A-Team, B-Movie

A few years ago I happened to catch on TV by chance an episode of The A-Team. I was quite pleased, having fond memories and was primed by the opening music and sequence. Unfortunately, I found it disappointingly bland, distinctly lacking in action. It was like watching Scooby-Doo, another favourite from my childhood that on a more mature viewing was unmasked - like the creep who had posed as a good guy - as hackneyed and predictable. Maybe, like those who don’t like Frasier but are badgered to tune in, I had caught a rare lame episode. Or simply my rose-tinted reminisces were revealed as just that.
Still, I was determined to watch the big screen adaptation, though the movie, even in previews, was hardly bigged up as a must-see. It could have been a travesty but that did not deter me, especially as Altaa and I had been queuing to see Inception and that had sold out as we were in line, with The A-Team the next in show and that perilously close to being full up, on its premiere on Wednesday. Given my revised opinion of the TV series, the film itself wasn’t so bad, lending it very much a Bourne Identity/ Supremacy/ Ultimatum feeling with sultry locales outside the US and Europe and technocratic urban centres within. Again, they miraculously find all manner of useful materials and set about these with Blue Peter zeal. George Peppard as Hannibal and Mr T. as BA Baracus were always going to be tough acts to follow; Liam Neeson is miscast but Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson does his best with his character who develops a conscience, when in the TV series all the good guys had one, rather than just being out for ‘revenge’.
When a film is directed by Joe Carnahan it usually isn’t a good sign, despite being a flavour of the month at Hollywood right now. He’s probably a better pitcher to get that green light than anything he does behind the camera. I felt let down that the original score got only a brief (and post-modern) cameo and then a single chord at the end, before the credits rolled with someone roaring in a charmless way. Overall, though, it was amusing in a dumb way, especially the interaction between Sharlto Copley as Howling Mad Murdock and Jackson, with some sharp lines from the bad guys. There was nothing high-brow about it, with a ridiculously pat resolution of Baracus’ moral struggle over killing people (which didn’t need to happen anyway), but it had a few twists that I didn’t expect. There was held out the prospect of a sequel but as this film concerned itself with the struggle to clear their names, the idea of doing what they did in the TV series holds little appeal as it simply would not transfer well for a two hour slot in a multiplex. It's summed up by the fact that the Orange advert parodying the film as an inducement to turn off your mobile phone is funnier than the entire film that follows. Let this be it. Two out of five, but migrating towards three.

With the release of the Afghan war documents to The Gurdian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel via Wikileaks, we have a truer understanding of the thud and blunder of war. People are surprised at how clumsy NATO forces are working in the lands beyond the Hindu Kush, but Tolstoy was writing about the vagaries and uncertain outcomes of war, especially pitched battles, 140 years ago. Yet what truly shocked me was Wikileaks blithe dismissal of their publication of sensitive information relating to Afghan individuals and locations as "misclassifications" - as callous as a neo-con. When their lives are not at risk, the people of Wikileaks are unconcerned at putting others in danger for the cause of crusading liberalism - they would probably call it 'the price of freedom' but that is a phrase we heard too often during the previous US presidency.

The non-pound in your pocket

Reading today that the pace of fakery in pound coins is picking up, I've long viewed a pound coin as of dubious value. Apparently (how do they measure these things?), 1 in every 36 pound coins is now no such thing, up from 1 in 40 just last year. I'm sure in Gillingham it is 1 in 3. Whenever I giftaid my church donation I am loath to put pound coins in the envelope, preferring either a mixture of silver, £2 coins and notes or simply just notes - it's getting to the point where I'll probably just go electronic from next year.
The only thing these 'pound' coins are good for is to release supermarket trolleys from the chain lock. I simply don't trust them for any other purpose. Redenomination is the only way.

In this era of the Great Recession, our elite comforts itself by thinking it could not have been predicted and therefore just happened. Lessons to stop a repeat are to be learnt and we all move on, unless you’re Lehman Brothers and you cease to exist.
Lehman Brothers make a cameo appearance in the part drama, part dance, part musical production Enron and their dysfunction, even ten years ago, is aptly parodied. But were the lessons of Enron’s collapse in 2002 learnt? They rationalised away their debt not into exotic portfolios but dummy companies that were like Russian dolls in the good times, but a house of cards – with its pyramid style – in the bad. Of course, what Enron did was illegal. What the banks did in the run-up to 2008 was, for the most part, entirely legal.
Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were economic gangsters of the highest order – the latter squaring up to any critics at the end sounding like if Al Capone were to attempt to defend his record. If Lay was highly immoral though, Skilling was thoroughly amoral – the kind of man who wouldn’t just trade his grandmother but hive off all parts of her body and sell them on as derivative packages, all in the name of innovation of course. He took social Darwinism to its Hobbesian extremes; now, social Darwinians don’t have a good rep and Skilling did nothing to enhance that. His ideology is such that he doesn’t feel a need to apologise to the 20,000 ex-Enron employees who invested their pensions, health insurance and life savings in Enron’s shares, as they were encouraged to do (it’s the American way), only to be wiped out when the company went under – these people have failed to survive as the fittest and deserve everything they get. All the time, he fails to realise that he is the biggest failure of all.
The play at the Noël Coward theatre is a modern take on the Emperor’s New Clothes, except that the Emperor knows he is naked and when he is deposed, it’s the ordinary person who gets squashed. Skilling got 24 years 4 months (when Bernie Madoff ripped off rich investors he got 150 years, go figure), but don’t feel sorry for him, since he’s still got $100 million in the bank waiting for him when he comes out.
The brilliance of enron is snot simply in the way it angrily lays bare the power lust, greed, corruption and arrogance as masters of the universe watch their own collapse, but the allusions we can infer from the characters and their backgrounds. For instance, Lay is the son of a Baptist preacher and such religious figures believe those who commit suicide go to hell, but at his funeral near the conclusion it is alleged that he topped himself to avoid prison, thus questioning the solidity of his faith and how far self-interest governs his life.
Even as the company is spinning out of control, they get their teeth into the deregulated Californian electricity market and Lay and Skilling seem to have had shame bypass operations as they purportedly rigged the Golden State’s energy market to bring down the Democratic governor and install a Republican in the form of Arnold the Gubernator (very amusingly caricatured by two people – as one – here) in the aforementioned position. Skilling at one point says that it is his job to get around regulation, put in place by bottom-of-the-class, know-nothing politicians. But in the free-for-all that was electricity provision in California, people died as the rich, for their own personal use, outbid the public services such as traffic lights and hospital for electricity use. Electricity was traded as infrastructure decayed, neglected, eventually leading to the two day rolling blackout across the whole state.
Topically, the last big idea Enron had was to trade the weather, that is, to buy up commodities whose supply has been affected by unfavourable climatic conditions. The very previous evening on Newsnight, there was a report on a hedge fund manager, popularly known as Chocfinger, who has corned the cocoa market after bad weather led to a bad harvest in a major cocoa producer. This hedge fund manager makes a £1 billion profit while westerners have to pay more for their chocolate bars and coffee (because by squeezing supply, demand increases and you can therefore charge more for your product) and farmers in the developing world starve or are impoverished as they can’t afford to buy the seeds to sow the next batch of crops. Enron want a piece of this and the heirs to Enron are doing very nicely.
The acting is top-notch building the traits of the characters slowly so you can see how they came to the decisions that they did. Their actions are interspliced with movie references such as Jurassic Park and Star Wars that make complex transactions far more accessible to a general audience.
At the conclusion, the play poses the teaser – doesn’t, not only human history, but our own lives, reflect a stock market chart; that we immerse ourselves in a feel-good bubble before it eventually pops and we crash. Given that it is Skilling delivering the oratory, the nihilism is understandable and you don’t have to agree with it, but there is an element of truth swirling around in there. Just need to keep believing, to keep hoping. Five out of five.

Now that the dust has settled in more ways than one on the South African ‘edition’ of the football World Cup, time for a few reflections of my own. The best team with the best individuals won. England deserved their last-16 exit, though the Germans can never carp about 1966 again. It was good to see former power Uruguay reacquire some of their former lustre though did so at the unfortunate expense of Ghana in controversial circumstances. Aside from the group stage implosions of France and Italy, that was it really for this World Cup. The staging was magnificent - it was the teams that turned up that did not perform to their billing.
South Africa’s first-round exit was disappointing but some time or another the host nation would have suffered that fate, it’s just that Carlos Alberto Parreira now has hung round his neck a World Cup winner’s medal as coach and the embarassment of being in charge of the first host nation eliminated in the group stages. As after Belgium in the European Championships of 2000, all subsequent hosts can breathe easy without fear of being lumbered with that tag.
I fancied the Dutch against the Brazilians, reasoning that one year the former must come good and they came closer here than in the previous two finals in 1974 and 1978. Maybe the Dutch prospered in a common kinship with the Afrikaaners, but it is more like that their workmanlike style that was so unattractive was also very effective in undoing more flamboyant opponents.
Then the final. Horrendous unless one rocked up expecting to watch some sort of Ultimate Fight contest. I was glad that an English referee and his assistants made the final but I will happily endorse some of the excoriation that followed, feeling north-eastern clubs suffer from the biased decisions of this Yorkshireman. Howard Webb is on record as saying “it doesn’t matter when you make the decision, just so long as it is the right decision.” He kept on Mark van Bommel and Nigel de Jong, when definitely one and probably both should have been sent off in the first half. These were instances of trying to keep player numbers equal in the ‘interests of the game’ where the decision was wrong on all counts, but made because it was early in the game. Given how quickly the Dutch defensive dyke was breached once one of their members in Jonny Heitinga finally received marching orders, Webb made a rod for his own back by sparing the street-fighting de Jong and van Bommel. It would have been a better, if one-sided, game had the Spanish had a man advantage for longer. As it was, the intensity of the game was the only interest to be scraped from it. I was fist-pumping when Iniesta scored that late, late goal. By that time, any sympathy for the Dutch at being runners-up again had evaporated, despite Van Persie’s Corinthian spirit in sending a corner straight back to the goalkeeper when it would not have been unchivalrous to have played it normally. Now Spain keep England company as having the worst tournament record of all the World Cup Winners (whereas the Dutch would have surpassed us). Another reason to celebrate.
So the World Cup that seemed at times more dedicated to searching out the best tattoo than the best team is over for four years. With the next one in Brazil, as the host nation seek to end the hex of the hexa and wipe memories of the 1950 ‘Hiroshima’ (inexplicable Brazilian term for that World Cup), England’s search to get their hands on the trophy will last more than four years. We’d better hope that we land the tournament in 2018 or we’ll have no chance of winning it for decades.

Shrek Forever After is allegedly the end of the dynasty, breaking the idea of tricolon with a quadrilogy and, as with such august franchises that stuttered into a fourth instalment such as Lethal Weapon or Die Hard, it can be largely justified not through high art or philosophical digression, but simply that to end on a trilogy would frame the whole series with the disappointments of the third film. Shrek 4 is better than Shrek the Third which lost its comic touch in favour of epic grandstanding. Rumpelstiltskin is the kind of quicksilver villain, by turns charming, camp and megalomaniacal, that was missing last time round in the form of the vain lovers Prince Charming and Rapunzel. The trouble is the previous three made a play on the essence of the fairytale, if with diminishing returns - Shrek 4 doesn’t really have a point except as another romp, its key tropes already well-worn ones.
This is not to say it’s not enjoyable, with Rumpelstiltskin’s tartly malevolent goose, Fabergé Egg palace and Louis XVI-styling, little points that struck me, others have noted his fondness for cupcakes. His The Untouchables stalking of his witches’ coven in the manner of Al Capone affirms his gangsterish traits - it is maybe no coincidence that he so well drawn given that he voiced by Head of Story Walt Dorhn. Little new adornments of character pepper Shrek, Fiona or Donkey and their established consorts, although Puss in Boots gets a through the looking glass far from trim alter-ego.
Mike Myers promised this would be in 3D and was true to his word, though viewing it in 2D was hardly a disadvantage with the advances in computer technology. Pity there was a regression in the raison d’etre for the whole series. A story comes to an end and let‘s not be too cruel on a brave effort. Three out of five.

Master and apprentice

On Antique Master last night, the presenter, Sandi Toksvig, boasted that the new reality television show had received hundreds of applications from thsoe wishing to become Antique Master. Contrast this with the 30,000 The Apprentice gets every series for the right to become Suralan's (now Lord Sugar's) apprentice. Maybe Sandi should have been discreet with her figure, rather in the shade that it is.

Postulations, postulations

Once again, the commentator's curse has struck. Everyone was trying to fathom why all of South America's teams qualified from their groups and how they made up half of the quarter-final line-up. Was it the ball? Was it that they play at higher altitude more often than teams from other continents? Was it that they have a longer qualifying season bonding them more closely together as a national unit? Conversely, it was the lowest number (proportionately given the increasing size of World Cup tournaments) of Europeans qualifying from their groups in ages. Was Europe in crisis?
Well, what a difference a weekend makes. Now, three out of four of the semi-finalists are European, bearing a close resemblance to the four from that continent that it was composed of four years ago and Uruguay are only in it by the width of a crossbar. Does anyone reporting from the World Cup know what they are talking about or does the constant media cycle mean any dubious story or analysis has to be dredged up and dusted down just so the hacks can justify their jobs. Probably a bit of both really.

British football commentators (and Marcel Desailly) are lamenting the elimination of Ghana at the quarter-final stage of the World Cup, beating up on the Uruguayans when the game was there for the Ghanaians to seize (if a penalty kick in your favour is the last kick of the game and you're a bundle of nerves, give it to someone with a cooler head instead of trying to take the glory yourself). But if England had topped their group and faced The Black Stars in the Last-16 of the tournament, Ghana would have been viewed as fodder for The Three Lions, despite being Africa's last team standing, indeed 'representing' the whole of its continent no less. It would have been "yeah, it's sad, but England come first." It's almost exactly the same position when England, Germany and South Africa were bidding for the 2006 World Cup a decade ago. England were eliminated and it went down to a head-to-head between the Teutons and the Rainbow Nation. The New Zealand member of the FIFA decision panel abstained, effectively handing the prize of being World Cup hosts to Germany. The English were very bitter about this, saying how unjust it was that the tournament had been snatched away from South Africa. But what if England had won the rights, after all? The prevailing feeling would have commiserated "well, South Africa can have a shot at the next one." Hypocrisy is unbound on this island and one can well understand why England and its football corps are viewed as arrogant by the rest of the world. The thinking of those interested with English football can be as numbskulled as the way the England team has played in South Africa.

What I've always thought about public tranpsort

When it comes to government portfolios, the one that exercises me the most on domestic matters is the transport department. I use the trains since I do not drive but the previous Labour government thought that it would continue the Thatcherite policy - as in so many areas - of favouring the car (and the aeroplane) to the exclusion of all public transport. This has not inclined my mind to take up driving, so I just get fed up that that Blair and Brown couldn't care less about the detriment to those who travel in the company of many others. Moreover, Blair said they would do what worked - a lie as so mnay others. What he meant was that he would do what was right-wing hence the disastrous PPP initiative for the London Underground - a piece of political spite towards Londoners, subsequently vicariously vindicated when London chose Ken Livingstone as an independent candidate - all of which is unravelling now. The previous Labour administration couldn't run a bath on transport, let alone the coherent over-arching strategy promised us - as with rail nationalisation - by John Prescott. Below is a Guardian editorial - yes, I know, but it lays into boths sides with gusto.

If Bernie Madoff were ever released from prison, he might consider a second career managing the finances of Britain's transport system, which is coming to resemble his horrific Ponzi scheme. All sorts of promises have been made to all sorts of people, but there is not enough money to pay the bills. The whole false edifice must soon come crashing down under the force of its own economic illogicality. Higher rail fares and worse services are inevitable; so are potholed roads, more overcrowding, abandoned improvements and – eventually – public outrage. Transport faces calamity at the hands of its own incoherent bureaucracy.

The problem is not underfunding by the taxpayer, and nor are the coming cuts all to blame. The problem is that an awful lot of money is being spent, almost all of it inefficiently. Managers at the top have made millions – the current annual salaries and bonuses of Network Rail's six directors amount to £3.6m. But that is only the extreme end of a regulatory and funding structure that would have seemed unfathomably complex even to bureaucrats in the latter days of the Byzantine empire. A whole host of organisations get most of their money from the state, and some of it from passengers, and then do deals with each other in a pretend game of free-market efficiency. Nothing actually adds up; real profits vanish into losses, while losses float on a sea of debt and no one is in charge. Even though the taxpayer puts almost £5bn a year into the rail network, and more than £3bn into Transport for London, both bodies have been racking up loans. Network Rail already owes £23bn. That is set to rise to more than £30bn by 2014, with interest payments of more than £5bn a year that will by then exceed the total state rail subsidy. How this can be paid, no one seems to know. None of this debt is listed on the government's books, even though it is all underwritten by the taxpayer.
Quietly, on election night, Boris Johnson announced that in London he was taking over the remains of Gordon Brown's disastrous public-private partnership for the tube. As a result, Boris Johnson becomes the first Tory since Ted Heath to nationalise something; but more than that he has had to spend £310m buying out the private Tube Lines company simply in order to delay its planned refurbishment of the Northern Line, which otherwise he was contractually obliged to fund and could not afford. Alice in Wonderland would have been thrilled.
On the roads, the transport secretary Philip Hammond confirmed yesterday, there will be standstill, with no major investment. If that sounds environmentally justifiable, then the railways will have to take the strain of a growing population and – it is to be hoped – a growing economy which will need better transport. But even a small fall in the transport budget will have a massive impact on investment and fares. Schemes which have long-term benefits, such as the electrification of the mainline to Wales, are being scrapped for short-term savings. Fares will take the strain – Mr Hammond has twice hinted that the inflation cap will have to be lifted. But they cannot rise enough to fund a planned £9bn investment programme, which is being wastefully run and funded entirely by extending Network Rail's unsustainable debt.
Savings must – and can – be found: Labour had already planned to cut the rail subsidy, and the coalition budget will make the cuts deeper. But the pain should be shared. It makes no sense to protect the £1bn cost of free national bus travel for all over-60s, for instance, as the coalition has promised for political gain. The benefit should at most be local.
The current government will get the blame for accelerating the fall, but this coming catastrophe is as much the fault of the last two administrations for creating an unsustainable structure. Britain has discovered a very costly way of running a moderately good transport system. It doesn't work and it can't last.

Makes a French civil servant doing five hours a week for £30,000 a year look remarkably good value, eh?