Political theory and practice – Thinking and doing

Being

Existir (2021) To Exist

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 22m, rated 5.0 by 152 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Argentina.

Verdict: Less can be enough.

Tagline: Only the Shadow knows.

Seven diverse individuals from around the world are gathered, abducted, and…. Meanwhile in Buenos Aires, She and He, after some preliminaries, started following clues that appear on her telephone screen to find Third who disappeared a couple of years ago, driving off in a huff after a spat, never to reappear. Third’s friends assume he has moved to another city to leave his disappointments behind and they get on with their lives, though what they do off camera remains unknown.

The clues lead them, after the necessary tropes, to a field (yes, of course there is a crop circle within), guarded by a geriatric and a stereotyped general with a Mad Scientist in tow.

All expense was spared, and we soon realise the other couple we see through the looking glass living a perfectly normal life are the writer and his supportive wife. Get it?

Meanwhile, in the story the hacker keeps sending clues to Her phone, and He and She keep on keeping on.

***

The writer meets the written as the written meets the writer. Saw another version of this trope in Gosti iz galaksije (1982) Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy from Croatia last year. But none equals Agnes Varda’s Les Creatures (1966).

Something comes from nothing, contrary to Lear, in this low budget production, making it a part of the story. Nicely done. Compare with John Sayles and Jean-Pierre Melville for cinematic alchemy to conjure something out of the air.

Leporidae, you say, not me.

The Rabbit Factor (2020) by Antti Tuomainen

Good Reads meta-data is 301 pages, rated 3.78 by 5,053 litizens.

DNA: Finland.

Verdict: A hoot and a holler! (The highest rating.)

Tagline: The Rabbit did it, twice.

Actuary is McKinsey-managed out of his 15-year position after being tortured by an open plan office with weekly ‘soft flow’ training sessions to release his inner creativity. The open plan office makes it impossible to concentrate on all the possibilities and assign them values, and the soft-flow training induces nausea in his hyper-rational mind. He has no inner creativity, nor does he want any.

At age 39 for the first time in his life, he is unemployed. Well, no problem, as long as people die there will be work for actuaries. He thought. He was half right. People still die, and more to come, well, to go. He was half wrong because the schools are churning out more mathematicians than anyone knows what to do with. Employers don’t want experienced actuaries who are set in his ways, they want young and strong employees desperate for their first job. Having never spent a Euro in vain, Actuary sits tight on his savings and waits, and waits, and waits with Schopenhauer to keep him company. Hmm.

Then things get worse. His seldom-seen brother dies. Oh, well, he will do the duties that need to be done in a cost-efficient way. It is then that he discovers he now owns his brother’s adventure park, and also his debts, both white and black. Then there is the rabbit.

The ride is slow and unsure, and then wild and unpredictable. Despite the odds, which he has carefully calculated, Actuary discovers things about the park, people, himself, and life. His reaction to art and the artist are charming, if life threatening. I will never smell a cinnamon bun again without flinching.

The managementese interspersed throughout alone is worth the cover price. A close second are the musings of Schopenhauer — in both incarnations — that are interspersed in the text. But then there are Actuary’s efforts to reduce his decisions to Gaussian equations!

Loose ends remain. Johanna runs the kitchen with an iron hand in an iron glove and never wastes anything. That combination made me wonder what she did with freezer man.

This is the third title I have read from this author, and I am very glad I did. The first was so-so, but I liked the north woods setting and finished it. Another was more diverting and I finished that, too, but this is the cake-taker. No, not the cinnamon bun-taker. No way! I have my eye on its two mammalian sequels. Stay tuned for further updates.

The ear is at it again.

Black Box (2012) Boíte Noire

IMDb meta-data is 2h and 9m, rated 7.2 by 17,000 cinematizens.

Genre: Mystery.

DNA: Gallic.

Verdict: Unusual.

Tagline: ‘Ear that?’

Another French movie, another ear, this time on an acoustic analyst who works on the flight recorders from plane crashes, of which there seem to be many to keep him busy. This hero is a super nerd, yet even so he has an attractive wife who seems to love him. Strange. Nerd boy is so introverted he folds up, the more so and often because of his acutely sensitive hearing that makes a reception excruciating, but it means he can hear a change of pitch in background engine noise on a flight recorder.

I wrote an undergraduate thesis on regulatory capture, and that is what we have here. The regulator works closely with the regulated, so closely that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. His wife works for a manufacturer of airliners, and she is personally dynamic and socially adept as well as technically competent, unlike Nerd King who sits all day in a dark room listening to engine noises, she wheels and deals.

The technical aspects are in the forefront, so unlike Hollywood, and these hold interest but as the aged and redoubtable André Dussollier (first credit 1970, and latest 2024) says, ‘with those toys you can make a recording say anything you want,’ and that seems to be what happened in the main event. In reality André would have been pushed into retirement years ago in any public service.

Of course, there is a deep and dark conspiracy that does not involve Boeing, but one thinks of 737MAX nonetheless, to approve a plane before it is foolproof. And a fool proves it.

The forensic detail certainly held my interest, though it was hard to take seriously the mismatched couple. Even harder to take was the disappearance of the chief acoustic technician, played superbly by Olivier Rabourdin, in the middle of the investigation and no one seems to notice or care, for some time.

Good to know that greed, corruption, and stupidity are not limited to the Anglo-Saxon world, but sad to know that screen writers can only grasp bad will, and nothing more complicated.

P.S. there are scores of films that use that title.

Mars?

Viking (2022)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 44m, rated 6.8 by 892 cinematizens.

Gerne: SciFi, dramedy

DNA: Quebecois

Verdict: Low key, very.

Tagline: He’s Elizabeth.

The milquetoast junior high school gym teacher gets an early morning phone call telling him, he’s a match. His answers to a stream of questions match those given by someone else. Off he goes. It is so secret he cannot tell his wife, but she stands by her man.

I cannot say much more without spoiling the plot and in this case the plot is all. Suffice it to say that it is an absolutely deadpan comedy as role and player blur and combine.

It’s Mars as you have never seen it before!

Howl!

Wolf’s call (2019) Le chant du loup.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 55, rated 6.9 by 22,000 cinematizens.

Genre: Thriller, Scifi elements.

DNA; Gallic.

Verdict: Well done, but why?

Tagline: here, hear.

The SciFi premise is that in the near future France is a superpower, and in the great tradition of such powers its armed forces go around the world shooting people and places up. Hey, that sounds like reality.

The action takes place on a super duper submarine where Hero is the sound-man. No he doesn’t hoik amps. He is an acoustic warfare officer who listens to the waters. There is a lot of technique in this that I liked. Hero is good at this but he overthinks things and tries too hard to prove himself to skeptics and makes a mistake. Or so it seems. I also liked the way the filing system played into this mistake. Then there is the onboard computer that doesn’t work, because we’re over budget for operations.

Things get tense and it is submarine against submarine. It’s all about the nuclear option.

There is a love interest for Hero who appears and then disappears. Most of the players are adequate, but none outstanding, though I admit I found it hard to take seriously the popinjay admiral.

Despite the setting, this one did not convey the cramped and compromised nature of the sardine can.

Oh, and it is spoken (not dubbed) in English on the SBS version, which is interrupted by inane commercials.

Life is a beach!

Palm Beach, Finland (2017) by Antti Tuomainen

Good Reads meta-data is 332 pages rated 3.66 by litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Finland.

Verdict: Loved it.

Tagline: Goofy did it!

It is all in the title. An enterprising entrepreneur, enthused by an MBA to think big and bold outside the box (aka reality), opens a resort on the Baltic Coast of Finland. He has invested in cabanas, floats, sailboards, tanning mirrors, sand pails, outsized towels, surfboards, pedal boats, sunbrellas, banana chairs, floppy hats, the whole Waikiki beach shebang. However, banks do not lend outside the box, so he borrows the money outside the box of legality. The debt collectors cometh.

She works there as a life saver, never mind that few can swim in the Baltic Sea…and survive without wearing two wet suits even in high summer. Beach resorts must have lifeguards. Having inherited her father’s cottage nearby and jobs are few, lifeguard it is for her, while she sets about renovating the house. Then one day she came home from work and to find a deadman in her open doorway. Who was he? Why was he there? What happened to him? Will there be more trouble? WTF?

It makes no sense to her, and so she gets on with her life. The local plods are at a loss and so in the time-honoured tradition of real life, they blame the victim, no not him, her. They begin surveillance, not to protect her from another incursion, but to implicate her in the crime. To add to the fun, they call her in for questioning time and again hoping to catch her in a contradiction. All this pointless activity is noticed at the National Crime Agency which sends in an uncover agent to sort things out.

While Undercover is chatting her up in a bar, her garden shed explodes. Ditto WTF! Undercover is pretty sure she had nothing to do with this second event, but the local plod are sure she did…. Another touch of realism when the cops work against each other rather than the krims.

I enjoyed the trip through the north woods, and the portrayal of the Laurel and Hardy villains. But, mystery remains, I never did grok why Anton was there in the first place. Maybe I blinked.

He’s here, there, and nowhere!

Edogawa Ranpo, Gold Mask (1930).

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 3.38 by 168 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Japan.

Verdict: A Nō pastiche with added Gaulic. (Get it?)

Tagline: Arsène did it

He’s here. He’s there. He’s everywhere. Gold Mask is supervillain. The amazing he does immediately. The impossible takes no longer. Acrobatics. Ventriloquism. Legerdemain. Sleights of hand. Plans made years in advance. He learned a lot from Fantômas, all 32 volumes.

He’s altogether too bad to be true as he runs rampant in Tokyo. He is Arsène Lupin of 24 novels.

Comes complete with footnotes to Leblanc stories.

The dialogue put me in mind of silent movie inter-title cards.

The feline cognoscenti say it is not his best work.

The book was recommended by Snowy the cat who is usually a more reliable source than Good Reads reviews.

Ouch! Hot!

The Burning Stones (2023) by Antti Tuomainen

Good Reads meta-data is 251 pages, rated 3.56 by 231 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Finland

Verdict: A light touch.

Tagline: The forest primeval.

When a sauna is maxed with an occupant who cannot get out, this victim watches as the stove slowly gets hotter and hotter with no water on the coals, and…kaboom. Victim Number One is well done.

Turns out he was in contention for the CEO job at the very company that made that exploding stove. Two things follow: a crisis in selling those stoves and suspicion falls on the next in line for the CEO position: herself. Moreover, there is circumstantial evidence associating her with the crime scene conveniently left for the police, unaccustomed to investigating such a scene, to find. They find it and congratulate themselves on their genius.

The race is on between the police making a case against her, did I mention that the second in line is 50-year sales rep, a woman, no? Well she is. She competes with the police to find the real killer, since it is impossible, so Aristotle said, to prove conclusively something that did not happen, namely her guilt. Go ahead, try proving Aristotle didn’t say that!

Being a novice she hits a few snags, takes a few wrong turns, fishes for the usual red herrings, and implicates herself unwittingly in a second murder of a member of the board of the sauna stove manufacturer. Saunas are dangerous!

…

What I like is the setting of village Finland 50k from Helsinki in heavily wooded lake country in the last days of summer. The days are Finnish hot (18-20C) and the nights chilly. The slanting sun brings out the colour in the early fall foliage. All of that is nicely done. There is also a lot about how a sauna works. My only experience of a sauna was in grad school where one was available in the men’s locker room and I used it after weekly Wednesday night volleyball games a few times.

What I found confusing was the proper names for places (lakes, villages, resorts, people) with all those double vowels, diacritics, and polysyllabic built words. In the luxury of hindsight I also questioned the speed with which our Heroine jumped to conclusions. A 50-year old experienced sales rep would surely realise there are twists and turns in dealing with people, even though she was anxious to exonerate herself. There was also a distracting subplot involving her wayward husband whose whole life centred around F1 racing, she thought. While I found some of the detail of that fixation interesting it wore me out.

Soap Box

Black River (2022) by Nilanjana Roy

Good Reads meta-data is 368 pages, rated 4.09 by 503 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: India.

Verdict: G^{4 (=}gritty, gruesome, garish, gory).

Tagline: TMI is not enough.

It opens with the murder of woman and then a child. It gets worse after that. Dirty doings in Delhi ensue. It follows as the night the day the obvious perpetrator did it, and 360 pages later we get to him. Those 360 pages pile on detail after detail of the injustice and oppression and squalor of Indian life for many people, especially for women, so who else could be the villain but a rich oppressor.

A police officer is introduced earlier in the proceedings but I lost track of him in all the G⁴ tsunami that followed. The policing does reappear about 150 pages later, and I liked the portrayal of both the investigator from Delhi and the local as they assess the situation. But in the end that did not seem integral to the story or the plot or much as the sermon on the evils of the society.

Oh dear!

Edmund Crispin, Holy Disorders (1945).

Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages, rate 3.64 by 1640 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Once is enough. More than.

Tagline: Yes, there is more, and more, and more.

An egotistical Oxford don spouts literary quotations alternating with Dad jokes as a complex, convoluted, and confused plot slowly unfolds, very slowly, consisting of fantastic twists and unbelievable turns. I could not decide whether to call it tedious, trying, or tiresome. Maybe the whole trifecta!

It strives to be humorous but stops short at annoying. The first chapter which I read on a Kindle sample was amusing and so I took the bait, but the air went out immediately after that. It is the second in a sequence of ten or so but this one is enough for me. More than….