Good Reads meta-data is 297 pages rated 4.12 by 320 litizens.
Genre: Biography in fiction.
Verdict: A god botherer.
Tagline: Curses!
François Leclerc du Trembly (1577-1638), alias Père Joseph, was the original éminence grise to Cardinal Armand Richelieu (1585-1642), l’Éminence rouge who dominated French politics for thirty years or so. Richelieu was much in evidence with ostentatious tastes, loquacious, a know-it-all busybody, and always in red. Deep in the shadows behind him stood Joseph.
Huxley found Joseph an odd combination of a self-abnegating, pious Christian mystic and an uncompromising, unremitting bloodthirsty warlord against French Protestants, much of the French nobility, Catholic Austria, and even more Catholic Spain, and Protestants everywhere. He is presented as one of the main architects of the Thirty Years War that destroyed most of German-speaking Mitteleuropa. Every time a compromise loomed, every time the prospect of peace occurred, every time a local armistice began to spread, he opposed it. While Richelieu, ever the Sybaritic realist, was ready to accept compromise not Père Joseph and he swayed the Red Eminence to his way of thinking and acting, again and again. Murderous taxes on peasants and piles of dead bodies were his divine KPIs.
Me, I see no paradox in this combination of mass murderer and pious sky pilot. The religious are always stirring up conflict and then urging others to fight to the death for their causes, while declaiming on peace, that is, the peace of the grave. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) put it this way: ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it in god’s name.’
After his own extensive drug us Huxley also found the mysticism of Joseph’s Catholicism intriguing. He certainly brings that to life. The book is exceptionally well written with surgical metaphors, striking comparisons, penetrating insights into motivations, and richly detailed of the mental interior and surrounding exterior context of the time and place. The prose is sinuous and and yet almost transparent.
After I had encountered more than one novelist who offers a fictional biography of Niccolò Machiavelli, I wondered what Huxley, the accomplished novelist, would offer in a fictional biography, so I read it.
Good Reads Meta-data is 149 pages, rated 0.0 by 0 litizens who have missed a chance to spout off.
Genre: History and cooking
Verdict: A Curiosity only.
About half of this short book is a social history of the development pasta (‘spaghetti’ is used as a generic term for pasta) and its importation to the United States. The other half is made up of recipes, some historical and some contemporary to the original publication date above.
The first half consists of short, illustrated chapters of 8-10 pages or less on the happy discovery of the hard wheat, the early use of the word ‘macaroni’ for all pasta, the wrong and right ways to eat pasta, the stereotypes of pasta eaters and eating through the ages, and so on.
It explains that odd line in the tune Yankee Doodle, ‘he stuck a feather in his hat and called in macaroni.’ In the 18th Century macaroni was brought back to England by grand tourists who had their cooks cook it (badly), and so eating macaroni was the mark of a toff, a dandy, a fad-following aristocrat. A macaroni was a rich layabout.
He also suggests that macaroni went from being a immigrant food in the United States with Prohibition when Italians discovered a new source of income by selling their home-made wine to the thirsty anglos, who might like a meal to go with this sly grog.
The author published not one but two biographies of Niccolò Machiavelli, both of which I have acquired and read. The first was Machiavelli, The Florentine (1929) and the second was Machiavelli (1967). In Italian the latter’s title was Machiavelli, Anticristo (1954). That stimulated me to find out a little about him, and there were two things of note. First, was the above book. The second was that in 1930s he taught Italian literature at Columbia University and was perceived by some as an apologist for the Mussolini regime until 1941. He weathered that storm in the academic tea cup and remained there.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 39 minutes, rated 7.3 by 4327 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Fairy tale.
DNA: Argentina.
Verdict: Olé!
Tagline: Vox populi.
In the dark city no one can speak for progressively their voices and words have been taken from them by an unscrupulous media mogul who uses television to drain the will of people. Sounds contemporary.
Only two voices remain. A coerced singer whose siren song is used to squeeze out the residual words from citizens. She has made a Faustian bargain for her now seven year old son was born without eyes and the coercing magnate has promised her that if she sings to the end he will supply the boy with eyes and that mission is nearing completion. The boy’s is the other voice heard later in the story.
By mistake the package with the eyes is delivered to the wrong address, and this leads to the involvement of a tweenage girl next door and her estranged but ever silent parents, she a nurse and he an inventor. Their wonder when the boy speaks is memorable.
Together the parents overcome their own differences and thwart Rupert but good.
It is a silent movie with a soundtrack, inter-title cards that become part of the action, and marvellous imagery.
Among the critics I read, one, while grudgingly admitting the film’s unique virtuosity, lays into it for privileging the nuclear family. Apart from that inanity, most reviewers see it as a metaphor for oppressive corporatism.
Maybe but it is more likely a metaphorical condemnation of the Dirty War (1976-1983) and the rule of the generals, allied with oligarchs, who suppressed voices and destroyed families, coerced singular individuals to legitimate the regime, and covered up by murdering witnesses. The resonance with these Dark Years would be surely felt by many Argentines, if lost on smug and cosseted Anglo reviewers.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 6.0 by 244 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Finland.
Verdict: Ambitious.
Tagline: Vertigo.
It is set in the future of 2011 and anticipates cell phones, the internet, and the pestilential persistence of flared trousers. It features transparent inflated furniture used in one noteworthy scene as a prism.
Fictional Finland 2011 is all glass and steel modern where all social and economic problems have been solved. Everything is state owned and our protagonist is a film maker assigned to make a documentary tracing the evolution of this idyllic state from its origins in the dark days of 1968.
He has a Twiggy assistant with spider eye make up and hot pants who follows/leads him around. With her subtle nudging, protagonist decides to use the life of an individual to narrate the transformation, a particular individual for in visiting an art exhibition, as arranged by Twiggy, he sees a 1968 photomontage of model that captivates him, and just by chance, again arranged by Twiggy, he comes across the photograph of a contemporary woman who is the doppelgänger of the 1968 model, he decides to recruit her to act out the story in mockumentry style.
What the sap doesn’t realise is …. SPOILER ALERT…that the doppelgänger has her own agenda and Twiggy is in on it.
The look-alike is an engineer in a nuclear power plant where the workers are about to strike! With Twiggy’s assistance, this engineer wants to use the documentary to get across their story and demands which are never articulated.
Love confuses everyone and everything and it does not go well for any of them. By the way, the title is explained in the dialogue and it is not the obvious but refers to an idyllic time, a time of roses. No, not under the sign of the rose, sub rosa, I.e., a secret.
The doppelgänger reminds me of Vertigo (1958), and the cinematography of Alphaville in the daylight.
Perhaps because of the poor subtitles, or my inattention, I could not fathom the climax.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour 25 minutes, rated 6.5 by 253 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: France.
Verdict: Effective.
Tagline: Who is calling, please?
A library rat whose speciality is very dead, very obscure languages from Meso-America neglects his girlfriend and ignores his only friend as he toils away in Paris. Then he starts hearing things. At first it just static on radios in the apartment or car but it slowly come into tune though only briefly. It is an androgynous voice speaking a very ancient obscure dead language which he has lately been studying for he is one of the few in the world familiar with this tongue.
These messages in Mayan, let’s call it that to keep it simple, come on a car radio, a stereo, a telephone answering machine, a Walkman and so on always when only he can hear them. He begins to think he is going mad and is unable to tell anyone for fear of ridicule or worse. The messages tell him to do this or that with the threat that if he does not a catastrophe will occur. Escalation ensues. When he hesitates a catastrophe does occur, so he then complies to avert another.
By the way the Mayan dialogue has French subtitles and English ones overlaid on top of them. The result is by Georges Braque.
The atmosphere of confusion, dread, and paranoia is nicely done without any gimmicks. Bruce Campbell does not leap from the shadows. Is it really happening or is he going nuts? Or both.
Moreover, there is a resolution of sorts at end. Think Tron.
IMDb meta-data has a bladder-challenging runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes, rated 5.7 by 661 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy (sort of).
DNA: Russia.
Tagline: An Eternal Putin!
Verdict: The elephant brought forth the mouse.
The fraternity brothers advise that it includes sex and violence, and violent sex, for those who like that.
In distant 2020 a small group of ageing, ultra-rich Moscow oligarchs find a fountain of youth and are…rejuvenated. The magic elixir collects in an abandoned facility of the Soviet space program called Target. Only lately have its properties been understood, but it was too late for Ponce de Leon.
These plutocrats are none too nice, and rejuvenation does not improve them. Does the astral mineral stop ageing or slow it, the subtitles weren’t sure. Whatever, bathing in radiation after Chernobyl did not seem very attractive but they do it.
Billy Wilder once said he started screenplays with the last scene and then worked back to how it all got there. He made that explicit in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and then topped it with another. Too often screenwriters and directors have no end in mind, no resolution, no summation, no direction on which to conclude, and this movie is an example of that. Like a student writing a thesis without a purpose who stops when the word limit is reached, it ends when they ran out of film not when the story concluded because it didn’t, perhaps, because it couldn’t, having no conclusion.
The science fiction trigger of the magic substance and some futuristic gadgets are minor accoutrements, not central to the story of what a few people would do if eternal youth were possible. Pretty much the same old stuff as they do now. Egads, more unbearable budget committee meetings!
The cinematography is superb both of the future in urban Moscow and in the wilderness near Mongolia where Target was located. It is a treat for the eyes, and the acting is fine. The whole, however, is less than these parts. Nor is it diverting. The film is as shallow and self-indulgent as the characters it portrays, rather like the remakes of The Great Gatsby (1974 and 2013). There is much emphasis on China and Chinese but it adds nothing to plot or character. And, why would such a future world continue to rely on semi-trailer road transportation that looks just like the 1950s.
Curiously one of the leads is a bilingual Anglo among all those Russkie names in the credits.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 23 minutes, rated 6.1 by 46234 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy fy; Subspecies: krimi.
Tag: Seeing isn’t believing, Dagwood!
DNA: Anglo-Atlantic.
Verdict: Nice trip, no arrival.
World weary flick passes a stranger in the street who puzzles him. Later he begins to investigate a series of murders. It is a real whodunnit. The first in a century…because in this world there is no privacy — our mind-eyes are open books to the authorities. Everything we see and do is recorded in this dreamworld of a Big Brother McKinsey manager. All of this is deftly conveyed in the first act.
In Act II someone has hacked into this hive mind with a private agenda. Bang! The falling bodies belong to the social elite and that pressures Weary Cop to use himself as bait by going undercover. It seems to work but there are wheels within wheels.
Spoiler alert.
Act III: An even more-super hacker is the puppet master though quite what the motivation was remains a mystery to me, despite a garbled explanation near the denouncement.
Nice touches: close your eyes and the hacker too is now in the dark. Though it is labeled a thriller, much of the action is a group of men, yes all men, sitting around a table, often in silence. That is punctuated by the actors staring into space to access the mental net. Daring that is in these days when the audience is pimply boys wanting blow-em ups in this genre, although they get comprehension in gratuitous sex.
If all records are digital and they are altered then there is no external evidence, no baseline of veracity, like those libraries that microfiched back-runs of newspapers to save space and then pulped them only to discover twenty years later that microfiche has quietly degraded to fly specks just as the data stored on CDs is doing now. Those newspapers, many of them unique local records are gone forever.
This film conjures more effectively than Dark City (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) a world where we cannot believe what we see with our own eyes. However, in common with many other films, since it has no resolution it just goes on and on. It’s too long and then dribbles away in an unresolved ending where there is a promising reference to personal autonomy that comes from and goes nowhere.
Worst of all the schoolboy villain is neither convincing nor comprehensible. Nor is the intermediate hacker’s response to him credible, she of the nickel-plated revolver, goes to water too fast. But the acting is nonetheless noteworthy all around. These stereotypes are vividly rendered, one-dimensional though they be.
The Library: A Fragile History (2021) by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree
Good Reads meta-data is 518 pages rated 3.84 by 987 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: The new is old.
Tagline: Where’s Melville?
A comprehensive survey of book collections from Alexandria – both ancient and contemporary – to digital. Along the way is papyrus, vellum, linen, paper, and pixels.
Books have always sparked conflicts by those looking for a fight. Romans were one of the few conquerors who preserved the books of the vanquished for a time. Of course, these books were scrolls on papyrus, which is very durable, but burns easily and most of what they saved was in fact later lost in the convulsions of Roman history.
There is always someone who opposes change. When Greeks began writing plays on papyrus, Socrates decried it. By writing things down, we no longer have to remember them and that will weaken our brains. Ergo the smartest people had an oral culture. Aborigines know that.
When Gutenberg’s printed books began to appear alongside handwritten manuscripts, Erasmus, among others, decried it. Printed books were not invested with the effort, the grace, or the artistry of manuscripts.
Priests and kings decried printing because it put books, including Bibles, into the hands of too many people without religious, social, or political censorship. That undermined both theological and political authority. Books are like that.
When e-Readers came along in the 1990s it was the same story, and still is. (We got our Rocket e-Books long ago when Bill Clinton was president.) Many today refuse to use a Kindle or any of its cousins because… [some reason or other].
Then there were the wars over what is in the books. When Martin Luther kicked-off the Reformation, he also toppled many a library. Catholics purged monastery libraries (these being the main book collections) of Protestant-sympathetic items, and commanded their faithful among the book-owning aristocrats to do the same. That was the first shot.
Protestants replied in kind. When Henry VIII closed monasteries their libraries were purged, i.e., most books were burned. Henry also sent scrutineers around the countryside to find books in the private homes of the wealthy reading class and purge them. Closet Catholics hid offending volumes in priest holes.
This went on for a hundred or more years. More than one reader, more than one printer was murdered (executed) for possessing forbidden books by Catholic and by Protestant authorities doing God’s will. Sure. Happy in their work.
Another skirmish concerned books (printed or manuscript) versus pamphlets, posters, coffee house sheets, newspapers, cahiers, and other ephemera. One of Christopher Columbus’s sons became an omnivorous book collector and he gathered everything on paper and then bound the leaves like books. The result is a social record still used by researchers today. Whereas when Thomas Bodley put up an enormous fund to build a library for Oxford University he forbid it ever to hold such trivialities. Sniff. Sniff.
In the Nineteenth Century as literacy increased and the cost of making books decreased, then another front was opened in this culture war. It concerned the printing, distribution, and availability of books as the public library slowly emerged. The first fault line was non-fiction versus fiction. Political authorities, social influencers, respectable investors wanted only pious, practical, uplifting books to be printed and to be available. No Tom Jones or Moll Flanders, thank you. A benevolent coal mine owner might establish a library in a colliery town and stock it with books like, How to be a Good Employee, Coal Mining for Beginners, The Joys of Being a Child Miner, Taking Care of Tools, How to Survive on Gruel, Pray don’t Strike, Church not Union, and other such titles. Few locals visited such a library more than once. They wanted light, escapist fiction to divert them for a time from the realities of their lives or literature that promoted a better future in the here and now, not in the afterlife.
This demand led book printers and sellers to form subscription reading libraries to cater for this taste. This struggle went on for a long time, and in the early Twentieth Century Mr Mills and Mr Boon came along and supplied one part of this market, and still do.
In the Cold War libraries were again in the firing line. Demands were made to purge the shelves, but to warehouse the books to keep them out of circulation not to destroy them. The Bolsheviks of 1917, after the initial thrill of victory, realised they could sell the seized libraries, much of which were in Latin, French, or German, of the aristocrats to the West and did so. But in the USA the goal was to silence the books period, but it was too close to the end of World War II to license Nazi book burning, however tempting that was. Below are some of the books recently banned in Florida.
The story in France is distinctive. After the Revolution of 1789 in the heady days of victory the winners declared all libraries public, the first and biggest of these is the Mazarin Library (which I have used), but they soon realised the stock of books was very Catholic, very aristocratic, and very reactionary. They then banned just about everything and devised a censorship system that was so complex not even René Descartes would have been able to navigate it. When Catholicism made its periodic rebounds, those forces wanted psalters, hymnals, books of days, and little else. When Jean Jaurès’s (1859-1914) socialists rose, they decided to make the local school room with its few dictionaries and primers the public library in the charge of an overworked and underpaid teacher. Thus a public library system was created without the expense of a building, staff, or funds to buy books. It was zero-budget policy hailed as genius.
It was only in the 1970s that the French government funded a huge initiative to create médiathèques, several thousand of them to accompany the Minitel revolution. (Who remembers Minitel?) These were multi-media cultural, community centres and quite by accident have become the model that underlies a great many public libraries today like the one I visited the other day. On now entering a library no longer does one feel like one is entering a memorial tomb where all is hushed, if not quiet. Originally intended as a site for public access to Minitel and its adjuncts, the médiathèques have endured by adapting.
Andrew Carnegie paid for the library building in which I did my early reading; it was one of 5000 he paid for in the USA and UK which then included Ireland. The deal was, he would pay for a building, if the local town council would supply the land and commit to spend a sum equal to 10% of the building cost to stock and staff the library every year thereafter. He offered six or seven types of building that might be selected, and if a town want to embellish or add to one of those at its expense, fine, but all had to include a Children’s Room. I am sure a shade of Herbert Marcuse can explain why this is an example of repression.
Recounted is the hubris of the San Francisco Library that anticipated a future library without books, and so built at great expense a new public library with space for only a third of the existing book stock, and there being no budget leftover for storage, pulped much of the remainder or sold it (perhaps legally). According to these authors no records were kept because the card catalogue was the first thing to go and with it all the meta-data.
There is a lot more in the book, but there is also a lot that isn’t there. It seems to me to be more about book collections than libraries. By that I mean there is nothing but a few asides about how the collections would be organised for retrieval, stored against degradation, restored after damage, the professionalism of librarians, the gender balance among librarians, and so on.
While closed versus open stacks are mentioned, that question is not connected to shelving. For open stacks to work there has to be some order based on content, whereas for closed stacks a shelf mark will do. That is in open stacks all the books by and about Aristotle will be proximate, not so for closed stacks.
Nor do they mention that marvellous short story by Juan Luis Borges, The Library of Babel with its Purifiers patrolling the shelves on search and destroy missions like those now occurring in Florida. Nor does this book mention Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and the ineradicable quality of the ideas in books. Nor the German librarians who secreted books from Nazis.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 8 minutes rated 6.0 by 6067 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA: England.
Verdict: Compelling.
Tagline: It’s really happening!
Three young men sit in a Volvo station wagon and talk. The result is a far better movie than Blade Runner (1982), Avatar (2009), The Arrival (2016), and much else.
These three are amateur astronomers, an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and a radio telescope technician who together drive to a hill top in Sherwood Forest away from light and other interference one night a month to star gaze each in his own way with the gear crammed into the car. These are the self-styled Astro-Nuts.
Though cold, it promises to be an especially good night with no atmospheric disturbances. The weather inside the car is chilly, too, because there are tensions among them that (very) slowly emerge. The pace is deliberate, leisurely even, but that makes a nice change from Hollywood harm scarum tempo used to conceal shallow characters and plot holes.
As they banter, doze, take leg-stretching and bladder-emptying breaks and drink more tea, amid the static the radio technician is scanning appears an anomaly. Well that happens and he tries to correct it while being teased about his past mistakes. Earlier a routine image of a weather satellite disappeared for a minute or two and then returned. That had never happened before. Later there is shadow detected by the (barely) portable telescope they have set up. One, two, three something is up the tree!
When scrubbed the radio signal persists. Huh? How can that be? Good question, Galileo. The satellite image loss recurs. Using infrared settings on the telescope the shadow look like…. [no one says it but we all think it].
Is ET calling? Just maybe. Better to be sure than sorry, so they pick up…. It ends on an upward positive note!
A recent Brit film I watched had a big name cast, location shooting in Wales, sex, and some flashy special effects with kindergarten science. Only a brave person or a fool watched to the end as I did. Hmmm.
This film has none of those things but it has a script and the car interior, two first-time film actors, and no special effects apart the grandeur of the night sky. The result is a far, far better thing than most I watch. The film school graduates who produced it could not find anyone to fund it, so they did it themselves. Chapeaux!
It is too long. The car chase at the end seemed needlessly attenuated, and there was just too much of the bromance. A producer not emotionally invested in it would have cut it by 30 minutes and improved it to get focus on the really big picture. Really BIG.
I shudder to think what Pox News would make of a first contact. The movies Contact (1997) and Arrival (2016) got the reception right – Madness times N. Panic, denial, fear, nukes would be round one though the image of a President Trump meeting an alien to sell state secrets sprang to mind.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 7.5 by 131 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: UFO.
DNA: West Germany.
Verdict: Imaginative.
Tagline: Move over Orson Wells.
In this mockumentary Intrepid, a television journalist, during a routine story gets drawn into a tale of UFOs. Shifting through the nutcases he finds some of the witnesses credible, the real evidence, though sparse, is intriguing. He follows the threads around the world, losing his job but not his camera and sound man, in so doing. The visas in his passport are many: Canada (where it started), USA, Peru, Italy, and so many more I lost track.
Intrepid tries everything to disprove the evidence he keeps finding, to no avail. He has one Canadian witness tested by psychologists, brain scans, and hypnosis but she continues to offer a low key but consistent account of meeting the titular delegation. He follows asides and descriptions in her recitations to find other clues. Project Blue Book gets a look-in. One clue leads to another, and so on. He is Indiana Jones in a suit and tie with a microphone.
Intrepid is dead when the story starts, that is disappeared and presumed dead, incinerated in a car crash. The movie is pieced together from the footage he had shot on his investigations. Much of it is cinéma vérité style from the field, because there are the mandatory crop circles.
It is all played dead straight, none of the nods and winks so unnecessary and so common in Hollywood productions. The commitment of the players to their parts is complete, and there are a lot of them. Ergo this was not a cheap production. Moreover, the travelogue must have been pricey.
It is steadfastly measured with cross cuts to the journalist sitting at a desk who found Intrepid’s footage and has assembled it. He is matter of fact about it all and leaves it to the viewer to decide. There is no world-ending hysteria. (I was reminded of the way German television reported on the 1999 East Timor crisis: cool and methodical, in vivid contrast to the feverish, panicked, judgemental reporting of the ABC.)
Some German viewers mistakenly thought this TV film was a factual report, hence the reference to the Wunderkind above, and not a drama. Today many viewers make the same mistake in taking Pox News for factual.
By the way the Canadian encounter took place near Sudbury, which is where I had my first teaching appointment with a college of Laurentian University.
