Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios / God's Crooked Lines (2022)

Worth watching for the production design alone, though it does drag on a bit to the roughly three hour mark.

 

The period of political  transition at the end of the seventies is a favoured destination for Spanish directors. This film is set four year's after the dictator's death, yet at the local police station his portrait is only just being replaced by that of Juan Carlos. It's based on a novel published in '79.

In other respects we can spot that we're on well-trodden ground as the protagonist has been committed to a vast asylum in Catalunya, initially convinced she has entered voluntarily, then convinced she has been legally kidnapped, but her key antagonist within the institution, a dead-ringer for Mark Kermode, never relinquishes his conviction that she's properly bonkers. 

As ever with this sort of psychological, or perhaps psychiatric thriller, the best moments are before the last act when all the possibilities are being tantalisingly dangled, accompanied to Hitchcockian ruminations on a piano.  

Resolution, or some sort of partial replacement with an aftertaste of ambiguity, never really satisfies.

 

 

Time to debunk the de-banked...

 

Again, it’s not really about Brexit, or even immigration, it’s about Farage’s known affiliation with an insurrectionist and a war criminal, both of whom are willing figureheads for neo-fascist movements.

And Farage is one of the disingenuous populist voices providing a cover of continued legitimacy and thus preventing democratic societies from taking all the necessary action against these men.

 

 

Fararce

When Farage started bleating that Coutts & Co had de-banked him for being a James, all they had to say was YES...or perhaps nothing at all. 

Instead their holding company has since handed him a completely bogus opportunity to posture as the heroic everyman victim of cancel culture — the latter something I vehemently oppose, but this represents a willful distortion of the issues.

It is a commercial reality in the UK that corporations and individuals within them often openly choose to reject undertaking contracts with specific clients based on a conflict of values. I certainly did.

A private bank is not a “platform” or indeed a public utility.

 

 

The Narcissistic Sociopathic State

Today we've witnessed a surge of protest and workplace walk-outs across Guatemala in response to what many people see as the covert autocracy's open interference in the supposedly free electoral process.

In The Revenge of Power Moisés Naím draws our attention to a new generation of what he refers to as 3P Autocrats, predominantly democratically-elected leaders who deploy Populism, Polarisation and Post-truth in order to be able to operate between the cracks of constitutional legality.

I think this only partially covers what has been happening here.

Populism in Central America has long been complemented with a form of clientism, whereby key demographics from amongst the relatively disadvantaged are recruited as a counter-weight to the educated middle-classes who might otherwise becomes drivers of radical readjustments.

I think what we actually have here is a kind of narcissistic-sociopathic state.

Like equivalents at the level of individual pathology, this is a coterie of government actors content to lie dormant most of the time, or at least wear a more or less functional mask of unthreatening congeniality and benevolence until, that is, the day that they are triggered.

In most cases this involves some sort of insufferable rejection (i.e. so many unexpected votes for Movimiento Semilla).

The narcissistic-sociopath state or NSS then erupts...the mask comes off and its behaviour turns overtly abusive and ultimately destructive, and not just to the designated victims, for the NSS abandons all restraint and concern for consequences which can eventually lead to its own undoing.

Having spent so much time hiding in plain sight, pretending to be decent and law-abiding, for the NSS, the so-called 'technical coup d'etat' option comes with a risk of complete de-legitimisation — a problem that old school dictators didn't really have to worry about as their authority came from the end of their boot and little else.

One must not forget that even when the mask is on, the NSS is an abuser. It's just that many people choose not to recognise and call out the signs.

 

Anti-gulagism

"Total abhorrence of dominant ideologies. And anti-gulagism is the dominant ideology today, The anti-gulag priests are every bit as bad as the gulag torturers. The sheep have taken over from the beasts of the apocalypse."

Back in 1983, when the postmodernisation of western thought was only just taking shape, Jean Baudrillard scribbled the above, slightly self-contradictory, statement.

I mean, are the sheep really as bad as the beasts of the apocalypse? Are Coutts & Co as bad as the Stasi? etc.

The real interest in this observation however is that Baudrillard pinpointed the way our political polarities have been turning non-binary (for want of a better term), the way all oppositions have become stuck in a self-referential, practically auto-catalytic whirl, such that it has become increasingly difficult to place the lines between the priesthood and heretics, between the dogmatists and those simply seeking freedom of conscience and operation in society.

Even between the different kinds of hooved beasties. 

 

I am right, you are wrong...

One of the more significant problems we face today in so-called mature democracies is what I would describe as the theological approach to politics.

Instead of understanding that the political stances we adopt (even the most cherished ones) are inevitably informed by circumstances, personal and societal, we increasingly appear to assume that they reflect fundamental matters of right and wrong. 

 

This has to be one of those American cultural exports which are so plaguing us at this point in the century, and this one is unquestionably pernicious, for once one believes that everything in one's head is some sort of inviolable principle (or indeed tenet), it becomes that much harder to listen to people with alternative notions, let alone submit to government by them for a fixed term.

The outside world is deeply concerned about...something.

This Guardian piece is the first article I have come across in the UK media referencing Guatemala's election shambles, and it follows depressingly familiar format.

The credit to "staff and agencies" means that nobody has bothered to even try to understand what is actually going on here. They've digested some press releases from the agencies announcing the concerns of the US and other G7 members, but beyond that...not a bleeding clue.

They largely point the finger of blame for the suspension of the June 25th result at front-runner Sandra Torres even though yesterday she explicitly called for the second round to go ahead as planned on August 20. Torres actually has little to gain from participating in legal delays, which could add extra oomph to the campaign of her (currently) second placed opponent.

The main drivers of the legal posturing have been the OTHER parties that fell short of the top two places, particularly Valor, Vamos, Cabal, Mi Familia etc. Sandra’s UNE seemed to go along with it at first, but must have quickly realised what a dumb play that could end up being. 

Anyway, on the positive side, if there is one thing I have learned about the so-called Corrupt Elite of this country is that it could just as easily be described as the Incompetent Elite.

Indeed, corruption and uselessness are very strongly associated with each other in Guatemala.

I guess that this is because corruption allows them to get away with things all too easily on an everyday basis, so that they neglect to spot the moments when a bit more effort and intellectual rigor might be required.

Ditto the Guardian.

Just be careful what you wish for...

Rather like the post-imperial Romano-Britons when things started to get a bit hairy after the legions left: “What we could really do with now is a whole load of those Angles and Saxons".

 

 

 

 

 

97 Minutes (2023)

Explosively stupid in terms of both content and realisation...

Features the unintentionally memorable Alec Baldwin line, “If you have a magic bullet, I’m all ears”.

His career may not not be over, but he’s a ‘with’ for the foreseeable future. 

As for Rhys Myers, he’s clearly arrived at the with Alec Baldwin phase.

 

(Goose-)stepping over the line...

I'm not one of those atheists who thinks everybody ought to be an atheist.

Indeed, I think diversity of human thought, action and wider culture is an essential pillar of existence that should be diligently preserved, and that this should be one of the key 'progressive' ideals along with the protection of biodiversity.

In my book — one I'd hesitate to have printed — if you think you are right and everyone else is wrong, you are by definition, wrong.

And therewith the problem: this is not an entirely inclusive ideal, and I am going to have to stray into mildly hypocritical territory here when I suggest that certain mindsets do still need to be actively discouraged.

 

These tend to involve a codification of a more limited worldview.

It all starts with opinions that have gunboats in inverted commas, so to speak. From mild censure we go from lists of individuals who might be 'first against the wall' in some unspecified future, onward to those over-energised late night knockings on the door.

The lines are never quite as clear as anyone lucid would like them to be. Yet who can honestly deny that we now find ourselves in a society built on liberal principles which fewer and fewer seem to instinctively understand and where the goose-steppers once again pretend to be working in the best interests of the under-represented, marginalised and downright oppressed.

The perfect bar doesn't exi...

 

 

In the absence of something so heaven sent, herewith my own current list of preferred drinking holes around ‘this region’…

 

La Rana Dorada, Panama City

Tántalo Rooftop, Panama City

Stiefel Pub, Otoya, San José, Costa Rica

La Lluvia de Oro, Havana

La Zorra Y El Cuervo, Havana

El Gato Tuerto, Havana

La Cueva, Trinidad, Cuba

El Barón, Cartagena de Indias

Beer Lovers, Getsemaní, Cartagena de Indias

Tap Ten, Cartagena de Indias

Tokyo Music Bar, Cuauhtémoc, CDMX

Pata Negra, Cuauhtémoc, CDMX

Sabina Sabe, Oaxaca

La Mezcalerita, Oaxaca

Cafe Bar Revolución, San Cristóbal de las Casas

La Negrita Cantina, Mérida

Pipiripau, Mérida

Xtabay, Campeche

Caiman Tugurio, Playa del Carmen

The Little Wine Bar, Placencia, Belize

Barefoot Beach Bar, Placencia, Belize

 

The White Ship by Charles Spencer

Diana’s brother Charles has no need of a ghost writer, unlike his nephew Harry. 

 

His highly competent popular histories have hardly strayed beyond his own family’s apogee, e.g the reigns of Charleses I & II.

Yet it seems he has a fascination with this, one of Medieval history’s dopey yet highly significant misadventures which occurred in 1120, when roughly 300 members of the ruling Norman elite, including the royal heir, set off from Barfleur in the Blanche-Net, the majority of both passengers and crew a little bit juiced up, choosing speed over caution in an effort to catch up with the King’s own vessel, thus encountering some rocks. The only survivor a butcher from Rouen who had boarded in order to chase his bills. 901 years later Spencer led the expedition which located the wreck.

“Game of Thrones, but in the real world” says the dust cover. (Oddly enough, today’s versions attract dust as opposed to repelling it like the old paper ones.) Thrones was based — loosely, let's say — on the Wars of the Roses, a later conflict aroused and fed by the awkward presence on the throne of the two least effective Plantagenets, Richard II and Henry VI, whose impact, domestically and abroad, encouraged their geographically-entrenched relatives to seek alternatives.

“The anarchy” which followed the sinking of the White Ship and the ascension of Stephen* — first (and last) of that name — was instead rooted in earlier dynamics which differed from GOT. The key players changed sides far more often. And if there was one thing the Norman nobility hated it was open battle (except when the other side was obviously French), so we see here how on two significant occasions the antagonists were encouraged by their aristocratic allies to sit down and parley.

Most conflicts that didn’t result in treaties were characterised by a string of sieges. Other than Masada, these have never made for good TV.

But there is some fun stuff here, including a defenestration enacted by the future Henry I himself, the victim a commoner (merchant) who had forgotten the golden rule of feudalism — flexibility was for the landed elites only, everyone else had to abide by their oaths, or else.  
 
* Only a bad case of the runs had prevented the then Stephen of Blois from boarding the doomed longship at Barfleur.

Hypnotic (2023)

"Preposterous tosh from start to finish" was Mark Kermode's take. He's not wrong, though we did kind of enjoy it.

 

I was thinking about the recent unfortunate cancellation of 1899, supposedly because a statistically-significant portion of the audience somehow lost the will to continue after an episode or two. 

Right now we are watching Apple's Silo and the phrase Dark for dummies springs to mind. 

And so perhaps we might describe Hypnotic as Inception-lite. 

Perhaps ironically when I watch a Christopher Nolan movie or a Baran bo Odar series, my inner mental state could well be represented thus...

 

 

 

With Hypnotic the only real swirling confusion surrounded the lackadaisical nature of the underlying ground rules and crucially, I never felt the urge to reach for my notebook because an interesting thought had been prompted to pop up inside my head. 

 

But maybe there really is a market for middlebrow mindbenders, and Netflix, having been burned by 1899, might be best placed to find it.

Minor spoiler alert: I did enjoy the way Robert Rodriguez taunted viewers for much of the movie with the sheer corny fakeness of everything (Mexico in particular, which should have hoisted a few fed flags), only to have an answer ready as the third act kicked off...though this was a new form of silliness.

Smotherers

After WWII Isaiah Berlin finally made it to Moscow. Following the cacophony of the United States, it was the silence he found there that was most disturbing. In November 1946 he wrote that the “slow humiliation of poets and musicians is more awful in a way than outright shooting”.

He was aware that Russia had always favoured authoritarian rule and that the Tsars had attempted to suppress creativity, yet in the nineteenth century this had had the effect of turning that nation into an almost unprecedented creative and intellectual hothouse. 

 

Something was different under the Soviets, he speculated, something that permitted him to conclude that not all authoritarianisms are equal in this respect, be they political or religious, and the defining factor had to be the ideological component. 

 

This ties back to my observations yesterday about the suppression of free discourse at places like the Oxford Union. Those whose point of view is backed up by a rigid, take-no-prisoners ideology usually don’t even wait to hear what potential opponents have to say before silencing them.

 

For it is one of the key assumptions held by those under the sway of Marxism, for example, that you can tell if someone deserves to be heard just by noting what sort of person they are — their socioeconomic (these days also identitarian)...and therefore historical status is the very gist of their winning/silencing argument.

 

 

Parley-vous?

 

Outside the arena of elite sporting competition this is a matter of frankly marginal importance for the majority.

 

Yet it is generating an undoubted hubbub, which is permitting the louder voices on both the left and the right to distort one of the really fundamental truths that ought to be understood by all members of a functioning liberal democracy: neither your tomes of sacred ideology nor your peer-reviewed books of agreed facts will dispense with the contradictions of either present day life...or history.

 

 

As many of us as possible surely need to be vocal pluralists (and part of that commitment involves acknowledging that it will never be all of us), which means recognising the need to balance and sometimes revise the assumptions that make collective existence bearable. 

 

People at the political extremes want to pretend that the world can somehow be made to reflect the simplicities of their own thought processes and that they owe respect only to those who are similarly, single-mindedly convinced.

Men are men and women are women is an over-simplification. Yet so too is men can be women and women can be men. 

 

There is clear and obvious room for open discussion here and the spaces where such parley traditionally occurs need to be protected from the authoritarian minorities. 

 

Look under the bonnet of anything coherent and you will soon spot incoherence. Similarly, anything apparently trouble-free rather often portends a good deal of trouble. 

With rationalism there is always an element of prejudice dressed up as common sense.  

The hard truth is that neither off-the-shelf theories nor rational guidelines absolve us from the need to acknowledge, even cultivate complexity even at its most awkward. 

 

And right now, this is what we are losing track of...again!

 

 

Influencer (2022)

Influencer has one or two minor plot holes* and based on what occurs prior to the opening credits, the ending is 100% predictable, yet none of that spoiled our enjoyment of this this well-shot and well-plotted Canadian thriller, set almost entirely in Thailand. 

As the title suggests, there is an element of satirical examination of the engagement-craving Instagrammer, but this is not handled in the heavy-handed or snarky fashion that one might tend to anticipate. 

Director Curis David Harder seems to be saying that these are in the end, just one variety of needy traveller with perhaps a peculiar set of vulnerabilities which 'CW' — played with deliciously apposite levels of attractive creepiness by Cassandra Naud — has elected to exploit. 

That everything she possesses and in a sense, everything she projects as her self, has apparently been accumulated from her past interactions with influencers is one of the most intriguing aspects of this antagonist. 

The absence of explicit exposition was a very effective choice here.

 

* Including one unused Chekhovian pistol, sort of. 

 

Beurokeo/Broker (2022)

On the face of it this is pretty standard Kore-eda fare, an empathy-squeezing, mildly comic drama about an ad-hoc 'family' group, several of whom are in the midst of leading a criminal lifestyle.

Yet there are some deviations. The location and language are Korean for a start. Was Kore-eda attempting to cash in on the success of Parasite, or merely covetous of an opportunity to work with that movie's stand-out star, Song Kang-ho?

In the Guardian Peter Bradshaw flags up another issue, one of tone. These would-be loveable rogues are murderers and child traffickers. Tut tut. 

"What sort of people might want to pay top dollar for a baby?" he asks. Well, a decade or so ago one only had to board any US-bound flight out of Guatemala to mix with such gruesome folk. 

At the time I had very strong opinions about this trade, so it might be supposed that I'd side with Bradshaw on this, but I can tell the difference between fiction and reality and for that reason choose not to immediately censure the Japanese director for his approach here.

Yet the following question does arise — what kind of wrongdoing cannot be redeemed in this manner?  

I recall how Robby Collin of the Telegraph recoiled at the way JoJo Rabbit turned Nazis into figures of ridicule. Nevertheless, last year in Colombia I met an historian who had just published a book about the Nazi education system of the 30s and she recounted to me how her American publishers had ’encouraged’ her to explicitly tackle 'the Jewish question' even though it was only rather indirectly relevant to her topic. 

There is no question that we are now inhabiting a cultural environment where certain gatekeepers (not just the Twitter mob) determine what can — or indeed must — be said and in which form, so Kore-eda's determination to sidetrack certain ethical preconceptions is refreshing. 

And I think he is quite explicit here in the distinction between people who do bad things for complex reasons and those who are instead just sociopathic by nature and should not be celebrated in any way. 

Kore-eda is one of my favourite directors and although this is not up there with his very best work, it's not to be discarded. 

Surrounded by more established Korean stars, Lee Ji-eun is revelatory as So-young.

Soz

 

— No child born today in Germany is in any way responsible for the horrors of the Holocaust.

— I should not have to apologise for all the times my mother was rude to people. *

These seem uncontroversial statements to me, but the urge to impose guilt and contrition where none are due has become a worrying feature of contemporary debate.

Just yesterday Joe Biden had to shake off pleas for a formal “awfully sorry” for the first atomic bombing.

It seems to me that many politicians are torn between knowing how nonsensical this is (and toxic to any grown-up understanding of history) and the underlying desire to openly wallow a bit in inherited, institutional or ethic/tribal guilt, an icky form of virtue-signalling that many seem unable to decode.

If I can thus point to some underlying disagreeable intentions, there are nevertheless plenty of largely decent ones in play here too, which makes this bunk an even more urgent candidate for de-bunking.

* Even though in Britain it is still considered a matter of everyday politeness to say sorry to someone who has just hit you over the head with a baseball bat.

 

 

Sisu (2022)

 

A kind of made to order cult movie from Finland, combining the moods of Sergio Leone and Wolfenstein.

When it was completed the makers sent a screener to Tarantino. One wonders whether he wet himself from joy or vexation.

This is just the kind of thing he's been trying to confect for years, yet somewhat less successfully. Turns out his problem, of all things, was too many words!

Superficially a compound of familiar tropes, this tale of a Lapland loner with a bag of gold nuggets taking on a company of retreating Nazis, feels utterly fresh and inventive for the entire length of its running time.

 

 

Commonwealth

One of the most toxic pieces of nonsense peddled by Meghan Markle in her Netflix whinge last year was that the Commonwealth is really little more than a rebranding of the British Empire. Kind of like United Fruit going around blithely 'uninformed' under the badge of Chiquita or Hugo Boss making subliminal Nazi uniforms in the disingenuous form of contemporary fashion.

Oddly enough, in the same series she described herself as a gift to that very institution that the British people and their nasty mouthpieces of vile hackery (i.e not the Commonwealth itself) chose to spurn.

On Coronation Day David Olusoga, fresh from his stint as ‘expert’ support for the Sussexes, turned up on the BBC in more conciliatory mode. He observed that in spite of all the efforts of historians like himself to write off the Commonwealth, it appears to continue to thrive anyway. (Indeed, several countries that were never part of the British Empire have recently successfully petitioned to join.)

One of the many things that the Duchess of Sussex failed to grasp about the milieu into which she had married, is that the fundamental proposition of the Commonwealth is not racial diversity, but human and cultural diversity in general.

This is what in fact distinguishes it rather sharply from any kind of empire (OK, maybe not the Austro-Hungarian) which are generally grounded in the imposition of a level of uniformity in both administrative practice and underlying core values.

In this respect, the Commonwealth has evolved into a kind of anti-empire, presenting a contrast to the larger power blocks around the world today, such as the US, China and Russia.

Or indeed to the dogmas of ‘woke’ which inherently tell us that there is only one way to think, only one way that ‘progress’ can go, even as they contradict themselves with platitudes about diversity, which on closer examination are never as tolerant, inclusive and non-hierarchical in intent as they might otherwise appear.

There is an important historical lesson to be learned by all here. If there is something in the collective world that we don’t like, taking a doctrinaire stance at a distant and opposite point may not be all that desirable.

After all, at ground level both poles are pretty similar in terms of unpleasant iciness. Refashioning the institutions and the symbolism that already exist to better fit our world and its current aspirations is the smarter play.