquaintance here in Guatemala, lost to either acts of senseless violence or silly, avoidable accidents.

One family has become emblematic of this dark phenomenon for us. Three brothers: one died in his car outside a bank in the capital, riddled with bullets. Just a few years before another had perished an insidiously dumb industrial accident. One remains.

 

Yesterday I had a sudden flashback to an evening at El Manhattan, a night club (panic not, the British rather than the Guatemalan variety, with the g and h in proper position) in Antigua, which now goes by the name of La Bodegona. 

 

You can still see the little arched niche of the taquilla out front.

The bar was located more or less where you'll find the cured meat refrigerators nowadays. In my reminiscence 'R', a love rival, is seated at a small round table giving me the stink eye as I pick up a drink. I guess it would have been positioned roughly where the Bodegona now stacks up the stuff from Pricesmart, on sale here at considerably scruffier prices.

I can't recall how long 'R' spent haunting me at the Manhattan that night, but in retrospect it seems like ages, especially as a few years later I learned that he'd met his end violently.

He was alone then, but was usually accompanied by his regular wing-man, a lanky lad named 'T', almost always at his side when we'd run into them on the streets of Antigua, usually part of a group of four, all of them 3-4 years our junior.

This whole package of memories that seem hard to distinguish from hallucinations came back to me yesterday because while we were standing at the corner of our local park engaged in conversation with some family members, a motorbike rounded the corner and its rider took a significant pause in order to gawp at us, his face a picture of nascent heavy processing. It was 'T'. 

 

And of course he wasn’t wearing a helmet. 

Tár (2022)

 

I went into this knowing that numerous people whose opinions I really care about had absolutely loved it. 

And yet I struggled, a little bit.

There are undoubtedly some extraordinary scenes, some gorgeous pieces of dialogue (“I made sure all the hangers in my closet were facing in the same direction”) and then there is Blanchett's performance to admire, but also, somehow even more marvelous, that of cellist Sophie Kauer, who played her own pieces even as she gave depth to a character I could so easily have had more from.

There’s some dark comedy, but somehow not enough.

What's the problemito here exactly? Mark Kermode said "an interesting film that takes itself too seriously" and that knowingness is definitely a starting point, along with the fact that there needed to be more dramatic connection between the events we are shown in series. 

There are abundance of audiovisual cliches, not just belonging to the classical music scene but also the arthouse movie genre. Elisions, because we can. 

That the director was the bloke in Eyes Wide Shut playing the piano whilst blindfolded is possibly a symbolic suggestion that I will leave readers to ponder.  

Some, like conductor Marin Alsop, have objected to the fact that Lydia Tár a woman. I'd tend to agree with Kermode that this is in fact what gives the story its frisson of agreeable contemporary ambiguity, yet I do in the end have a bit of an issue with the fact that she is a lesbian. That part seems ill-chosen. Some of the cancelled classical giants of late (James Levine...) were indeed homosexual, but Domingo and Dutoit are not, and it seems fundamentally obvious why those in positions of power with minority desires, even in the arts, might tend to adopt a more predatory strategy. 

 

 

Justicia Para Vero

This week Diego Ariel Stella, 'gerente' at the Ni Fu Ni Fa steakhouse in Antigua, was convicted of rape and sentenced to 8 years in prison.   

This was ample vindication of the courage, determination and persistence of his victim and not only also a significant victory for all women of this nation who believe that "No means No!", but also a slap-down for the cabal of public officials, professionals and small business owners in the city who live as if constantly exploring what they can get away with. 

Not just rule benders and breakers, but ratas bereft of basic common decency most of the time.

It goes without saying that anyone who participated in the smear campaign against Verónica Molina should be ashamed of themselves for the rest of their days on this earth. 

No matter how much one might desire to support or show basic loyalty to a friend or family member, in cases involving rape or other types of sexual aggression, any kind of victim shaming and/or online abuse is the lowest of the low.

Llegó tarde, pero llegó

Gradually, then suddenly

Two important lessons one can easily learn from the history books, if one is that way inlined.

1) Beware of governments claiming to have reassured the markets.

2) Sistemic flare-ups like wars, revolutions and banking crises often sport an apparently singular trigger event. Yet these are no more the ‘cause’ of the eruption than Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination caused WWI. 

These moments simply make unavoidable something which was already there before, but was being avoided. 

“Gradually, then suddenly,“ as Hemingway put it.

'Cayalización’

This week has seen protests — for which I harbour strong sympathies — against the Cayalá-zation of Antigua. 

The phenomenon is, I suspect, less the result of some dastardly dictatorial masterplan than a knee-jerk reaction to developments which have been in the pipeline over in the capital for almost a decade and which the pandemic undoubtedly accelerated. 

Cayalá itself is the flagship project amongst several aiming to being strong clusters of very aspirational entertainment and consumption to Guatemala. Our mayor, who owns a crib there, has been well placed to see the writing on the wall. 

Ever since I first came to Antigua in the 80s there has been a pattern of weekly migration from Guatemala City. Young affluent capitalinos would flood the place on Friday and Saturday nights and then a more family-orientated herd would trot around the streets on Sundays, congregating at for coffee and cake at Doña Luisa X. or for traditional forms of tooth decay at Doña Maria Gordillo's sweet shop opposite.

These places have been feeling staid and/or passé for quite a while now, but more modern and swanky city-based chains have always struggled to establish themselves in this town, on their own at least. 

Covid brought an extended halt, not just to the flow of tourists, but also to the more domestic transfer of disposable income from the other side of the hills. At the time I predicted that things would not go back to precisely how they were, pre-pandemic, and so it has transpired. 

The likes of Cayalá have established a loyal clientele. Meanwhile, here in Antigua many businesses had to pitch themselves just a little bit more down-market to survive, and this has stoked the underlying reaction. Antigua has been shedding its USP of tranquil authenticity for decades anyway, which makes it easier for the mall mentality to encroach. 

What we now see happening all around us is thus a consequence of Antigua being forced out of its economic comfort zone. If it is to be properly discouraged we need to understand that telling people to be content with what they had won't cut it, because many are currently looking for ways to assuage the anxiety which has slotted into the space previously by occupied by contented complacency.

Sharper (2023)

 

Several of the films we've sat through recently have begun with some serious intent, yet it has soon become clear that — rather like Newcastle United today in the Carabao Cup final —  there is going to be no end product, so to speak. In other words, a decent set-up slipping relentlessly into a disappointing resolution.

Fortunately this is not the case with Sharper, a movie that has a clear plan and seems to know what it is doing for every moment of its running time. It's no masterpiece, but the dialogue, the locations and the just non-linear enough section splicing by character perspective all work as they are supposed to. It’s the kind of production critics tend to call ‘slick’, which is almost always a slightly back-handed compliment. 

 

If you go to see a film about grifters on the loose in the stupidly rich parts of Manhattan, you surely know what to expect. Here we get the familiar nested cons and then the con-ending-con, all exactly as we probably should have expected, but with no leakage of the entertainment value, even if the ending isn’t exactly triumphant. 

Julianne Moore is the biggest star, but perhaps the stand out performances come from Sebastian Stan and Briana Middleton. One might say that Moore, after her biggish reveal, becomes a diluting agent in the dramatic mix. 

Knock At The Cabin (2023)

And, here we go again...

 

 

Another fairly high-tension, potentially high-concept thriller which in the end is content to be merely ludicrous. (Having once landed one of the best endings in recent cinematic history, M. Night Shyalaman has missed a few since.)

For some of the way there is some pleasing dramatic tension between the propositions posed by Faith and Reason, but this is ultimately resolved unsatisfactorily, especially as the kind of Faith we see here is largely of the Qanon variety. Indeed, we find ourselves at the end of a world that has turned out to be one big, rather nasty conspiracy. 

Infinity Pool also asked some hard-edged moral-philosophical questions* and then provided only rather garbled answers. 

Here, Eric's attempt to explain his Damascene conversion to the worldview of his four committed abusers is particularly silly. His husband Andrew has a concurrent loss of faith — in the tenet that humanity are not really worth saving — which at the very least needed the support if its own mysterious figure in the light.

And again, some of the basics could so easily have been done so much better. For example, the way events outside the cabin are represented via TV news reports. 

The ending is less ambiguous than incomplete, by reason of the trail of incongruities left behind it. 

Reason has been trounced, but the judges in this bout may not have been impartial. 

Fine performance from Dave Bautista. 

 * Spoiler: What if you could pay to have a clone suffer the death penalty for you as a surrogate, yet had to watch 'yourself' die?

Infinity Pool (2023)

This cartoon made me wonder if AI could already be used to produce genre screenplays which don't stutter to a disappointing conclusion, in particular when the final moments involve a hefty dose of ambiguity. 

I mean, humans can do this — The Shining for example — but it is becoming less common. 

Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool is extraordinary and however you feel about the way it winds up, you are going to know that you have been properly movie'd! 

I think the problem here is ultimately twofold. Firstly the basic conceit falls between two stools. It could be used in a movie as it is here, more or less as an extended exercise in visceral, visual suggestion, with considerably more show than tell OR it could be strung out (rather like Dark) across three ten episode seasons with a bit more to-ing and fro-ing between the existential teasing and some actual, if partial resolution. I suspect that the climax would be a bit meh either way. 

The second issue I had is that even in the part I was most gripped by, I was starting to think of simple things that could be done to improve the experience. Several characters needed padding out and as someone who generally loves any story set in a hotel or resort, something felt missing here in the way the location was realised. 

And if anyone should delight in a metaphorical treatment of how comparatively well-off foreigners tend to behave as if they are above both the law and moral censure when liberated from their more native constraints, that would tend to be me.  

 

My feelings about Mia Goth's performance neatly mirrored those about the whole production. Wow, I had thought at the start, confirmation that X/Pearl were no flukes,  and that we have another strong yet unconventional British-South American silver screen presence to put alongside Anya Taylor-Joy. By the end it all felt a bit over-strained and detached from credibility.  

Ditto Alexander Skarsgård doing his grunty thing. Pleasing to a point, but then it starts to manifest as a cover up for weaknesses in the script. 

The movie designed to terrify North Americans with passports is practically a genre of its own, and while this is a lot more interesting than Hostel or Taken, it doesn’t quite do enough to entirely transcend its tropes. 

I'm not going to say anything more, because in spite of these misgivings I would recommend this film, and I do think it is worth seeing before one has discovered much about the plot.  

 

 

 

 

Alice, Darling (2022)

I was genuinely surprised how thoroughly Mary Nighy's directorial debut connected with me.

Fundamentally this is a film about female friendship, and a rather specific urban, North American form of it, so I might have rather churlishly concluded that it is "not for me", but it is just such a clever confection that I was riveted.

Nighy (Bill's daughter) did not write the screenplay herself, and that turned out to be another surprise, because so much of what makes this work is the balance between the said and the unsaid and I cannot imagine anyone would have been all that excited by the words on the page alone. 

Anna Kendrick plays a young woman we are not meant to immediately warm to. Gradually we start to realise that her personality on screen reflects the distorting impact of another character, her smarmy, controlling, artist boyfriend Simon. Alice is in a sense possessed by him, and her alone time is measured by the beeps of his checkings in, by her attempts to be pleasing to him, even at a distance.

Simon's variety of hegemony is enforced by the kind of non-verbal, procedural violence that leaves no visible harm, beyond that which the oppressed inflict on themselves.

Only as the story evolves do we come to appreciate this more directly, and even then Alice remains someone who is never entirely sure from one moment to the next whether she is a victim or her "life partner's" co-perpetrator.

Her pair of increasingly concerned old friends, played by Wunmi Mosaku and Kaniehtiio Horn also deliver a masterclass in body language. 

 

 

 

 

Carajilyo

Carajillo, typically pronounced by its hardcore native adherents with one L acting far more like an L — e.g. Marbelya — is possibly not the best way to start your morning. 

 

 

I was first introduced to this brew by my father in what was a sort of right of passage in a working men’s bar in Andalucía behind a beaded curtain: the sort of joint where asking for the version below would be the equivalent of requesting a Pimms at a pub in Paisley. You’d kind of deserve whatever happened next. 

 

Further north in Spain they make them with the pomace brandy called orujo. Evil stuff. They will tend to offer it to you as an emergency digestif in Cantabria after you’ve finished your fabada and think you’re probably going to die anyway.

 

 

 

 

Don't Look Deeper (2020)

I know plenty of grown ups who’d be reluctant to sit through this and I myself reached the end feeling rather chuffed that I’d skipped the full 14-episode series that this represents a condensation of.

In spite of the spectral presence of all those narrative excisions, the limited amount of science in this SF proposition plus a modicum of wokeishness, I really rather enjoyed it.

Director Catherine Hardwicke, known for Thirteen and Twilight, always handles adolescent angst with acuteness and style, and left me pondering why the replicants of the Blade Runner franchise have never been so subtly ambiguous, ethnically and sexually as Aisha here.