Spy Caper Spoof

      Spy (2015) [D: Paul Feig (also wrote), with Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Jude Law, Miranda Hart] Mildly amusing spy caper spoof in which a CIA desk-operative Susan Cooper (McCarthy) volunteers to take on a “track and report” field mission involving an international gang of suave psychopaths who are trading in suitcase-sized atom bombs.
The joke is that Cooper is not a svelte, elegant, self-confident wonder woman, but a dumpy, inelegant, unconfident woman who’s hopelessly in love with the spy (Jude Law) she assists. But she’s smart, brave, has trained in martial arts and firearms, and gains self-confidence as she outwits, outfights, and outshoots assorted baddies. The fun comes from McCarthy’s acting, our recognition of the James Bond tropes, the above averege script (although far more F-bombs than it needed), and the care taken to make all minor characters just caricatured enough for humour. The cast and crew obviously have a lot of fun too, which always helps. Enough (semi-plausible) plot twists to keep you watching.  I enjoyed it. **½

Wycliffe on Holiday and on the Case

      W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Pea Green Boat (1975) Part One describes how an innocent man is convicted of a rape and murder. Part Two tells how Wycliffe while on holiday takes on a current murder because a colleague has misgivings. As you will expect, those misgivings are fully justified, and the general solution to the puzzle is pretty obvious. However, Burley’s strength is character, ambience, and the slow build-up of detail and surmise until the full picture emerges. It kept me reading to the end, even though I had the answer to the central question long before Wycliffe arrived at it. Wycliffe fans will be satisfied, many of those who haven’t cone across him before will want to read more of the series. There was a good TV adaptation done in the 1990s, starring Jack Shepherd as Wycliffe. **½

Murder in Nero Wolfe's brownstone

     Rex Stout. A Family Affair (1975) Late at night, Archie admits Pierre Ducos, a waiter at Rusterman’s, who wants to consult Nero Wolfe because “a man is trying to kill me”. A minute or two after being left in the front room of the third floor, an exploding device kills him. Things go severely downhill from there. The murderer has killed three times by the time justice of a kind is done. And that’s as far as I’ll go in hinting at spoilers. One of Stout’s best, and also the last book he published. He died a month later. I found my copy at Value Village, unread. Great find. ****

Wimsey deserves better than this.

     Lord Peter Wimsey: Clouds of Witness (19720 [D:Hugh David. Ian Carmichael et al] Awful adaptation of Dorothy Sayers’ novel. A screenplay that’s about as banal and simplistic as you can get, stretching the story over 5 parts (225 minutes). The amount of padding this requires makes it mind-numbingly slow. The characterisation is superficial, and that’s the politest way I can say it. Bland cinematography  with poor lighting and bad sound adds to the pain. The editing is strange, so put it mildly: long shots of unmoving faces are suppose to convey menace, I guess, or maybe comic fun. It all depends on the owner of the face. And so on.
     We stopped watching this mess part way through episode two. The 1987 adaptations of Sayers' novels starring Edward Petherbridge are far superior. It’s unfortunate that the two series treated different novels.  Based on my disappointment, I want to rate this a BOMB, but I guess one star is fairer: *

Nun Solves Mystery

    Veronica Black. A Vow of Chastity (1991) Sister Joan, of the Daughters of Compassion, teaches a motley group of farm and Romany children. When one of the Romany boys goes missing, she investigates. The story builds slowly, the discovery of the murderer is a surprise (the clues don’t really persuade), but overall this is a satisfying read. Convent life is rarely depicted convincingly. This book comes close, despite its somewhat too-good-to be true ambience. It’s the practicalities of daily life (and school teaching) that create the life-like feel that we want from a novel. The title has only a tenuous connection with the plot. This is #2 of a series that reached #11. **½

Alien language, alien mind (Arrival, 2016)

     Arrival (2016) [D: Denis Villeneuve. Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker. Based on a story by Ted Chiang.]

     The aliens finally arrive, in 12 ships scattered round the globe. They clearly attempt to communicate, so linguist Louise Banks (Adams) is recruited to learn the language. The heptapods (one less tentacle than octopuses) use both whale-like sounds and a written language. Louise, with some help from physicist Ian Donnelly (Renner), deciphers the written symbols, each of which is a complex circular string of squiggles that represents a complete utterance.
     The movie, like the story it’s based on, asks and plausibly answers a number of questions. Could one  communicate with a non-human mind? Yes, if there are some common concepts to start from, in this case the difference between “human” and “Louise”. Does learning a language rewire the brain? Yes, in fact it does. Does that rewiring change the way you perceive the world? Maybe. As a bilingual, I would say yes, but not as drastically as is posited here. For the heptapods time isn’t linear: They have an all-at-once perception of past, present, and future. Their circular "sentences" can be read starting from any point and in either direction. Louise’s daughter has died of leukemia. As she masters the heptapod language, Louise's latent second sight develops so that her daughter’s life becomes present to her, as does her future with Ian, and the child she will have with him.
     The mcguffin is that the 12 ships each provide part of the answer about the heptapods’ purpose in arriving on Earth: They will need human help in the future, but can get it only if humans co-operate and become one world. Which happens, but only because Louise is able to talk to the Chinese ruler in his own language over an NSA cellphone.
     As you can see, this is a complicated movie, on many levels. Villeneuve knows how to make us engage in what for many of us would be an esoteric irrelevance or a boring exercise in abstruse academic theorising. The acting and editing occasionally confuse, that’s why I want to see it again. Is it a fault that the movie demands more than one viewing? I don’t think so. ****

Choices, freedom, and responsibility

Many people think that freedom is the freedom to choose what one wants, to have control over one’s choices.  The problems with this idea are many. Let’s start by considering what it means to choose something.

First principle: You can choose only from what’s possible. You can’t, obviously, choose to flap your arms and fly. The laws of physics prevent that. But surely one can choose what one wants otherwise? The answer is, no you can’t.

Second Principle: You can choose only from what’s available to you. That’s a truism. Like all truisms, it has real consequences. You can’t for example choose a vanilla ice cream cone if there isn’t one there for you to choose, no matter how much you want it. That seems like a trivial example, but it illustrates a fundamental principle: all choices are made within a given context. Call it an option space. Option spaces differ in the number of options they contain, and in the type of options available. Again, a trivial example: An ice cream parlour that offers 37 flavours offers more choice than one which offers only 21 flavours. Obviously.

Inference: One measure of freedom of choice is the number of options available.

Third Principle: Control of the option space is control of choice. Continue with the ice cream example: if there is only one ice-cream parlour available to you, its owner controls your choice by deciding what flavours to offer.

Inference: Another measure of freedom of choice is control over the option space.

Suppose your village has a pub, a restaurant, and an ice cream parlour. You now have three option spaces. They may overlap somewhat, in that the pub and the restaurant may offer some of the same dishes, and the restaurant may offer some ice cream. But when you choose one of these venues you automatically limit your choices to what’s on offer there. You can’t choose the pub’s brand of ale in the restaurant, or the restaurant’s steak in the ice cream parlour. You could of course go to each of them one after the other, but at any given time, your choice is limited to what’s available at that time.

Inference: Circumstances control the contents of the option space. Hence another measure of freedom of choice is control over circumstances.

Fourth principle: Choosing is the result of wanting one thing more than another. The ice cream choice depends on what you want at the time of choosing. In fact, if you don’t want ice cream, you won’t choose it even if it’s available.

Inference: Desire drives choice. Thus ability to fulfill a desire is a measure of freedom.

That last inference is the reason people define “freedom” as being able to do what you want to do. But desire itself is a complicated drive. You can both desire and not desire something, for different reasons. For example, you may want to order ice cream for dessert, but you also want to maintain something like an attractive waistline, and so want to avoid ice cream. Which desire will win? That depends on you. How well can you curb one desire in order to fulfill another is not easy to predict. Research shows that it varies. Your emotional state, the relationship with your dinner partner, what you just talked about, whether and how much you think about the choice, all these and more will tip the balance between your conflicting desires.

Inference: Random factors that affect which desire you fulfill reduce your control over your choice.

Summary: There are several ways of considering “freedom”, but all involve choice. I think the general conclusion is that “freedom of choice” is how we feel about our choices, not about how we make them. In fact, it looks like we have no real freedom of choice at all. We have little, and often no, control over the option space. Our desires are influenced and controlled by factors we may not even notice.

So in what sense(s) can we be held responsible for our choices?