Rick of Alexandria and the Legendary Chronicles

I had so much trouble focusing on last night's new Walking Dead. The first half was so airless, I couldn't believe I was only halfway through, it felt like I'd been force feeding it to myself all night. Things picked up a bit in the second half but the show's come to a point where Xena and Hercules need to show up so it can commit fully to the campiness it seems to have accidentally wandered into from the vaguely realist survival horror it used to be.

Spoilers after the screenshot

I'm guessing whatever Gabriel's decided to do was prompted by the bible passage we see him reading. I wonder what it was. "And the Lord sayeth to Gabriel, go ye and taketh the provisions and storeth them in the boat from last season you weren't told about." Even Rick noticed this didn't make sense in a bit of lampshading. I hope the explanation, which wasn't given in this episode, will be satisfying enough to justify the delay but I expect it won't be.

Afterwards, we get a somewhat entertaining scene with Gregory that reveals he's completely superfluous in his community. Also, I thought Tara had gained weight because of her real life pregnancy, now I wonder if I'm seeing muscle. I'm honestly not sure who'd win in an arm wrestling match between her and Daryl:

Then the man named Jesus who looks like Jesus leads Rick and his friends to the Kingdom and King Ezekiel and his somehow perfectly healthy and docile tiger, the show's effects budget allowing it to appear at the beginning and ending of one scene. Oh, the harsh, unforgiving world of the post-Apocalypse.

Afterwards, a ten headed dragon bursts out of the ground and a team of wizards flies in to form a desperate alliance with Ezekiel, finally giving Rick the Trident of Tammany, his birthright as the secret prince of Tammany Hall, to slay the beast before it summons the army of Centaurs from the Zorp dimension! Just kidding. Actually we get Rick telling Ezekiel a fairy tale to convince him to join in the fight against the Saviours, everyone tells Ezekiel to fight against the Saviours except Morgan who seems hesitantly against it, one of Ezekiel's closest men tells him the importance of being a hero when you can be, it looks like it's time for everyone to stand up for what they believe in against the tyrannical Negan so at the climax of the segment, Ezekiel . . . decides not to. Well, I guess we can't have the season finale in the middle of the season. Looks like it's all up to Daryl.

The episode finally stopped being a chore when Rick and his people had to deal with a barrier of cars, a steel cable, and dynamite rigged on the highway. It's good watching this group work together creatively to find a solution as a horde of zombies approach, though the distance they seemed to cover at such a slow pace made me think they have Lancelot physics:

Rick sure is sweaty.

It seems kind of obligatory for a close-up of someone inspecting a bomb though Christ Our Lord was of course dry and shampooed.

Cannibal Hodgepodge

A secret society of mindless cannibals may exist in the London Underground at the same time as there's an endearingly eccentric but not especially effective police inspector in the city. 1972's Death Line, a.k.a. Raw Meat, establishes this, among a few other things, without any significant correlation. Despite the strangely unfocused quality to the film's plot and the substantial implausibility of its premise it's pretty entertaining and unsettling.

Donald Pleasence gives a surprising and absolutely delightful performance as Inspector Calhoun, irritably wondering why the tea at the station is steeped in bags while he seems to take in the facts of a case only out of the corner of his eye. But there's a method to his perhaps feigned distraction, evident when he interviews Alex (David Ladd), an American who spotted a Member of Parliament in a tube station, unconscious, before said MP vanished.

A scene where Calhoun is put off his lunch a bit by a description of bloody details is followed immediately by our first glimpse of the cannibal larder, somewhere in a forgotten part of the Underground. Clive Swift plays Inspector Richardson, the only one who seems to pay absolutely no mind to Calhoun's nuttiness, appearing only twice in the film to explain a Victorian railway construction accident that buried men and women alive.

Would you believe that a community of Victorian labourers, who fed off each other to survive and somehow lost the power of speech, augmenting their diets by picking off commuters from tube stations, would go unnoticed for seventy or so years? Yeah, neither would I. But Hugh Armstrong doesn't let it stop him from giving a disturbing and sad performance as the last surviving cannibal who can only mumble something that sounds like, "Mind the doors," over and over.

The first scene shows the MP (James Cossins) perusing some pornography before soliciting a prostitute and then getting attacked. There seems to be a broad statement here about the human compulsion to physically exploit other human beings but the movie never takes this any further. Sharon Gurney plays the American's girlfriend--I was hoping he would die first. She breaks up with him at one point because he was so callous about the unconscious man they'd come across but they get back together a few scenes later, leaving me to wonder what the point was of showing them break up in the first place. A similarly pointless scene has Calhoun and Detective Sergeant Rogers (Norman Rossington) getting drunk at a pub and trying to stay past closing time. But that scene was at least entertaining and that's all the point I really need.

Christopher Lee also graces the film with his presence for one scene as an MI5 agent. It was nice to see him but he was also another thing that didn't seem to have a whole lot to do with anything else.

Twitter Sonnet #962

Investments root in clanging pans and pots.
A singing line delivers laundry east.
We all stand by while teeth from candy rots.
To find a cure we dream a pasta beast.
Fatigue awakens salamanders soon.
A liquid flame conducts the aisle seat.
Collected charcoal forms the usher's doom.
No Duke or King informed us how to eat.
Serene, a voyage ends in hems too long.
A buzzing fortune fell afoul of soap.
Forgiveness never caved to tempting song.
Eternal springs a temporary hope.
A fog delayed in banks of sound was seen.
And yet I hold the old auspicious bean.

The Unreliable Armour of the Daleks

The second story in the second War Doctor audio play series, A Thing of Guile by Phil Mulryne, picks up with the War Doctor (John Hurt), now a prisoner of the Time Lady Ollistra (Jacqueline Pearce), being forced into helping her on a mission to a secret Dalek base. A nice enough Dalek story, it's of the genetic experiment type of story that's been done a few times with Daleks (Genesis of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks, "Evolution of the Daleks") but there are a few nice ideas put into play in A Thing of Guile.

Most of the story takes place in a series of underground tunnels and Mulryne does a nice job of establishing what's happening by having the Doctor (who's generally referred to as "the prisoner" in this one) and Ollistra describe what they're seeing without understanding what they're seeing. They're wearing goggles that allow them to see in the dark and this pays off with a creepy revelation later in the story.

Ollistra has had a relatively minor role despite appearing in every War Doctor audio play I've listened to up to this point but here she basically functions as a companion. Jacqueline Pearce and John Hurt have an amusing, tetchy rapport, something else that becomes part of the plot in an unexpected way, founded on Ollistra having the position of real authority while the Doctor is there because she can't deny he has the greater experience. One of the more effective moments in the episode, though, is one where they forget their difference for a moment to wonder what a series of ghostly objects are they see passing by overhead. It was a nicely, surprisingly eerie moment.

Say No to Genetically Engineered Alien Super Weapons

This week's new episode of The Expanse, "Static", was a big improvement for me from the première. I felt like characters were allowed to breathe and act more organically and even the colour palette seemed better.

I loved the scene between Miller (Thomas Jane) and Amos (Wes Chatham) at the bar, particularly because neither one directly mentions Amos shooting Miller's friend. I've been watching the first season of Daredevil lately where it seems like for every scene a producer came in and said, "The audience is too stupid to understand what they're talking about, add a bunch of third grade level explanations to our show in which people can say 'fuck'." Miller and Amos never mention Amos shooting Miller's friend but it hovers over the scene because now Miller's in hot water for making a split second decision to kill someone else.

It was a good episode for Amos who reveals he's grown wise enough to know people like Holden are probably wiser than him. He keeps thinking this even though he comes up with a better strategy of interrogating psychopath scientist. I liked his opening up the conversation with Holden by asking if he'd ever talked to a paedophile.

Thomas Jane makes Miller's reluctance to live up to his new folk hero status a lot more interesting than it otherwise might have been. Seeing him lean over the sink while the younger Belter blasts music from Eros, you can see his knowledge of how heroes aren't all they're cracked up to be weighs on him now that he's pegged as one. And of course Miller in that Mormon church was an automatically fun visual. I wish he'd get his hat back, though, or one like it.

The episode was written by Robin Veith, who wrote a few episodes in the previous season, too. I hope she writes a lot more.

Twisted Growth

Behind things that seem very simple, like cultural beliefs, guns, and laws, are often complex and nuanced realities. 2013's In Bloom (გრძელი ნათელი დღეები) shows how recognising these may mean the difference between being controlled by these forces or avoiding them. It's a film that creates an impression of a society accustomed to violence for generations with an air of accuracy that comes through a story composed of well drawn characters.

Natia (Mariam Bokeria) and Eka (Lika Babluani) are best friends, fourteen year old students living in Tbilisi during the Georgian Civil War of the early 1990s. Natia is the more assertive and popular of the two; their classmates always laugh when Natia makes a joke. When she's kicked out of class, the teacher's stunned when every student in class goes with her.

This is a mild example of the tenuous influence institutions of authority have in the film. Focusing on marriage and killing among these very young protagonists, the actual adults seem to be disconnected from everything that's happening. When the two girls enter an apartment in the middle of an argument, one of them is finally obliged to inform the older married couple living there that their son has just killed someone, to which the father can only respond by throwing up his hands and leaving the room, saying he needs to think.

Eka is the quieter girl but over the course of the film we learn it's not out of shyness but out of a keener understanding of what's going on around her. On her way home every day, a couple boys hurl abusive language at her, one of them even threatening her with a knife. Eka refuses to respond to them. When Natia accompanies her home one day, she immediately starts trading insults with the two, prompting Eka to ask her later why Natia takes their bait. Later we see Eka actually save the boy with the knife who was being bullied by another couple of boys and we can see that Eka has a better understanding of what's going on behind the brash words of kids.

Early in the film, Natia is given a gun by a boy who's in love with her, Lado (Data Zakareishvili), and it works as a source of tension throughout the film. Alfred Hitchcock once famously explained how the soul of suspense is not the explosion but the ticking bomb under the table and the gun in In Bloom proves his point. Lado tells her to be careful with it but Natia's a kid--of course she plays with it and she and Eka pass it back and forth like a toy. The possibility of one of them shooting herself accidentally is always there but the issue is complicated by the fact that they really do live in a dangerous place where they might really need to defend themselves.

The film eventually becomes about a culturally sanctified rape and forced marriage and about how the practices of the culture can subtly and therefore thoroughly reinforce this brutal manifestation of patriarchy. The film's cinematography is a bit bland but otherwise directors Nana Ekvtimishvili (who wrote the screenplay) and Simon Groß effectively show how cultural practices designed to perpetuate family units play on pride and lust to force young people into deeply dysfunctional relationships.

Twitter Sonnet #961

Disordered suction cups caroused in peace.
A scraper states in metal woods for space.
A city drawing of the Kong released.
An ape has yet collapsed in monkey grace.
The ostrich legs descend into the hall.
A lively tone was stretched by glowing orbs.
A quiet night would not proscribe a ball.
As time recurs the reddened grill absorbs.
A turquoise cloud becomes a pastel crab.
The trooping thoughtless eaters overheat.
Unwinding roads of dust subsume the cab.
In countless hardened steps a heavy street.
A speeding Nerf bullet rebounds from law.
The Pekingese has stretched too far its paw.

Kudzu and Pills

I'm sure doing a lot of reading these days. As a change of pace to-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest which includes Caitlin R. Kiernan's new Dancy Flammarion novella called Tupelo (1998). I was going to remark on the clues in the story that let the reader know it's set in the late 90s but I realised just now it's in the title. Maybe that's appropriate since a story about a girl whose attempts to figure out what's going on are constantly thwarted by perceptions distorted by forces from without and within--and then there's the hazy line between which is which, and which is intentional and which isn't. It's a good story.

I love that it's set in '98 and here we've come to the point when something set in the 90s is a period piece. Good grief, time moves too damned fast. Caitlin refers to an old tube television and the fact that CBS not airing The Wizard of Oz was news. Those days when everyone had to pay attention to when things aired on television in order to see it. Now we all programme our own channels, one can argue we've lost something that came with being a society set to the same media clock.

Dancy Flammarion is a character who's appeared in multiple works by Caitlin R. Kiernan. I first encountered her in the novel Threshold and then in other novels and short stories. There's a comic book series, also written by Kiernan, I haven't had a chance to read (generally speaking, comics are too expensive a habit for me and I refuse to pirate books). An albino girl who wanders the southern U.S. on missions from an angelic being who might or might not be a hallucination, stories of Dancy are often about the fuzzy place between a character's hallucination and actual supernatural occurrence. Even when they're from Dancy's point of view, we're invited to make our own judgements about her judgement, her preoccupation with sin and Christian beliefs suggesting she may not see very clearly.

Tupelo (1998) presents an older Dancy now living in a hot apartment and paying visits to one of the most obnoxious psychiatrists I've ever heard of. The poor girl divulges how she likes the sounds of trains and the psychiatrist unpacks it to mean something about home sickness and I really can't blame Dancy for being wary of everything she says to the woman.

In addition to being a fascinating portrait of unreliable perception, it has great atmosphere, having the flavour of the south as it appears in good fiction (not as I've experienced it in real life). I particularly liked a car ride Dancy has in the story with a man I'm pretty sure is the Bailiff, another recurring character from Kiernan's stories. The title seems to be a reference to a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and knowing it contributes a nicely to the tone of the story.

On a Gentle Edge

Most movies are about people reacting to circumstances or things that happen. Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero is about people reacting to potential circumstances and things that seem on the verge of happening. The result is a gentle and deeply endearing comedy.

Most of the film is set in a little coastal Scottish village coveted by an American oil company which wants to use the location for a refinery. Mac (Peter Riegert) is sent to negotiate the purchase of the village with its inhabitants. He's accompanied by a young man named Danny (Peter Capaldi) who works for the Scottish arm of the oil company. Nothing much happens when they arrive and mostly they try to figure out who to talk to about what. The closest thing to an authority in the town is Gordon (Denis Lawson) who owns the local inn. Mac and Danny speculate on the great physical relationship between Gordon and his wife, Stella (Jennifer Black), and we see the two indeed take every opportunity to schtupp like crazy.

Over the course of the film, a subtle attraction develops between Mac and Stella, something Gordon seems oddly sympathetic with. He, meanwhile, is busy coordinating the other villagers who, far from holding tight to their ancestral home, are eager to get the highest price they can from Mac's company for the sale of the village.

Burt Lancaster has a small role as Mac's boss, more obsessed with astrology and preoccupied with a strangely abusive therapy than the actual oil business. If the movie has a nucleus, though, it's in Danny's budding relationship with a marine research scientist named Marina (Jenny Seagrove).

He and Mac meet Marina at a research station in Aberdeen before coming to the village. Afterwards, Danny somehow always encounters her alone and always by the sea.

The movie never directly states the possibility that Marina is a sea creature of some kind but it's clear from Danny's face it's what he can't help but imagine.

Peter Capaldi is great as a fresh faced young man with a perhaps over-active sexual imagination. But it's lovely how the film lightly teases the line between Danny's imagination and reality, which generally describes the charm of most of the characters in the film.

The Elephant in the Film

How many contradictions can one movie present? 1958's The Roots of Heaven is an anti-hunting film directed by John Huston, a game hunter. It's set and shot in French Equatorial Africa just before it gained independence from France and this is part of the plot but hardly any of the lines are spoken by black characters. Errol Flynn has top billing but plays only a supporting role. But all of this is trivia, really--what matters is that despite some good intentions, very good performances, and great visuals, the film has aged more poorly than most films of the period for its dated attitudes.

The movie's high point is its first scene, where the real star, Trevor Howard, tells a prostitute and hostess played by Juliette Greco quite eloquently why it's important to save the elephants. His assertion that saving a species from extinction is valuable for humankind and the planet as a whole seems an attitude strikingly ahead of its time. It's even more effective for being shot entirely outdoor and building with the very casual energy of a tired man and a woman serving him drinks.

Morel, Howard's character, takes to playing non-lethal pranks on elephant hunters and hands out petitions that are laughed at. Finally, a television host vacationing in Africa (Orson Welles in cameo role), finds himself the target of one of Morel's pranks and instead of being outraged is converted to Morel's cause. After this, Morel becomes a thorn in the side of the colonial government and a tentative ally to the rebels.

Edric Connor as the leader of the rebels seems like he might give a decent performance but sadly the film relegates him to nodding thoughtfully while the white people talk. The film takes a subtle pro-colonial government attitude--I'm not sure how much of this is the sentiments of the filmmakers or simply caution in a major Hollywood film towards a governing power that did currently have legal control of the country. It sure doesn't look good now. Neither does the sight of one of Morel's men giving the only female game hunter depicted a spanking at her dinner party.

Considering that all the male game hunters receive injuries in the posterior from Morel's pranks, it could be argued that Madam Orsini (Jacqueline Fogt) is only receiving an equivalent punishment, and a more mild one than that, but the scene does unmistakably reflect an attitude that a disagreeable woman should be treated like a child. I might be inclined to consider all this just a reflection of the time if I didn't have Huston's great 1961 film The Misfits to compare it to. In many ways, The Roots of Heaven feels like a dry run for The Misfits--both films focus on a small group of men and one woman, each in his or her own way a social outcast with a past that torments them. Both films also have a message that ultimately condemns the hunting of animals to extinction but The Misfits has almost none of the outdated cultural baggage of The Roots of Heaven.

Greco is great as a survivor of a Nazi prison camp who led a rough life as a prostitute before ending up in Africa. When they're crossing the desert and she's so ill she has to be carried, Morel tells her one day all this will seem like a nightmare and she replies it's the world she'll be going back to that will be the nightmare. It effectively conveys just how miserable her prospects are.

Errol Flynn, who in Against All Flags had seemed to me devoid of that wondrous spark that made him a captivating performer in the 1930s, is actually really great here basically playing himself: a former man of adventure who's now merely amiable and perpetually anaesthetised with liquor. I like Trevor Howard but Flynn definitely steals the show.

Twitter Sonnet #960

No seamless path is free to paper walls.
Across the mark, ideas of snails emerge.
They say when oranges rise the apple falls.
Or no, they don't, but citrus may converge.
Unknown, the hands arranged the stones for dawn.
Receding helpers may or spirits shy.
Where heat connects to chilly spheres they've gone.
A calloused hand now gauged a weight and sighed.
The scale of dropping words engraves the wall.
The sheer and sloughing bound aligns the string.
Familiar screams affirm a strangled call.
But even slower thugs evade the sting.
A crunching sound disturbs the solace shade.
A vapour cuts air like a vorpal blade.

Saving Harley

I've already written about the stupid trend among amateur internet movie critics to fixate on the concept of a character arc as an essential thing for a movie to be good. But I wanted to bring up a particularly stupid example I saw in this video essay by Patrick (H) Willems. While I agree with him the writing is generally bad in DC movies, his insistence that the inclusion of more character arcs as a fix I find incredibly short sighted, particularly in one of the examples he brings up for Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn.

Harley, while probably the most fun person to watch in the movie, is completely static. She wants to get back together with the Joker for the entire movie. That's it . . . What's a shame is that there's a great arc sitting there unused, where she could realise over the course of the movie how abusive and awful he is and then finally gain some independence and reject him. Sadly, that does not happen.

Willems himself admits Harley is fun to watch but apparently this doesn't matter if she's static. To fix this, he wants to take away her relationship with the Joker in her very first film. That would be like a first Batman movie in which Alfred decides he doesn't want to be a butler anymore and leaves. He wants her to triumph over the negative influences in her life to be heroic example to us all.

If Harley Quinn were a real person, I'd be first in line encouraging her to kick that psycho to the curb. But just because something's positive in real life doesn't mean it's good fiction. Real people can be hurt. Characters in fiction demonstrate aspects of human behaviour and try dangerous or unwise paths without any actual risk to real people. The advantage is that it allows a storyteller to say things about the human experience without actually killing or injuring anyone. I don't have to look far for a case in point--look at Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight. Remember his arc? Of course not, because he didn't have one. He showed up, he caused chaos, and he was caught. He never had a soul searching moment, he never had a scene where he clearly seemed to be thinking maybe he should give it all up and do his time. The film is so much better for it. Can you imagine how unbelievably trite and forced it would be if every member of the Suicide Squad happened to learn a Very Valuable Lesson by the end of the film?

One might say that the difference between Ledger's Joker and Robbie's Harley Quinn is that one was a villain while the latter was a hero. In which case, you've put your finger on exactly what was wrong with a movie that was supposed to be about a team of villains.

Variously Threatened Existence

The second War Doctor Doctor Who audio play series, Infernal Devices, kicked off in February last year with Legion of the Lost. John Hurt returned again as the War Doctor, this time confronting, as the series title suggests, a terrible new machine of the Time War. It's a nice story featuring also David Warner as a rogue Time Lord.

The War Doctor is still generally referred to as just "the renegade" or "the one previously known as the Doctor", which is getting a little awkward. I hope a subsequent story introduces an in-story reason for characters to call him "War Doctor" or something. Writer John Dorney has done a good job imagining the sort of terrible weapon that might be deployed in a Time War, in this case a machine that wipes an entire species from history but leaves the memory of that species to those remaining in the timeline. The ethical question presented in the story is over whether or not it's right to benefit from the deaths of people who never existed. I would say (as essentially does the War Doctor) that if you're able to harness them for power, this in itself indicates they existed in some way.

I hope a few of these War Doctor stories involve him going to Earth and maybe get involved in a more atmospheric story, as fun as this very abstract war story might be. Warner is good as a villain called Shadovar and the War Doctor gets a temporary companion named Collis played by Zoe Tapper who screams orgasmically when her mind is shifted between realities. Which is much appreciated.

The Expanding Expanse

I got around to watching the second season premiere of The Expanse last night, the show that in its first season was an exciting, inventively written space opera with a fascinating attention to real science. The premiere of the new season is something of a deflation from the high emotional pitch of the first season's finale and bore a striking resemblance to the Star Wars prequels, though I don't consider that in itself a negative thing. Mainly I enjoyed Thomas Jane's voracious scenery chewing.

Shohreh Aghdashloo is back as UN Assistant Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala, fresh from playing essentially the same role in the latest Star Trek film, which contributes to the feeling that present day Star Trek is struggling to catch up with other space operas of to-day. But she's introduced in the second season of The Expanse with a scene that resembles one from the beginning of Attack of the Clones where Padme Amidala's ship is destroyed on its landing pad. Like Padme, Chrisjen narrowly escapes and like the Star Wars film the scene is designed as a visceral shock to draw us into the relatively dry political discourse that follows.

I love Aghdashloo's costumes. Everyone around her is in variations of black suits and military uniforms while she looks like royalty.

I wondered how the writers would handle Thomas Jane's character, Miller, being on the Rocinante. Without his normal location and his quest to find Julie Mao, he was in danger of becoming a fifth wheel and Jane's acting style is so different from the plain line deliveries of everyone else on the ship he really feels odd. But it was a welcome break from the episode that largely consisted of exposition. I loved his hand gestures and decision to trail off on certain lines, his eyes always wandering around his environment.

I enjoyed all the scenes on space stations and I liked that I was able to spot new details in the backgrounds when I took screenshots. The show does a very good job of creating a feeling of a complex society despite its limited colour palette.

I've always wanted to live on a space station. This one doesn't look quite as cool as Deep Space Nine but I'd take it.

The new Martian soldier characters were cool, it's nice that we get the perspective from the Martian side, though I wish they'd cast actors who seemed more like soldiers and less like a retail sales team. I wonder if Jenette Goldstein is busy.

Twitter Sonnet #959

A slowly winding clock begins to rust.
The clouds were shaped like tanks in decade eyes.
At hand, the spite that crushed the marble bust.
A singer cold and thin unwrapped the skies.
A daisy's dragged in purple wake of pond.
Misplaced, a lazy summer thought intrudes.
With burns like cigarettes the suns'll bond.
It's ev'ry joint the jelly life excludes.
The cook's old pot is burned with eggs and souls.
His butterfingers supernatural.
A mind begins an absent dance for trolls.
And shrinking queue encumbered seneschal.
In space, the bars are easier to clean.
In stations ads are sexy as a dream.

An Atmosphere with No Land

One of the most important methods for maintaining control of other people is to seem like you're in control of other people. Milo, the drug lord from Nicholas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy, finds his feigned nonchalance is his only remaining tool as things collapse around him in the third film of the trilogy, 2005's Pusher 3. Like the previous two films, it offers an entertaining glimpse into an effectively realised world of street drug trade in Copenhagen, in this case with a particular focus on how power shifts or is protected through the careful subtext in negotiations.

The original 1996 film was part of a 1990s tend in art films to indulge in stylishly unvarnished street gangster culture. The sexiness was wearing off by the time Winding Refn made the second two films of the trilogy and the third film is the least sensational. Milo, again played by Zlatko Burić, the Serbian drug lord who held Frank's fate in the palm of his hand in the first film, still has his restaurant and is the supplier for a new generation of young street pushers, but he's older and seems tired. He doesn't know what to do with a shipment of ecstasy he acquires when he was expecting heroin.

He goes to the Albanian gangsters who'd sent him the shipment and is informed the heroin is on the way and reluctantly Milo says he's going try to sell the ecstasy too. In the previous films, Milo had affected an attitude of paternal friendliness towards Frank and other pushers, offering them food he'd made himself and generally seeming unworried and amiable. This is part of how he maintains his position and one watches him throughout the third film struggling to maintain it. He can't think too long about accepting the ecstasy because he doesn't want people to know he doesn't know much about how to handle the ecstasy. It happens to be his daughter's twenty fifth birthday and he's preparing a huge feast for her and her friends and he has to seem unworried for her benefit as well, not so much because he wants her to have a good time but because she constantly badgers him and he has to seem firm in his decisions.

On top of this, he's decided to stop taking drugs himself and is five days clean. The film has a slice of life feel to it in its general tone; the hand held camera style from the first film is back and the music is generally from sources within the scenes. But the film really has a central scene unfolding in Milo's restaurant almost like a stage play. One of the Albanian gangsters, Rexho (Ramadan Hyseni), brings by a Polish pimp to help broker a deal between the pimp and Jeanette (Linse Kessler), a prostitute from the second film, for the sale of a tense, quiet young woman. Jeanette doesn't seem interested because the young woman clearly seems to be there against her will and when we learn it's her birthday, like Milo's daughter who doesn't much seem to appreciate the party he's throwing for her, we wonder if Milo's sympathy for her is going to cause him to do something rash.

But the story that plays out is subtle and told primarily in the decisions of the actors, particularly Buric. Milo's commitment to not seeming care as Rexho orders him about seems at times precarious and at times so natural as to be involuntary.

"What can Men Do Against Such Reckless Hate?"

After reading this morning that Republican senators had suspended rules to push through Trump cabinet nominees without Democrats, I went to meet my parents for lunch and Williams S. Burroughs' "Apocalypse" came up on my iPod while I was driving:

Consider an apocalyptic statement:
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted,"
Hassan-i Sabbah, the old man on the mountain.

Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained and destructive behaviour, that would be a minor episode, which would run its course.
Everything is permitted because nothing is true.
It is all make believe: illusion, dream, art.
When art leaves the frame and the written word leaves the page, not merely the physical frame and page but the frames and pages that assign the categories, a basic disruption of reality itself occurs.
The literal realisation of art.
Success will write "apocalypse" across the sky.

As debate continues to swirl around both sides calling the others' news fake--though, make no mistake, it's the side whose stories won't cite credible sources or evidence that truly presents fake news--the true purpose of the "I'm Rubber, You're Glue" strategy becomes clear; to undermine all credibility of all media so that the only deciding factors will be political and military power. The only way someone would choose such a strategy is if he or she has decided the whole point of media is to manipulate people rather than to enlighten them. Such a point of view must consider evidence to the contrary, all evidence, as subjective and not in itself relevant.

Many people might recognise the line "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" from the video game Assassin's Creed. Presented to the player, it explains why he or she has licence to swagger about in a white hood like a dick and kill people. Because the sanctity of human life, from this point of view, is only an illusory concept of human institutions.

This is also why the Joker in The Dark Knight was such an effective character, because he demonstrated that the social contract, the rules which society plays under, can be abandoned at any time. That's why he resonated with psychopaths like the guy who attacked a movie theatre. For people like him, it was exciting to hear that all these rules he'd been told all his life are things you can just throw aside. Because they're not real--a gun is real, the idea to not fire it is only an idea.

This is why people said they wanted to see Trump elected "for the lolz". Frustrated by a government that accomplished nothing, made complacent by the comforts they didn't know they enjoyed and blaming Obama, despite the fact that his efforts were continually obstructed by Republicans, they wanted an agent of chaos.

I remember at the time of Obama's first election, Doris Kearns Goodwin was making the rounds of interviews for her book Team of Rivals about how Abraham Lincoln put together his cabinet from adversaries. Obama cited the book as a major influence on him so one can see how what turned out to be the greatest flaw in Obama's presidency originated in what sounded like a good idea. Maybe it's better to say Obama's flaw was his optimism, his genuine belief that his adversaries wanted to make the country better and not simply empower themselves and their cronies. Compromising with rivals is only a good idea if your rivals also have noble intentions at the end of the day. If they had, then to-day Republicans would be returning the favour and taking the arguments of Democrats into consideration. But that was never their plan.

Burroughs' "Apocalypse" sounds optimistic. I was reminded of an interview with David Bowie that made the rounds after Bowie's death, where he talked about how internet culture would de-mystify rock stars and other figures normally accorded respect for their lofty positions. And we see this at work in the widespread derision that Trump receives. Maybe it'll even contribute to Trump's demise.

Maybe nothing is true. But I would advise people to remember why we want some things to be true and act as though they are.