Die Schlüssel zur Freiheit (2025) The Keys to Freedom
Not on IMDb: runtime 5m.
Wim Wenders narrates a brief meditation of war and peace occasioned by the anniversary of the German surrender in a school room at Rheims France on 6 May 1945. It is thoughtful, moody, quiet, measured, and altogether a relief from contemporary insanity.
The film is on You Tube and elsewhere. An insightful review can be found in the NYT.
By the way that surrender was re-enacted a week later in Berlin with the Soviets presiding. That explains a scene I saw in a film awhile ago and questioned. Answered.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 40m, rated 6.4 by 38,000 cineastes.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: Oh hum.
Tagline: Claim jumpers abound.
Gold rush among the stars. A teenage girl and her father prospect for rare minerals in the far reaches of the galaxy on a rainforest planet and encounter some unpleasant types wearing masks. Shoot-outs follow, and Randolph Scott does not ride to the rescue. More’s the pity. Also absent is a leathery old timer chewing tobacco in this space oater.
The twist is that, oops spoiler, the girl grows up quickly in this environment. Remember Kim Darby? I do.
The girl or her nemesis are in nearly every scene and carrying the film as far as it is carried. The second half becomes clichéd, some might say. Well, I did.
The setting is effective and the two principals are committed to their parts, unlike some of others who seem to find the whole thing boring. Oh, maybe that was me.
A few years earlier, It was preceded by a very short short of the same name on DUST as proof of concept to raise the money for this effort. Full marks for wit, energy, and initiative.
Late in the Republic Plato outlines the decay of democracy into autocracy. The details are supplied in a number of lesser works. Of course the sage of Baltimore did the same much more succinctly and colourfully.
Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908).
Good Reads meta-data is 155 pages rated 3.77 by 11,866 litizens.
Genre: Fiction; Prophecy, Documentary.
DNA: USA
Verdict: Hamer blows!
Tagline: It happened.
After centuries of rule by Iron Heeled oligarchs the socialist revolution triumphs in 2600 AD and unearths it own past in previous, failed revolutions of earlier times. The protagonist in those early effort was Avis, a woman born to privilege, who becomes aware of the terrible conditions of the working class through a committed revolutionary husband.
She sees through the free market rhetoric of the kleptocracy, and joins the doomed cause. Proselytise though he does, Jack London also had a sharpe sense of humour as when he portray William Randolph Hearst as a socialist!
The prose has the sledgehammer subtlety of Fox news and the characters are all cardboard for the preaching of the author, like Fox news. But there is also energy and conviction on the page, too. The story goes from 1913 to 1932. For an update read more below.
It has much contemporary resonance with the censorship of universities, stripping of opponents of citizenship, rounding up anyone and everyone for confinement behind wire in Florida, the complete corruption of the judiciary into hirelings…. Well, just watch the news tonight for further examples.
It generated two Russian films 1919 and 1999 and stage adaptation was done in 2016.
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
Good Reads meta-data is 400 pages rated 3.80 by 22,537.
Genre: Fiction; Prophecy, Documentary.
DNA: USA
Verdict: Grim but boring.
Tagline: Ripped from today’s headlines!
Mirroring Hitler, Buzz rises to power in the USA; his Boswell logs his course. Once installed President Buzz disregards Congress and the Supreme Court and charges ahead, imprisoning critics, disappearing opponents, and loosening a masked Praetorian Guard on real and imagined enemies, as well as harmless bystanders to meet corporate KPIs of body count. Those who do not support Prez Buzz are threatened into compliance by these heavily armed, masked men who patrol voting sites in the states to make sure only Buzzards get in.
The army is set on the civilian population, while Mexico is invaded, perhaps to change the name of Gulf of Mexico. The press is censored, and brought to heel with threats, intimidation, and violence. The free market kleptocrats rule. Only Fox newspapers and radio stations are permitted and they sing the praises of the Buzz on the hour. Two minute hate session are deemed inadequate to encompass all the enemies.
Lewis’s exposition lacks the energy of London’s but it shares the bellicose urgency. Huey Long provided the model of Buzz, as Lewis declared at the time. See my previous posts on this creature of the bayou.
Lewis himself collaborated on a stage version of the novel. A film based on the stage play was bruited in 1935 but did not proceed, because the script was judged ‘too anti-fascist’ to sell in fascist markets. Ah, the free market! Available at a price but only for a price.
Might add to this pair Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) with RFK re-parenting work camps for those who lack enthusiasm for the fascist supremo Charles Lindberg, the regime’s badgering of the media into silence, the murder of critics of the maximum leader, the administration’s support for the resurgence of the masked Ku Klux Klan, and…. Like the author’s other books, this one is mostly about himself, a subject of endless fascination … to him.
For further details check the latest news from Yankeeland.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h 46m, rated 6.3 by 14,000 cineastes.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Sweden.
Verdict: No exit!
Tagline: IKEA to the stars.
It is well thumbed script since When Worlds Collide (1951): Humanity is leaving the dying Earth for Mars, and here it is again. However, while previous manifestations of this theme have a handful of pioneers in pressure suits buckled into Qantas economy seats without saltine crumbs or even an inflight magazine, this version has a multitude of immigrants in a spaceship IKEA for the three week voyage to Mars. There are twenty restaurants, a dozen cinemas, gyms, libraries, the mandatory wellness centre, a shopping mall, spas and saunas, hair salons, and, yes, a holodeck. It is a gigantic cruise ship with thousands of passengers.
Of course, it is all too good to be true, and within a few minutes one of the front tyres blows — hit by a meteor — and the ship, Aniara, loses power. It will now drift, drift, and drift. The mean scriptwriter denies them any rescue, and they drift on and on. (Why Swedes would give this ship a Greek name is never explained within my attention span. Cul de Sac or Huis Clos would have been a better title.)
Tensions follow: the captain combines being dogmatically optimistic with terminal boredom, while the protagonist, a 360-degree Bill Clinton empath mind-melding with the computer and who feels everyone’s pain, except mine at the attenuated proceedings. At least there is no Greta preaching about our Earthly sins.
What follows for the bulk of the runtime is a study of individual reactions to shopping without end in the maze of this interplanetary IKEA store from which there is no exit. A few straws are grasped but no salvation occurs and years pass though none of the actors appear to age. Is that a result of the relativity of time? As the years roll by, the population of the spaceship re-enact the idiocy of Earth. There is sexual dalliance, irresponsibility, cults, gangs, litter, false prophets, destructive fashions, flared trouser legs, pointless conflicts, dumped share bikes, demagogues, and other instances of the decline of civilisation. The end. Solaris indeed.
Downbeat. Very Ingmar Bergman. Dreary.
* * *
It is based on a 1957 epic poem! That in turn was the basis for an opera in 1959 which was then filmed in 1960. Yes, it was a space opera; it was also dead boring. The poem runs to 160-pages and the Swedish Academy, of Nobel Prize fame, ruled it the second most important book published in Swedish in the Twentieth Century, later awarding the author a Nobel Prize. What was number one? Pippi Longstocking?
There are at least two other films on the IMDb with the same name, making four versions in all, two of which I have not been able thus far to locate. Tips welcomed about the 1986 and 2023 variants. The four are listed below for those who have to see to believe.
Good Reads meta-data is 597 pages, rated 3.50 by 2 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: The strength not to fight.
Tagline: Chads, what chads?
Who was Samuel J. Tilden (1814-1886)? And who cares?
He was a New York Democrat who supported Republican Abraham Lincoln, opposed slavery, and warred on Tammany Hall. In 1876 he was the Democratic nominee for U.S. President, described as dour, colourless, drab, and taciturn. Still he won the popular vote by a margin of more than 250,000. However, neither he nor his opponent, Rutherford Hayes, had a majority of electoral votes. To be exact, Tilden fell one single vote short of majority of electoral votes. One vote.
The result was a stalemate, that went on from 7 November to 7 March the following year, and the outgoing Republican-majority Congress resolved it by establishing a bipartisan, well, deeply partisan, Commission to adjudicate the electoral votes. Given that the Republican majority in Congress ensued this commission had a majority of dog-loyal Republicans the conclusion of its short deliberation was forgone, and Hayes took office.
Samuel Tilden
Tilden observed all these shenanigans with a dignified silence and accepted the inevitable outcome with equanimity. Having lived through the Civil War, he had no wish to stir up a new conflict (pp 400-403). His agents did however secure a commitment from Hayes to reduce the postwar burden of Reconstruction on the Southern states in return for Tilden’s quiescence. But others in his party kept the controversy alive for years thereafter, and, inevitably, dragged Tilden into it over the next decade.
When the 1880 election approached, the Democratic nomination was Tilden’s for the taking, and given that the corruption of the 1876 election result was by then widely known, his election seemed assured. All that, it seems, was true. It was also true that he was not a well man, and had grown to like rustic retirement. Thus he forbade placing his name in nomination.
During the Civil War, Tilden did not profit himself by buying a rank or taking a quartermaster’s role, as did so many others in politics, e.g., the egregious Chester Arthur. He continued his legal practice and did fundraising for the war effort. However, he demonstrated colossally bad judgement in supporting George McClellan’s 1864 presidential campaign.
Here are a few things I learned about the man. He was easily bored and that together with his fragile health explains why he went from school to school without graduating, the Williams Academy, Yale University, Union College, and Columbia University. The curriculum in all these places was mostly Latin and Greek. He later entered law via apprenticeship.
He remained a bred in the bone hypochondriac all of his life, often speaking in a whisper to emphasise his fragility. Yet in law and business he set a cracking pace for those who worked for him.
He was a single-tasker; he did one thing at a time. When I think of a multi-tasker I always think of Napoleon. When Tilden’s political energies led to six years in public office he was honest and conscientious, one of those people who never put off anything until tomorrow. He would finish the job before going home. In this work he was oriented to the last detail.
By the way he does not seem to have had a home-life to which to go. There was no wife by age 40. By then his health seemed stable for the next twenty years and with his legal and political prominence, he was an eligible bachelor who was regularly invited to meet likely young ladies. While he enjoyed flirting with the bright young things, there was no advance on that. Make of that what you will. I did.
The text quotes several extracts from his legal briefs which often contained numerical data and statistical extrapolations, which he would then explain to the court with visual presentations. He seemed to be good at boiling down the mass of data he collected to something he could explain in very simple lay terms, because he won most of the contests. Contemporaries described his method as scientific and mathematical.
Even as a teenager he had found political work engaging, writing pamphlets, organising speakers, getting handbills printed, renting halls for rallies, and so on. He was inspired to do this by family friend and neighbour Martin van Buren, 8th US President (Ret.). He was involved in an endless round of campaigns for Democrats, usually in the backroom organising, only speaking when no one else was available for he was not imposing on the stump, being small and wheezy.
His success against Tammany Hall led to his election as Governor of New York State in 1874. Once ensconced he re-newed his attack on political corruption which flourished under the neglect of President Grant’s administration. Thus credentialed, he won the Democratic nomination in 1876.
After his 1876 concession he became a recluse in distant (!) Yonkers. (Sounds like a Neil Simon title that – ‘In Distant Yonkers.’) Unmarried and childless, he left a considerable fortune, earned as a corporate lawyer and his own sagacious investments, much of it to the New York City public library, in today’s dollars more than $110,000,000! Yes, he had always been an avid reader of history, biographies, novels, travelogues, and more.
The book concludes with a finely judged retrospective chapter on his life and career. It seems obvious that a biography should have such a chapter, but a surprising number do not, still less a chapter as comprehensive and clear as this one.
***
Alexander Flick professed history at Syracuse University and published many studies of American history, especially regarding New York State. Good Reads credits him with 43 titles!
On that election start with: Michael Holt, By One Vote (2008); William Rehnquist (yes, that Rehnquist), The Disputed Election of 1876 (2004); Roy Morris, Fraud of the Century (2003); Lloyd Robinson, Samuel J Tilden and the Stolen Election (2001); and Bill Severn, Samuel J Tilden and the Stolen Election (1968).
IMDb meta-data is 30m runtime, rated 7.0 by 83 cinemtiazens.
Genre: Docudrama Sy Fy.
DNA: Romania.
Verdict: curiouser and curiouser.
Tagline: Did she make it to retirement age?
Carpathian folklore has it that upon death souls migrate to the Moon and at the full moon they return to Earth briefly. Gulp! Undead indeed.
It starts on 19 June 1969 in a retrospective from 1998.
A top secret Soviet mission to beat the USA to the Moon went awry on that date, contrary to For All Mankind (2019). The timing of the Apollo mission was well publicised and to get there first the Soviets had to cut corners even with the low bid comrades. The only cosmonaut willing to volunteer to sit on the duct-taped rocket was Ulyana Markovskaya, the story goes. So off she went sitting on 45,000 kilonewtons of explosives. (Dunno what that means but it sounds big.)
It is her badly burned helmet that falls to the Earth (from the Moon shot) in the Carpathian Mountains, where a hiker, hearing a boom somewhere in the distance, chances upon it still smouldering.
Most of the film is a talking head narrating events in retrospect.
As the film ends we see Ulyana (sans helmet) descending on a parachute. Whew! What happened? She survived the big bang, but did she survive Transylvania? Did she meet a count? Vlad happened next? There is a contemporary Russian actress of that name. Is she a descendant from this descender? These and others questions await the sequel.
The footage of the mountain hike is marvellous and the interspersed Soviet cosmonaut poster art is inspirational. The posters reminded me of a retro 1960s restaurant where we once ate in Moscow that was replete with stirring Soviet propaganda posters of the period, including some celebrating cosmonauts.
***
What the point is of Ulyana’s story is anyone’s guess. The few reviews on the IMDb did not add to my comprehension. This one was hard to locate.
Good Reads meta-data is 512 pages, rated 3.80 by 10 litizens.
Genre: Biography; Species: Hagiography.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Time conquers all, Bob.
Tagline: A philosopher-king without a throne.
Bartholomew (Bob) Santamaria (1915-1998) was a major figure in Australian public life for two generations, yet he never held a public office, though many of those who did so looked to him for guidance, including a recent Prime Minister (who liked to pick fights with people who never heard of him, that being so much easier than governing for all the people).
Much is made of Santamaria’s service in World War II. It is resolved by Santamaria’s own testimony. Be that as it may, I wondered why there were no archival records that applied to this question of fact. But on this point, and many others in the book, saying it was so makes it so.
Santamaria had a weekly column in the Australian newspaper from 1976 and a 7-minute Sunday television program called Point of View sponsored by the National Civic Council which ran from 1963-1991. There are episodes on You Tube. (His column and television comments were in English. I mention this because comparable Catholic television in Quebec of the early 1970s was in Church Latin, if you can believe it. Believe it, because it is true.)
Earlier he had founded and run The Catholic Worker to counter the Communist Daily Worker. In its pages he found a red under many a bed. Soon he was a force in Catholic Action in Australia (see Tom Truman, Catholic Action [1960]), a Catholic soldier marching and marching his whole life, continuing to do so long after that war was over.
His most famous role was in ‘The Split’ that divided the Australian Labor Party and condemned it to the electoral wilderness for a long generation. This is a complicated story but the kernel is the influence of communists in trade unions which in turn influenced the Labor Party. The omens were there for those with eyes to see: A loud and proud Labor minister in previous governments revelled in the nickname Red Eddie. A noted Canberra historian of the time was awarded an Order of Lenin. It was a time of mass immigration from both post war Europe and Asia, and many, like Santamaria, supposed communist sympathisers and infiltrators were among them. Then came the Petrov Affair to confirm the menace.
Formation of the DLP
Unlike many rabid anti-Communists of the 1950s, Santamaria was calm, measured, insightful, and stuck to facts most of the time. That gave him creditability beyond the hard core. The result was the Democratic Labor Party which supported the Liberal Party by siphoning votes from the Labor Party. See, I said, complicated. (For those that don’t know it, The Liberal Party has never been liberal.) In all these ways and means he had more influence than most knights of Rome.
He continued to fight this fight long after it was lost and that combined with his adherence to a medieval version of Catholicism meant that the march of time left him behind by the 1960s. One can only speculate on his reaction to the Beatles tour of Australia, including Melbourne, in 1964 (because it is not mentioned in this text), but it’s fun to do so. Labor Party leaders began to use his intransigence to illustrate the dead hand of the past. Dogmatic as he was, he maintained good personal relations with many whom he opposed in the Labor Party. There was never then nor now any reason to doubt his sincerity, unlike the many opportunists who rode the anti-communism bus to fame and fortune.
His final rearguard battles were against snail’s-pace changes in the Catholic Church itself, especially regarding contraception. He was, as the saying goes, more Catholic than the Pope. He also wanted to turn the clock back on professional sports, homosexuality, the ABC, and much else, stopping the march of time around 1936.
I said ‘hagiography’ above but it is true that Henderson notes Santamaria’s blind spots, inconsistencies, ego, and the like, but still the tone is reverential. Henderson is less sparing with rival acolytes like Robert Mann, and that was very enjoyable.
Gerard Henerson
The book offers a wealth of detail, names, dates, meetings, reports, speeches, piled into a ziggurat, but the altitude yields no insight, and after my reading I did not feel I knew Santamaria any better than when I started. The man himself is obscured, not revealed, by the blizzard of details that comprise the book.
What I can say is that Santamaria was parochial Melbourne through and through, with little reference to the wider world beyond the Yarra River. He seldom traveled and when he did, well, he went to teach not to learn; to give his wisdom not receive any; and to tell not to see or listen.
Nor is there any evidence in these pages that he mixed with the racial, cultural, social, generational, aspirational, diversity that Melbourne was becoming in the 1960s and after. His reaction to the Labor election in 1972 was fatalistic. How could people be so wrong? Back to bully pulpit he went with renewed energy.
Upon reflection, the details are so many that it almost seems the author himself is trying himself to find the man in the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the information he has amassed. By the way this is Henderson’s second book on Santamaria.
Questions remain for me. Why did he (and his parents) prefer ‘Bob’ to ‘Bart’? Was he tempted by the priesthood because that was certainly his calling? Henderson touches on these points, but that is all it is, a touch: Enough to underline the question not enough to shed light.
***
By the way, I borrowed an electronic copy from the library and read it on the Kindle as a PDF.
Good Reads meta data is 320 pages, 3.35 rated by 342 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Yankee.
Verdict: ‘Looking, Garv.’
Tagline: the squirrel did it!
Taxidermy is a dangerous trade, but Garv was not warned of this peril when he learned the business. Now he knows. He survives the mobsters, psychopaths, MAGAs, and more through the combined efforts of (Y)Angie his de facto wife who is an inveterate love tackler; Otto the Russian imp who honed his survival skills in the Gulag whom they shelter from ICE, his criminal brother who is less of crook than the police and lawyers after them. Oh, and the sacrifice of Fred, the tame, because stuffed lion, in the living room. Fortunately, it turns out the venom in a dead snake’s fangs is still toxic. Who knew.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 2h and 1m, rated 6.4 by 14638 cinematizens.
Genre: Adventure
DNA: Fred Ward.
Verdict: More Fred.
Tagline: It’s Fred again.
Yep, it’s all about a revivicus Fred Ward aka Remo Williams and his vigilante rescue of Captain Janeway. The cast of stereotypes include a mystical Chinese (played by a European in the best tradition of Charlie Chan), a corrupt inheritor who reminded me of the current news, a bought off general who…ditto, and others. Wilfred Brimley elevates the tone, as always, from behind his moustache.
Remo’s training is most of the fun in the first half, thereafter it drags through the stereotypes: The corporate corruption is routine and most of the action then is limp, apart from the statue of Lady Liberty. WOW!
Captain Janeway has little to do but be a victim. But as always Fred nails it. You may not believe in Remo, viewer, but by Jupiter Fred does!
Japanese anime (1978-9) 52 half-hour TV episodes rated 7.9 by 1,700 cineastes. These were also screened throughout Europe at the time, as witnessed by the German and Spanish reviews on the IMDb.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: More, please.
Tagline: Holy Jupiter!
Between 1940 and 1951 Captain Future policed the nine planets in radio plays, pulp magazines, and even pulpier paperback books in the United States. There were further adaptations, like the Japanese series noted above.
Seventeen of his 45-minute adventures were available from Radio Archives the last time I looked. Recommended to all SyFy nerdlngs. These radio plays were written by Edmond Hamilton and voiced by Milton Bagby who does a marvellous job.
Captain Future is Curtis Newton who is the most scientific of all scientists in the Solar System, where all nine planets, some moons, and a few asteroids and a comet or two are inhabited, and even some pinheads, mostly by humanoids, along with the required monsters for Curtis to tame, bamboozle, trap, or slay.
In his mission of mayhem he is aided by a living brain in a self-propelled glass box with waldos, being the last of Dr Simon Wright whose science is second only to that of Curtis; Grag the giant metal manling; Otho the rubber android, and assorted others. See the Wikipedia entry for details.
Nothing stops Captain Future: when villains maroon him on an uninhabited asteroid in a space suit with two hours of air, using the metals of the asteroid and his handy sonic screwdriver borrowed from Dr Who, he promptly builds a nuclear reactor to turn the rock itself into a space ship. Likewise the dreaded demons who dwell in the Great Red Fire Sea on Jupiter are no match for this wizard of science.
Sorting out the Solar System is a big job, to be sure, but Curt is an even bigger sort-outer than that, and in the later stories he extends his crusade against wrongdoers to time travel as well as interstellar and intermolecular space. This crusader needs no cape when he has science on his side.
Edmond Hamilton
I heard some of these stories as a child, syndicated to a local radio station, and now I listen to them on my daily walks as a holiday from the unrelieved idiocy of contemporary events.
