Mail
not intended for publication should be clearly noted
as such
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
TV
now tells you what to feel.
It
doesn't tell you what to think anymore. From EastEnders
to reality format shows, you're on the emotional journey
of people—and
through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the
agreed form of feeling. "Hugs and Kisses," I
call it.
I
nicked that off Mark
Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which
said that if you analyze television now it's a system of
guidance—it
tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having
the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad
Feelings is redeemed through a "hugs and kisses"
moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral
guidance, but of emotional guidance.
Morality
has been replaced by feeling.
That's
what all the disorders are about. They are a way of
oppressing and measuring whether what you're feeling is
the correct feeling. Intellect and morality are intimately
related, but feeling is now predominant. —Adam
Curtis
COMFORTER,
WHERE, WHERE IS YOUR COMFORTING?
PAULSON, FATHER OF US
ALL, WHERE IS YOUR RELIEF?
Trust
Diane
Francis to get to the heart of the
matter:
America's
political dysfunction and its economic crisis intersected
catastrophically yesterday in the House of
Representatives, which failed to pass the bailout for Wall
Street's mess.
At
issue is President George Bush's lack of credibility. As
commander in chief, he exaggerated the threats in Iraq in
order to launch a needless trillion-dollar invasion. Now,
as America's CEO, nobody's listening to his description of
the situation as "dire" and
"dangerous" as he pulls the fire alarm over Wall
Street.
To
many, it's a case of fool us once, shame on you. Fool us
twice, Bush, shame on us.
Unfortunately,
this time he may be right and a rescue is needed.
The
contagion will spread. Five banks had to be propped up
over the weekend, and in Toronto, financial sources tell
me that three high-profile condo projects have had their
financing pulled. The leveraged buyout of BCE and others
could be casualties. Trump's empire is for sale.
You
know, before I read this, I was against the buyout. I saw
it as foolish and unavailing, succour for socialists,
money down a rathole. But now I see how selfish I was.
Francis has placed the whole horror of the alternative
before my eyes, causing the scales to positively leap from
them. Condo projects in T.O. put on ice? BCE's leveraged
buyout deep-sixed? Trump threatened with bankruptcy again?
No, no, it's too much. Surely we must now all agree that
there is no price too high, no sacrifice too great, no
fraud too stinking to allow us to even consider mussing a
single hair of The Donald's magnificent comb-over.
A personal appeal from The
Donald: 'Unless the bailout passes, thousands
of stylists and L'Oréal employees will be fired. Won't
you please help?'
Unintentional
hilarity from Jane
Taber of the Globe and Mail:
Stephen
Harper used some of his most specific language to date
Monday in saying a re-elected Conservative government
would not reopen the debate over the country's abortion
law because there are too many other important issues to
deal with.
"We
have a lot of challenges in front of the country,"
Mr. Harper said during an announcement about arts and
fitness funding for children. "We have a
difficult world economy, as we all know. That has to be
the focus of the government and I simply have no intention
of ever making the abortion question a focus of my
political career." [Emphasis added.]
It's nice to know what
Stephen Harper, the Doughboy Demosthenes, considers
important and what he considers unimportant.
Government-sponsored sit-ups and fingerpainting for the
kiddies: vital—government-sponsored
legislation to protect the would-be kiddies from being
killed, up to and including the time when their little
heads protrude from the womb: uh, not so much.
And
as this
story makes clear, "family man"
Stephen Harper will put paid to any
non-government-sponsored efforts to protect the unborn. So
one can only marvel at the advice proffered by Jim
Hughes of Campaign
Life Coalition: "Harper's statements
proved once again that pro-life advocates must vote
for the pro-life candidate in their own ridings regardless
of the party they represent."
Why? So quisling fucks like Jason
Kenney can continue to bask in a
wholly-undeserved moral superiority even as they continue
to serve the most pro-abortion government in the Western
world?
We're the Harpers, and we
approve this 'intact dilation and extraction'
Too
often today people are ready to tell us: 'This is not
possible; that is not possible.' I say: whatever the true
interest of our country calls for is always possible. We
have nothing to fear but our own doubts. —Enoch
Powell
Wayne
Gladstone is funny. And so his videos are
no longer on Funny or Die—check
this
out, I dare you—but on Cracked,
a mag I'd figured had gone to the Great Compositor in the
Sky decades ago. Turns out it's a website
now. Not half-bad, either.
Hey,
d'ya think Sarah Palin likes The Kid? To ask the question
is to answer
it.
Credit
Default Swaps
—
a Wiki definition pulled from the future:
Credit Default Swaps (CDS) were used in through the turn
of the millennium to spread and amplify risk
systematically through the economy and is considered one
of the main impetus leading to the Great Calamity (see
also: Great Fiat Collapse). On its face, CDSs were
essentially unregulated insurance of debt provided by a
counterparty. In hindsight, the CDS clearly was an
organized attempt to lock in all financial profits by
allowing the unelected financial arm of the government to
back all private debts (see: Goldman Sachs Cabal, Wall
Street Trials). This was because the layers of the CDSs
formed a complex interlocking web with a leveraged value
of several times the entire economic system of the time,
so that if any major failure was not prevented with a
public bailout, it would bring the whole system down as
the swaps were forced to unwind (see: MAD, Financial
Terrorism). A CDS, or issue of any similar financial
instrument, is now punishable by immediate execution of
each involved corporation's board of directors (See:
Corporate Mortal Accountability and Finance Reform Act of
2022). —'MethodMan,'
commenter on Mish's Global, September 16, 2008
The
most common question I hear from readers these days is,
"What's the deal with that Palin baby name?"
Fairly obvious, I should have thought. Trig Paxson Van
Palin is clearly an homage to that "hard rock"
combo of the 1980s, Van Halen. But which Van Halen, you
ask? Classic David Lee Roth? Populist Sammy Hagar? Or Gary
Cherone, the George Lazenby of VH frontmen? Well, husband
Todd is Diamond Dave all the way (fave tune:
"Panama"), while his wife Sarah, who can't
resist belting out "I can't drive 55" whenever
she burns up the A-1 to Anchorage, of course touts Sammy (fave
tune, another solo effort, is the immortal "Red"
—"Some
like it hot/I like it red"). As for their older
children...
[Editor's
note: They want to know about the first name, you nitwit] Well,
According to the authoritative
People, it was husband Todd who decided to
choose the odd, not to say reprehensible, Christian name
"Trig," although I'm not sure I believe this. My own experience has been that
"creative" baby names are almost always the mother's inspiration. Again, according to
People, Todd claims that "Trig is a Norse name for 'strength.'" Todd is almost certainly
wrong here. I suspect someone in a bar told him this, or he came across it in one of those cheap, fraudulent books consulted by parents
proud to advertise their deracination. I do know there is a Norwegian name Trygve and that there was a
famous Norwegian who bore
it. According to this source, which looks reasonable, it is "derived from Old Norse
tryggr meaning 'trustworthy.'" After last night,
which saw a newly infantilized nation bow its will to the
Palin clan's overpowering fertility, we
can only hope that Sarah is indeed as
"trustworthy" as her most recent blessed
event!
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY (SPECIAL BRISTOL PALIN EDITION)
As
far as the moral health of a nation can be affected by
any human agency, it is affected by prophets and priests
and not by politicians. But this certainly has been one of
the best field days that the self-righteous have had since
Parnell was cited as co-respondent in O'Shea's divorce
case. In all these miseries, the fact that so many people
have found some genuine happiness is something to which,
in all charity, we have no right to object. —Nigel
Birch, Speech in the British House of Commons on
the Profumo
Affair, 17 June 1963
Bristol (right): Adding
enormously to the gaiety of the nation
Well,
Mrs Pettigrew, I do so remember our two uncles together,
and we were all staying down in Dorset. There was a bishop
and a dean and our two uncles. Oh, poor Tempest was bored.
They were discussing the Scriptures and this manuscript
called "Q."
How Tempest was in a rage when she heard that
"Q" was only a manuscript, because she had
imagined them to be talking of a bishop, and she said out
loud, "Who is Bishop Kew?" And of course
everyone laughed heartily, and then they were sorry for
Tempest. And they tried to console her by telling her that
"Q" was nothing really, not even a manuscript,
which indeed it wasn't, and I must confess I never
understood how they could sit up late at night fitting
their ideas into this "Q" which is nothing
really. —Muriel
Spark, Memento
Mori
In
Sinatra's time it was really cool to be 50, to be a man.
You put on a hat, and a suit and you keep on going until
you die. Now you get 50-year-old guys in sleeveless
T-shirts, going to the gym and desperately trying to fix
their hair, and you think: 'Whatever happened to real
men?'" —Rob
Dougan
In
the end I believe Obama will win because McCain is aligned
with the unpopular Bush regime. But until then, it's a
high-stakes branding chess game no different than selling
soap or cornflakes or SUVs or Brad Pitt only a lot more
important to humanity. —Diane
Francis, "Obama
McCain Brand Strategies,"National Post, July 27, 2008
Let's
see: Obama is going to win, but everybody agrees to go
through the motions, which take the form of a board game,
which is no different than selling consumer goods
or Brad Pitt (what about Angelina?) and is terribly
important to humanity, hence the "high stakes,"
except that Obama has it already wrapped up. Don't ask me
to imagine what "branding chess" might be.
I got as far as pawns reaching to the eighth rank and then
being promoted, not to Queens, but to Cadillac
Escalades...and then blood started seeping from my ears.
This isn't writing; this is Mad Libs.
Francis: The José Raúl
Capablanca
of the mixed metaphor
WASHINGTON—Americans reacted
mostly positively Friday to the surprise selection by John McCain of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Republican nominee for Vice President. The 37-year-old Palin continued her meteoric rise to
political demigod status, which began just 9 years ago, when she was elected Mayor of
Kolyma, AK, population 79, and continued two years ago when she was elected Governor after the entire Republican
state hierarchy was indicted for corruption and then photographed in a giant hot tub with underaged Boy Scouts.
In an already historic Presidential year, one that has seen left-field Democratic candidate Barack Obama ride a wave of guilty hysteria to triumph over supposed
sure-thing Hillary Clinton, Gov. Palin brings her own considerable exoticism to the table. A working mother,
she is married to her dog-mushing school sweetheart, Ookpik, who runs a thriving
seal-gutting business when not doing something or other
for Alaska's only major employer, Big Oil. Ookpik, who is 1/32
Eskimo on his stepmother's side, is an X-treme moose-eating
champion and enjoys staring at the aurora borealis. The Palins have five children, Truck, Trig, Sine, Cosine and Hypotenuse.
The glamorous Gov. Palin is
sure to turn heads on the campaign trail. Chosen Miss Skagway in 1989,
she was featured in Vogue last year wearing the traditional Alaskan
summer costume of mukluks and a dress constructed entirely of ThermaCare heat patches.
Experts contend that Gov. Palin's candidacy will
considerably enlarge Sen. McCain's base of embittered
Bush'ite loyalists, hedge traders and End Timers.
According to Catholic University of America political
scientist Ed Neuwirth, "She will go over especially
well with 'curling' moms, men who think women who wear $1,500 titanium eyeglasses are
'hot' and all Americans ignorant of the 25th Amendment to the
Constitution" (which stipulates that upon the death or incapacity of the President, the Vice President assumes his
office).
David Gergen, U.S. News
& World Report editor-at-large and former adviser
to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, had
particular praise for the choice, saying, "Sen.
McCain has demonstrated his bedrock commitment to our core national values of vibrancy, diversity and the Hail Mary
pass."
Dan Quayle, however, struck a discordant note. Reached at his home in
Paradise Valley, AZ, the former Vice President declared, "You remember the shit I went through when Bush picked me in
'88? I was 'too young' and 'too inexperienced.' Well, compared to this broad, I was
Daniel Fucking Webster." Quayle refused further comment, mumbling enigmatically, "It's Miller time."
Sen. McCain celebrated his
72nd birthday Friday, and his VP pick was expected to be
closely scrutinized, considering the sensitive topic of his
bumptious decrepitude. A former spokesman for defeated
rival former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said off
the record, "We all wondered about it, since we all
know he's got a 50/50 chance of stroking off in any given
week. There's a rumor been going round for months that
McCain signed a deal with the Devil, promising that he'll
be elected President if he agrees to allow his soul to be
ripped from his husk of a body and delivered shrieking
into the bowels of Hell at precisely 12 noon, January 20,
2017. I never gave [the rumor] much credence
before, but then he went
and picked Palin. Makes you think, doesn't it?" Calls
to the Devil's head office in Las Vegas were not
returned.
She doo:
Gov. Palin on her morning commute to the state capital in
Juneau
"You're
as bad as my friend Arthur," said Ferdie. "He
seriously believes that nothing violent need ever happen
if we all get together and love one another."
"Love,"
said Nina Cattermole. "Yes, I think there is
definitely a place in any non-violent revolution for
personal relationships."
"I
agree," said Ferdie. "There's this girl called
Elizabeth Pedal in the class who I am beginning to think
seriously about. But I never let that sort of thing
interfere with one's political beliefs."
"Don't
you?" said Nina, looking him in the eyes. Ferdie
smiled. She might have something. One did get rather bored
sitting in the office for hours on end, doing nothing.
"But
seriously," he said. "I am not sure that I want
a revolution anyway. And if I did, my experience of
revolutions is that they have to be pretty violent. You
will never goad the inert grey masses of the English
proletariat into doing anything violent, so you might as
well give up any ideas of a revolution."
"This
is precisely what I have been trying to say all along. Because
the English working class is so inert, grey and
inarticulate, it will put up no opposition to a
revolution provided it is non-violent. As soon as
you start shooting people, or hanging them, the English
fill up with Dunkirk spirit and make trouble. But if you
just quietly take over the Government and start passing
laws, nobody would notice. The would complain about it in
the pubs, of course, and a few people would write letters
to the Daily Telegraph, but everybody would realize
in their hearts that we were being progressive."
"And
how are you going to quietly take over the
Government?" Scorn poured off Miss Catterpole's back
like fat from a basted duck, leaving her slightly browner
and tastier than before.
"By
a gradual process which need not even be conscious. It is
happening all the time, although, of course, it will be
speeded up a bit when the younger people like ourselves
begin to make themselves felt in politics." —Auberon
Waugh, Who
Are The Violets Now?
(1965)
Ofcom's
annual report on thecommunications
market offers a nightmare picture of British society in
which everyone is trying to do several things at the same
time. People watch only six minutes less television a day
than they did in 2002 - but television is no longer enough
to keep them satisfied. The young, in particular, are
constantly using their mobile phones and checking the
internet, even while they are watching TV. Sending text
messages is especially popular, with the number sent in
2007 having risen by 36% from the previous year to an
astonishing 60bn. According to Ofcom, there are now more
mobile phones in circulation than there are people in the
United Kingdom.
The
spread of the internet and mobile telephony has produced a
compulsion to keep in touch that prevents people from
concentrating on any one thing at a time. It is, of
course, nice to communicate with other people
occasionally, but to do so constantly and for no
particular purpose is a kind of disease.
Why
do people do it? Are they frightened of missing out, or of
being forgotten or overlooked? Whatever the reason, it
means that they are losing the ability to focus for long
on anything, which can't be a good idea. It can only
result in us all becoming more stupid, more ignorant, and
more neurotic.
Addiction
to communication seems to me as dangerous as addiction to
cigarettes or alcohol and should perhaps be taken as
seriously by the health authorities, who might advise
treatment in the form of a few hours reading or meditation
a day. —Alexander
Chancellor
My
father worked in a greengrocers' shop for 35 years; my
mother was a housewife before she committed suicide in
1987. They were both lifelong Labour voters. My mother
hanged herself in the house she lived in all her life, in
Southall, west London, a town that had changed beyond all
recognition. It is today the least white place in the
whole of Britain.
She
wrote in her suicide note: "I hate Southall, I feel
so alone." In case anyone dare accuse her of any
racism, she may have hated Southall, but my mother was
incapable of hating people. She worked in the last years
of her life as a dinner lady in an all-Asian school and
was much loved. But she was lost. Her world had
disappeared.
Her
dilemma is partly the dilemma of the white working
class...
By
what methods were the white working classes (WWC)
despatched? The first development that undermined WWC
hopes and morale was the great betrayal in education—
the abolition of grammar schools and the retention of
private schools.
Grammar
schools, in the guilt-ridden WLMC [white liberal middle
classes] view of things, favoured
middle-class children over working-class children. What
they actually favoured— or could have favoured, if the
tests were designed sufficiently well— was clever
children over less clever children. And if you look at the
dynamism of the post-war grammocracy (Pinter, Dyke,
Potter, Jacobson, Sillitoe, Bragg, Bennett and hundreds of
others), it provided a crucial injection of WWC
sensibility into the wider culture...
The
second great betrayal was multiculturalism. This was the
creed that said all cultures were as valid as each other
(in theory) but that minority cultures were somehow— no
one was quite sure how— actually superior to the host
white indigenous culture which was axiomatically racist.
So even if you happen to come from a culture that endorsed
female circumcision and was misogynist and homophobic, it
was a given that you were a "victim." And who
were the "victimisers"? The WWC who were faced
with the profound challenge and stresses of assimilation.
There
was a lot of WWC resistance to immigration. This was
partly about racism, which, of course, the WLMC are immune
to. Something in the organic bread, I think. But it was
also about losing housing opportunities, cheap labour
taking away jobs, and the simple, profound problem of
learning to exist in a new kind of culture, which in some
cases overwhelmed and bewildered the indigenous one. The
trick of learning to feel ashamed at the same time as
everything was being taken away from you was a really hard
one to pull off...
The
third great betrayal was the WLMC determination to stamp
out nationalism— at least if you were English. If you
were Scottish, Welsh or Irish, of course, you could
celebrate your flag and your culture as loudly and proudly
as you liked. But if you were native WWC, to celebrate St
George and the English flag was racist. This is because
the WWC, despite being stuck down mines and corralled in
factories, apparently managed to exploit their colonial
brothers and sisters throughout the previous centuries, so
they could no longer show pride in their own country, the
country that their parents and grandparents died for and
suffered for in two world wars— in the second one
fighting a racist tyrant. They continue to die in Iraq and
Afghanistan. And without complaint, because they have
learned to be quiet and to be ashamed of who they are and
accept that they aren't "good" like the WLMC,
who lived in all-white enclaves and to whom
multiculturalism meant a nice Continental deli at the end
of the road.
What
else? The utopian council estates of the 1960s and 1970s— the WLMC, pursuing their project of bracing
architectural piety, uprooted whole WWC communities and
put them in ugly, unliveable blocks, leaving them without
a sense of place or meaning, while the architects and town
planners themselves lived in little Edwardian terraces or
Cotswold villages. Since the great council house sell-off
of the 1980s— fiercely opposed, of course, by the
liberal left— many of the WWC have bettered themselves.
But now that the housing stock has run out and run down,
those left behind are beached and helpless.
Who
can wonder why the white working classes have got
themselves a bad name? Who can wonder why they are angry,
why they are despairing, why they carry knives, fight and
drink themselves into oblivion...
Do I
look down on the WWC now that I am middle class myself?
Probably. But I don't hate them, not in the way I hate the
people who destroyed and abandoned them, the ideologues
and meddlers that have left them without a meaning and
without a home and without an escape. I'll keep voting
Left because I can't imagine voting Tory, and the Lib Dems
are a wasted vote. But I know that, in the end, I am
voting for a double-talking mealy-mouthed enemy of
everything they purport to be promoting— equality,
opportunity, fairness. They are the living embodiment of
Lao Tse's greatest truth and the source of the white
working classes tragedy— that "goody goodies are
the enemies of virtue." —Tim
Lott, "White,
Working Class And Threatened With Extinction: It's The
Do-Gooding Liberal Middle Classes That Have Betrayed Those
'Beneath' Them," Independent, 9 March 2008
The
fact that it is considered "daring" for the BBC
to make a
series of programmes about the problems and
fears of the white working class (i.e., the majority)
tells you all you need to know about the BBC and much of
what you need to know about Britain.
Richard
Klein, the series commissioner, must have
fought hard to get sanction for programmes about the mere
majority.
The
most daring programme so far (in media eyes) has been the
sympathetic picture of Enoch
Powell.
It
conveyed his rage that the populace was never consulted
about the drastic change being made in its composition and
culture without so much as a by your-leave.
Politicians
on both sides, furious about the "river
of blood" speech in 1968, claimed then—and
some still do—that
Powell's speech hindered reform.
It
was so extreme, you see, that it made it difficult for us
moderate men to do something about immigration, which we
obviously had intended to do when the occasion was
suitable, when the time was right, at the appropriate
juncture, etc.
I
promise you as God is my witness that what the two
frontbenches wanted to do was nothing, nil, zero, rien
and nicht. It was this conspiracy of
silence and inertia which enraged Powell and much of the
public.
It is
understandable why he became hated by Labour figures like
Roy Hattersley, interviewed on the programme. For it meant
that he and his fellow socialists had been found out.
For
all their supposed unique contact with the masses, and
their beliefs that the proles would naturally trust Labour
to be told what was right, here was an aroused and angry
public indicating the opposite.
It
undermined the very basis of many a Labour politician's
lifelong belief along with his faith in the universal
brotherhood of man.
Powell
was scarcely less hated by various Tory politicians
because an election was looming and here was this bloody
man turning everything upside down, enraging the
opinion-forming elite and insisting that the party had
jettisoned its responsibilities.
Interestingly
enough, a middle-of-the-road Tory from that elite assured
me the other day that immigration was not a problem,
though he admitted "there are still some difficulties
with the white working class."
It is
a remark worth treasuring. Framing, if not embalming.
Powell
was always an uncomfortable man politically, his impassioned
attack in 1959 on the official hushing-up
of atrocities in Kenya's Hola Camp for Mau Mau terrorists—Denis
Healey describes it as the finest Parliamentary speech he
ever heard—was
a nuisance for the Macmillan Government.
Powell
also deplored our nuclear deterrent: he wanted an end to
our bases East of Suez and an end to posturing as a world
policeman.
He
saw the Soviet threat as greatly exaggerated and the
Anglo-American alliance as a menace. Ted Heath's prices
and incomes policy was "madness."
Enoch
was my oldest friend in politics, and in later years he
would regularly invite me to scrutinise his speeches in
advance. I would sometimes comment that his remarks would
upset many people. His usual reply was that they needed to
be upset. —Andrew
Alexander
Powell: Mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium
sermo
According to Mrs
Besant th[e] universal Church is simply the
universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all
one person; that there are no real walls of individuality
between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell
us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our
neighbours. That is Mrs Besant's thoughtful and suggestive
description of the religion in which all men must find
themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any
suggestion in my life with which I more violently
disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I,
but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the
world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is
one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is
entirely different. If souls are separate love is
possible. If souls are united love is obviously
impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but
he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does,
it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of
real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon
Mrs Besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one
enormously selfish person.
Grade: C-
The Darjeeling Limited:
The wheels in the brain go round and round
This is another spiritual
journey, featuring hitmen, two Irish and one English, who
are philosophers as all movie hitmen these days must be,
just as all movie policemen must be head cases. Colin
Farrell's hitman is a head case too, but any competent
moral theologian could have told him that the second
killing he agonizes over was no more evil than the first
which precipitated it. Suggested scriptural reading:
Proverbs
9:10.
And someone should tell
writer-director Martin McDonagh that a superabundance of
swears alone doesn't make you the next Coen Brothers or
David Mamet. Though hiring Carter Burwell to do the music
doesn't hurt. Bonus points: Bruges
itself, the great Brendan Gleeson and the lovely
Clémence
Poésy and Thekla
Reuten, Andreas
Schmidt singing Der
Leiermann and the little boy's
confessional crib sheet, which is the saddest thing I've
ever seen.
Jason Statham struggles
manfully against inept direction, inapt cinematography and
a witless, distended script, but he cannot save this steak
and kidney plod, despite valiant support from old pros
Peter Bowles, Jason Faulkner and the peerless David Suchet.
And he gets no help from Saffron Burrows, who's a cold
fish to match her trout
pout. Perhaps she simply doesn't like men.
Best bit: the opening
credits, set to T Rex's "Bang
a Gong," which is everything this
movie is not: sexy, swaggering and cocksure.
Grade: C
The Bank Job: Nothing
in their outward
appearance suggested a total lack of chemistry
When did I realize this movie
was risible? About one minute in, when we are introduced
to a top female cable news network correspondent who would
strain credulity as a contestant on America's Next Top
Model. How ridiculous is the plot? Dale Gribble would
scorn it as contrived. When did this movie make me laugh
out loud? About one hour in, when the chief conspirator
says, "We have to tie up all of the loose
ends." To what can sitting through this movie be
compared? Like being trapped in a Tilt-A-Whirl while being
subjected to brief random images and belaboured about the
head with saucepans of various sizes. If there were a
Dennis Quaid School of Acting, what would it teach? 1.
Grimace. 2. Shout. 3. Repeat. Where can I buy one of those
cool PDAs that lets you detonate bombs and perform
assassinations by remote control? Nowhere as yet, but
Steve Jobs promises delivery of the iTerrorist by 4Q 2008.
Grade: D
Vantage Point:
Sigourney Weaver asks,
'Will someone please tell me what I'm doing here?'
Jay
Currie and Edward
Michael George have challenged me to
"share six non-important things/habits/quirks about
yourself." Probs neg, as Nathan Barley would say, but
I will add the usual proviso that the tag dies with me.
Since
the death of Debussy, Sibelius and Schönberg are the most
significant figures in European music, and Sibelius is
undoubtedly the more complete artist of the two. However
much one may admire Schönberg's powerful imagination and
unique genius, it is difficult not to feel that the world
of sound and thought that he opens up—though
apparently iconoclastic—is
au fond as restricted as the academicism it has
supplanted. Sibelius's music suffers from no such
restriction, and it indicates not a particular avenue of
escape but a world of thought which is free from the
paralyzing alternatives of escape or submission. It offers
no material for the plagiarist and is to be considered
more as a spiritual example than as a technical influence.
We are not likely to find any imitations of Sibelius's
No. 7 because the spiritual calm of
this work is the climax of the spiritual experience of a
lifetime and cannot be achieved by any aping of external
mannerisms. —Constant
Lambert, Music
Ho!, 1931
Sometimes technique is
enough. And when it is harnessed to an uncompromising
vision followed through with total commitment, you get
art. Yes, that's right. If this seems ridiculous, consider
what Steven Spielberg would have added to this apocalyptic
scenario. Well, you'd get superfluous exposition, kute
kiddies, a happy ending and a wooden stake of
"meaning" driven through its heart.
Instead, Cloverfield is pure cinema, stripped bare
of accretion. Its flat emotional affect delivers a mise
en scène perfectly consonant with the personal
experience of disaster as it happens.
Post-9/11 metaphor? Think
harder, reviewers. Cloverfield is not horror
recollected in sentimental tranquility. It is a
presentiment of the
long emergency.
Grade: A
Cloverfield: 'Does this mean we don't get bonuses this year?'
Has atavism been entirely
bred out of the (North) American male? It is tempting to
describe Juno as a twee feminist fantasy, but the
almost universal rapture with which our elite has greeted
it suggests we are meant to regard it as The Way We Live
Now. So this is the way the (Western) world ends: not with
a bang, not with a whimper but instead suffocated under an
avalanche of
excruciatingly poptastic "witticisms." Imagine
Oscar Wilde as channelled by the Gilmore Girls, and you'll
get an understanding of just how sissified this movie is.
After Juno had ended,
I resolved to devote what remains of my life to making the
possession of acoustic guitars a crime punishable by
death. Then I considered converting to Islam. Later, after
I calmed down, I was possessed by a renewed admiration for
the truth and beauty to be found in John Hughes's high
school comedies.
If Juno is the Barack
Obama of Oscar-nominated films, then There Will Be
Blood is the John McCain
—nothing but atavism. In fact, much like John McCain's
public image, it is a celebration of insanity. As
Aristotle pointed out, the mad have nothing to teach us
and so neither does this movie, despite its high level of
technical achievement.
Now, I understand that the
past is a foreign country, and that it is too much to
expect Paul Thomas Anderson to betray the slightest
knowledge of orthodox Christian theology, let alone the
syntax and cadence of the Authorized Version. But am I
alone in finding Eli Sunday the feeblest fundamentalist
ever? Prediction: "I'm finished!" will be to the
2000s what "Here's Johnny!" was to the 1980s.
You have been warned.
Thank God for the Coen
brothers, who make movies for adults. No Country For
Old Men is just as technically accomplished as There
Will Be Blood, but its artistry is deployed in the
service of moral seriousness, not merely in striking the
nerve endings that induce bleats of
"masterpiece" from the critically jejeune.
Another difference between
the two is that while Daniel Plainview and Anton Chigur
may both be regarded as the Devil, No Country For Old
Men does not regard his triumph as inevitable. Two
caveats: 1. One suspects that Tommy Lee Jones cannot
distinguish profound from ponderous
—or mellifluous from mushmouthed. 2. One suspects
that the Coens believe cheating the audience of narrative
expectations to be per se a good thing. But this is
an exquisitely beautiful film and terrifically exciting in
every respect, while Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin are
just as good as Daniel Day Lewis. Better, actually, because
their performances are less self-regarding.
Grade: A-
No Country For Old Men: Dogs are the stormtroopers of
the animal kingdom
