The Ministry Of Truth

John Patterson continues to be one of the most astute commentators on the politics of film making and the film industry. I commend to you his latest column for The Guardian, entitled Back in Black:

“You can see why the Walt Disney organisation has long balked at reissuing Song of the South, [a movie] almost immediately condemned by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for its absurdly sunny depiction of the Old South. Its star, James Basket, was unable to attend the film’s premiere in segregated Atlanta, which rather gave the lie to Uncle Remus’ claim that, “Yessuh, things are lookin’ mighty satisfactual.”"

Mind you, Mandingo, which I have not seen, is controversial not just because of its shocking frankness, but because the scenes of brutality against the slaves were tantamount to what we might now call “torture porn” with an unpleasant racial edge, to ensure maximum KKK arousal. When David Mamet called Spielberg’s Schindler’s List: “Mandingo for Jews”he wasn’t being complimentary.

“I think my mum would be proud of me.”

1997:

2008:

We’ve just had Energy Saving Day.

Backed by environmental organisations like Greenpeace and energy suppliers such as E.On, E-Day was designed to get people to conserve a bit more energy by doing nothing more than switching off at the mains socket unnecessarily connected electronic devices.

The result?

The [National] Grid’s final figures showed national electricity consumption for the 24 hours (from 1800 Wednesday to 1800 Thursday) was 0.1% above the “business-as-usual” projection.

Despite being a member of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, I was unaware it was happening.  Nobody I know seems to have known it was happening.

Perhaps that’s in part because of the BBC:

The E-Day concept started life as Planet Relief, an awareness-raising BBC TV programme with a significant comedy element.  But in September the BBC decided to pull the project, saying viewers preferred factual or documentary programmes about climate change.

The BBC dropped the project because of “poor audiences for Live Earth”, an anodyne and soulless concert at Wembley Stadium last July hoping to emulate Live Aid but instead featuring C-list popsters such as Bloc Party and Paolo Nutini.

So because the BBC failed to “entertain” last summer it decided not to bother to “inform” or “educate” yesterday, despite the current media interest in all matters environmental.

Own goals like this lend validity to the argument against the existence of a licence fee-funded Corporation, particularly when last night’s BBC1 line up included programming as unadventurous as EastEnders and Ashes To Ashes, BBC2 offered only Torchwood and Catherine Tate and BBC3 - daringly forsaking a Two Pints Of Lager repeat - broadcast Freaky Eaters and another helping of EastEnders.

It’s a particularly sorry state of affairs when the Daily Mail, of all publications, has led on the environment for three consecutive days this week, today carries an article on the environment from the Prime Minister and is taking the credit for Marks & Spencer’s decision to charge a token amount for carrier bags in its food outlets.

In the immortal words of The Go-Gos: “Has the whole world lost its head or is it just me?”

I received my contract of employment for my new job today.

The HR professionals (sic) spelt my name incorrectly on it.

The normally fairly sensible Dominic Fifield makes one of the most risible ever comments in today’s Guardian football pages:

Abramovich… has been patient in the past, most notably in allowing Claudio Ranieri a season to prove his credentials, but he will be far from happy if this campaign ends trophy-less.

Patience is not sacking a manager four weeks into a season after he’s won you four trophies in three years, including back-to-back league titles.

Patience is not spending over half a billion pounds and employing three managers in four years.  (And he didn’t give Ranieri a season to prove his credentials - he gave him three months, after which he was a dead man walking.)

Patience is doing what Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Bill Shankly did at Manchester United, Celtic and Liverpool - creating scouting networks, developing homegrown young talent and building dynasties that dominated for decades.

Does anybody genuinely believe that Chelsea will survive as one of the “top four” for more than a couple of years after Roman and his wallet do one?

Meanwhile, and on a wholly unrelated topic (but prompted by yesterday’s earthquake that almost caused me to soil the bed) did you know that the theory of plate tectonics is barely older than The Minister, gaining widespread acceptance in geological circles only in the late 1960s?

I don’t profess to understand it at all, but it is something that has “always been there” in my life and taken for granted: there are tectonic plates, the plates move, when they collide earthquakes happen and when they split volcanoes erupt.

If you don’t believe me it’s all on Wikipedia, so it must be true.

To everyone I know, the theory of plate tectonics is a given - it’s the orthodoxy.  To retired geologists, however, it’s probably heresy (or at least it was to them when it emerged).

The topic was discussed on an unusually-interesting recent edition of In Our Time on Radio 4 and it was (apparently) a very controversial theory in the 1960s and initially strongly resisted by the geological establishment: to this day there remains a small rump of geologists who do not subscribe.

I’m not entirely sure of the point I’m trying to make, but I wonder whether we someimtes set too much stall in science as a way of “proving” or “disproving” things that are not necessarily provable.  Little is black or white, after all, and our standards of proof are only based on what we know at any given point in time.

Some people, as Bearded Baby recently pointed out, do not subscribe to the theory of evolution.  I disagree with them because there is - now - a raft of evidence to back the theory up.  But that wasn’t always the case and theories are - and always should be - open to challenge.

That I consider creationists to be borderline certifiable is based only on the prevailing orthodoxy of our times.  Darwinism became the gold standard, but Darwin was initially pilloried for his views.  Who is to say that another Darwin won’t be able convincingly to disprove evolution theory in a few years’ time?

I’m no scientist but I’ll stick with science unless and until something else comes along that makes more sense.  But it can’t be entirely healthy to close one’s mind entirely to scientific development and theoretical discourse.  It’s only because of mavericks swimming against the tide that our species has evolved at all.

Perhaps if our political leaders realised that they wouldn’t be so keen for thoughtcrime to be a legislative reality…

The world is going to cunt.  It’s official.

 There’s now even a survey to prove it.  The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life surveyed 35,000 Americans to discover their attitude to religion. 

 84% said they were affiliated to a religion.

26% are evangelicals; 23% Catholic.

Interestingly, but this is something that is probably way beyond those in the White House or anyone likely to take up residence, the Muslim population was only 0.5% - interesting as it is significantly below that in the UK and most of Western Europe.

So, at least 49% of the world’s superpower believe that the only reason we’re not walking round stark bollock naked is because a woman, who had been carved from a living man’s rib, was persuaded to eat an apple.  By a talking snake.

But most concerning was the introduction to this report on CBS News, which said that it was to discover if America was becoming a “secular, morally void place”.  The notion that those two concepts are not automatically conjoined seems wholly alien to American journalists.

(with thanks to Mark Steel for the gag)

This feels weird.

It’s nine years since Tottenham Hotspur won anything. In 1999, I sat in a St. Albans pub watching Sky Sports with the Minister’s Wife and Domdeplume and felt every agonising minute of a dreadful match against Leicester City. Allan Nielsen’s winning goal - the only one of the game - went in just seconds before the final whistle, and I erupted.

This afternoon I didn’t make it the 50 yards to my local pub. I didn’t even upgrade our Sky subscription so I could watch the match from the comfort of our lounge. I had the Radio Five Live commentary on in the background but I certainly wasn’t glued to events; there was no cheering, booing, shouting, swearing, pacing backwards and forwards, jumping about or celebrating.

I am pleased that the team and the coach have won. I am genuinely delighted that the club captain Ledley King lifted the trophy - it’s hard to remember a player more loyal to the club since David Howells was run out of town by the inept Glenn Hoddle.

Similarly Robbie Keane has worked hard and played well for six years and deserves his medal, while Dimitar Berbatov is the most talented player to wear a Spurs shirt since David Ginola (a member of the 1999 League Cup winning team). Juande Ramos, meanwhile, has done a fantastic job in a very short period of time; without him, this win would not have happened.

But it’s impossible for me to forget that Martin Jol deserves some of the credit - 14 of the 16-strong Spurs squad today were at the club before he was dismissed - and it’s impossible for me to feel that the club’s current directors deserve any success at all, given the manner in which they choose to conduct themselves.

I can’t properly re-engage with Spurs until Enic and Daniel Levy do one. My hope tonight is that - if it means anything (and there have been too many false dawns in my 27-year association with the club for me to have much confidence) - this win might make the club more attractive to potential purchasers so that Levy fucks off back under the rock from which he crawled eight long years ago and takes tools like Damien Comolli with him.

But it’s an excellent result (beating Chelski never feels bad…) and the players and coaching team deserve congratulations. I’ve set the Sky+ box to record ITV’s late-night highlights but gone - for now at least - are the days when a win like this could sustain my good humour for months.

If the answer to a pub quiz question “Which classic film uses Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in its most famous scene?” turned out to be “Fellini’s 8 1/2″, the quizmaster would most likely be pelted with beer. But the scene at the fountain pre-dates Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) by sixteen years and is every bit as memorable.

Whilst few contest Fellini’s technical virtuosity, critics have at times adjudged him to be indulgent and frivolous. He ought to plead guilty on both counts, because his indulgence and his frivolity are what makes his films great. By investing himself and his insecurities so wholly in his pictures, Fellini relaxes the viewer and invites them to play and dream along with him.

Otto e Mezzo (actually Fellini’s 8th film, but he had previously made two contributions to portmanteau films, hence the “half”) is a film about a creatively and sexually frustrated film-maker, Guido, and (allowing for the use of charismatic lead actor and regular alter ego Marcello Mastroianni to portray him) would be the most plainly autobiographical film by a director until Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979).

But whilst a lot of film-makers seek to point the finger at the obstacles facing them, Fellini points the finger squarely at himself. It is this honesty and self-deprecation which draws the audience into the surreal and astonishing dreamworld of the film. This perfect marriage of style (by the lorry load) with substance (the film acts as a 2 hour confessional) amounts to one of the undisputed landmarks of 20th Century Cinema.

The SMIC concerns Guido’s visit to a source whilst on a “cure” (a sort of old-fashioned continental form of rehab) and his fantasising about an unknown girl (Claudia Cardinale). All of Fellini’s cheek, style and satirical prowess pour out of the screen, setting the standard for a film whose set pieces never cease to outdo one another.

[The SMIC is from 0.00 to 3:21]

Having for years been able to recite huge chunks of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles from memory (Gerry Rafferty’s second biggest hit after Baker Street was called Night Owl: I think I might have been mildly autistic as a teenager), I rarely look at the singles charts these days but for some reason I’ve run the rule over this week’s official Top 100 Singles.

It’s clear that the inclusion of purchased downloads has dramatically changed the nature of the chart - nothing else can explain the appearances of radio mainstays Sweet Child O’Mine by Guns n’ Roses, The Killer’s Mr. Briteside and Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls, or four tracks from the 25th anniversary edition re-release of Michael Jackson’s 1983 album Thriller.

A couple of things caught my eye in the lower reaches of the chart.

First, Supernatural Superserious, R.E.M.’s new single is a new entry this week - at an embarrassingly lowly #54.

R.E.M. have always been an album band but it’s a damning indictment of the paucity of their last album and how far their stock has fallen that the fairly good lead single from their new album has failed to make either the Radio 1 or Radio 2 playlists and, consequently, couldn’t even debut ahead of Rhianna’s nine-month-old Umbrella-ella-ella-ella.

You wouldn’t want to swap places with R.E.M.’s record company CEO at the moment if this is remotely indicative of the reception the band’s forthcoming album and tour will get…

Second, this week represents the 76th week in the singles chart for Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars.

After an initial, 15-week chart run (during which time it never got higher than #6), Chasing Cars re-entered the top 10 when downloads were included (as of 13 January 2007) and hasn’t left the Top 100 since.

Snow Patrol may not be everybody’s cup of tea (though the Minister adores Chasing Cars and thinks Eyes Open was the best album of 2006), but that’s a remarkable achievement.

Marion Cotillard wins again, this time the French “César” for best actress.

How nice that Alain Delon was there to join in the celebrations…