Citizen Black (2004)

 Conrad Black in 2013

      Citizen Black (2004) [D: Debbie Melnyk] Documentary that serendipitously follows Conrad Black from the time just before the unravelling of his life up to the first trial for financial misdoings.
     Melnyk seems to have won Black’s confidence; at a book signing for his biography of FDR, he jokes with her, at other times he answers her questions courteously. She gives us a sketch of his life and career, along with lots of opinions and reminiscences by people who knew him (but not a word from Barbara Amiel). There is more than one instance of a slapdown that the speakers would not have dared when Black was at the peak of his economic and social power.
      Black comes across as a man too full of his own importance, and confident that he will be acquitted. There’s no doubt that he engineered excessive non-compete payments by selling newspapers to himself. It was this that brought him down, but he was convicted of mail fraud and obstruction of justice. His yearning for the cachet of a nebulous nobility, his hobnobbing with the great and glittery, his contempt for the people who made his money for him, his skill with words, and the charm that made so many people blind to his faults, all these are plainly shown. What we don’t see, and perhaps will never know, is what drove his ambitions.
      His career since his release from prison has been spotty. He doesn’t have much money left compared to what he used to have. He has a gig on Zoomer on Vision TV, but his first set, a poorly done interview with Rob Ford, received a lot of bad PR. He’s living in Toronto, and has suggested he may want to regain Canadian citizenship. He blogs for the Huffington Post. The Ontario Securities Commission is still investigating his case (very slowly). His lawyer claims that Black is a victim of the Hollinger affair, not its perpetrator. His Order of Canada has been withdrawn. And so on.
     I have never had much sympathy for him, but this documentary arouses some pity. It’s not pleasant to watch a man delude himself. The film has been overtaken by events. Search on his name. The story ain’t over yet. **½

 

 

 Conrad Black Mugshot

Martin Reese. Just Six Numbers (1999)

     Martin Reese. Just Six Numbers (1999) The six numbers characterise our universe. This is how Reese describes them:
N: the strength of the electrical force that holds atoms together;
ε: the strength of the force that binds  the atomic nucleus together;
Ω: the amount of material in our universe;
λ: the force that expands the universe;
Q: the ratio of two fundamental energies;
D: the number of dimensions.
     If any one of these were too different, our universe would not exist, and we wouldn’t be here to wonder about those six numbers. This fact is referred to as the ”fine-tuning” of our universe. This freaks some people out. And the people who yearn for reassuring support for their religious fantasies have jumped on this fact as providing proof. In fact, it does no such thing. It suggests that there could be other universes with different combinations of those six numbers, and some theories appear to imply that such universes actually exist, although what “exist” means in a cosmos whose parts cannot know of each other is a nice question.
     Reese writes well, but I found too often that it was my prior reading about cosmology and physics that enabled me to understand him. He’s nicely modest about what’s known and unknown, and what may be unknowable. In the 15 years since he wrote, a number of speculations are on the verge of becoming hypotheses. The recent announcement of evidence for  gravity waves, ripples in the space-time fabric, is a step towards distinguishing between several proposals for a Theory of Everything. The notion of a multiverse is no longer mere speculation, and string theory may be examined again. There is hope that a model that unifies gravity with the other three forces is possible.
     Nevertheless, theories at the outermost boundaries of the knowable will always be more or less speculative. The strongest theories will be those that one the one hand imply what we can observe, and on the other require no assumptions of what we cannot observe. Nature has a way of confounding our expectations, which is good: this helps us distinguish between viable and unviable speculations. Reese knows this. In his last chapter, he allows that a final Theory of Everything may not be possible. That would not be the end of science, however. Just because you have a good theory doesn’t mean you know all its implications, nor that you know all the ways in which it applies to what see around you. A good theory contains surprises.
     A good book, but you need some background to profit from it. **½

Ruth Dudley Edwards. Carnage on the Committee (2004)

 

    Ruth Dudley Edwards. Carnage on the Committee (2004) Hermione Babcock, the chair of a literary prize committee dies of ricin poisoning, which is an excuse for Georgie Prothero and Robert Amiss to arrange the appointment of Jack Troutbeck, well known curmudgeon and Mistress of St Martha’s at Cambridge, for the post. Three more members of the committee are offed before the murderer confesses, via letter, mailed on his way out of the country into his private crook-protection scheme.
     The plot is rather thin, but Edwards is really more interested in satirising the literary prize racket and all that goes with it than with concocting a proper police procedural. The book may be a roman a clef, but I wasn’t interested enough to pursue the necessary research. It’s a funny and for the most part well-aimed satire on the pseudo-intelligentsia and dimwit academics and other infestations of civilised society. See, I approve of Edwards’ targeting these types, and so I was amused enough to keep reading.
     The resolution is the butler ex machina ploy, which suggests that Edwards was also needling the crime genre. Or else she just ran out of ideas, and decided to end the story while she was ahead. Edwards narrates the novel almost entirely in dialogue, which allows for lots of bon and not-so-bon mots, as well as the kind revelations that make us feel we know the characters and their relationships better than we actually do. Well done, but not quite as well done as the cover blurb promises. It says “Devilishly funny...  beautifully written satire”. I wouldn’t go that far, but I still rate it above average. Found on the library’s discard shelf at $1, and worth it. **½

Maureen Jennings. Season of Darkness (2011)

     Maureen Jennings. Season of Darkness (2011) I borrowed this book because of The Murdoch Mysteries TV series, which we’ve been enjoying. This is the first story in a trilogy. Set in late summer/early fall of 1940, it deals with the murders of two Land Girls, both of which were accidents in that they weren’t pre-meditated. The girls just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The connection is a German spy embedded in an internee camp, and several more people die before he’s caught. Ironically, the information he killed for is forwarded to Germany by MI5 moles.
     Inspector Tom Tyler investigates, but he doesn’t so much solve the mysteries as stumble upon their solutions. The cast includes his family, his first lover, MI5, the camp commander, a motley crew of internees, several soldiers who survived Dunkirk, and some villagers whose back stories will no doubt be expanded in later stories, and so on. This makes for a rather laid back narrative, and some plot difficulties, which Jennings solves by giving us “meanwhile, the spy is thinking...” and other such ploys to fill in details that she can’t provide through Tyler. He’s the focus of the novel, and we get to know him quite well. He’s a flawed nice guy, with a strong sense of duty, and enough imagination to appreciate the ironies of his life, his task, his profession.
     The 1940s setting is well done considering that Jennings is too young to know it even at secondhand, as I did when we visited England several times after the war. Post-war England took a long time to recover from the effects of the war. The real difficulty with writing a historical novel is language: it’ s remarkably difficult to write in the right tone, to avoid anachronistic idioms and pop-culture references. Recognising these errors diminished the effect of this novel, but overall it was a good read. **½

Moses (1975)

     Moses (1975) [D: Gianfranco de Bosio. Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quayle, Ingrid Thulin et al.] A spaghetti Bible epic, and not very well made. Lousy visual continuity, and nothing remotely resembling a coherent script. Anthony Burgess is credited with writing the script, but so are de Bosie (the director) and Vittorio Bonicelli, whoever he is. A mess. There are glimpses of the human story within the Moses story (and there are plenty of hints of that in Exodus, I think), but there’s no coherent vision. De Bosio obviously thought he could do a better job than Burgess. He was wrong.
     There are five or six sequences worth a look, about the Pharaoh on the one hand (he’s a complex character), and about Moses relationship to his god on the other (a prickly one). Both characters are (intermittently) presented as beset by doubts and wearied by the burdens of leadership. Both feel the conflict between their public roles and their private lives. From what I know of Burgess’s writing, I’m sure these are the remnants of his script.
     The movie holds some interest to any student of Bible-based movies, but I don’t recommend it to anybody who wants to understand the power of the epic recounted on Exodus, an epic that gains mythic power precisely because we can see in it the human struggle for freedom, from oppressive tyranny, from oppressive human law, and from oppressive superstition. Still less do I recommend it to a believer who wants to see a plausible interpretation of the Bible story. The script doctors for one reason or another did not take Exodus on its own terms.  Bomb
   Update: I discovered that this movie was edited down from a 6-hour TV series, so no wonder it\s a disjointed mess. But that information doesn't explain for the bad writing.

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009)

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009) [Documentary by E. Thalenberg, by Stormy Nights Productions]
     Oliver Schroer died in 2008, one month after his last concert, which he devised and performed while waiting for his death from cancer. I knew nothing about this remarkable man until we saw the last few minutes of this film last summer on TVO. This time, we saw the whole movie. As a documentary, it’s very well done, intercutting archival footage, interviews, and the concert. The filmmakers have a good sense of how to stitch together the bits and pieces of other people’s relationships with Schroer and his own words (and music) to give us a portrait of a great human being.
     And it’s that human being, Oliver Schroer, that stays with us. He touched many lives, I think because he never hid himself from other people, he didn’t put on the masks that most of us use to protect ourselves from intimate contact. He understood that music is more than entertainment, it’s a means of creating community, and a path into one’s self.
     At one point he talks about music as a sacrament. Yes, it can be, and Schroer shows us why. Listening to his long flowing explorations of melodic lines, I felt that the music was familiar, that it took me to places that I recognised, but could not reach any other way. Susanne Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) quotes a musician: Music sounds the way feelings feel. Yes, and music can reveal ways of feeling that we didn’t know we were capable of. Feelings are the essence of what we think of as our personal experience; they make the world we live in. Schroer says that music grows out of the silence at the heart of things. His gift was to share his music so that we can follow him into that silence, where grief and joy are reconciled.
     You can find several videos on YouTube and Vimeo. ****

The Stalking Moon (1968)

     The Stalking Moon (1968) [D: Robert Mulligan. Gregory Peck, Eva Marie Saint, Robert Forster] Army scout Sam Varner quits to work his ranch in New Mexico. On the last raid, Sarah Carver, a white woman who was kidnapped by Salvaje, an Apache warrior, is rescued with her half-Apache son. She wants to get away as fast as possible, as she knows Salvaje will come after her. Sam doesn’t want to be burdened with her, but agrees to take her to Silverton to catch the train, then offers her a job as cook on his ranch. Salvaje is a vicious killer, who wants his son back, and also wants to punish all those who in any way involved in Sarah’s escape. At least eight bystanders are murdered by him. Sam wins the showdown, of course. The final shot shows Sarah helping him into the ranch-house.
     A well done Hollywood bread-and-butter Western, the kind that provided a steady income for the studios, and later became a staple of 1950s and 1960s TV. There’s very little dialogue, which means the story has to be carried by the photography and the acting. Gregory Peck is one of those actors who can convey much with his face. It’s not just an eyebrow twitch or a narrowing of the eyes, the whole face changes. Eva Marie Saint is almost as good.
      The movie is engaging while you watch it, although a modern audience knows too much to accept all the twists in the plot. Sam is too eager to leave the ranch and go after Salvaje, a tactical mistake that costs his two friends their lives. There are touches of humour, for example in Sam’s attempt to get Sarah and the boy to make small talk during meals. The ethos and dangers of the West are nicely represented. The movie’s look and characterisations are heavily influenced by the “adult Westerns” of the 60s. Sam is not a superhero, he nearly dies in the last fight. The stage coach post is a grungy looking assemblage of poles and adobe that somehow manages to be a corral and an inn. There is more than a hint that any encounter with a stranger could be lethal. And so on. But it’s still an old-fashioned Western in storyline: the hero, strong and taciturn, is a perfect gentleman with the ladies. Salvaje represents the wild and untamed society that was being replaced by order and lawfulness, often by brutal means (his name is the Spanish for 'wild, savage'). The violence is necessary, even when it’s regrettable.
      For the fan of Westerns, a good couple of hours, for the movie fan, a nice example of how movies used to be made. **½ (IMDB: 6.6/10)