Synchronic (2019)

The past, present and future are 'local' not global phenomena. Modern science owes this revelation to Albert Einstein.

One month before his own death the physicist wrote a letter to the sister of his recently departed friend Michele Besso, in which he noted that the fact that one person passes before another 'means nothing' and that all our experience of time is in a sense, illusory.

Nevertheless, Italian pointy-head Carlo Rovelli has warned us against treating this memetic soundbite out of context, as something vocalised by an oracle. Einstein, he notes, was grieving and attempting to offer a shared comfort.

Nevertheless, a sentence within that letter forms the basis of the premise of Synchronic, which has the potential to be profound, yet limits itself to the shallowest of implementations — there's a new designer drug which messes with our pineal gland, apparently the part of our brain responsible for the conscious experience of the very personal, if not illusory, present. Younger people, whose pineal glands have yet to calcify, not only experience potentially dangerous temporal commingling, but actually travel back in time physically...for seven minutes.

From this point onwards, the more I try to explain this premise, the more arbitrary and generally silly it is going to sound. If chronology is an illusion established inside our minds, why would the physical body itself hop between times, for if the disappearing human form can be seen and filmed, then there is inherently a shared, objective element to all this. Exit Einstein.

The protagonist is at one point left trying to explain why his dog's lead, minus the actual dog, has returned to his original present, and says something remarkably similar to 'It's quantum, baby'. This is just lazy.

Still, as B movies go, and there do seem to be a lot of them around right now, this one is fairly engaging. On some levels it works better as horror than sci-fi. One is left with the impression that there is no point in the history of New Orleans that was anything other than a nightmarish ordeal. Even contemporary NOLA, garden district and all, is presented as a penumbral mind-trip.

Zoila Urízar Soto, aka La Canche; RIP

The passing of 'La Canche', so soon after her shrine-like shop beside La Merced, had us traipsing back down memory lane this afternoon.

We were trying to recall how many of the businesses which existed when we first met are still with us, and then proceeded to delve yet deeper into the era of my wife's childhood.

Bakeries have fared better than most. The San Antonio (Cuchi-Cuchi) and others were all up and running. Stationery shops were also doing quite well, at least until the pandemic. The Mariposa was there on the corner of the park, with an earlier incarnation of the Azmitia print shop a block or so away.

The vast majority of the long surviving restaurants tend to be Chinese, most prominently La Gran Muralla.

On the Calle del Arco the Fonda had long assumed its station but, believe it or not, there was no Pollo Campero to be found.

Cafe Ana was there on its own corner, decades before its near neighbourhood came to be dominated by the 'Panzón Verde'.

Helados Sarita sat roughly where one finds Café Condesa today, the latter one of those contemporary establishments like Doña Luisa, El Viejo Café and so on, whose job, like much of the rest of the city, is to look like they have been around forever, when they haven't.

Gilda Jolas's dance school was nestled into the arch and the Casa Troccoli was long established, though the present store is more of a reincarnation than a continuation.

As for Doña Maria Gordillo's traditional sweet shop, but of course.

What have we missed?

(La Canche, born in the same year as my mother, may have to be notched up as yet another victim of a local phenomenon which can be put down to the inadequate pension provision in Guatemala. I fear many of the over 65s here are continuing to run small retail businesses with unavoidable customer contact at a time when they really ought to be comparatively sheltered.)

Shadow In The Cloud (2020)

This movie is basically one big WTF from beginning to end. I guarantee you that if I were to start fully describing the premise and how it pans out, you would soon start facepalming.

The 'absolute blast' described by the poster comes afterwards when one learns that this feminist WWII caper with lashings of misogyny and suggested gaslighting was co-written by a man accused of abuse in Hollywood by eight different women.

The action is set on an American bomber dubbed The Fool's Errand en route to Samoan islands from Auckland and there are some very strange individuals on board. Describing two of them would involve unnecessary spoilers, but there is also a grisly Scotsman and a gremlin.

The latter can be rather unfavourably contrasted with members of the rampaging reptilian mob in Joe Dante's 1984 classic, which were comfortable as both actual and metaphorical presences in the plot. This larger, more bat-like cousin is seemingly disconnected from all the other unfathomable stuff going on around it, including an apparently impossible attack by Japanese zeros.

It's true that the term Gremlin originated in the RAF during the 1920s, but these little beasties were always supposed to be mischievous rather than downright malevolent.

Anyway, the sense of foreboding I was left with was the realisation that low budget genre movies made in New Zealand may soon end up representing a greater proportion of our overall feature length viewing options.

The Dangerous President vs Dangerous Precedent 'debate'...

Watching the impeachment debate in the House this morning has left me slightly underwhelmed with what one speaker referred to as this 'tabernacle of democracy'. 

I'm not a regular viewer of this soap opera, so I suppose I will have to allow that this particular episode might not be typical. 

Yet, just as Brexit tended to expose what is both good and bad about the UK's parliamentary system, #POTUS45 has been a sort of flesh and blood bug test of the US Constitution for the past four years. 

Some of the problems I perceived today can be attributed to personalities. Nancy Pelosi's own uninspiring contribution was along the lines of "Lincoln, bla, bla, Kennedy, bla bla, last best hope...etc." 

She's not the only American politician who seems to think history exists in order to be recited like passages from the Bible. 

There's a deeper issue. Westminster-style oratory is famously adversarial. The way different speakers pop up and tussle verbally during the course of a debate allows for a process akin to thesis+antithesis=synthesis. It may be rare, but you sense that opinions can fluctuate in the collective during the time allocated. 

Instead, inside this recently-violated tabernacle, the members of congress pop up and deliver, from notes, the opinions they all must have already possessed when they woke up in the morning. That's really not how democracy is supposed to work. it's certainly not how the Athenians did it.

The Serpent

 

A eight part British TV drama with only one British speaking part I can recall (a consular official who looks a bit like Lord Lucan after some disappointing plastic surgery and does little more than grunt), and thus an opportunity for a range of my nation's upcoming thesps to show off their knack for accents. 

Tim McInnerny, perhaps the least upcoming of them, abandons all pretence of being authentically Belgian after his first appearance, reverting to and remaining at loud, blustering generic foreigner for the duration. Billy Howle and Ellie Bamber seem a bit more up for it, however. 

And poor old Jenna Coleman has to speak actual French, though as a Québecoise not in a manner that is recognisably such. (She's perhaps a bit too relentlessly stylish here throughout, I eventually concluded. If there was some cognitive dissonance on offer on my fairly recent trip to Montreal, it was that here is a city where the population speak French and dress, well, like Canadians.)

All of this may be helping to disguise one piece of casting with the potential for some real controversy: Tahar Rabim, playing a man of mixed European and East Asian parentage.

There's a handful of as-cast foreigners in the show too. Mathilde Warnier almost certainly hired as Nadine for her conspicuous ability to deliver oblique, intensely-apprehensive glances worthy of a Mexican telenovela. And the first couple of episodes feature two objectionable Aussies, played of course by actual Antipodeans, so as not to offend. 

Yet all this confabulated exoticism, combined with a timeline that behaves like a Mexican jumping bean, undoubtedly contributes to the charm of this thriller, for the most part set in Bangkok and in the 70s. It tracks the career of a chillingly chippy psycho who preys upon 'young intrepids with big dreams', or those seemingly known to embassy personnel  in Thailand as 'long hairs'. 

The fundamental clash of worldviews is teased and yet not fully developed. It all ends up a bit in the wind, rather like (spoiler alert) my favourite character Ajay, played by relative newcomer Amesh Edireweera. 

Idle Curiosity

When we Brits observe a mob like the one that stormed the US Capitol last week, the question 'how many of these people have passports?' springs readily to mind.

Of course many of these patriots might have been abroad as part of the US’s bloated armed forces. What we really mean is how many have travelled beyond the borders of their nation out of sheer idle curiosity. Yet this is essentially a very British anxiety.

It was us who seemingly invented travel undertaken for the purpose of secular self-improvement, more for the mind than the soul, and modern tourism essentially began as an offshoot of our empire.

Sometimes, as was the case with Egypt, we sent our tourists (along with Thomas Cook and his infrastructure, travellers cheques etc.) before even the gunboats.

For citizens of the self-styled ‘greatest nation on Earth’ it is hard to get around the fact that the most self-improving thing any human being is supposed to be able to do is travel to the USA and simply remain there.

It's supposed to be enough. The entire culture is based around approximating a degree of satisfaction which could never be fully transcended by any experience of otherness. And a fairly large proportion of that small proportion of Americans with passports apparently prefer to travel to places which reproduce as much of their familiar home environment and concomitant consumer satisfactions as is feasible for mere foreigners.

A society so relentlessly dedicated to chasing satisfaction will of course experience phases of renunciation. Many Americans and other westerners of the boomer generation took to the world’s then lesser-trodden trails in the latter stages of the twentieth century in a quest for the authentic that significantly contributed to the elimination of anything worthy of the name from the surface of the Earth.

And for most of the last century there was a steady flow of more educated and affluent Americans towards European cities like Paris and Florence in an echo of the eighteenth century Grand Tour — though for the most part missing out on some of the more earthy fun (and risk) formative English gentlemen had experienced in places like Venice a couple of centuries earlier.

Today, much much of modern travel seems to have become self-improving in a sadly more limited sense — that of improving the image that others have of one’s self. Such experiences are undertaken not so much for themselves, as for their value as fodder for visual presentation on social media.

Ayatollah Time?

Donald Trump Jr > “Free speech is dead and controlled by leftist overlords.”

I'm no friend of cancel culture, but this is no time to compare the silencing of the insurgent-in-chief with the no-platforming of a controversial speaker at some University campus.

Unlike the BBC, Twitter has no charter committing it to a variety of rose-tinted neutrality. In as much that Trump would find it hard to be employed as a columnist at the New Statesman, Twitter has concluded some seemingly tough editorial demarcation, reportedly aided by employee sentiment.

There are few enemies of western democracy/common decency that have an automatic right to this platform.

Trump can keep blathering. Amnesty International need not sweat. It's just that he will end up like that bloke in the corner of the pub...

Happy 158th Birthday

 

To the London Underground. 

The Enigma of Room 622

During the course of a short sojourn on the Mayan Riviera a couple of years ago I discovered that the key I had been given opened every room in the hotel. This immediately struck me as good material for a short story. The circumstances of my discovery would provide the impulse for the narrative. 

I've probably mentioned here before that I have a particular affinity with stories set in hotels, the older and grander the better, so this particular title did rather jump out at me. 

In truth the room in question here, and the hotel which contains it, are not quite as central as Dicker's title might suggest, or rather they are, but as the drain around which the rest of the plot eddies and circles. Slowly and rather over-elaborately. 

Still, this is good clean Eurotrashy fun, an enjoyably middlebrow mystery set amidst Geneva’s banking community. 

Venality and Social Awkwardness

“This day was left at my house a very neat silver watch, by one Briggs, a scrivener and sollicitor, at which I was angry with my wife for receiving, or, at least, for opening the box wherein it was, and so far witnessing our receipt of it, as to give the messenger 5s. for bringing it; but it can't be helped, and I will endeavour to do the man a kindnesse, he being a friend of my uncle Wight's.”

Samuel Pepys, April 17, 1665. 

A case of watch where you open that box. 

I once had some clients in government institutions during the nineties who would go to near extraordinary lengths not to be seen to be receiving any sort of tribute, even a bottle of plonk at Christmas. 

Dark Web Donald

There's a new mute-ation in the USA and it is of Trump's Twitter stream.

Permanent social media silencing is political death for T(-12), though he has arguably been flatlining for some time already today.

Even right wing politicians hoping to stand on his shoulders in four or eight years time, presenting themselves as continuity candidates for at least part of his agenda, must surely now be calculating that their interests would be better served by....

Daylight Robbery

 A favourite phrase of my mother's.

The house I grew up in had a couple of these. It was constructed in 1812, 38 years before the tax was finally repealed.

Adam Smith rather grudgingly admired the measure because government bean (...window) counters could do what they had to do without entering one's residence.

Death to 2020

Charlie Brooker's scathing annual review got the big budget update just in time for the bad news mega-event that has just concluded.

That included a stellar cast. Hugh Grant (I had some flak from V for not immediately recognising him) and Cristin Milioti were particularly superb. And then there was Samuel L. Jackson comparing the order of the US mail vote count to watching Jaws backwards: a load of panicky white people being spat out by a shark...

Strangely enough, I found myself laughing loudest at the gags made at Biden's expense.

This is basically British humour with an LA pricetag, and so may not work for all subscribers.

Soul (2020)

I guess there are several ways to appraise this movie, but most obviously in terms of its animation and storytelling versus its metaphysical payload. 

I know I can all too easily be sucked into the latter, so I am going to largely avoid the temptation. I'm grown up enough to enjoy a good ghost movie without believing in spirits, and I don't think one has to be heavily invested in mind-body dualism in order to get a kick out of the humour and imagination that went into the making of Pixar's latest film. (Actually, one doesn't even need to hold jazz in particularly high regard, for that matter.) 

I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end and although it used to be the default that each new animated feature that came out of this studio was incrementally better than the last one, it's been a while since I have genuinely felt that to be the case, yet Soul really could be described as their best yet, on some levels, if not all. 

There was a part around the mid-point where I did start to feel I perhaps wasn't entirely on board. Bertrand Russell said we mistake the struggle for life with the struggle for success and the film itself seemed on course for making this mistake, until suddenly, upliftingly, it wasn't.

And anyway that part featured a particularly wicked calico cat, so I was cool with it! 

The scenes located in the Great Before and the Zone reminded me of rather trippy dreams I had as a young child. This colourful overworld didn't quite hang together and one supposes that attempts had been made to offend as few true believers as possible and the end result was a sort of cake and eat it ontology. 

It did make me ponder what would happen if we were to suddenly suffer from a collective religious amnesia, misplacing the over-bashed texts we have accumulated from decidedly less informed times, and had to come up with an entirely new and modern existential rationale for the next generation, starting entirely from scratch. 

Soul starts off down that road, but it's an American product at heart, addressing American audiences before all others, so it pulls up before the whimsy can fully present as doctrine. 

Overall rather glad it was this movie we chose to watch on New Year's Eve (2020) and not the one from the night before. 

The Nest (2020)

There's something weirdly wonderful about this BBC/Canadian-funded flick, written and directed by Sean Durkin (He of Martha, Marcy and so on).

It could have been scripted from the outset with Jude Law in mind, though it seems we watched it just a bit too soon after The Third Day such that that besmirched white linen jacket was hard to dispel from the mind. If Jude was cast almost by default, Carrie Coon's inclusion was a little more inspired.

The main action is located in a permanently autumnal England of the mid-eighties, roughly between my last year at school and the end of my first at university, a setting that is both rousingly recognisable, whilst amusingly filtered through transatlantic goggles.

There's a similar duality to plot and script as well, in parts very much on the nose with admirable precision, in others almost excruciatingly off target. (The less said about a horse disposal sub-plot the better.)

There are not many films these days where I can say around the midpoint that I have no idea where it is heading, and that is generally a positive, especially when accompanied by the sensation of being gripped.

As the conclusion loomed I started to wonder if Durkin was planning on ending it every which way he could, but he drew back from the near simultaneous calamities he'd apparently been lining up, leaving his protagonists, rather like 2020, significantly battered and largely bereft of either the means or the disposition to carry on, and yet intact and importantly, still together.

How this became listed under 'Romance' on the IMDB is a minor mystery. Someone must have seen the poster and not the film. The original score by Richard Reed Parry might also have provided a few early clues as to how much of a feel good experience was to be anticipated...

HBO's The Art Of Political Murder

A disappointing adaptation of Francisco Goldman's extraordinary book, which retains the 'art' of the title, whilst shedding it in the telling for telly. 

The format is a string of interviews — essentially a trip down memory lane for the key investigators and journalists involved, plus some useful backstory. 

Goldman himself tries to add some deeper insight, but it might have been better to have deployed him as the narrator and to thus frame the narrative as a complex whodunnit, which is precisely what the author did on paper. Sadly, sales of the book are unlikely to benefit following the airing on HBO, because the whole production is rather mundane and slotted into standard-received Guatemala for foreigners...

Bishop produces surprisingly revealing and detailed report on army atrocities and is murdered a couple of days later. Authorities try to pin the blame on housemate and then the same supposedly gay priest's dog. But persistent human rights investigators locate a vagrant come double agent who will testify to the presence on the night of a pack of mid-level military sociopaths and eventually the justice system comes good. The end. 

What has gone missing from this version are the disturbing connections to two former presidents: Alvaro Arzú and Otto Pérez Molina. The documentary barely mentions the fact that Lima jnr and Villanueva were part of Arzú's palace protection unit and that on the night of Romero's death the sargento was supposedly doing time here in La Antigua for another more random homicide, which Arzú was at the very least a direct witness to. 

Arzú's subsequent attempts to globally propagate an alternative solution to the crime, assisted by the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, are also strangely absent here. 

Some mention of the bloody fates of Byron Lima and his sidekick might also have been included. Plus how the former evolved into one of Guatemala's most vocal pantomime villains even as he was simultaneously very loud and yet very quiet from his jail cell. 

Anyway, the book remains a top recommendation (now in updated form) even if the documentary was thoroughly meh. 

Sending 2020 off with a glug...

My Somebody Else's Problem Field is just about holding up. And this really does appear to be somebody else's problem.

 

On the plus side, just as La Antigua has been granted some sort of Safe Travels recognition, we appear to have acquired a brand new tourist attraction. And there's definitely some water hiding underneath the village. For now...

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Fitting perhaps that the two ‘big’ movies of 2020 were both utterly absurd. 

First there was the one that was going to save the big screen experience (Tenet) and now we have the one that essentially says sod it to cinemas. 

The trouble here is I couldn’t consistently establish whilst viewing just how knowingly ludicrous WW84 is, and ended up pondering how great it would be to see Gadot in a movie for grown-ups before this nonsense swallows her career. 

Great to see Pedro Pascal out of his helmet again. His performance is silly yet entertaining in a good way, unlike a lot of what is going on around him.

Brexit, a pre-history

Under the influence of a continental super-state Britons started to live in rectangular houses instead of round ones and social status began to accrue from education and economic muscle rather than the more local ties of kinship and tribe.

It was in these circumstances that perhaps our first great Brexiteer emerged: Boudica, queen of the Iceni.

In 60 AD she led an army of up to 100,000 in a bloody revolt against 'ever closer union', laying waste to much of urban Roman settlement in the south with a particular ire directed against Londinium. According to Tacitus 70,000 of its citizens were slaughtered as it was razed to the ground. 

There is still a layer of red, oxidised iron to be found under the City, so in effect there have been two Great Fires in London's history.

Brimming with optimism, Boudica's horde then faced up at an uncertain location to a Roman force led by Gaius Paulinus Suetonius (ten times its inferior size-wise) and duly lost, really badly. 80,000 dead on the British side, 400 on the Roman. 

In modern parlance it seems they had a tactically-naive attacking game and were thus extremely vulnerable to the counter.

Britain's new anti-cosmopolitan folk heroine then either fell ill and died of natural causes, or partook of poison. 

The Chambermaid (2018)

"On Monday, February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6, the job came to an end."

An extract from the blurb accompanying L’Hotel, a series of voyeuristic photographic observations made by Sophie Calle of the items in these rooms, that were at one stage on show at the Tate in London and went on to inspire a stage play by Mexican actor-come-director Lila Avilés which evolved into her first feature film.

And perhaps if this had focussed more on the reverse anthropology conceit in Calle's installation the movie might have been more consistently interesting. Instead it uses atmosphere (very effectively) to show us multiple aspects of its protagonist's invisibility, with the whole not quite adding up to a fully coherent story. 

In his review Peter Bradshaw captured what is both gripping (and in a sense the opposite of gripping, as we both nodded off a couple of times) in the mood projected by Avilés as she shows us a set of salient incidents in the daily activities of young camarista Eve, seen to be "in revolt against the almost erotic narcosis of the place and the expensive weightless perfection, which the reality of her existence is always liable to soil in some calamitous way."

Like the art work that inspired it, the film is fascinating in an almost photographic way, as a collection of stills or vignettes that inspire further contemplation beyond the narrative line. 

Mexico has a solid tradition in a sociological cinema of race and class, where non-professional actors have often excelled. As Eve, Gabriela Cartol is a pro, seemingly trying to capture the guilelessness of an amateur. It works some of the time, but there are moments in the movie where both the lead and the director seem to be too visibly struggling to project a depth beneath the blankness.