Catching up with the past

In an environment when even the twenty-four news cycle has been replaced by the immediacy of live website feeds and twitter, it can seem not just old hat but positively antique to discuss events that have occurred several weeks ago. Numerous films I have seen but have not commented upon – I could discourse greatly on the King’s Speech (which I saw twice) but have left it so long it has now been released on DVD. Although there are a few anachronisms and can’t believe Colin’s Firth’s Bertie (later George) would not know his family history or his father would be so prescient on events that were far from apparent at the alleged date he made it, it was an immensely engaging movie, especially for history buffs watching out for famous quotes being trotted out, dealing with triumph over adversity. Well worth the Oscars it garnered. The Fighter, although seemingly totally unconnected in time and social milieu, also dealt with someone overcoming handicaps, of their own and those that others impose. I watched it on a whim rather than any pre-determination that I would see it on the basis of hype or reviews and it was an astounding ‘discovery’. Great acting plus interesting twist on an old plot. All in all, a worthy return for director David O. Russell after a few years in the doldrums. True Grit was a flick I saw motivated by what others said about it especially regarding Jeff Bridges performance. True enough, the delivery was top notch by the cast – you really believed in the characters. My main trouble was that (aside from an irritating black line that danced across the middle of the screen for most of the running time distracting from the immense openness of the prairies – was this the only reel the cinema had available?) it all felt a bit reductive. This maybe a deliberate ploy of the Coen brothers, to suggest there are no easy resolutions and life just goes on, whatever one’s circumstances happen to be. It is a running thread through most of their productions, yet I must say, while admiring the craft, it leaves me unmoved. Even their most lauded creations, Fargo and No Country for Old Men, haven’t done anything for me in terms of engagement. Not having seen the John Wayne original, I couldn’t make a comparison.
Now, more recent, Lord Sugar probably got bored of hiring people who didn’t last their contractual period or who did but then quit the business on their own initiative to do their own thing. Then again, perhaps a reality format isn’t the best way to decide who to appoint as underlings. That is why it makes sense for him to go into business with the winner as a 50/50 partner. As usual, there were some incredibly stupid blunders by the participants. I’m glad Tom won - of the last five, he was my pick on a personal preferment though I though Susan would be a strong rival. As it was, in the final two, (after Jedi Jim fell away – I was disappointed that it was not alluded to in the review show that Jedi mind tricks only work on the weak-minded – Star Wars fans indeed), he faced off against the formidable Helen. She, however, had produced a very underwhelming business proposal and the compounded the error by at the last moment abandoning it in favour of her ‘second choice’, even though she could produce no facts or figures on the spur of the moment for this second choice. From the second she did not defend her original concierge idea to the hilt, Tom had won. So we had, in essence, a very elongated version of Dragons Den, where someone will win an investment, even though Sugar junked Tom’s plan to go into offices to stress test people’s backs and on the review show, pretty much said the chair was not what he was after, more he would be developing Tom’s nail file enterprise. For the sake of success, let’s hope Tom’s business plan doesn’t relate to the history of literature (“Byron was writing at about the same time as Shakespeare, wasn’t he”) or the Age of Dsicovery (“Columbus – he was British wasn’t he? Didn’t he discover the potato?” No Tom, Columbus ‘discovered’ America and Raleigh was associated with the potato).

Many things, of varying accuracy, have been said about the Norwegian shooting and car bomb that it seems almost superfluous to comment on the horrific massacres. When the first reports came in with Norwegians describing this as their September 11th or Mumbai attacks (this was before the death toll on the island of Utoya became clear), I thought it was a little over the top, maybe reflecting that in a country regularly topping international quality of living stats, littler events in terms of numbers or carnage can be just as a shock as the more destructive previous two events. But as the full scale of the murdering hove into sight, this clearly was a close approximation to Mumbai or indeed the Oklahoma City bombing. And like Timothy McVeigh, Anders Behring Breivik was captured alive. Indeed, the latter surrendered willingly to police rather than risk a shoot-out with them that might result in his death. Also, unlike most mass shooters he did not take his own life – he is not mad in the conventional sense or even mad as angry but he is a psychopath. Although it goes against the grain of the greater openness promised by the Norwegian prime minister in the wake of this tragedy, I think it was the right thing to do to have Behring Breivik’s hearing behind closed doors to deny him the public platform he clearly wanted to use to spout his vile rhetoric.
What needs to be done is to see what can be done in response to the overall assault. The Norwegian police have a lot of explaining to do. Instead of flying by helicopter to Utoya, police special forces drove by road then took boats, taking five times longer than if they had flown there directly. Also, they miscounted - badly - the number of people who died, eventually revising it down and were so chaotic that they let this error stand for three days – for mourning families and for all society that is totally unacceptable. On Sunday morning – a day and a half after the event - police held a conference on the steps of their headquarters and almost every answer to a question was ‘don’t know’ or ‘we don’t have the details’ – it was farcical and these are the people charged with maintaining order in Norway.
There are though deeper, sinister undercurrents in European societies though, particularly Scandinavia. A lot of anti-immigration commentators after blowing smoke up the arses of the public are now seeking to cover their own. Behring Breivik was a social misfit with unpalatable viewpoints who, at some point in his life, fused these into a desire for murder. His talk of a monoculture can be dismissed – riddled with inconsistencies, ‘white’ Europeans are actually declining in number through falling birth rates and the ‘monocultures’ of South Korea and Japan that he admires are rapidly aging to the point where the retired will, in the not too distant future, place a near intolerable burden on those of working age. But in his mind he was planning a revolution and must have thought there was a groundswell of opinion on his side, if only he could provide the right conditions and he drew succour from the columns of the hard right of mainstream, high-selling newspapers (among others). It in no way justifies mass murder but influential people must be responsible in their published comments.
Much of Europe in the last decade has turned rightward and one doesn’t need to read Scandinavian fiction to realise that dark forces bubble below a seemingly tranquil surface. The eugenics programme practised by Sweden for forty years between the 1930s and 1970s is a reminder that inhumanity can occur in apparently liberal societies. The leaders of the anti-immigrant True Finns (who now hold the balance of power in Finland) even received Behring Breivik’s manifesto before the attacks and merely forwarded it on to their members as ‘something of interest’. Radio 4 has been running a programme called ‘Turning Right’ about these disturbing trends. Across Europe, east and west, there is a general fear that Europe’s time has passed and it is in decline. The elites say the best way is to integrate the EU further so that we all stand together in order to prevent us all hanging separately but the nationalist populists want to tear this down as well. Fear can drive ordinary people into doing things they would not normally do, such as voting for extremist parties. The economic uncertainty just adds to the sense of malaise and so they lash out at outsiders and minorities – those they see as other. In the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, when they broke into London the first to be slain were the Flemish merchants. No Jews were affected as they were n other parts of Europe because they had already been expelled a century before. Now, quite a lot of people would like to expel not Jews but Muslims, the ‘new’ outsiders. We have supported oppressive regimes and unfair trade deals to our general benefit (not to mention perpetuating climate change that affects the poorest) and the disadvantage of the populations of these countries but we don’t like it when the chickens are coming home to roost, as immigrants see the richness of Europe and, not unnaturally, want a part of it. Issues such as these take decades to resolve yet politicians prefer easy(ish) power to make serious effort to tackle them. Grim times.

Too much, too ridiculous

When The Fast and The Furious first came out, it was regarded as a disposable, one-dimensional thriller and no-one would have predicted that it would run to five instalments, with a further sequel suggested. It is no surprise though that one of the co-producers in this latest in the franchise is Vin Diesel himself, given that his Hollywood career has been reduced to this rump (not inappropriate given the semi-clad beauties here) and outside of this venture his attempts at broadening himself has crashed and burned in the manner of any of the vehicles trashed in the course of the running time. I imagine each time of these flicks appears, it is a shot at redemption.
I hazarded to enter the cinema for The Fast and the Furious Five (they should have curtailed it to Fast Furious Five), having seen previously only a fragment of the Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, which had (as far as I know) none of the principal characters in this latest one. In the event, had worry over a complicated and contiguous plot from the other outings been a factor, it would have been redundant. Fast Furious Five is good, dumb fun. One doesn’t need to be a petrolhead to appreciate the action scenes, not to mention the stunning women that crop up with rapid-fire consistency. If anything, this is a date movie for guys in a quid pro quo with their ladies who can admire the toned beefcakes on display. Moreover, in its denouement, it resembles a high-octane, bigger-budgeted Hustle, in how the good guys fool everyone else. It is a mammoth sugar rush.
As well as being a showcase for Diesel, Paul Walker (as Bryan – I don’t know him in anything else) and the rapper Ludacris, it also gives a bearded Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson another silver screen chance, in the light of his filmology being less than illustrious. Watching Toretto (Diesel) and elite DEA agent Hobbs (Johnson) knock meathead lumps out of each other is one of the highlights – their wrangling over shattered glass shards would put John McClane to shame.
There are a few unusual touches that most Hollywood thrillers skim over – talking openly about going to church and over religious iconography may play well with a Midwest audience but still is uncommon to avoid scaring the pigeons (characterisation? Goodness me); also, throwing a pregnant woman into several mêlees doesn’t always happen.
Of course, there are cavernous plotholes that wouldn’t been out of place in a supercave, such as a conveniently disused warehouse in Rio de Janeiro – a location we will see more of in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics – that no-one else seems to know about. Hobbs, despite describing himself, in a variety of ways, as incorruptible, isn’t above a little extra-judicial killings in cold blood when it suits him. There is the unexplained tremendous thrust of some of the cars. Then there are the faceless goons who assail our heroes. Toretto and Bryan (what a name for an action figure) are sketched out as much as needs be and Hobbs’ team get similar treatment. Yet they face wave upon wave of criminals and latterly corrupt cops, who for their sins are all fodder to the meat grinder. The Austin Powers’ conundrum that these are real people, with families and friends to match. This could be especially true of the policemen, some of whom may have fallen into the wrong crowd or had some money troubles through no fault of their own. That doesn’t matter – they are treated as universally bad.
All this isn’t the point of Fast Furious Five though and it would be unfair to dwell on these factors. It’s a case of sit back and enjoy the ride.

So Michael Wolff, biographer of Rupert Murdoch, was wrong – Rebekah Brooks is still in post at News International and it is now Thursday. After getting the whole of the News of the World journalistic staff to fall on her sword for her, she struggles on for no discernible purpose other than to act as a firewall between the public anger and James Murdoch, Rupert’s heir apparent (although whether that now comes to fruition is a moot point). It all reminds me of Jeremy’s Thorpe’s quip after Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ moment as he reshuffled his cabinet in the wake of the Profumo scandal: “No greater love hath a man than his lay down his friends for his life.” With the US Senate asking the FBI to investigate any Stateside nefariousness, how far will the purging at News Corp go?
If Murdoch was to survive this and divested himself of News International’s stable of newspapers, then were he to revive the bid for total control of BSkyB, even if it were referred to the Competition Commission again, it would probably pass the test of media plurality. George’s Mombiot’s public triumphalism is a little distasteful given the circumstances leading up to News Corp’s withdrawal of their bid. Everyone knows to a greater or lesser degree how the vileness and hypocrisy practised by most tabloids, not least to ‘ordinary people’, chewing them up and spitting them out once their commercial value in selling papers ceases. But the depravity of what has come out has been so far beyond the pale it has charted news depths of wilderness. So he can dance round his desk in Guardian Tower if he wants but could he keep his exultation to himself next time.

While it happened on Friday evening, repeated Saturday afternoon, I’m still seething Monday morning. Though occasionally speaking a bit of sense, Matthew Parris on Friday’s Question Time was mostly craven, as his bosses at News International seek to deflect and defuse the public anger by making the scandal diffuse in dragging in all journalists. The first tack he tried was to downplay the seriousness of the allegations. Justifiably, he got a few boos for this. In response, he followed the party line of his paper, The Times, by saying all of Fleet Street were up to their necks in it, most journalists as rotten as the next. This is scandalous talk in itself. While it may be true, if it is, where is his evidence? Can’t prove it? How convenient. (Here’s a bone – it seems The Sunday Times, according to Lord Ashcroft, illegally acquired the latter’s tax receipts from HM Revenue and Customs; would like to verify this Matthew?) But the real outrage is the attitude. In what jaded and morally decadent universe does Parris inhabit, where it is not just the accepted norm to hack in the phones of a missing girl (raising hope for the family be deleting messages), those of the parents of murdered children, the families of terrorist victims and the families of soldiers who have fallen in service to their country, but to publicly back these people and causes all the while eavesdropping on what they thought was personal and intimae anguish? That is despicable betrayal from people who have expunged all their humanity.
Parris even had the chutzpah to drag in the BBC (for no good reason) and say that the whistle-blowing on MPs’ expenses reported on by The Daily Telegraph was directly comparable to the immorality, illegality and corruption within his own organisation. He may be pleasing his paymasters but by acting as apologist, he is choosing to reside in the same moral vacuum as those who committed these dreadful, dreadful acts. Oh and just for the record, Mr Parris, contrary to your declamation, your newspaper has been conspicuously reticent in reporting the whole hacking saga, as lax as a Berlusconi media organ in reporting bunga-bunga parties (do you read anything other than your own column?). The Times only piped up when this disgrace could no longer be ignored and even then casually flinging the muck around. Clean out your own stables (or would that test even Hercules?) before you criticise anyone else.

Licence revoked

It really has been extraordinary – the decision to close the News of the World (although Murdoch will not forsake the Sunday tabloid market – that is a certainty). It reminds of the film A View to a Kill in which mad, evil genius Max Zorin, as part of his masterplan, is about to destroy a crucial mine with his workers inside still. The mine foreman, learning of this, protests indignantly “Mr Zorin, these men are loyal to y…” He is unable to finish his sentence as he is coshed by a Zorin associate and fall unconscious into the quarry area. Zorin proceeds to blow up the mine and machine guns to death everyone who survives the explosions and floods, maniacally laughing all along. If you replace Zorin with Rupert Murdoch, his henchman as James Murdoch and the mine foreman as editor Colin Myler, it works. “Mr Murdoch, these people are loyal to y…” I haven’t mentioned Rebekah Brooks? Well, Zorin tries to bump off Mayday as well to preserve his own position. Frankly, the brand may have been toxic but she is beyond that – Brooks is radioactive.
You may think a comparison with Elliott Carver in The World Is Not Enough would be a better James Bond reference. But Jonathan Pryce’s character was strangely insipid. The brutality, ruthlessness and casual callousness of Christopher Walken’s portrayal is a more apt.
Okay, these current News of the World staff are no innocents abroad but they weren’t involved in any illegality. I am shedding no tears at the demise of the paper, but I feel sad for those whose livelihoods were sacrificed on the altar of Murdoch’s masterplan, the acquisition of al of BSkyB.

When you think ‘how could it get any worse’, it actually does. Now, it emerges that the News of the World hacked the phones of families of soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. To treat these revelations with the legalese caveat ‘if true because they are just allegations’, is akin to saying “This idea of gravity, if true, would have serious implications, but it is just a theory.” Yet still no resignations from News International. Rupert Murdoch wants to brazen it out, yet he is doing so with the public, a constituency he usually is so adept at keeping onside. He may treat Rebekah Brooks like a daughter but sometimes children must face up to the consequences of what they have done or overseen.
Robert Peston, nominally of the BBC, is such a New International bitch. He also seeks to protect Brooks when last night he ‘was told by inside sources’ that the newsroom of the News of the World was ‘out of control’ between 2003 and 2006. How convenient that 2003 was the year Brooks (née Wade) moved on from the News of the World and that period is the primary domain of the man they are hanging out to dry, Andy Coulson. It’s a little inconvenient that these hacking allegations go back from before 2003. They try to say that Brooks, then Wade, was on holiday and out of the country as if the culture that condoned this behaviour did not exist before of after her holiday plans – it is beyond credibility.
Meanwhile, Coulson is in serious trouble. Not only is the bribery of police officers an offence punishable with prison, it also emerges that in the libel case involving Tommy Sheridan and the News of the World, Coulson lied under oath in court about not paying police officers, making him guilty of perjury. It would be a scandal if this was not followed up, especially as the disgraced Sheridan went to chokey for exactly the same offence.
Coulson is the sordid individual that, on the prompting of George Osborne, David Cameron invited into the heart of his Downing Street operation. It is not enough for the Prime Minister to say “I take responsibility for whomever I employ,” as what responsibility is that (apart from embarrassment)? It is meaningless.
A bit like the PCC. Lady Peta Buscombe was torn to pieces on the Today programme. Relating how she herself has said that the PCC has been lied to by News International, the interviewer pressed her over who was the person who had lied to her and the PCC. It was like the Jeremy Paxman and Michael Howard face-off in 1997. Lady Buscombe found varieties of evasion over the exact person or people who had deceived her, making her sound ever more ridiculous. No wonder the tabloids were happy with her appointment as chair of the PCC.

If governments can nationalise economically bankrupt banks, set them on a right keel and then sell them back into the private sector once the bad practices have been purged, what about morally bankrupt newspapers? It was once unthinkable that the government should intervene in taking over ruined banks, but it spared Britain from the full force of the markets that crashed into Ireland.
On another note, Socrates via Plato is again proved correct: when under serious pressure (whereas good people will unite in the common cause), bad people will end up blaming or betraying each other. News International backed David Cameron at the last general election. Now, the disgraced company is revealing that under the auspices of Andy Coulson, News of the World paid police officers for information, a flagrant breach of the law; it calls into question the judgement of the Prime Minister in appointing to the role of communications chief a man who resigned over the initial revelation of phone hacking in 2005. It is all a conspicuous attempt to divert some of the attention they have received over their degeneracy, which now extends to hacking into the phones of those who lost loved ones in the Tube and bus bombings on 7th July 2005.

See no evil, hear no evil, but read all about it

It is pretty disturbing that The News of the World (and almost certainly all the other red tops and mid-market tabloids) engaged in hacking phones of celebrities and politicians on an industrial scale, but to be revealed to have hacked the phones not just of ordinary people but people going through unimaginable ordeals is of a new order of depravity. As bad as hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone was the fact that Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator authorised to conduct the illegality, deleted some of the messages so as to see who else would call, thus raising hope among the Dowlers that Milly was still alive and deleting these herself, as well as interfering with a police investigation that became a murder enquiry. Furthermore, there are suggestions that the NotW broke into the phones of the parents of one of the child victims of Soham murderer Ian Huntley. This paper was always shameless but to befriend these bereaved parents while at the same time betraying them reveals the journalists to be less than human.
Tory politicians are scrabbling to say that this has no bearing on News Corp’s bid to take over BSkyB because that is based on media plurality. But the silence of not just The Times, but the entire tabloid market bar The Independent of coverage of this on their front pages shows plurality or the ability to hear multiple voices is seriously impaired by the immorality of tabloid journalism. These newspapers are probably all guilty not just of phone hacking (hence their shying away from drawing attention to it as well as kind of honour between crooks) but a whole range of wickedness.
For those who say that this phone-hacking business, terrible as it is, is in the past and practices have changed, well, this very morning Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, has opened proceedings of contempt of court against both The Sun and The Mirror. Now, translating that dry language, these two papers for the sake of a scoop were prepared to jeopardise the murder trial of Joanna Yates and thus potentially led a murderer go free. When the police arrested Miss Yates’ landlord, Christopher Jeffries, the reporting of these two rags was so prejudicial to his character that Grieve has decided that if it had gone to court, it would have been impossible for him to have a fair trial. Since the character assassination of Mr Jeffries, a lodger in the same building as Miss Yates has confessed to the killing and understandably Mr Jeffries is suing not just the two mentioned newspapers but four others for libel. It is proof positive that the PCC (which has been sued for libel by a lawyer when defending – a newspaper complaints commission defending newspapers! – the NotW) is a broken reed, although that has been clear for a long time and that the British tabloids are out of control, punch drunk on the power and influence they wield.
Inside sources at the NotW (who either have a conscience or an axe to grind) said that those who were in charge of news reporting called themselves ‘the princes of darkness’ – maybe in jest, but the best jokes have searing accuracy. The daughter of Babylon lauded it over all and thought she was untouchable but she was laid low and everything she had laid waste. You reap what you sow. You encourage lynch mobs yet who will defend you if they come round your home, outraged at the Dowler case (and any more that might emerge). The Labour party, who you stabbed so delightedly in the back when Gordon Brown gave his keynote party conference speech by announcing you were switching your support to the Tories, are calling for a public enquiry. The full consequences have yet to run their course.
And Rupert, Rupert, Rupert. You gave your incompetent children positions of authority within your organisation and they have presided over chaos and illegality. You would never have been so careless in your pomp. Everything you have strived and built up over your lifetime, all of it will be dissipated and lost within less than a generation. The Mughals thought they were invincible yet following the death of the brutal Aurangzeb, the same fate befell their empire. Everyone who knows anything about newspapers, remembers (via popular history) William Randolph Hearst, old Citizen Kane himself, but no-one remembers who came after him.

Hardly dazzling

Having heard good things about Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, I was rather disappointed when I finally got around to seeing it last night. Admittedly, missing the first forty minutes in order to watch episodes of Family Guy new to BBC Three was not ideal but I quickly picked up the thread. Now, I generally like the work of Boyle, Cillian Murphy and flavour of the month Rose Byrne, yet this production left me distinctly Earthbound.
There was plenty of religious vocabulary and quasi-religious themes to the fore but this merely felt like drapes over the whole concept to give the veneer of depth that wasn’t really there. Heliotheism has a long cultural and historical tradition, most famously in the era of the Roman Empire, when the soldierly were particularly attracted to that form of worship. However, while setting up the scenario, the film made no attempt to explore the background, bar a few swipes at psychology. In musing on the religiose aspect of his production at the time of release, Boyle mentioned that scriptwriter Alex Garland was an atheist – it shows with the ‘sun-god’ very much nuts and bolts in the physical world, rather than something transcendent. What it left me thinking most was “So this is where they got the inspiration for that Carling advert from (‘You Know Who Your Friends Are’).” It hasn’t advanced much beyond Star Trek V and Doctor Who has covered similar ground with a lot more interest in 45 minutes.
Halfway through the movie, it mutates from sci-fi exploration to a kind of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in space. Worst of all, the climax is denuded of drama for its final two minutes.
There are clear references to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (the mysteries of deep space), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (apotheosis) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (crew get bumped off one by one by lurking monster). Another influence has to be Event Horizon which was a horror movie that was not very scary. The trouble is the lack of freshness this gave to the whole film in that broke no new ground. The subliminal images were initially incredibly spooky but were overused and lost their potency.
This is not to completely rubbish Sunshine (although, leaving aside scepticism about ‘reigniting’ the sun, space never reaches absolute zero of -273 degrees Celsius) – it was okay, but I never really felt I had missed much with those first forty minutes.