Deadlier Than The Male (1967)

     Deadlier Than The Male (1967) [D: Ralph Thomas. Richard Johnson, Elke Sommer, et al] A James Bond-style thriller, with a wannabe world-class villain pitted against Bulldog Drummond, hero of I don’t know how many pulp fictions of the 1920s and 30s, later updated in the 1950s and 60s. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldog_Drummond.
     Not the worst of these attempts to cash in on the Bond genre, but lacking the crackle and tension of the Bond movies. The narrative pace is slow, even for its day, when film narration was much slower than nowadays. The villain uses good-looking women to do his dirty work, while Drummond is of course much too gentlemanly to take advantage of them, so that a ploy or two fails. But it provides an excuse to show Sommer and others in bikinis. Scenery and sets suitably exotic, a nicely done chess game using large pieces on a computer-controlled board, a cool hero, and fast cars and boats froth together in a pleasantly entertaining but ultimately uninvolving mix.
     Oh, the McGuffin is the villain’s offer to eliminate bothersome business obstacles in return for a fee, and his tendency to encourage payment by offing people who refuse to pay up when the obstacles succumb to accidents. Drummond almost becomes an accident victim himself, of course. **

Dik Browne. Hagar the Horrible on the Loose #3 (1974)

     Dik Browne. Hagar the Horrible on the Loose #3 (1974) When Hagar first appeared, he was a lovable overweight naif, unable and unwilling to live the respectable life, addicted to misbehaving, kept on a shortish leash by his wife Hilda, flummoxed by his daughter Loni who wants to be a Viking raider like him, and flummoxed even more by his son Hamlet who reads and writes poetry. He’s been around now for forty years, and not much has changed. Hagar still goes on regular raiding journeys to England, still drinks too much beer and eats to much venison, still gets into scrapes that would destroy a lesser man. Browne makes no attempt to show Viking life realistically. Hagar is a 20th century suburbanite with an unusual career, is all. He’s also shrewd, loyal (usually), and rather sweet on Hilda. That makes the strips comments on contemporary life. Here are some of my favourites in this collection, ones that work as well in straight print as in a strip. Many Hagar strips depend on the drawings, they’re visual puns, bizarre situations, and so on.

Hagar: Don’t you see it? It’s a joke...
    Aw, women have no sense of humor.
Hilda: Oh Yeah? Then how come we marry men?
...
Hilda: You’re Crazy!!
Hagar: Well, if I’m crazy, you made me crazy.
Hilda: I did not! You were crazy when you married me!!
Hagar: I’ll drink to that! [Hilda grimaces]
...
Hagar [sucking up soup]: SLURP! SLURP!
Hilda: Oh lovely! Just lovely!
Hagar: Thank you.
Hilda: That’s sarcasm, stupid!
Hagar: Well, whatever it is – it tastes good.
...
Hagar: What are you looking at?
Lucky Eddy: I never saw you without your hat.
Hagar: So?
Lucky Eddy: How do you get it on over your horns?

OK, so you may not roll on the floor laughing. But Hagar is still worth a look, you’ll spend a pleasant few minutes every time you open a Hagar collection. Warning; this is potato chip reading. **½

Geopolitics 101: A Machiavellian analysis of ISIS

     The declared aim of ISIS is to re-establish the Caliphate, by which they mean the old Ottoman Empire, probably with additional territories. To achieve this goal, they have started a war against the local Middle Eastern governments, and have seized control of major transportation routes. They have slaughtered whole villages, displaced hundreds of thousands, and done everything they could to put pressure on the regional governments. They initailly formed an alliance with Syria, but I think that is a purely pragmatic move; in the long run they want to displace the Syrian regime as well.
     Correction and update 2015-05-17: ISIS's initial alliance was with the opponents to the Syrian government. It has been short lived.
     Do they want to conquer the West? The answer is no. It’s impossible to do that. They have barely enough manpower and materiel to maintain their hold on the areas they have conquered in the Middle East. Their demand for a $200 million ransom for the Japanese hostages suggests they are running out of cash. So what’s the purpose of their continued provocation of the West?
     Looking at their strategy with a Machiavellian stance, I see two goals for their recruitment of disaffected Westerners, their murder of Western hostages, and their support (almost entirely verbal, not material) of Jihadist actions in Western states.
     First, they want to provoke Western action in the Middle East, which will tend to raise tensions (as the diplomats put it) between the West and its Middle Eastern allies. They know that Western military action relies on conventional weapons, which cause a lot of so-called collateral damage, which will create a backlash against the West. It will also provoke anxiety among Muslims in the West, and when Western casualties mount, anti-war sentiment will increase. And of course they want to disrupt the alliances between the West and  those Middle Eastern States they hope to include in their Caliphate.
     Second, they want to foment political instability in the West by deflecting Western public opinion from their Middle Eastern ambition and making it focus on the danger to Westerners in their own countries. They know the anti-Muslim backlash will increase disaffection and anxiety among Muslims. They want a backlash against Muslims in the West so that they can present themselves as the only true, safe, and Islamist refuge for Muslims worldwide. Hence the beheadings of hostages, and the support of the Charlie Hebdo murders, and the praising of any action that can be even remotely connected to Jihadist beliefs. The reactions by the Canadian and other governments shows that this strategy is having considerable success.
     Today's news out of Jordan indicates that their strategy is having some success in the Middle East also. The killing of a Jordanian pilot has Jordanians wondering whether they should participate in the war against ISIS. If Jordan pulls out, support from other Middle Eastern states will also diminish. This will enable ISIS to conquer those states with relatively little military effort. That, which includes the elimination of Israel, is their first goal.
     Their ultimate goal is to purify Islam of all versions that they believe to be heretical. If they ever reach that point, they will begin to attack the Muslim states in the rest of the world.
   Update 2015-02-04 21:52: Jordan's response to ISIS's murder of the Jordanian pilot was to execute two Al Qaeda prisoners they held, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment. The Jordanian public have turned their rage against ISIS. Seems ISIS miscalculated. Also, the enmity between ISIS-style Islamism and Islam generally has sharpened. Doesn't look good.

Paddington (2014)

 Paddington (2014) [D:Paul King. Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, and  Ben Wishaw voicing Paddington] I like Paddington Bear very much. Created by Michael Bond and starring in several books as well as an animated series for children’s television, he’s a hapless but friendly furry person whose enthusiastic naivete gets him into all kinds of scrapes. Here, sent to England by his Aunt Lucy after an earthquake destroys his home in “deepest Peru”, he yearns for a proper home and a family. He gets both, of course, but not until getting into all kinds of scrapes and being nearly murdered and stuffed by an ice-cold villainess.
   
     I enjoyed this movie. The makers wisely decided to play Paddington’s naivete for laughs while accepting the improbable premise at face value, and taking Paddington’s predicament seriously. Well done special effects, a narrative pace nicely tuned to children’s need for time to absorb plot-points and adults’ quicker uptake of the subtext, very well done animation, and characters complex enough to make us care for them but simple enough that we recognise the stereotypes immediately. Not the greatest movie ever made, but a well-crafted entertainment with hardly a false note. ***
 

Sparkling Cyanide (1983)

 

    Sparkling Cyanide (1983) [D: Robert Michael Lewis. Anthony Andrews, Deborah Raffin, Pamela Bellwood] Transplanted to Los Angeles, with a British private eye and a local cop co-operating on the case, this isn’t Agatha Christie’s story, but it’s close enough to give us what all Christies supply: plentiful red herrings, numerous misinterpretations, and the slow revelation of the essential facts. There’s even the scene in which the sleuth gets all the suspects together and sifts through the clues to arrive at the truth. This version was made for TV, which means it softened and even avoided the dark subtexts. This makes for a rather bland movie, competently acted, photographed, and scripted, but lacking the sense of evil that pervades all of Christie’s stories, and which more recent adaptations take pains to show. **

Destry Rides Again (1939)

     Destry Rides Again (1939) [ D: George Marshall. James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich] The town of Bottle Neck is ruled by gangsters. Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) is in league with them, and assists in defrauding a rancher of his property in a crooked card game. The sheriff who goes to investigate is killed, replaced by a drunk, who calls in Destry (James Stewart), the son of his old friend. But Destry doesn’t like guns. That’s the setup.
     So how will Destry tame the town? He does it by showing he’s a crack shot, but mostly by insisting he will enforce the law, and doing so even when he knows that the law favours the crooks. That insistence on law enables him to arrest the murderer of the previous sheriff, but when it gets out that he’s called in a federal judge to try the case, there is the inevitable gunfight. Frenchy, who is after all an immoral woman, dies protecting Destry.
     A nicely done movie which no longer seems mold-breaking. Hailed as a classic, it offered Stewart his first starring role, Dietrich’s come-back role.A mix of silliness and cliches masquerading as humour, well done photography, and an intelligent script add up to a pleasant hour and a half. It’s supposed to be a comic Western, and it does offer some laughs. But I have no desire to watch it again. **1/2

The Genius Within (2009)

      The Genius Within (2009) A bio of Gould that pays homage to his music, but focuses on his love life. He fell in love with Cornelia Foss, and she with him, so she moved her children to Toronto, and for a while it seemed they might marry. But Gould became increasingly dependent on his anti-depressant meds, and eventually she returned to her husband. Gould died of a series of strokes in 1982 at the age of 50. His death hit the children especially hard.
     An above average documentary, with reminiscences by Cornelia, the children, Lorne Tulk (the sound engineer on Gould’s recordings), and other friends and acquaintances. The biographer speaks a few times, and confesses that there’s a mystery he was not able to penetrate. This remark is echoed by other people. In the end, what remains is Gould’s music, and  the impression of a life that was perhaps less fulfilling emotionally than it might have been.
     Does the genius of Gould’s interpretations of Bach match the cost of his and others’ emotional pain? Perhaps. Everybody must balance the costs and gains of his life. Gould came to accept the cost, enjoying his time at the family cottage, and in playful impersonations of imaginary figures, recorded in photographs. Hearing his second recordings of the Goldberg Variations, I imagined scenes from a movie, of figures in a cityscape at night, together but alone, wandering in and out of lights and shadows, while some unknown hunters close in on them with dispassionate intensity, preparing for the kill. ***