Movie madness

I ended last year with a brief comment on a recently-watched movie (The Power of the Dog), so let's start 2022 in the same vein. Plenty of time for more serious stuff later.

We watched Don't look up, the hard-to-categorize disaster movie-cum-satire on Netflix. Reviews have ranged all the way from "masterpiece" to "worst movie ever made". For us it was somewhere in between, not least because the first hour is so much better than the second.

It's presumably not a spoiler by now to say that the premise is that a team of astrophysicists discover a comet heading directly for Earth, and try with mixed success to warn the world of the approaching danger. For the first hour, at least, it is very evidently played for laughs, though a surprising number of online reviewers don't seem to have clued in to that. The satire is not of a quality to cause Armando Iannucci any sleepless nights, but it's serviceable enough. Politicians, journalists and even the scientists themselves are the target of some reasonably well-aimed barbs.

The second half of the movie flags badly, with much less focus on the satire as the comet looms ever closer. The A-list cast (Leonardo di Caprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Mark Rylance) are watchable throughout, but the whole thing becomes tedious well before (spoiler redacted). 

Supposedly we are to read the whole thing as a cri de coeur from the movie makers that we take a looming existential crisis (climate change) seriously before it's too late. If that's the case, I'm not sure it really works: the message I took from it is that experts can make their best efforts, but politicians and rich people will always find a way to screw things up. That's largely true, but the movie offers no ideas at all about how that dilemma can be solved.

At the other end of the quality spectrum, we re-watched Stanley Kubrick's astounding Barry Lyndon. This may be the most visually perfect movie ever made. I paused it once or twice at random points for comfort breaks -- it runs over three hours --  and coming back into the room and seeing the still image on the screen was like entering an art gallery. The music is excellent too and reflects Kubrick's unflagging attention to detail.

Much of the criticism of Barry Lyndon tends to focus on Ryan O'Neal's performance in the title role. His Irish accent is certainly hit-or-miss. However, the criticism of his overall acting ability (or lack thereof), while justified, may be beside the point. In a Kubrick movie, nothing is left to chance, so we should assume that this is what Kubrick wanted, a tabula rasa performance that almost makes Barry a bit player in his own story rather than the focus of it.   

We're not done yet!  After enjoying Barry Lyndon, my wife and I have agreed that next week's three-hour marathon will be Visconti's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale.  Life's too short, and the pandemic's too long, for bad wine and bad movies. Happy New Year!

Holiday pot pourri

Just a few thoughts as we wind down toward the new year...

* The US economy seems to be ending the year on a strong note, per this article from CNN.  The 2.1 percent annualized GDP growth rate originally reported for Q3 has been revised up to 2.3 percent, and modeling from the Atlanta Fed suggests a sharp acceleration to north of 7 percent for the final quarter.

Perhaps the most surprising stat in the CNN article is the news that US consumer confidence actually rose in December.  Evidently a lot of Americans are managing to avoid all of the hand-wringing over the omicron variant, with CNN very much in the forefront. It's very doubtful that confidence can remain high if hospitalizations and deaths start to mirror the rise in infections that omicron is driving. Q1 of 2022 looks likely to be a tough one for the economy, with the severity and duration of the slowdown almost entirely dependent on how omicron behaves. 

* The Canadian economy began the final quarter of the year on a strong note, according to one key indicator released by Statistics Canada today. Retail sales rose 1.5 percent in current dollar terms, or 0.9 percent in real terms, in the month of October.  Seven of the eleven sub-sectors posted gains, led by auto sales. StatsCan estimates that retail sale rose as further 1.2 percent in November. 

Just as in the US, the outlook for the Canadian economy is omicron dependent. Restrictions have been tightened across the country, most notably in Quebec, so it is very likely that the all-important retail sector will slow significantly in December and for at least the early part of 2022. (UPDATE, December 22: StatsCan reported today that real GDP rose 0.8 percent in October, and an estimated further 0.3 percent in November, which would bring GDP back within 0.1 percent of its pre-pandemic level. A strong GDP result for Q4 as a whole is just about locked in, but this tells us very little about how Q1/2022 will unfold).

* the lazy dog -- and on an entirely different note, the new Jane Campion movie, The Power of the Dog, appears to be the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar. I watched this last weekend, and can only say, seriously?  The scenery is lovely and the acting is fine, but the pace is glacial. And the plot? Quite honestly, there's not nearly enough of that to fill a movie that runs more than two hours.

An interesting discussion of the movie by two critics can be found here on Slate. Warning: multiple spoilers! One of them liked it, while the other reacted to it much the same as I did. It's interesting that they agree that you really need to see it twice to figure out what happens. That set me thinking: do directors now feel free to make movies baffling because they assume just about everyone will watch via streaming rather than in a theatre, and can therefore watch as many times as needed to understand what they're watching? If so, that doesn't seem to me to be a good thing.

* Happy holidays! And finally, best wishes to all visitors to this blog for a safe and healthy holiday season. Hope to see you all again in 2022. 

Gotta know when to fold'em

This posting is not about one of my usual topics. It's about the Netflix show "House of Cards", specifically the final series. If you haven't seen that, what follows may include a few things that could  spoil your enjoyment of it -- although, if you do read on, you will see that I hardly think that would be possible. 


For better or worse I have watched every episode of House of Cards.  I started with the original UK series, which was dark and violent but spiced with a little dark humour.  It gave us the briefly popular expression, "You might think that; I couldn't possibly comment".

The first series of the US remake followed the original very closely -- sometimes, scene for scene. It was Netflix's first attempt at a prestige drama series, and once they realized they had a hit on their hands, they commissioned a whole lot more of it.  By the end of the recent (and final) series, there were more than 70 episodes. The plots became harder and harder to follow, but it always seemed reasonably plausible -- a Bizarro West Wing, if you like.

Then Kevin Spacey, who had played Senator-then-President Francis Underwood,  had his little fall from grace.  Filming for the final series was already under way.  Netflix and its producers could have just walked away right then, but they took the fateful decision to kill off Spacey's character and rewrite the remaining episodes around his widow and successor Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright.

Bad mistake!  There have been long-running dramas before where the producers didn't quite know when enough was enough; the final series of The Wire is an obvious example.  However, that was a masterpiece compared to the last run-out of House of Cards, which is truly abysmal.  What went so badly wrong?  I think there were several factors at play.

The Spacey factor.  Kevin Spacey is a great actor.  In his best roles he combines a suave exterior with an unmistakable inner menace.  This made him perfect for the Underwood role.  The recurring motif of "breaking the fourth wall", lifted from the British original, allowed him to communicate his nefarious intentions to the audience with a quizzical grin, allowing viewers along for the ride as his schemes played out.

Robin Wright is a good actor, but not one with much facility at humour.  Her Claire Underwood is the ultimate ice maiden in every respect -- severe hairstyle, drab clothing, all-business dialogue. Her too-frequent breaches of the fourth wall are just menacing, rather than conspiratorial as Spacey's were.

The plot factor.  The usual approach for a final series is to tie up the loose ends in some surprising ways, allowing the audience a last chance to hang with some well-loved or cordially-hated characters. A number of characters from the earlier series of House of Cards play important roles in the final episodes, but the main players (apart from Claire Underwood) are two people we've never met before.  These are the Shepherd siblings, rich, rabidly right-wing, and evidently modelled on the Koch brothers.  Introducing these newbies inevitably required the kind of scene-setting that's normally taken care of in a first series.

The result of bringing in the Shepherds is that the plot very quickly becomes difficult to follow.  This isn't helped by the fact that the writing seems to be of a much lower calibre than before, possibly because of the rewriting needed to dispose of Kevin Spacey's role.  Even the directing seems to suffer.  If you want to sample the final series to see if I'm right about all this, just watch the fourth episode, a jumpy and incoherent mess.

The reality factor.  Even while Spacey was still on board, the show's producers were fretting that the real world (i.e. Trumpistan) had turned so crazy that they might never be able to top it in a fictional universe.  This seems to have seriously daunted them, and in response they didn't so much jump the shark as cartwheel over it and leave it floundering in their wake.  The final series has a higher body count than a two-hour session of Call of Duty, there are threats of nuclear Armageddon .. and by the time the credits roll for the final time, there are more loose ends than a dollar-store rug.

I once wrote here that the modern  tendency for series to bloat made one long for the return of a writer like Rod Serling, who could tell a complete story in less than thirty minutes.  House of Cards stands out as a sad example of what happens when financial considerations are allowed to trump all else.

The one about Nazis

Spoiler alert for viewers of The Crown who have not made it to Episode 6!

We are devouring the second series of The Crown at a two-episodes-per-night pace.  It amazes me that, with the Queen and Prince Philip still very much alive, the producers are so willing to air the Royal Family's dirty laundry.  One episode in this series was entirely about Philip's long-rumoured philandering; Princess Margaret seems like a high-class tart; and the Queen Mother is portrayed as an insufferable and humourless snob.

Last night we watched episode 6, in which the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were depicted as not merely insufferable snobs, but also as Nazi fellow-travellers.  The producers have been very careful to keep everything about the show in its proper time period, from the cars to the twinsets that the Queen often favours.  So I was a bit surprised to find a major error in protocol as it applies at the Foreign Office.

Early in the episode, incriminating documents about the Windsors are translated by a Foreign Office linguist. He barges into his boss's office, to be greeted with a bark of "Don't you know how to knock?"  The two of them then go to a senior diplomat's office, carefully knocking on the door before entering.  Here's the thing: almost the first thing I was told when I started work at the Foreign Office many years ago was: never knock on a door. Even if you suspected that the Permanent Under Secretary was in flagrante with his secretary at that very moment, you just walked in unannounced.  I never encountered that practice anywhere else and I'm surprised that nobody mentioned it to the people making The Crown.

It's probably not a spoiler if I reveal to you that the Duke of Windsor seems to have been a conniving sack of sewage.

Uneasy

One of the new offerings that showed up on our Netflix menu this month was Easy Rider, described as a "counter-culture classic". My wife had never seen it, so we thought we'd give it a go.  We were a little surprised by how poorly it was rated by the Netflix audience -- but then we watched it and all became clear.

The movie is a real dog's breakfast.  The first half is basically a hippy travelogue. The dialogue is mostly unscripted, which is not a good thing.  Director Dennis Hopper uses lots of long tracking shots of the magnificent scenery of the US west, with the protagonists (Hopper and Peter Fonda) engaging in mumbled conversations with each other and the various folks they meet.

Things start to take a darker turn when Jack Nicholson enters the "story" as a low-rent lawyer.  Jack is a far better actor than either Hopper or Fonda, and he leers his way through the middle of the movie before meeting a violent end.

Hopper and Fonda make their way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans (that's the "easy" part in the title). Neither the city nor its famous bacchanal looks the least bit appealing here.  Hookers are hired, drugs are consumed and the pretty tableaux of the first half of the movie are replaced by a blurry series of cross-cuts that are evidently intended to simulate the effect of LSD.

And then suddenly we're back on the bikes again, and the movie reaches a sudden and violent conclusion.  It's all wrapped up in just over 90 minutes but it seems much longer.

I don't remember Easy Rider as being this bad when I first saw it and I certainly don't recall the sixties being as tawdry as this.   Still,  at least the music stands the test of time -- well, apart from "If you want to be a bird".

Bloat-TV

Sure, the holidays are a time for family, but they're also a fine time for binge-watching TV.  This year we've been watching a couple of spooky series that show just how much TV programming has changed over the decades.

We keep being told that we live in a golden age of television, blessed by offerings like Deadwood, Mad Men, The West Wing, Breaking Bad, and on and on.  In the last year or two a lot of well-received material has been originated by Netflix.  Just before Christmas, it dropped (with little fanfare) a sci-fi/fantasy series called The OA, co-written by and starring Brit Marling.  Without spoiling it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I can safely reveal that the principal focus is near-death experiences and the people who survive them.

Like the other series I've listed, The OA unspools at a measured pace, with eight episodes of varying lengths.  There's lots of flashing back and forward in time, a large cast of characters and plenty of unexpected twists and turns.  And, like so many other such series, it doesn't actually reach a conclusion: the ending is ambiguous to say the least, and sure enough, a quick Google search reveals that Ms Marling and her co-auteur, the marvellously named Zal Batmanglij, are hoping to secure funding for another series, or two, or even three!

What ever happened to telling a story economically?  The creators of Breaking Bad will freely admit that the story took on a life of its own: for example, the character of Jesse Pinkman was supposed to be written out at the end of the first series, but ended up as a mainstay of the entire six-year run. Marling and Batman say they have a complete story arc for The OA that can unfold over several seasons, but it's very likely that the tale will evolve in the writing.

You couldn't find a sharper contrast for this style of story-telling than The Twilight Zone, which is now available in a 25-disc complete set, and which found its way under our Christmas tree this year.  Each episode runs for less than 30 minutes, yet manages to create from scratch a coherent scenario in which the action takes place.  The stories don't always reach a clear conclusion -- indeed, that's often the point -- but each episode is entirely self-contained.  The show's creator, Rod Serling, gave himself absolutely no wiggle room -- at the conclusion of each week's show, he would briefly appears on screen to offer a teaser about the following week's entirely different episode.

I'm not suggesting that even Rod Serling, genius that he was, could have told a complex story like that of The OA in less than half-an-hour.  However, there are times, watching The OA or even much superior shows like Breaking Bad, when you wish the writers could have reined in their self-indulgence a bit and just got on with the story.  

Trip and fall

There was an enjoyable little movie that came out in the UK a few years ago, called The Trip. It basically followed two comic actors (Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon), playing very slightly fictionalized versions of themselves, as they drove around the north of England, staying in fancy hotels and eating elaborate meals.  The notion was that Coogan was to review the restaurants for The Observer newspaper. It was part travelogue and part food porn, but the real pleasure was its unscripted feel, as the two protagonists discussed all manner of topics while airing their favourite impersonations: Michael Caine, Al Pacino and many more.

So this year we have the inevitable sequel, now available on DVD: The Trip to Italy.  And it's an epic fail.

Coogan and Brydon are both back, as is the conceit that The Observer has commissioned a series of restaurant reviews.  This time the journey is to take the pair from Turin to Rome and ultimately to Sicily. Italian scenery, Italian food and wine, killer impersonations -- what could go wrong?  The answer, alas, is just about everything.

The scenery is wonderful, of course, but the movie was clearly not made in the sun-baked summer months.  The weather is frankly a bit grey throughout, which does nothing to enhance the dolce vita vibe that the producers were obviously hoping for.  There's food, but it gets a lot less screen time than in the original movie. And there are duelling impersonations, but those fade into the background as the movie progresses, because a fatal mistake has been made: instead of relying mainly on the quickfire comedic talents of its stars, The Trip to Italy has a worked-out-in-advance plot.  The loss of spontaneity makes the movie far less enjoyable than its predecessor, and even a bit mean-spirited.

Even worse, the movie unerringly aims for the cheapest gags. Brydon and Coogan make the drive in a Mini, mainly so that they can do the obligatory Michael Caine/Italian Job line,  "you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" -- but this is pretty much thrown away right at the start of the film. Later, at Pompeii, Brydon hauls out one of his moldy-oldie party pieces, an odd little vocal thing called "small man in a box", to have a conversation with the calcified corpse of a victim of the Vesuvius eruption. Not, perhaps, in the best of taste, but worse than that, not funny.

A quick look at Rotten Tomatoes reveals that critics quite liked The Trip to Italy, but regular audiences were much less impressed. I'm with the paying customers on this one.  My three word review: non mi piace. 

Rule of Schlock

You may think that the most depressing news out of the entertainment world this week is Sony's capitulation over the release of The Interview, but trust me, this is worse!

With new ideas ever harder to find, I suppose it's no surprise that someone has hit on the notion of a Broadway production of School of Rock. The movie was an enjoyable though lightweight Hollywood feel-good fantasy, made watchable mainly by the reliably off-kilter presence of Jack Black in the leading role.

The movie's soundtrack was mostly unoriginal, featuring killer tunes by the likes of The Doors and Led Zeppelin.  So guess who the producers of the stage version have chosen to write new material for the stage version.  Yes, it's a man whose very name is synonymous with rock'n'roll -- Andrew Lloyd Webber!  Truth to tell, it's hard to think of any living composer with less rock sensibility than old Andrew, but his name in lights outside the theater will certainly pull in the punters, at least those who did not run screaming into the streets from Starlight Express or Cats.

And of course the story itself has to be adapted for the stage, and who better to do that than...Julian Fellowes! Yes, the plummy British toff whose tin-eared dialogue and preposterous plots have mysteriously attracted a global following for the execrable Downton Abbey.  Who better than a man who can't write believable dialogue for people of his own race and class to put words into the mouths of a misfit American teacher and a group of feisty teens?

Two creaky members of the British House of Lords writing a rock musical for Broadway -- by all that's logical it should have about as much chance of success as Springtime for Hitler.  It's scheduled to open next November at the vast Winter Garden, where it will replace the equally implausible stage version of Rocky.

I think I may start a rumour that their Lordships are inserting Kim Jong-Un into the storyline.  

See this movie!

Locke is a miniature masterpiece.  It's only 85 minutes long, there's only one character on screen (Ivan Locke, played by Tom Hardy), and essentially only one set: the interior of Locke's BMW.  You won't be able to take your eyes off it.

The storyline is deceptively simple.  Locke breaks away from an important business assignment to look after a personal crisis, the nature of which gradually becomes clear. As he drives in the dark toward London, making and taking an endless succession of phone calls, both his personal and professional lives come unraveled.

It's been quietly mentioned as an Oscar wild card, and I suppose there's always the possibility of a Hollywood remake. But if you wait for that you'll miss Tom Hardy's gentle and melancholy Welsh accent, which adds greatly to the pathos of the unfolding drama.

It's just become available on DVD.  See this movie!

Banking Bad

When I can tear myself away from binge-watching Breaking Bad, I've been using Netflix to catch up on some interesting documentaries.  I started with Searching for Sugar Man, which tells the unlikely tale of Sixto Rodriguez, a long-forgotten American folkie who has always been massively popular in South Africa, but nowhere else.  Rodriguez is from Detroit, so Netflix then directed me towards Detropia, a gloomy but compelling analysis of the decline of the Motor City.

And from there I was directed to Inside Job, an Oscar-winning diatribe about the financial crisis, narrated by Matt Damon.  It's a few years old now -- Dominique Strauss-Kahn was still at the IMF when the film was made, rather than helping innumerable police forces with their inquiries, and Christine Lagarde was still in the French government, not at the IMF -- but it still packs a punch.  The narrative of how the crisis unfolded is still all too familiar, but the movie tells it clearly and concisely.  You won't get as deep an analysis as you would from, for example, Michael Lewis's The Big Short -- there are plenty of CDOs in Inside Job, but the film's makers seem to have decided that synthetic CDOs were maybe a step too far -- but there are no obvious blunders.

The film's director and writer, Charles Ferguson, uses a lot of talking heads to move the story along.  These are mostly people who are very happy to take the opportunity to castigate Wall Streeters: Eliot Spitzer features prominently, for example.  People who might have defended Wall Street or its regulators proved rather harder to nail down, and one of Ferguson's most effective techniques is to name and shame them:  "Alan Greenspan declined to be interviewed for this film";  "Lloyd Blankfein declined to be interviewed for this film" and so on, many times over.

It has to be said, though, that those who "declined to be interviewed" are unlikely to have many regrets, because most of those who did venture in front of the camera to defend the financial sector were roughed up very badly.  There's former Dallas Fed boss Frederic Mishkin, for example, who resigned from the Fed at the end of August 2008, just as the crisis was coming to a head, because "I had a textbook to revise"!  Mishkin comes across as shifty and, to be frank, a total lightweight*.  Or there's Glenn Hubbard of Columbia Business School (and the Council of Economic Advisers), who bristles at the tough questions and barks at Ferguson "You've got three minutes!  Give it your best shot!"

Much of this ground has been covered extensively by other writers and film makers.  The closest thing Ferguson has to an original contribution is his exposition of how academic economists have sold their souls to Wall Street in exchange for massive consulting fees.  In addition to the aforementioned Messrs Mishkin and Hubbard, Ferguson managed to inveigle Martin Feldstein in front of the camera, where he did himself very few favours.  Others named by Ferguson, including the biggest kahuna of all, Larry Summers, "declined to be interviewed".

Ferguson demonstrates very effectively that none of these folk, nor any of the bankers who paid (and continue to pay) big consulting fees for their services, feels any responsibility, let alone remorse, still less guilt, over the dire consequences of their actions.  By and large they're still on the job, and back to business as usual. Ferguson notes that the only person closely involved in the crisis to have been run out of town is Eliot Spitzer, and that was in connection with his personal life, rather than with the crisis as such.

With the Obama administration failing almost totally to deliver on its promises of regulatory reform, the world is relying on the promises of the bankers that they've learned their lessons, and won't do it again.  If you've watched as much Breaking Bad as I have, you'll have heard Walter White make the same kind of promise many times -- and you'll know how much you can believe it.

*I was tempted to say "Idiot", but I don't know how many readers I share with Dostoevsky.

No way, Sherlock!

I've mused here once or twice before about the inability of TV producers to come up with a realistic depiction of the world of business.  We had another example of this last evening, in a somewhat unexpected locale: the season finale of the Sherlock Holmes update, "Elementary", this year's most successful new network series.

Holmes finally gets to meet his nemesis, Moriarty, whose identity is a big surprise (and undoubtedly not one that Conan Doyle would have contemplated).  Moriarty is in New York for nefarious purposes and naturally Holmes, using his normal technique of sticking bits of paper onto the wall, figures out the plan.  Remarkably, it's sort of based in reality.  The Republic of Macedonia has come up with an agreement with Greece that will  allow it to join the Euro, but Moriarty has a scheme to make large sums of money by derailing the deal at the last minute.

What Holmes supposedly figures out is that if Macedonia joins the Euro, the Macedonian dinar will become worthless, whereas if its admission to the single currency is vetoed by Greece, the dinar will soar.  Moriarty, of course, has figured out the same thing, and has strapped on a big dinar position that will increase massively in value if the nefarious plan succeeds.

Evidently neither Holmes, nor Moriarty, nor the producers and writers of Elementary, has any grounding in economics. When a country enters the Euro, its currency doesn't become worthless: it just gets converted, at a rate that's set well in advance.  And if any country were to get derailed just at the point of Euro entry, there's no doubt that its domestic currency would collapse in value, not soar, so anyone with a big speculative long position, like Moriarty, would get hosed.

In other words, on this occasion Holmes's formidable brain and inexorable logic have led him to a conclusion that is in fact entirely implausible and illogical, even if it does serve the purposes of the plot.  That never happened when Conan Doyle was at the helm!

And just who does Moriarty turn out to be?  Well, as you may not have seen the show, I won't spoil it for you.  Let's just say I've had to be a little bit careful how I've written this piece so as not to give it away.

The Queen and the Maestro

An interesting feature-length documentary that came out last year, called "The Queen of Versailles",  should make every central banker think twice about the supposed benefits of rock-bottom interest rates.  The movie centres on a developer by the name of David Siegel, who grew the largest timeshare empire in the world, Westgate, largely on the back of cheap money.  Egged on by his much younger wife, a living miracle of silicone and botox and a mother of seven children, he tapped the banks up even further to build "Versailles", intended to be the largest home in America at 91,000 square feet.

Then the financial crisis hit.  All of a sudden the money dried up.  Siegel's business came to a screeching halt, because his model only worked as long as the kind of people who buy timeshares could get access to cheap money.  He had to fire almost all of his sales staff, while trying to conceal from the existing buyers the news that his bank was attempting to foreclose on his flagship property, a blue glass monstrosity in Las Vegas.  And to his wife's horror, work on Versailles came to a standstill.

At the end of the movie, with the Vegas property out of his control and Versailles slowly crumbling, Siegel muses quietly to the camera:  "I developed 28 resorts.  If I'd just stopped at 15, we'd still be all right today".

There you have it.  The combination of cheap money and capitalist greed is a powerful one, both for good and for ill.  The longer you keep throwing cheap or free money at people, even successful ones like David Siegel, the less sensibly they'll use it.  And if their plans have no rationale other than to take advantage of the cheap money, then taking that money away will cause things to fall apart very quickly indeed.

I've criticised the Toronto Star's financial columnist, David Olive, a few times recently, but over the weekend he published a very good piece about why the continuing flood of cheap money provided by central banks is failing to get the global economy moving again. The financial crisis was largely caused by cheap money, under the leadership of "Maestro" Alan Greenspan, so it was never easy to believe that the solution to the crisis would lie primarily in a whole lot more of the same.

QE and all that were rushed into being as measures to cope with a dire financial emergency.  Half a decade on, they're still with us.  That can only mean that the central banks lack all confidence in the economy -- and if they feel that way, how can businesses be expected to feel any different?

So, Messrs Greenspan and Bernanke and King -- you got us into this.  Any ideas how to get us out?  If you do,  David Siegel and his spendthrift spouse would love to hear from you.

Tortured logic

I haven't had a chance to see Zero Dark Thirty yet, but I certainly intend to, as I was very impressed by Kathryn Bigelow's previous movie, The Hurt Locker.  (A movie, by the way, that bears repeated viewings -- we watched it again recently on Blu-ray and found it just as absorbing and exciting as the first time we saw it).  Ms Bigelow has found herself defending her movie against a series of attacks from all sides, most of which don't make a whole lot of sense.

Long before the movie was given even limited, Oscar-qualifying release, there were suggestions that Ms Bigelow and her writers had been given access to a lot of classified information about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and especially about the raid in which he was eventually killed.  It was intimated, mainly by Republicans, that the Obama administration had given the film-makers sensitive information in the hope of seeing themselves portrayed in a more favourable light.

Now that the film is on general release, there's a whole new set of criticisms, to the effect that the movie depicts and attempts to justify the use of torture in obtaining information about bin Laden's whereabouts.  The US has denied any use of torture, though its definitions in this regard have always seemed fairly loose: waterboarding, for example, is considered to be an "aggressive interrogation technique", rather than torture.   (The late Christopher Hitchens, who underwent the procedure for research purposes, emphatically disagreed).  There have even been calls from some senior Hollywood figures, including Martin Sheen, for Zero Dark Thirty to be boycotted because of the torture scenes and the implication that they were instrumental in tracking down bin Laden.

There are a lot of experts out there who argue that torture is completely useless as an interrogation aid.  The victims are so terrified that they will invent things that they think the interrogator wants to hear, just to get the process to stop.  As a result, any information obtained this way is of no value unless there is outside corroboration. Maybe so, but Kathryn Bigelow is in no doubt that it was used by the US in the hunt for bin Laden, and has issued a robust defence of its inclusion in the movie.  Given what we know about waterboarding, illegal renditions and the continuing travesty of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, it seems all too sadly likely that she is telling the truth.

So, on the one hand Zero Dark Thirty has been attacked because the moviemakers knew altogether too much about what went down, and on the other they're being attacked for making up something that, hands on hearts, never happened, no sir! On the well-established principle that there's no such thing as bad publicity, Kathryn Bigelow is likely to be laughing all the way to the bank.

The morning guys at our local talk radio station, the redoubtable CKTB, were discussing all of this yesterday and made an interesting point.  All kinds of people are piling in on Zero Dark Thirty because of its supposed liberty-taking with the truth, yet the entirely risible Argo, a fictionalised telling of the Iran hostage rescue in 1980, is scooping up awards all over the place, despite bearing only a flimsy resemblance to the actual events.  Artistic license, it would appear, is fine as long as it flatters the right people.

***

We shall be away for a few days, catching a few rays.  Back around the end of the month.

It's the pictures that got small*

Sometime over the holidays, the two hosts on one of the all-news channels were wittering on about a prize that members of the audience could win that day: a new smartphone/tablet thingy.  They enthused about the connectivity and such, and then one of them raved that "you could easily watch a movie on it".

Well yes, I suppose you could, but why in the name of DW Griffith would you want to?  We live in an age of CGI and Dolby sound and Imax and 3-D (and Imax 3-D) and even 48fps.  Yet a lot of people choose to enjoy the movie experience on a screen the size of a pack of cards, with tiny tinny headphones, rather than on a big screen with a seat-shaking surround sound system.  It's all part of the atomization of popular culture, where nobody wants to be stuck watching something that anyone else is interested in, or at a time other than of their own choosing, even if that means losing 90% of the experience.

The same thing has, of course, been happening to music for many years.  People of my age can remember when ads for music systems boasted about huge speakers with "30 watts RMS per channel".  I never did figure out what that meant, except that your neighbours were probably going to learn all about your tastes in music.  Now most people listen to music in solitary splendour, using headphones.  And the quality of the sound has changed for the worse.  Gone, except for audiophiles,  are the days of the analog vinyl disc, which lost none of the depth and texture of the original recording.  On the way out is the CD, almost as good in terms of quality and much more durable.  Now most music is downloaded in compressed formats, with significant loss of quality. Producers are even optimizing the mix of recordings for headphones rather than for home stereo systems.   People's obsession with never having to risk listening to anyone else's choice of music has meant that they are listening to their own in a greatly diminished form.

I don't want to suggest that bigger is always better in art.  After all, for every Sistine Chapel, there's a Mona Lisa.  (You were amazed by how small it was when you finally got to see it, right?)  But for the first time, people seem to be consciously choosing to consume important art forms -- movies and music -- in a hugely downsized format, just in order to be able to live in their own little cocoon.

But there's hope.  Sales of movie theatre tickets in the US actually rose in 2012 for the first time in a long time, thanks in part to the late-year success of The Hobbit, and the music business is increasingly becoming focused on live shows rather than recordings.  These trends suggest that people are starting to pine for the shared experiences of old, in preference to the isolation that can so easily be created by personal electronics.    Whether that can forestall the complete collapse of a shared culture, only time will tell.

* Line spoken by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard.

Oi, Emmerich -- you're bard!

After his success with such cerebral blockbusters as Independence Day and 2012, director Roland Emmerich has turned his attention to an even greater fantasy: the notion that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact the work of someone else. "Anonymous" has just opened here in the UK, to uniformly contemptuous reviews that make it sound like Dan Brown on a bad day, if such a thing is possible. US reviewers have been almost equally merciless.

The "it wasn't Shakespeare" movement has been going since at least the mid-nineteenth century, without ever coming remotely close to either disproving Shakespeare's authorship, or even agreeing on an alternative author. Emmerich's candidate, one of the many out there, is the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere, known in his own time as a nasty piece of work and third-rate poet. Other putative candidates as the "real" author have included Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson and a host of lesser lights. Along the way, this nonsense has attracted adherents both distinguished (Mark Twain and Helen Keller both signed on at one stage) and comical, such as the appropriately-named J. Thomas Looney, a schoolmaster from that well-known centre of literary exegesis, Gateshead.

All of these claims have been comprehensively and repeatedly demolished by the US scholar James Shapiro, in "1599", an account of a year in the bard's life, and more recently "Contested Will", which trawls through the whole sorry history of Shakespeare denial. They are both worth reading. So is "Shakespeare's language", by the great Frank Kermode. While Kermode does not directly address the authorship question, his analysis of the uniqueness of Shakespeare's "voice" is very compelling.

Does any of this matter? After all, Anonymous is just a movie, and if it's as awful as people say, it's unlikely to be much of an opinion-former. Unfortunately, Sony Pictures has tried to up the ante by sending out study kits to US high schools, peddling the film's absurd conspiracy theories. Needless to say, James Shapiro doesn't merit a mention in Sony's fair and balanced look at the issues. It's a nasty and pointless piece of attempted brainwashing. One can only be grateful that they've stopped short of claiming that the Earl of Oxford was born in New Haven or somewhere, but perhaps they're saving that for the sequel.

The Killing flaw

Not so long ago, the British believed their home-grown TV was the best in the world, a view that was apparently impervious to the regular presence of the likes of Mr Blobby or Jeremy Beadle or Terry and June on the nation's screens. These days, it must be said, a lot of the more watchable stuff comes from abroad. From Europe, we get crime dramas (Wallander, from Sweden; Spiral, from France; Forbrydelsen, from Denmark, of which more later) and even quirky comedies (Night Shift, from Iceland). From the US, there's a whole range of well-written and immaculately produced series, from The Sopranos and The Wire via Mad Men to Larry David's cringefest, Curb your Enthusiasm.

By comparison, the UK seems stuck in the past: still churning out the increasingly preposterous Doctor Who, shamelessly reaching back into the past with the flaccid Downton Abbey, or producing excruciatingly old-fashioned sitcoms like the unwatchable Miranda. (For non-UK viewers -- and aren't you the lucky ones? -- this features a very tall and, shall we say, homely-looking woman who falls over a lot). Oh sure, there are exceptions -- Sherlock was pretty good -- but aside from news and sports, the discriminating viewer could very easily meet his or her home entertainment needs without once watching anything produced on these shores.

The revival of US television is arguably the major entertainment story of the past decade. Driven by HBO and a gaggle of ambitious competitors, the small screen has largely usurped the cinema as the major medium for creativity and storytelling. To a greater and greater extent, it's where all the money and talent -- writers, directors, actors -- want to strut their stuff.

So here's the question. With all of this creativity bubbling away, with the reputation of US television growing around the world, why did anyone think it was a good idea to remake Denmark's remarkable Forbrydelsen* (The Killing) for US audiences? The reason usually given is that US audiences won't watch anything with subtitles, but hasn't anyone ever heard of dubbing? And anyway, the subtitles thing isn't even true. When The Wire boxset became available in the UK, newbies were advised to switch on the subtitles in order to pick up on the Baltimore gangspeak -- and were assured that Americam viewers had done exactly the same thing.

The remake, sad to relate, is feeble and dull. It's a shame that US viewers, growing increasingly used to seeing high-quality output from their own country after so many years of dreck, have been deprived of seeing a product of equal merit from an unexpected source. Forbrydelsen 2 arrives in the UK later this year; it would be nice if US viewers could get to see it too, rather than some pointless and half-baked remake, but alas, a second series of The Killing is already in the works.

* For those of you who have let your once-fluent Danish lapse, the title actually means "crime", but it was shown in the UK, and has been remade in the US, as The Killing.

New horror film announced

Unfortunately, I'm not making this up. The loathsome and overrated Sacha Baron Cohen is to play the awful and overrated Freddie Mercury in a new film about Queen. The only thing that could make this worse would be hiring Michael Winner to direct it.

Mr Peace, meet Miss Blyton

I gave a big thumbs-up to David Peace's novel "The Damned United" when I read it last year. I just got around to seeing the film, which is an absolute masterclass in how NOT to adapt a book for the screen. Here's a review I just posted on Lovefilm:

You don't know what you're doing!

David Peace's extraordinary novel 'The Damned United' waded into the story of Brian Clough's ill-fated 44-day spell as manager of Leeds United with fists flying. Clough was portrayed as a teary, sweary, bleary boozer who hated the Leeds players as much as they hated him. It was so hard hitting that, just before the film based on the book was due for release, the Clough family sponsored a documentary of their own to tell their side of the story.

Did I just say this film was 'based on the book'? If it was, the screenplay must have been adapted by Enid Blyton. Who knows, it may well be a more accurate depiction of 'what really happened' than the book ever was, but it's not nearly as interesting or enjoyable. It's about as much fun as a floodlight failure during an Accrington Stanley Reserves game on a wet January night. Avoid the film. Read the book.

It's good to have got that off my chest. Now I'm hoping that my wife, who sat through this tedious nonsense with me, will be talking to me again by the end of the week.

War on Peace

Back in early 2007 I posted a brief comment here on David Peace's remarkable novel, "The Damned United", about the late football manager Brian Clough. I've read it again since, and I still like it.

The Clough family, however, doesn't like it one bit. With a film based on the book (loosely based, from the bits that I've seen on TV) about to appear, the family has co-operated in the production of a documentary telling their side of the story. Peace's Clough was a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, Ramsey-swearing genius who wasn't above accepting a few quid in a plain brown envelope once in a while. The man the family remembers seems to have been a mordant wit who only just failed the audition to join the Twelve Apostles.

Clough was a moderately successful manager with Hartlepool and Brighton and an amazingly successful one with Derby County and Nottingham Forest. His only failure was his brief tenure at Leeds, in between his triumphs at Derby and Forest. It's not surprising that a novelist like Peace would choose to examine this low point in Clough's career, rather than the more upbeat parts. Peace's achievement is to demonstrate how the personality traits that stood Clough in good stead elsewhere failed him so spectacularly at Leeds. Leaving aside the smoking, swearing and boozing, which most of us would consider to be minor sins, Peace's Clough is a dedicated and decent family man who can't quite believe what he's got himself into. It's a work of fiction, and some of the more bizarre episodes are completely made up (Clough's burning of his predecessor Don Revie's desk, for example), but for anyone who watched Clough's career from the outside, it's quite credible.

So I think the family is protesting unduly -- and in some ways, may inadvertently have proved Peace's point. The documentary recounted how Clough was waiting at FA headquarters for an interview for the job of England manager, a post he craved. An old gent came past and began to struggle up the stairs, prompting Clough to yell after him that a man in his condition should take the lift, in case his heart gave out on the stairs. That gent was, of course, one of the panel who were about to interview Clough. The family also claims that the entire interview process was a fix -- the FA already knew who it was going to appoint -- but as there are no written records of the interviews, that claim is no less fictitious than anything in Peace's book.

Peace is a challenging writer and a bit of an oddball. His speciality is fiction based on real people and real events. Before "The Damned United" he wrote a searing indictment of the Yorkshire police (recently televised as the Red Riding trilogy) and a novel on the unpromising theme of the miners' strike. He now lives in Tokyo and is writing a trilogy on that city in the aftermath of World War 2. The first volume, Tokyo Year Zero, is already out in paperback. It makes The Damned United look like Little Miss Muffet, but fortunately for Peace, all of the protagonists are now dead.

Say No to Borat!

I have no intention of seeing Sacha Baron Cohen's "movie film". Usually I would say that disqualified me from commenting on it. But stick with me -- I have some pretty strong views on what Cohen seems to regard as acceptable ways of geting laughs and making money. (For what it's worth, when I went to see the latest Scorsese epic I saw the Borat trailer. I didn't find it funny. But that's beside the point, or at least bseide my point).

When Ali G first appeared on TV in the UK, it provided some wonderful moments: Mohamed al-Fayed dancing around the stage chanting his own name, Tony Benn maintaining his rigorous socialist correctness in the face of ever more provocative questioning from Ali G, to name but two. (And one other personal favourite: Ali G's gleeful reaction when some royal hanger-on or other described Camilla Parker Bowles as "a very fit woman". You couldn't have scripted a better set-up line -- though I'm tempted to think that Cohen scripted that one).

Throughout that series, Cohen's unwitting victims saw their own pretensions unveiled and then fairly gently mocked. That's OK; they were mostly public figures who should have been able to take care of themselves. However, there was another aspect of the show that started to trouble me. Although Ali G was presented as a white trash yoof who just wished he were black, it was clear that Cohen was using the character to get laughs by skewering black urban culture. It's not hard to guess what the reaction would have been if a black comedian had attempted the reverse trick by playing an equally stereotyped Jewish character.

I lost interest in Ali G in the second TV series, partly because it was becoming harder to believe that the "victims" weren't in on the joke, and partly because the hugely offensive Borat character was introduced.

So to the current "movie film", which as I say I have not seen. Once again Cohen's character embodies vicious racial stereotypes of a kind that he would justifiably find very objectonable if they were apllied to Jews. But he is no longer using his comic creation to lure unsuspecting public figures into dropping their guard. Now he is using a variety of techniques (getting his victims drunk seems to be one of the less reprehensible) to get ordinary people not just to look foolish, but to portray themselves as racists and anti-semites. It seems to me that this is a slur not only on Kazakhs, through the Borat character himself, but also on the Americans who are Borat's victims. This is a pretty unpleasant way to make money.

One last, semi-personal note: I haven't met Sacha Baron Cohen, but he went to the same Cambridge college as I did. Famous graduates: John Milton....Charles Darwin....Earl Mountbatten of Burma....me....Cohen. Things definitely seem to be going in the wrong direction!