Michael W Jackson – Political theory and practice

Watch the Skies (2022) UFO Sweden

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 54m rated 6.4 by 8,400 cinemtizens.

Genre: Sci Fi.

DNA: Sweden.

Verdict: Diverting.

Tagline: The worm (hole) turned.

After her father disappears in the north woods one night UFO chasing, a young girl becomes obsessed with finding him. (There is neither wife nor mother in evidence.) In so doing she teams up with a group of misfit UFOlogists.

Her determination to do something — anything! everything! right now! — to find dad brings tensions to the group which has functioned more as a sheltered workshop for its members than an investigative project. Apple carts go flying. The weather and the bureau of meteorology figure in the story.

It all hinges on the adolescent lead who carries the picture. She is not in every scene but when she is there is an energy and urgency.

There are many chases, usually the police interfering with their illegal activities to secure data. Action fans will be satisfied. Me, not so much.

Quadruple ending as if the writer/director couldn’t let go made it far too long. Alain Resnais once said something like if you can’t tell a story in 90 minutes, you don’t know what story you are telling.

About the plot: Was the weather bureau involved in some kind of conspiracy? Why was the meteorologist a crucial character and then dropped? Apart from his lugubrious name what was Jonah (Gunner) doing? Does a patrol officer have that much authority? After the journey why didn’t daddy’s girl follow him? Pick, pick, pick, I know.

I enjoyed it. Enuf said.

***

The supercilious and condescending review on the Ebert platform is, well, not something the dean himself would have condoned. Too many reviewers are so jaded they can’t see what it in front of them. I admit this review was intelligible, unlike many I have read in the name of Ebert which are incoherent, written to show peers how clever they are, not to inform movie viewers but reviews are supposed to be for viewers.

Swedish made but spoken in English for the international market. So I thought. Turns out to be more complicated. It was made in Swedish and then Ai dubbed with Swedish accents and edited with lip sync to correspond. Had me fooled. Seeing is no longer believing. If ever it was.

By the way, pay attention to the ear tag on that cow. Like the title, it is part of the tribute to the genre. The title? Oh, those are the last words of The Thing (1951) one of the best Sci Fi movies. The number? Well those that know know….

The Brand New Testament (2015) Le tout nouveau testament.

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 54m rated 7.1 by 31,066 cinematizens.

DNA: Belgian.

Genre: Comedy; Species: Black, very.

Verdict: Big heart; bigger imagination.

Tagline: What a bastard!

Something to offend all the many self-righteous: blasphemy, cruelty, bestiality, profanity, pornography, prostitution, and more. The surprises just kept coming.

The reality is that God continues to lay down the law from a slovenly apartment in Brussels that he never leaves. Each new law is even more petty, spiteful, and meaner than the preceding 2,507 ones. He is a right bastard, dyspeptic, short-tempered, mangy, unwashed, odiferous, and selfish, a being who delights in the misfortunes of people. He embodies pride, greed, gluttony, wrath, sloth, the whole seven and more all rolled into one.

He is, indeed, old school, Old Testament in worn carpet slippers and a torn bathrobe with a grey singlet that might have been white, once, long ago in B.C.

His son, JC, rebelled against the old bastard, and that provoked God to even more meanness, starting with abandoning his only son. It has been downhill since, as he lays down one law after another, e.g., a dropped piece of toast always lands buttered side down! The other line always moves faster than yours with a corollary that if you can change lines, the new one stops. Remember Law 2003? The freeze in your computer does not occur when the technician logs in with Team Viewer. The last bus left just as you arrived at the stop. No problem is too small for this god to take the time to make it worse. After all, he has eternity to make everyone’s life miserable.

Turns out, Murphy was right, far more right than she realised. It has all been part of the masterplan.

Now JC’s little sister has had enough and…she sets out to recruit more apostles to write a brand new testament. This sprite begins by leaking divine data before going on a quest to recruit six new apostles to achieve a balance. Meanwhile, she is pursued by her angry old man, that is, god to you, but since he has never been out of the apartment in the world before, he is not very good at it, and he keeps running into the consequences of the very laws he has promulgated.

Charming, amusing, surprising, insightful – these are the words that come to mind. There are loose ends, e.g., what happened to the tears she collected? Why is eighteen the right number? What does baseball (in Belgium?) have to do with it, anyway?

I came across it on TV5Monde+ and the irreverent summary was interesting as was the presence of Catherine Deneuve who at age 74 has more screen presence than most at 24. Her last credit on the IMDB of 150 films is dated 2026 so at 80 she is still trouping 0n. Her first credit was 1957. Every time I see her I think of Repulsion (1965).

Platform Decay (2026) by Martha Wells

Genre: Sci Fi

Good Reads meta-data is 256 pages rated 4.40 by 5029 litizens

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Decaying.

Tagline: SecU is back.

The return of the nameless A.I. Security Unit, part man, part machine, all diarist, as well as full-time couch potato media consumer is back, but his energy seems to be flagging.

The mission is to extract hostages with the subtlety Murderbot is known for. It seems almost too easy, and this is because it is. The ante is upped, and apple cart tipped. Much of the dialogue is SecU talking to himself, largely about the idiocy of humans, a subject without end, but also musing about his own growing emotional reactions which are not in any program module. This lets him to say ‘What the fuck a lot!’ Too much. More than 90 times by my count, thus about every third page. Any effect is blunted by repetition.

We are also in for preaching about sexuality and family. This is number #8 in the sequence, but the zip, zest, and zing are long gone, leaving only the sermons. The bastardy of corporations is rehearsed…again…and again. I got the message the first ten or so times.

AppleTV+ has a Murderbot series derived from these books, but I haven’t had either the heart or the stomach to see how many light years it is from the original. No doubt it will be aimed prepubescent boys with arrested development since they made it.

Vie privée (2025) A Private Life

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 47m, rated 6.0 by 4,500 cinemtaizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Incoherent.

Tagline: Meh.

This is the IMDB summary: ‘The renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner mounts a private investigation into the death of one of her patients, whom she is convinced has been murdered.’

The local advertising labeled it a mystery comedy. Such was the bait.

The laughs, if there were any, were on me because the switch was immediate into stylish incoherence.

There was too little and too much of everything, and a last act in which new information is used to explain the previous one and half hours by introducing a new character. Aristotle neither nor Knox would approve. All that went before proves to be irrelevant, the cigarette smoking man, the constant rain, the hypnotist, the pregnant daughter, the Nazi son, the walking backwards in Central Park clip, and so on. If you were paying attention to all those clues, you wasted your time. I know I did.

I went to be amused, entertained, informed, or diverted and I wasn’t. More fool me.

It was so convoluted at end I am not sure what happened or why. But I know I don’t care. No, I don’t know what the title has to do with anything. But I did wonder how a psychiatrist could get to be renown. Isn’t their work supposed to be private, very. I concluded that the copywriter did not know what the word means.

I did re-new my celluloid acquaintance with Daniel Auteil whom I haven’t seen in years. I also savoured the brief look into the Bibliothèque Mazarine which I used to walk by in my Sorbonne days. I don’t think I ever dared enter. It is based on the eponymous 17th Century Cardinal’s collection. He was chief minister to Louis XIV for twenty years. It is the oldest public library in France.

We saw the movie at the Dendy Newtown Theatre 5 row G 9 and 10 seats. N.B. entry is from the front and upstairs to seats. There is only one aisle on the left (is that permitted by fire regulations?) facing the screen, or on the right as one enters. Aisles seats are 1 and 2 and midway would be best another time. I’ve been caught on this lack of a second aisle and front entry before. Now I have a second time maybe I will avoid it next time.

Who got dunit?

Pick Your Victim (1946) by Patricia McGerr

Good Reads meta-data is 191 pages, rated 3.70 by 20 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Office.

Verdict: Nah.

Tagline: More island, please.

Its unusual set-up is the whole game. A group of soldiers on a remote Aleutian Island in 1943 are desperate for diversion. Amid the newspaper packing of a rare mail delivery, they read a fragment about the confession of murderer of a co-worker stateside. Turns out G.I. Joe used to work for that perpetrator in that very same office.

The gambler in their midst suggests a pool in which they guess who the victim was, since that was not in the shard, and before they do this, Joe will tell them everything he knows about the confessor and the others in the office. He will also write home and ask for the identity of the victim. Hence the title. They listen and choose from among the possibilities as Joe tells all he knows for pages and pages.

There is nothing about life on the Aleutian outpost and the bulk of the story is office politics. It is competently told but not compelling for those of us who skip pages and pages of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ that neither move the plot nor develop character.

The sexism of the time and place is choking. All the women are girls. (The took refuge in Pat rather than Patricia.)Though I did like the admission of one corporate vice president upon appointing an incompetent that no one objected when when the incompetent was a man. But try appointing a competent woman and the objections are an avalanche. Has anything changed?

Krimi deans Barzun and Taylor included in their 50 crime classics for its unusual set-up. It has nothing else to recommend it.

The war that never ends.

An Iliad by Liza (Lisa, sometimes) Peterson and Denis O’Hare at the Wharf Theatre (Available in book form of 96 pages (2014).

Medium: Live theatre.

Genre: Epic réchauffé.

DNA: Greek and Us.

Verdict: Exhausting to watch, and worth it.

Tagline: The war goes on, and on….

A one man monologue with Helen Svoboda’s double bass accompaniment. Those that claim to know say it would take more than twenty hours to recite all 15,000 drum-beat lines of dactylic hexameter. Ergo in a presentation just under two hours, most is omitted.

Aside from orientation, it concentrates on a few set pieces like the withdrawal of Achilles, the rejection of Agamemnon’s ransom, Patroclus misadventure, the death of Hector, and Priam’s supplication.

Greek though Homer was, the most sympathetic characters that he draws are the Asians: Hector, a man of responsibility, with his stoical wife Andromache and Priam, a loving father to his sons and to his people. In contrast the Greek Achilles never feels responsible to or for others and Agamemnon is more interested in himself than even his daughter Iphigenia. (If you know, you know. If not, find out.)

I particularly liked the inclusion of Achilles’ admission that he loves Briseis, which was omitted in the twelve lectures on the Iliad we watched on The Great Courses as homework for this show.

The historical and topical references were effective.

It is derived from the Robert Fagles translation, though I prefer Richard Lattimore in which Helen is treated as a plaything of fate, and not a villain. Indeed, in the Iliad there are no villains. That is the tragedy. See the P.S. below on translating the Odyssey.

Omitted from this script is one of the passages that seldom gets its due: the discussion between Sarpedon and Glaucus. They have come from far away as allies to the Trojans, and when the going gets tough they wonder why they are there at all. Their conclusion is a proto-social contract.

Our people have treated us like leaders with respect, deference, and material advantage, so we are obliged to act like leaders and uphold this alliance which benefits our people. Moreover, in so doing we show our worth to our compatriots. After all, what does it matter? We will die sometime, someplace, so it might as well be here and now to repay our obligations.

Glaucus replies, To the gods we are nothing more than falling leaves on the autumnal wind.

Quite so, yet when Sarpedon dies, Zeus weeps tears of blood on the sandy plain before Troy. Not even this god of gods can dam the river of mortality. Petrichor, the blood on stone scent of rain, the term was inspired by this passage: Petr = stone; ichor = blood.

***

David Wenham, 61, has come a long way from Diver Dan. This was a tour de force relying entirely on the actor, though there was a surprise when a hand first plucked the bass.

It was a Sydney Theatre Company production with brilliant, spare staging and direction that is the norm at the Wharf 1 Theatre which is on Wharf 4-5, and not on Pier 1 as we discovered by trudging around on a fine, sunny autumnal afternoon. Seats B1 and B2 suited us very well if and when we return.

We should lunch at the end restaurant some sunny day.

Inspired me to re-read something I published about Hector in a classics journal a few years ago, well, 1983. Perhaps I am older and wiser enough to rework this. Nope.

P.S. Thinking of those two translations remind me of the week long ago in an undergraduate class with Dr Sarah Jane Gardner when we pondered the fifth word of the Odyssey with which the man himself is introduced: πολύτροπον. Transliterated that is, polytropon. ‘Poly’ means many or much. ‘Tropos’ means turn, way, manner. Ergo it can be translated as ‘many-turning.’ And therein lies the rub.

Is Odysseus many-turning, or is he many-turned? Does he twrst and turn, or do the fates twist and turn him? Is he active or passive? A does or a victim? Is he cunning or is he vulnerable?

The translations on my shelf vary. Here is a selection.

Emily Wilson – ‘complicated’

Robert Fagles – ‘the man of twists and turns’

Robert Fitzgerald – ‘skilled in all ways of contending’

Richard Lattimore – ‘the man of many ways’

But the prize must go to Thomas Hobbes in 1647 who opted out of the problem said – ‘the man.’ Hobbes always cuts to the chase even more concisely than Wilson.

By the way, Odyssey is both turned and turning.

Of course, Odysseus is both a twister and a twistee.

Fame, fortune, and misery

Berlin Hero (2025) Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstasse

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 52 m, rated 6.3 by 389 cinematizens.

Genre: Satire.

DNA: Deutschland.

Verdict: All too true.

Tagline: Believe it or not!

Bear runs a bankrupt video store in Berlin of 2020. It is more like a derelict museum than a business. When a cheque-book journalist in search of a story offers him Euros to tell his tale, he obliges for the geld. Since there was no story to tell he makes one up to jack up the price. He is surprised when that works, but Euros are Euros.

Once the lie is out there, it takes on a life of its own, and then it takes over his life. It cannot be un-lied for now he has something to lose – money and respect.

He may have been unhappy in his squalid store before the journalist disturbed the cobwebs, but now he is miserable, living and lying up to the expectations his story has ignited. The Euros are important but it isn’t just them. The respect, the civility, the admiration that the lie has brought him, starting with own adult daughter, are heady and addictive.

The fact that it is all lies does not phase the journalist at all who is eager to keep riding the wave as long as it lasts, and later when it does crash, he switches to another without missing a beat. He is an accomplished lie surfer.

Some comments on the IMDb suggest it is unrealistic. Oh hum. Watch Fox News for five minutes. Lies are swallowed whole everyday.

I enjoyed seeing some Berlin sites, though most of filming was done in Leipzig, including the Friedrichstasse station which when I went through it in 1994 still bore the marks of East Germany with a kind of internal Berlin Wall. I also noticed the chain link fence with the posters of the Wall martyrs on it. When I examined it in 1994 the last one to be killed in the Death Zone was a 25-year-old student two weeks before the Wall fell. Several hundred were killed in the Death Strip. Regrettably most of my photographs from that visit got lost somewhere along the way.

The Bear is played beautifully on this emotional roller coaster.

But the best line is dipped in acid when the retired, reptilian, repugnant, and rapacious Stasi officer says, ‘The mother of fools is always pregnant.’ It is from an Italian proverb: ‘La mamma dei cretini è sempre incinta.’ Ergo in German: ‘Die Mutter der Idioten ist immer schwanger.’ Words to live by these days.

The director died before the final shoot and the editing, and it was finished by another with some re-shooting to patch it up. That may explain why the reconciliation in the lavatory seemed too quick and easy. Time to get it done and out the door.

We saw it as part of the German Film Festival.

Survey Request Fatigue

This week from the Curmudgeon Times.

In the last week I have been asked to rate and comment on a variety of experiences, events, interactions, and transactions. The list includes purchasing a rubber door stop for $6, receiving a parcel in the mail, the quality of packing of said parcel, the courtesy of a receptionist, the speed of response to a question, the ease of use at a website, a taxi ride, punctuality of a bus, the hygiene of a toilet, quality of an online purchase in the parcel above. Most readers have similar experiences on the computers screen, on the pocket phone, and in person.

Those who employed will add to this list the numerous in-house surveys they are obliged to complete on this, that, and everything else. Retired though I am, I see some of these go by on email, and, now I think of it, even as a retiree I have been required to complete one on modern slavery and another subject I can’t recall now. I was required to do them, else risk my access to certain services supplied to we doddering emeriti.

These requests often come with a dozen or more items, with a response required for each, and with an additional open-ended dialogue box that must be completed with a minimum number of characters. These questionnaires are designed to avoid response-set bias and so take some little thought and attention to complete.

Each instance of this request has the ostensible purpose of improving the customer experience while its immediate effect is to degrade one customer’s experience.

Most of the time there is nothing to report. The parcel was delivered, the door stop went home….

At times I feel an obligation to comply, say with local business which I hope will continue or a personal online retailer, e.g., through Etsay. I feel no such obligation to corporate giants but I have found if I do not reply, the request remains like Banquo’s ghost. I cannot delete the request just as McBeth could not delete Banquo.

These requests do provide an opportunity to flag a problem, but my personal experience with that is negative. When i ordered a six-pack, among other things, from an online retailer and found on delivery only four bottles in the pack, whereas, on checking, I had paid for six, I reported this in a feedback request to blind eyes. There was never a response, let alone restitution. It was simply a corporate routine.

In many companies the volume of this feedback must be considerable, and the harvesting must be technical, identifying only the more egregious remarks. The rest of us are chaff.

The solution is to do another survey about surveys! Managers must have something to manage.

Of late, I find that even the most casual purchase is met with a request for my phone number. Why? So I can be sent a Survey Request Form about buying a pack of chewing gum. My response to this request now is ‘No.’

When I search the web I find the management and business industry is formulating tactics to trick customers into replying.

Sherlock aborning.

A Study in Scarlet (1887) by Arthur Doyle

I listened to it on Audible during my daily Newtown peregrinations. It was read by Derek Jacobi.

It starts with a long, wandering backstory from Dr Watson. Boring.

Then comes Holmes enters and livens things up. Briefly.

That it interrupted by five or was it six long chapters on the backstories of the victim(s). This was also boring, though of course I warmed to the portrayal or Mormons as sadistic, sex-crazed, slavers, and worse.

Then we have some more Holmes wrapping it all up from a footprint.

It really cooks when Holmes is being Holmes and that is about a third of the total length of the book. (That disproportion reminded me of the first Charlie Chan movie when he only appears half way through.)

It is surprising that it caught on.

Banned in Utah and Florida for its anti-Mormonism.

Derek Jacobi is brilliant even when the material is not.

This was the first of four Holmes novels to go with the fifty-six short stories. This one has been the basis of films and literary tributes most of which are much snappier and paced than this turtle.

Charming.

Isn’t it Romantic? (2003) by Ron Hansen

Good Reads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 2.93 by 273 raters.

Genre: Screwball comedy.

DNA: Heartland.

Verdict: Charming.

Tagline: Nebraska red. Big, indeed!

It is light, bright, and breezy, so different from some of the author’s other novels, like Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) or Hitler’s Niece (1999) though both of these are memorable, too.

Nathalie is a Bibliothèque nationale librarian specialising in Americana who flees from her very ex-fiancee le beau Pierre. She is Helen of Troy beautiful and he is Achilles manly, but… destiny takes its course.

To avoid him she signs up for a See America tour by bus from New York to San Francisco, sure that he would never follow her, but he does, setting off in love-struck pursuit with only the clothes on his back (a white silk shirt with gold cufflinks and a designer necktie, an Armani black suit, a painted necktie, and handmade tasseled loafers – elegant yes, travel durable no, and a black AMEX card in his wallet) and appears in Omaha to join the tour. As they travel, they bicker continuously in Franglais even when visiting such compelling sites as a spam cannery, the Vermillion corn palace, a talk from a man who had shaken Larry Bird’s hand, stockyards in Chicago to hear Sandburg recited, the view of the fog from the St Louis Arch, Harold Warp’s collection of collections, and then…when Pierre had supposed it could not get worse the bus broke down in the Nebraska Sandhills atop the Ogallala Aquifer on the way to Mount Rushmore skirting Ted Turner’s ranch.

Beau Pierre, tattered from travel, angry at her continued rejection, confused by the English he cannot quite understand, caught between the Loup and Niobrara Rivers in the Sioux country of James Neihardt’s poetry and Maria Sandoz’s novels, he stays with the bus as the driver discovers that the lug wrench isn’t quite right, there is no mobile phone coverage, the spare tire is low, and the jack can’t stabilise the load. Still the driver remains confident he can fix it! In time.

Once again to avoid Pierre’s passive-aggressive hectoring and pleading she stalks off, with her red roll-aboard bouncing and dragging behind her over road grit and sandreed grass to the water tower down the road. In a seething rage, Pierre follows unencumbered by any baggage. So they come to earth in Seldom Nebraska, population 395.

Here they will stay until the next bus, if there is one. Here they discover an unknown world across the language barrier or maybe because of it. She speaks textbook English, unlike the residents of Seldom, and he has a few words and phrases mostly from films. Comedies of error follow.

He discovers from Owen, the town’s one and only (not a very good) mechanic, that red has at least two meanings in Seldom, and she finds a farmer who reads in the air conditioned cabin of a combine harvester. In so doing, they (re-)discover each other. Their carpet ride takes along several Seldomites, too. And while things remain the same, they have also changed.

How anyone could rate it below 5 is one of life’s mysteries to me, but Good Reads comments section is full of mysteries like that. I have read and commented on this book before I was in the mood to renew my acquaintance.

Strangely the Kindle version is available from Amazon USA but not Amazon AU.

Disclosure: I went to high school with Ron Hansen once upon a time.