GoodReads Meta-data is 473 pages rated 4.47 by 337 litizens
Genre: Krimi: Species: Period.
Verdict: intense
Tagline: Fear the book!
It is the winter of 1588 along the River Vltava in Prague as Dr Giordano Bruno arrived, ingenue assistant in tow, sent by Francis Walsingham, English Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, to make contact with his agent-in-place John Dee. No sooner did Bruno cross the stone bridge than he was set upon that very dark and dreary night by two Spanish thugs. No Pilsner for him.
Prague was then a polyglot crossroads where the Holy Roman Emperor, having vacated Vienna for a quieter life in rustic Prague, shut himself up in the castle on the hill. This hermit is Rudolph II (1552-1612) whose interests are so otherworldly that he allowed religious freedom within the city. The result was that Catholics hate him for tolerating Protestants who in turn hated him for tolerating Catholics, and the two only combine to hate Jews, who know a good thing cannot last.
Rudolph, barely five feet tall in pumps, is fragile but determined. Most of that determination is devoted to his scientific and meta-scientific interest in this, that, and everything from automatons to Harry Potter’s philosopher’s stone. His patronage has attracted to Prague scientist, alchemists, astronomers, occultists, mediums, seers, and charlatans who speak a babel of tongues.
The Papal nuncio plots his downfall with the ready assistance of the Spanish ambassador, while Protestants undermine Rudolph’s tolerant Catholic chief minister. In between the Jewish community knows that whoever prevails will come after it next and so makes campaign contributions to both parties.
There are so many wheels within wheels that it takes quick-witted Bruno an interminably long time to sort them out. The open-faced and friendly librarian is stealing books from the Imperial Library. The honest and steadfast book dealer is corrupt. The dying old man is a knife murderer from his own deathbed. His pregnant daughter carts away the bodies for later mutilation. The respect-inspiring patriarch is double-dealing. The girlish countess is a poisoner. The Spanish thugs are, well, thugs. A Spanish Inquisitor on holiday in Prague admits he misses breaking people’s fingers in the name of god. Whew! What a cast. What’s worse than all that however is Rudolph’s secret grand plan …[which will remain secret].
Some of this mischief stretches credibility but so be it. The plotting is – see above – complicated but all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place by the end. That in itself is a wonder.
By the way, Rudolph paralleled Queen Elizabeth of England in remaining unmarried. He realised that unwed, he was a prize for matrimony. He encouraged many such prospects to keep royals, nobles, aristocrats, and other chancers catering to him and seeking his favour in the hope or marrying a daughter to him. No fool he.
This is the seventh in a continuing series of Bruno’s adventures before the Florida Inquisition got him. Years ago I read the first, Heresy (2010) which was set in Oxford at New College (where I once bunked for a conference) a long time ago. I found that the plumbing hadn’t changed since Bruno’s visit.) It was well done but the atmosphere, as in this one, was suffocating and I did not follow Bruno’s trail. In a way that means it was too well done for my feeble tastes.
We visited Prague not so long ago and we traipsed through Prague Castle, from whence all of his treasures had long since been looted or destroyed by one conquering army or another. The weather was benign during our visit and after I completed my duties at Charles University we wandered about and crossed that very same bridge a number of times. Then I read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Princes and Artists (1976) which included but did not concentrate on Rudy, leaving me with the desire to learn more about him. Hence I started this book.
IMDb is runtime of 1 hour and 54 minutes, rated 6.9 by 1301 cinematizens.
Genre: Comedy; Species: musical.
DNA: South Korean.
Verdict: Manse!
Tagline: Winning isn’t everything.
It takes nerve to make a comedy with K-Pop musical interludes set in the most heavily armed border in the world, the misnamed Demilitarized Zone, which has more than a million heavily-armed, highly-trained soldiers poised for action along its 250 kilometres length, separated by no more than four kilometres at any one place. The DMZ is itself extensively mined by the armies of both Koreas in disregard of the treaty and though it is forbidden by the terms of the treaty both sides patrol in it…at night and plant those mines. Meanwhile there are eyes in the sky overhead in geostationary low earth orbits and down below the ground are equally forbidden tunnels. There have been many shooting incidents in these environs only a few of which are ever reported. While there were escapes over, under, and through the Berlin Wall, there have never been any such breaches of the DMZ.
A winning lottery ticket brings together a microcosm of those million soldiers in that environment, four North Koreans and three South Koreans. To retrieve the ticket wind-born into the north, the ROKs (that is, Republic of Korea soldiers) plan a military operation: analyse the enemy, probe, assess, decide on tactics, prepare, train, equip for stealth, and engage. But the KPAGFs (figure it out) have home court advantage.
Twists, turns, irony, and so it goes. Beneath the armies’ discipline, the suffocating propaganda, and cultural alienation of generations, they are all the same.
It’s longer than my usual watch-time but it whizzed along with plenty of laughs, offering insight into the Koreas where I spent a few months once upon a time at Korea University. I made two visits to the DMZ, set foot in North Korea, and walked through one of those tunnels. The title above refers to the lottery ticket draw.
It echoes, deliberately it would seem, JSA (2000), a deadly serious study of the differences between the Koreas and the Koreans in the DMZ. Like this movie, JSA is entirely Korean, ignoring the elephantine US Eighth Army of occupation.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 long minutes, rated 6.7 by 58,765 cinematizens. (A long minute has 75 seconds.)
Genre: unidentified; Species: ennuni.
DNA: Hollywood.
Verdict: Meh.
Tagline: Are we there yet?
We watch a science fair in desert south west where the aliens roam. All the parents are bored and the students would rather do science than stand around. The result is a series of pastel tableaux with little or no connective tissue. If you have seen The Grand Hotel Budapest (2014), you have seen this.
By the secret Protocols of the Elders of Hollywood, Tom Hanks makes a gratuitous appearance. The alien come to retrieve a missing sock (just kidding) is in and out in less than 30-seconds.
By the way, should it be called Meteor City, as per the web page of the International Astronomical Association?
Lacking the subtlety and human interest of a Three Stooges skit I chose not to sit through it to the end.
The opening credits make clear it is a one-man band, no second opinion, no alternatives were considered. Such is genius.
IMDb meta-data is 13 minutes runtime, rated – by -.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Israel.
Verdict: Compelling.
Tagline: Gone is gone.
A scientist tries to recreate her dead daughter in a cyborg with mixed results, assisted reluctantly by another, surviving daughter. It is a slow process, and then it goes awry.
It is a short story of love-loss-love-and-loss…again. Not rated on the IMDb by any of the usual trolls. I came across it on You Tube (but not on Dust).
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 4.5 by 98 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Noir.
DNA: Yankee.
Tagline: Here we go again.
Verdict: By the numbers.
A burned out police officer arrives at an isolated mining dome on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2057 to investigate the disappearance of the manager. Since no one can survive outside the dome, the missing man is presumed dead. Neither of the remaining two miners seems much bothered by or interested in the disappearance. They are as indifferent to the fate of the manager as managers usually are to the fate of underlings.
The pace is slow, the dialogue repetitive, but we all know the conventions. Officer has a backstory that emerges slowly and none too clearly. However muddled that is, it is more than we ever find out about the missing manager, or the two surviving miners.
Nothing is made of the locale. It could be in Alaska.
It is better than some I have seen— e.g., Music of the Spheres (1984) — but…, well, that is a left-handed compliment. However, it does not bristle with the ideas that Spheres had despite its amateurish execution.
IMDb meta-data is four episodes, each of 24 minutes, rated 5.4 by an unknown number of cinematizens.
DNA: Swiss.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: post Apocalypse.
Verdict: Molasses.
Tagline: Do electric sheep dream of androids?
By chance an engineer survives a nuclear war in 1970 and when he is unearthed and revived it is 2145, he awakens to a brave new world deep underground where the few remaining humans have created androids to do all the lifting. He finds that he prefers the honesty of the ‘droids who cannot tell a lie rather than the dishonesty of the people who can.
That summary makes it sound more interesting than it is. The acting is stilted; the direction worse, and it goes downhill from there.The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) is the same sort of story told a little better. It is reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
This future society is Sial and the sector is IV, ruled by…Machiavelli. Yep. This Machiavelli is played by the old hand Marcel Dalio (the croupier from Rick’s in Casablanca [1942], and many other films including Catch-22 [1970]). With that name Machiavelli in it, I had to watch it.
It is very high brow with quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Saint Just. Nothing is quoted from Machiavelli.
Those who are bored by freedom from want and work are treated as though they are sick and cured by drawing their emotions off onto androids who are then destroyed. Maybe that explains the bad hair. Among the sick are those who want to be sick. Who resist leisure and happiness. It is their right to be unhappy, to suffer, to fight, and to be killed! Yes, they are freedom fighters, who will fight freedom wherever they find it. Ayn Rand Libertarians all!
The whole thing is as absurd as an episode of the Avengers of the period but without either the humour or Mrs Peel. [Sigh]
It makes Australia’s own The Stranger (1964-1965) look snappy.
Dalio’s own backstory story as a Jew escaping from defeated France is far more compelling than this program.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 40 minutes of runtime, rated 7.2 by 3,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Je suis perdu.
Tagline: Who cares.
Claude Rich gives a superb performance but it just doesn’t add up or hold interest. It is a series of tableaux, some repeated too often, with little momentum or coherence.
In sum, he is a rising man in a publishing house who marries a co-worker; she tells him that she likes him but doesn’t love him or care much about him or anything else. She is and remains clinically indifferent about anything and everything. (She would make a perfect manager.) It just gets worse when they move to Glasgow. Yep, just the cure for depression, a winter in damp, drizzly, dank, and dark Scotland. She dies. He feels responsible. He probably wasn’t responsible but it is ambiguous, and in any event that he feels responsible for her death makes it so.
He volunteers for a time-travel experiment, since he, too, is now clinically depressed (from reading the script). Seven scientists ensconce him sous vide in a bladder where he is to time travel to the past. What is the past but memory. The result is a shuffled mixtape of his memories, some on a loop, many feature Olga. It is vaguely implied that reliving these memories changes them somehow but that is only a speculation, not developed in the film.
Some of the memories are more likely to have been dreams with no basis in fact, like one where he is slaving away over copy late into the night when five of his superiors surround his desk and make disparaging comments on his work as he toils away. It may have felt like that but I doubt five senior executives stood around his desk at midnight. But then does dreaming it was so make it so in a memory? What is the membrane between memory and dream?
By the way, he is like many other celluloid time travellers in that he wants to go back in time, not forward. Wells’s eponymous time traveller went forward by mistake, I seem to recall.
Rich is in nearly every scene and carries the film with his impressive range of emotion, thought, confusion, loss, depression, and more. His last credit was in 2015.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated 6.3 by 2,900 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Yankee.
Verdict: Better than the title.
Tagline: I didn’t wanna do it!
The night before his wedding strapping Youth is body swapped with an alien (the monster of the title) who has come to Earth on a mission. The females of his world, we learn later, are infertile, and the mission is to determine if his kind can mate with earthlings to renew their species. Now in a semi-zombie state Youth goes ahead with the wedding but … well, his anatomy is new to him and there were no sex education lessons on the 1950s flight to Earth and he doesn’t know what to do.
His newly wed wife, true to the 1950s, concludes his frigidity and confusion is her fault and tries her wiles to seduce him. No sale. Meanwhile, his fellow aliens are body swapping with other young men and soon they effectively seal off the town. While most of the other aliens are as lost as Youth, one or two take out their frustrations with ray guns. A shoot out ensues.
Wife figures out that the problem is Youth, not her, and he confesses his extraterrestrial identity to her. She tries to tell others — a doctor, a police officer, a Republican — who, true to the 1950s, dismiss her reports as female hysteria. Cringe but true.
We never get to the mating, much to the disappointment of the Fraternity Brothers.
In hindsight much of it seems an unwitting commentary on the gender stereotypes and roles of the time and place. The condescending doctor was particularly irritating. It blends several Sy Fy tropes: alien invasion albeit low key, body snatching, isolated locale, disbelieving soon-to-be victims, and so on.
True to the 1950s, Youth was himself driven out of Hollywood as a homosexual shortly after this film. He took up a second career as a writer with success. Wife went into television with about a hundred credits. This seems to have been her only feature film leading role.
Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (2022).
GoodReads meta-data is 472 pages, rated 4.08 by 37 litizens.
Count Tocqueville’s life’s work was the reconciliation of liberty with equality. It began when he was twenty-five and went on to the end. Liberty can only exist if it is self-limiting. Democracy with its countervailing institutions might offer a means to that end. This is a counter-intuitive conclusion because for most people liberty means license, that is, no limits, meaning anything goes. Of course, if anything goes, liberty will soon destroy itself, e.g., shouting fire in a darkened theatre.
This self-destructive tension pervades and explains everything he did and wrote.
John Stuart Mill put it this way: the maximum liberty consistent with a like liberty for all. We can only be as free as everyone else, and vice versa. By the way, he and Mill were correspondents, and Karl Marx may well have been in the British Library on the days Tocqueville visited with Mill.
It all began when as a bored lawyer with little to do, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his friend Gustav de Beaumont (1802-1866) went to the New World in 1831 for nine months, which to them was less a geographic than a political expression. The New World they wanted to see (and to report back to France upon) was Democracy which happened to be located in North America. Making use of their aristocratic connections during the reign of King Louis-Philipe, they got themselves commissioned to study prisons. This writ related to a movement to reform French prisons to rehabilitate inmates rather than only to confine or to punish them. The commission gave them letters of introduction and entrées to French counsellors but no financial support. The trip was funded by their families.
They did visit many prisons like Sing-Sing and they did write a report (1833) which few either read or cite. More importantly, Tocqueville wrote the magisterial Democracy in America, and Beaumont wrote novel called Marie (1835) (about the evils of slavery and racism which he had seen).
The trip itself is worth reading about: they went by ship, steam boat, canoe, barge, horseback, foot, raft, dog sled, mule, and stagecoach from New York City, Boston, Montreal, Quebec, Detroit, Sault St Marie, Green Bay, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Mobile, Columbia (SC), Fayetteville (NC), Norfolk (VA), Baltimore, Washington (DC), Philadelphia, and many points between from May to March of the next year through swarms of mosquitos, boiling heat, enervating humidity, hail, driving rain, sleet, snow, over black ice, and repeat. See Anne Bentzel, Travelling Tocqueville’s America (1998).
They met all manner of people from President Andrew Jackson, former president John Quincy Adams, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, to rising magnates, and French-speaking native Amerindians around the Great Lakes, German immigrants who spoke no English, and more. This trip and these experiences were the formative years of his life and later as he wrote the two volumes, the experience made him the man he became. The book was his teacher as he ordered, culled, refined, discarded, reinterpreted, digested what he had seen, heard, and learned, and it changed his mind about many things. To be sure, the man certainly made the book, but the book also made the man.
Having seen France go through one cataclysmic disaster after another, each of its own making, Tocqueville hoped to find a new way to live in Democracy and to communicate it to his fellow citizens. This ambition was no abstract exercise for him. His parents, just married, had been arrested and sentenced for the crime of birth to the guillotine during Robespierre’s Terror. They endured 10-months or so on death-row waiting for their turn at the blade, such was volume of prisoners, as all of his wife’s family from her aged great grandfather to her teenage nieces, nephews, and cousins were beheaded one after another to the audible cheers of the crowd. They were spared, and later Tocqueville was born, only when Robespierre was ousted and there followed a brief respite in the blood-letting.
The author avoids the pious homilies that others shower on Tocqueville when he points out more than once the obvious that he missed, like the suppression of his Catholic brethren in New York City and Boston, like the emerging political machines in those cities, like the continued theft from Amerindians, like the oppression of French in Canada and the Irish in the States, the early gestation of the abolitionist movement in Boston, and so on. Nor did he have much of an eye for the wonders of nature. There was so much to take in and almost all of it was new to this ingenue, so that he did not perceive it all.
What he did have was a thirst for knowledge, and he filled one notebook after another with observations of towns, crossroads, inns, street scenes, hotels, and endless interviews with all and anyone would talk to him. He spoke a fractured English swotted up during the sea voyage to New York. In addition to the high and mighty he met, he also talked to wagoneers, hunters, inn keepers, travelling salesmen, farm wives where they bunked en route, gamblers, deck hands on river boats, a day labourer at a harbour, and a slave or two. When they took ship to return to France he had three large steamer trunks filled with the notes and artefacts he had collected from government reports to a bow and arrow and a buffalo rug.
As he travelled through North America he hatched the idea of a book on democracy, but upon return he and Beaumont decided they had to write the prison report immediately to complete that obligation. They did so post haste: On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France, which runs to 300+ pages, nearly half of which being appendices of notes and documents. What they found was no system at all but variations between and within states. A great deal of hindsight has been applied to this report by scholars in search of a topic.
Tocqueville is so judicious, careful, and hesitant in Democracy in America that he gives lengthy accounts of opposing points of view, subsequently providing ammunition for others to quote for and against every proposition he considers. He can be quoted for and against democracy itself, since he recognised and catalogued its flaws and failings. Moreover, he did not suppose the American example could be transplanted to France, so he did not recommend that, but rather sought, and continued to seek, the underlying mechanisms that could be developed in France. Hence, his later research into the origins of the French Revolution, where he elaborated what a hundred and fifty years later would be called the J-curve explanation of revolution. (Look it up, Mortimer.)
Every US President, except for the illiterate one, has had occasion to quote, cite, or refer to Tocqueville, yet one suspects that they have seldom turned a page of Democracy in America (1835 and 1840), making it a classic that fits Mark Twain’s definition perfectly. It is widely cited and equally unread. I have to plead guilty to that charge. I bought the abridged student edition of the two voluminous volumes when I was an undergraduate and read whatever was assigned at the time and no more. Since then I have picked over other sections when investigating this topic or that. I tried and failed to read the long chapter ‘The Three Races.’ It is a safe bet that few, very few, of those who quote from Democracy in America have read even as much as that, and sure thing to bet that they have not read more.
By the way, while topics like the tyranny of the majority command many citations, one of the best parts of the book concerns the development of public opinion in the spiral of silence.
See also, as reviewed elsewhere on this blog, Leopold Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (2010).
By the there is a phd to be had in a comparative study of theorists in parliament, Tocqueville, Mill, and Max Weber had a term in office. Who else?
Daydreaming during a zoom meeting with the boss Melody gets a message in her lunch time bowl of alphabet soup! No, she doesn’t believe it either…she soon has reason to do so.
The earth is under attack by aliens, starting with her!
Fortunately for us she still has her blue guitar borrowed from Wallace Stevens for ‘things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.’ Pretty good poetry for an insurance agent.
It is one hoot and holler, ending with the promise of Melody’s further adventures! Yes, please.
