Män som hatar kvinnor[Girl with the Dragon Tattoo] (2009)

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.dca.org.uk/)

Nothing-special wish-fulfillment fantasy along Hollywood lines; albeit one featuring naturalistic performances.

The characterization is rather superficial and the plot contrived. The essence of this mystery is easy to guess pretty much from the outset; leaving the audience with little to do but wait and see if their dramaturgical guesses are correct.

Revenge is an issue here handled with all the common sense one has come to expect from a Western culture mired in its own militarism and the desire for violence-against-others-without-consequences. We are invited to empathize with someone who makes emotional decisions without consequential reflection while - absurdly - her choices work out perfectly.

The fact that sexually-dysfunctional Christian families are common is never questioned nor explored, dramatically. So we are presented with sexual violence as entertainment without ever really understanding the affects this has on the central characters. And without these affects, there is no real drama - despite the visual realism.

Films like this exist solely within the confines of an alternate reality that can only be explained with reference to a declining European culture; fantasizing about its lost world-power status. The anti-sexism and anti-racism of the plot is simply a decoration to the narrative and not an essential part of it: A well-made paean to the self-obsessive, narcissistic solipsism of a nihilistic culture - with little in the way of subtlety or insight to offer its jaded audience.

Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

24: Redemption (2008)

RATING:	40%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/)

It is bad enough that this cliché-ridden exercise is weakly-written, directed & acted, but this is a self-contradictory tv-movie tainted throughout with the genetic obsessions and xenophobia of its makers.

The approach to terrorism is the usual shutting-the-stable-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted approach so typical of Western culture. Fatal in politics and, in fiction, produces little more than empty-headed propaganda and woefully-inadequate and one-sided drama with the same latent desire to exacerbate problems rather than prevent them. This latter point is nowhere dramatized although it is crucial to the understanding of the situation presented here.

White man saving the world from the terrorism largely caused by the West is presented as a fairy tale of Whites helping Africa escape the plight Whites caused in the first place. At no point is an African shown helping himself: Africans are somehow incapable of doing this. This would-be hidden agenda is partly obscured by having attractive Black children suffering to allow White emotions to distract from their intellects. (Interestingly, the fictional African country here is subtitled 'Sangala, Africa', but would France be labeled as 'France, Europe'? Here, the Dark Continent remains utterly opaque - at least to Whites.)

The usual straw man argument of claiming torture is necessary to save lives is repeated with no evidence that this is so. Only in the movies, has there ever been a case of a ticking bomb that could only be defused by torturing a suspect almost to death to discover its location before large numbers of innocent bystanders are killed. That such an ahistorical hypothesis is used to justify immorality - without dramatic exegesis - proves the writers’ poverty of imagination and lack of original research. Even the Nazis never used torture for this reason – only to frighten occupied peoples; as a preventive not a cure. (Moreover, there is also, of course, the inevitable phenotypal hypocrisy of advocating torture for the dark-skinned, but resenting it when applied to the light.)

This political agitprop in the guise of entertainment never reveals the enemy’s point of view so necessary to defeating them, so we end-up with meretricious melodrama without an all-important historical or psychological context.

Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

BLIGHTY: A Cynic’s Guide to Britain (2008)

RATING:	100%
FORMAT:	Book

(Image: http://www.amazon.co.uk/)

More a realist’s guide than a cynic’s, this is an exceptionally funny book about the state of modern Britain, which is not all that different from what it has always been. Although partly subjective, this is a highly-accurate rendering of affairs, comparable to The Welfare State We’re In.

Britain was always a tawdry place obsessed with spectacle and pomp rather than any genuine cultural, moral or political content. Marred by generations of sexual hypocrites; Europhobes; closet homosexuals; social, racial and sexual snobs; the emotional repressed and the White obsession with an Empire that makes them feel simultaneously guilty & ashamed and yet not-so-secretly superior. Successive political (Danes, Saxons, Romans, Normans, Dutch) and religious (Christianity) invasions destroyed any indigenous culture (Druids) and left us unsure of whom we are; hence, the impossibility of defining “Britishness”. The latter is a purely-White obsession - a desire to define it exclusively as "White" while not wanting to be thought racist. Such a definition is a BNP-like attempt to get others to conform to a vague standard from which only Whites can ever benefit.

The British national myth is just that - a myth. Patriotism is shown up for what it is: An excuse for immoral behavior toward foreigners - whose wealth is stolen - and the poor - who are used as cannon-fodder to further enrich the rich. Unsurprisingly, the British Empire is convincingly-equated with the Third Reich as nationalism becomes a love affair with ones geographic circumstance and ones accident of birth, so that the dark-skinned can be labeled unpatriotic - in perpetuity.

Britain is a culture without a culture, living off the still-burning embers of Empire without any real direction, like a sometimes-lucid Alzheimer’s patient whining-on about Auld Lang Syne. The would-be creation of “British Values”, that cannot possibly exist because values have no nationality, leads to the realization that this is a phrase designed to conceal core “British Obsessions”: Shopping and drinking. Moreover, a give-and-take culture unable to share with others because it has so little to share. The strangest aspect of the idea of Britain’s greatness is that those saying so do not actually like most Britishers and would rather starve than treat a lower- or a middle-class person as an individual.

No easy answers are offered here, but at least we can all go down laughing as the ship of states sinks slowly into the west and the sun finally sets on Britannia. Even better than the earlier Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? by the same authors.

Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Knock Out (2010)

RATING: 80%

(Image: http://www.bollycurry.com)

Superb remake of Phone Booth that does not suffer from the tendency inherent in US remakes of foreign films of forgetting cultural context. This makes many pointed stabs at Indian political corruption that makes not only a remake but a re-tooling to fit the new cultural context. It also deals with the legacy of the British Empire - corruption in high places - as well as the meaning of nationhood, ones highest loyalty and trust. These issues are discussed in both a political and a personal sense as the film comes down on the side of the nation being more important than the individual.

Politics drives this narrative forward even more effectively than it did in The Bourne Identity and we discover that the villain is not so villainous after all and that the ostensible hero has feet of clay. As in The Third Man, we are clearly informed that no man can be affectively neutral in life and still be effective. Like Dog Day Afternoon the crowd of onlookers shown here becomes a proxy for the audience as it watches an apparent unmotivated murder turn into a hostage situation that reveals some of the political depravity of a ruling class still Anglo-centric in its ways.

Irrfan KHAN and Sanjay DUTT are both world-class in this characterful action-thriller as they make us overlook the somewhat wishful-thinking ending. However, it is hard to imagine the paunchy-but-avuncular DUTT as a Jason Bourne-like action hero when confronted with younger and fitter men; including Joey ANSAH from The Bourne Ultimatum!

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Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Life (2007-9)

RATING: 60%

(Image: http://www.excessif.com/)

The usual problems with US tv material: Trite situations and dialogue, acting-by-numbers and formulaic plotting. This is all enlivened - but not entirely salvaged from the wreckage - by the performance of Damian LEWIS who makes the general psychological implausibility seem sort-of believable.

The hackneyed odd-coupling of two very different police officers works quite well as we all-too-slowly learn what makes them tick. However, the dialogue gives the impression US tv pays by the word since there is far more than necessary; while it insults the actors' ability to emote effectively and the audience's ability to stay awake during the quiet moments. The characterization and the plotting are in direct conflict and the ersatz Zen Buddhism is just another dramatic gimmick that does not allow the actors to breathe life into their roles.

The worst aspect of this is the old White-supremacist chestnut of the Caucasoid central hero and their ethnic-minority sidekick. The fact that she out-ranks him is neither here nor there, since her character is thinly-written as a sexual neurotic. Whites are still neurotically obsessed with the sexuality of non-Whites.

This drama behaves as if intelligence-led operations were simultaneously irrelevant and necessary; as if dependency on criminals to help solve crime were not a simple fact of a policeman's life. The greatest crime committed by these crime series is that of trying to get us to believe that police officers can solve crimes through sheer brainpower and have no need for informers - who can continue committing crimes with federal government immunity to protect them.

Muddled and unintelligent.

Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.