After last summer’s handwringing hereabouts on whether or not it mattered that I could outwrite ChatGPT this summer begins with the horrifying realisation that maybe I can’t outwrite not even ChatGPT but its lesser rival Google Gemini.
It all began with being busy. I had seen Kristi Noem making a prize ass of herself. I had read James Parker’s amusing quick doggerel in The Atlantic where he listed things that had not happened that he was now removing from his own upcoming memoir. And I thought of something. I couldn’t think what. But something. After a few hours I realised I was thinking of ‘Losing My Edge’ by LCD Soundsystem. What a great opportunity to rewrite that to be about Kristi Noem losing her slot as Trump’s VP. But I was busy. In the middle of one of the busiest fortnights of the year at work I didn’t have time to really dig into the lyrics. I didn’t want to annoy Friedrich Bagel with another ChatGPT request, after his sterling work on Walt Whitman poetry, so I logged into Google Gemini for the first time ever and asked it to rewrite the lyrics to what I wanted. It didn’t get it. I tried to explain it better. It did an attempt, that bore no resemblance to the song. I tried again, and it did a better attempt that still bore no resemblance to the song. At this point I realised it would be quicker to just do it myself from scratch, so I did. And after a quick polish posted it, and returned to another frenzied week of work. Only for Friedrich Bagel and The Engineer, who had been kept apprised of my unsatisfactory experience with Google Gemini, to both assume that the finished product was the result of AI. Whereas in fact it was 100% pure home-grown human.
Am I really not that much better than Google Gemini?!
This after all is the beginning of what Google Gemini spat out when I prompted it to write 500 words lamenting this misunderstanding:
“Alas, a tale of misunderstandings and missed opportunities! Here I stand, bard unheralded, lamenting the chasm that opened between Friedrich Bagel, The Engineer, and myself. The culprit? A mere pop song, or rather, its twisted reflection – a parody, you see, aimed at the esteemed (or perhaps infamous, depending on your political persuasion) Kristi Noem.
It all began with a noble quest. I, with a mischievous glint in my eye, sought to enlist the aid of Google Gemini, that marvel of machine learning, to craft a lyrical skewering of Ms. Noem. Visions of LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” twisted into a side-splitting commentary on South Dakota’s political landscape danced in my head. But, alas, Gemini, for all its prowess, faltered. The task, it seemed, was beyond its grasp.
Undeterred, I took pen in hand (or rather, fingers to keyboard), and with a flourish, composed the parody myself. It was a masterpiece, I assure you! Witty, pointed, yet strangely sympathetic – a delicate balance, wouldn’t you agree?
Here’s the rub: Friedrich Bagel, bless his cotton socks, attributed the work to Gemini! The Engineer, ever the pragmatist, chimed in, his brow furrowed. “This can’t be you,” he declared, “it has heart! Empathy!” “
It got worse from there.
And also went a bit Skynet.
“Now, I wouldn’t dream of denigrating Gemini’s capabilities. It excels at tasks that would leave me floundering in a sea of data.”
But, really….
It was cold comfort that The Engineer explained he had assumed it was AI because it was the only thing he had seen or heard that seemed to have any sympathy with the self-confessed puppy killer Noem. Therefore only an AI programmed not to say anything negative about anyone, no matter how many adorable animals they shoot in the head, could have written it.
It is now 55 years since a trio of minis roared around the crowded streets of Turin to the strains of Quincy Jones.
The Italian Job is a caper film that zooms along on a whirlwind tour of swinging 60s London preparatory to a daring heist in Italy. The soundtrack by Quincy Jones deserves its own spotlight. It’s a funky, jazzy mix that perfectly captures the cool confidence of the era. The electric guitar riffs and soulful vocals propel the action sequences, while the laid-back grooves simmer with anticipation during planning scenes.
Michael Caine gives perhaps his definitive screen performance as Charlie Croker, the mastermind thief. Caine’s effortless charisma in the role keeps the audience onside with his gang of villains throughout. He leads his team of specialists – including a getaway driver, an explosives expert, and a computer whiz – with brio. Caine’s delivery of lines like “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” is iconic.
Opposite him is the legendary playwright, songwriter and actor Noel Coward. He is the incarcerated crime boss Bridger, lured into financing the Italian Job by Croker’s purported concern for the balance of payments, a topic over which Bridger frets. Coward’s signature dry wit and impeccable timing add a layer of sophistication to the film. The contrast between Caine’s youthful energy and Coward’s world-weary cynicism is a highlight.
The Italian Job portrays a London bursting with miniskirts, pop music, and a general sense of rebellion against the establishment and sexual mores. This backdrop adds context to the film’s themes of loyalty; Croker lists one team mate’s prison record and then praises him for being as honest as the day is long; and the allure of the criminal life. There is also a number of gay characters, from Bridger and his lieutenant on the inside to Bridger’s man on the outside – Camp Freddie. Not everyone would have the confidence to stand on a balcony in Turin wearing a bright pink suit. Camp Freddie does.
The heist is of course the centerpiece of the film. Croker’s plan to create the mother of all traffic jams in Turin and then stage a smash and grab on a shipment of gold bullion is Turin is audacious and brilliantly executed. The sequence involving Mini Coopers weaving through the chaotic streets of the city is a masterclass in car chase choreography. And then when the police have been eluded Quincy Jones unveils the ace up his sleeve – ‘The Self-Preservation Society’. The Italian Job is more than just a heist film. It’s a time capsule of a bygone era, a celebration of 60s cool, and a testament to the power of a well-assembled cast and a killer soundtrack. It will make you want to drive around Italy lilting “On Days Like This, da da, da da, da da da da”.
Hollywood, the land of make-believe, has always walked a tightrope between reality and illusion. However, in recent years, the balance seems to have shifted dramatically.
I remember when this was a real picture of Ian McKellen saying I remember when this was all forced perspective
My jaw dropped when I saw a YouTube video showcasing VFX work done on The Wolf of Wall Street. I would have thought that Martin Scorsese was more or less immune to the world of green screen, but no, here were imaginary locations stitched together or created wholesale out of CGI. I had much the same reaction towards the vaunted grittiness of Joker, when behind the scenes footage showed great swathes of CGI being painted on the cityscape in the background because it wasn’t gritty enough. Physical sets, meticulously crafted by production designers like Guy Hendrix Dyas, and even costumes, painstakingly imagined by costume designers like Kym Barrett, are facing an existential threat: the ubiquitous green screen. This raises a crucial question – is the capturing of physical reality becoming a relic of the past in filmmaking? The allure of green screen is apparently irresistible because of its supposed cheapness. (This depends on outrageous working conditions for VFX artists as has become widely known now) It allows for the creation of fantastical worlds, impossible locations, and dazzling visual effects. Blockbusters like Avatar and Inception wouldn’t exist without it. However, this reliance comes at a cost. The meticulously built sets, painstakingly researched by production designers, become relegated to concept art that is inexpertly realised by stressed software jockeys. The tangible textures, subtle interplay of light and shadow on a physical costume: these elements that add key depth and realism to a scene are sacrificed for the sterile “perfection” of the green screen.
This decline in the importance of physical sets puts the future of production designers in question. Their skillset – the ability to translate a script’s vision into a tangible space, to breathe life into a fictional world through physical construction; to create, as Alex McDowell did for Fight Club, a building that appears to be decaying from the inside out, even as the narrator’s psyche similarly implodes – may seem increasingly redundant. But before we write their obituary, let’s consider a new technology that this seachange has almost made obsolete before it even arrived: drone photography. Drones offer a unique opportunity to capture breathtaking cinematic landscapes. Smaller and more nimble (and safer) than helicopters, they can get remarkably close to actors and then soar with astonishing speed into wide vistas. Imagine soaring above a rugged mountain range, or weaving between towering skyscrapers, in a low budget production that could never dream of hiring a helicopter rig: drone footage can add a sense of epic scale and immersive sweep to any scene. Recently the TV show Catch Me a Killer utilised drone photography to great effect. Showcasing the varied landscapes of South Africa as Micki hunted serial killers in several provinces, it helped give a sense of the geography of crime scenes, as well as providing great emotional impact to her nervous arrival at a particularly intimidating new police headquarters. These are the two uses I first wrote about when the BBC started using drones in documentaries: explaining geography, and depicting emotional isolation.
I remember when this was all forced perspective
This application of drone technology isn’t new. Shows like Supernatural and the second revival of The X-Files were using drones almost a decade ago to capture startling establishing shots, and provide a cinematic sweep to the simplest scenes of characters moving thru locations. Low budget feature films gratefully embraced them too. The enigmatic opening sequence of Don’t Breathe wouldn’t be the same without the drone’s unsettling slow descent through the dilapidated Detroit setting. So, why has drone cinematography seemingly stagnated in cinema since? The answer, much like the almost total abandonment of 3-D, lies in the extreme overreliance on green screen. When everything is shot on a green screen soundstage, there’s no physical location for a drone to showcase. The actors are adrift in a sea of pixels, and the vast landscapes they traverse are likely just as digitally generated as their weightless capes. (I’m looking at you, Doctor Strange) There’s a distinct difference between the visceral thrill of a drone soaring through a real canyon and the weightless, sterile feeling of a digitally created CGI simulation. Drone footage, when used judiciously, could ground the most fantastical story with a sense of physical reality. Just look at the difference between The Lord of the Rings, with its sweeping aerial photography locating its characters in rugged mountain landscapes hiding from a flock of Saruman’s scouting birds, and the overlit wall to wall CGI madness of The Hobbit’s escape in barrels down a river, leaving a thoroughly wasted potential tour de force.
The opening episodes of season 3 of SEAL Team set in Serbia set a new bar for action choreography with drone photography. But that was October 2019 and Covid prevented anyone really rising to its challenge for a while. Until Michael Bay, bored out of his mind during lockdown, decided to make one of his small personal movies, and went wild with drones. Ambulance can use drones because for the most part it is not shot on a green screen soundstage. At times Bay’s use of drones is vertigo-inducing as they dash across rooftops, start an establishing shot by falling down the side of a building and twisting about. (It also seems at times damn unsafe, as the drones shoot past actors in enclosed spaces at the speed of sound) But it is extremely telling that a man who loves to roll cars and blow stuff up is the one who rises to the challenge of using drone photography in cinema, because he can; because he is doing a lot of this stuff for real, in a physical location. The future of cinema must be about a return to reality. Green screen may allow for fantastical worlds, but without the foundation provided by physical sets or locations, those worlds feel hollow and derivative. A copy of a copy of a copy, so many swirling trash cans in the sky. Production designers are not digital set builders. Their irreplaceable skill set lies in crafting tangible worlds, imbued with texture and detail.
Costume designers too have a vital role to play in creating physical garments that translate to the screen with a depth and authenticity that CGI simply cannot match. People have spoken of the magical moment when an actor puts on the cape for the first time and the set goes silent as people suddenly behold Superman in their midst. By contrast poor old Benedict Cumerbatch is walking around with the knowledge that a weightless cape will be hurriedly added in post-production because that’s a better idea than actually designing and manufacturing and fitting a real cape for him to work with as Doctor Strange. And Tom Holland has been playing Spider-Man without the benefit of actually being able to look down at his body and see a red costume with a black spider logo. Ultimately, the magic of cinema lies in its ability to transport us – to make us believe in worlds both real and imagined. The point of Hollywood trickery was to fool the eye. Now our eyes are not fooled, but we are taken for fools by an industry that insists this is good enough. Nope. By embracing physical artistry and real locations, film-makers can continue to create experiences that resonate on a deeper level. The future of Hollywood may involve pixels, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of capturing the physical world that has always been the wellspring of cinematic truth. Without a return to reality, cinema risks becoming a mere shadow of its former self.
Watching Michael Palin recently, first on the trail of Hammershøi, and then sojourning in North Korea, made me remember the duelling Hemingway documentaries of the strange stressful summer of 2021.
They were only duelling because the BBC decided to re-run Palin’s 1999 documentary on Hemingway as they premiered Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS series. Palin’s documentary had originally been timed to mark the hundredth anniversary of Papa’s birth. Whereas Burns and Novick’s was merely ‘what’s next’ in their insatiable curiosity. Two documentary series tackling the same subject, but offering vastly different portrayals. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Hemingway takes an objective, historical approach; there is the inimitable Peter Coyote voiceover, the archive footage, the still photography, and the reading of letters by luminaries, including Jeff Daniels as the voice of Ernest Hemingway. Meanwhile Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure dispenses with any pretence to such objective journalism, displaying a characteristically personal touch; as Palin traverses continents to see what Hemingway saw, eat and drink what he ate and drank, and even wear what he wore, modelling Hemingway’s fashionable (sic) safari outfits, and in the process painting a surprisingly likeable picture of the often-gruff author. And to say other people found him gruff is putting it mildly…
Burns and Novick delve deeply into Hemingway’s turbulent life. They don’t shy away from his eventually terminal struggles with depression, his multiple failed marriages, or his obvious alcoholism. The result is a complex, deeply unflattering portrait. It is hard to stomach the vainglory of the peacocking ‘wise old man’ of A Moveable Feast recording himself in his youth in Paris as having said to himself – “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know” – from the same man who deliberately did not report the reality of the conduct of the Spanish Civil War, even as he propagandised for the Communists, because he was hoarding their atrocities for his novel on the topic. Truth 0 – For Whom the Bell Tolls 1. We see Hemingway as a man capable of great cruelty and emotional neglect in his treatment of women. He persistently starts affairs and is out the door on one wife before she knows that he’s in the door with the next. This historical lens is crucial for understanding the man behind the myth, but it leaves viewers with a sense of Hemingway as a deeply flawed and deeply unpleasant figure. This is the Hemingway that Lillian Hellman memorably records her partner Dashiel Hammett as losing all patience with at a New York table. As Hemingway bloviates about his experiences in Spain, his great knowledge of Spain, and war, and love, and literature, and truth, and really just his general awesomeness, he eventually ends up at a highly Seinfeldian place of feats of strength: Belligerently insisting the other male diners prove their virility by matching his bending of a fork. Hammett exasperatedly sighs, “I probably couldn’t do that now. But when I could do things like that, I did them for Pinkerton money. Why don’t you go roll a hoop in the park?”
Palin, on the other hand, brings his own adventurous spirit and infectious enthusiasm to the table. He retraces Hemingway’s footsteps, travelling to the places that shaped the author’s life and work, asking random people at bullfights in Spain about their knowledge of Hemingway, and talking to people who drank with him in Cuba about their memories. Palin doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects, but his approach is more personal, almost conversational. He seems genuinely fascinated by Hemingway, finding humour and camaraderie in the writer’s larger-than-life persona. Whereas Burns and Novick wring their hands over all the head injuries; and indeed as good as imply that Hemingway’s diminished literary power and increased depressive episodes were related to the endless concussions; Palin recreates an early (actually quite Pythonesque) accident in Paris into a delirious comic set piece of flushing the skylight, as it were. This personal connection shines through. Palin highlights Hemingway’s love for landscape, his passion for bullfighting, and his deep affection for drinking companions. We see a man restlessly seeking adventure, deeply affected by war, and who craved a simpler life. Palin’s own charm softens Hemingway, making him more endearing than he really was. The contrasting approaches raise interesting questions about whether complete objectivity is possible. Palin’s series acknowledges the established facts but adds a layer of personal interpretation, and whimsy, making Hemingway feel less like a historical figure and more like a flawed friend. This doesn’t erase the darkness, but viewers see the man behind the myth with a more sympathetic eye, because Palin is not trying to see all sides of the man. When you find out that Hemingway was very short-sighted in Burns and Novick, you wonder when Palin is in the savannah how the hell Papa ever shot anything, and then Palin demonstrates the pocket for glasses that he needed, but avoided wearing in public…
Hemingway, the macho macho man. It is very easy to tire of Hemingway’s bombast and braggadocio, especially when his hypocrisy is held up to scrutiny. Ultimately, both series offer valuable insights into Hemingway’s life and work. Burns and Novick give us the warts-and-all portrait of a literary giant, while Palin’s more personal lens allows us to follow in his footsteps. One doesn’t negate the other; they offer complementary perspectives. For my own part I couldn’t help but think that it was the crucial moment of reading Hemingway that made the difference between the two approaches. Palin had to read A Farewell for Arms as a teenager for school, and in some ways he still is the enthusiastic teenager, forty years later, following his literary idol into far flung places – immortalised in trademarked prose. The explosion of a very adult world of sex and war, told in clipped, repetitive, stylised language, dripping with macho affectation and cynicism, into a 1950s schoolboy’s existence is easy to understand as the kind of intervention that lastingly shapes a worldview.
For my own part I had to read The Sun Also Rises for college, and was nonplussed by it and some short stories. Whereas Palin was wowed by Hemingway’s macho nonsense, I was left cold by it after my secondary school years spent watching reruns of The Avengers. John Steed is a very different model of being a man than Ernest Hemingway ™. To continue the bizarre association of ideas (it was a strange and stressful summer as I may have mentioned before), that show also depicted Steed & Mrs Peel as inseparable and equal, and I was revisiting it in 2021 with The Engineer, even as Burns and Novick’s rigorous documentary produced an increasing loathing from me towards Hemingway, especially how he treated women. The war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wanted to be an equal partner. Hemingway preferred slavish devotion in a wife. Friedrich Bagel and I have been having the same argument about Hemingway v Fitzgerald in coffee shops and restaurants from the IFI to Petanque for nearly two decades now. I felt maybe he was right and I had misjudged Hemingway after a revelatory adaptation of The Sun Also Rises at the 2012 Dublin Theatre Festival. So I read A Moveable Feast, and enjoyed it. And then I read A Farewell to Arms, and struggled to get thru the celebrated first chapter about as many times as Hemingway redrafted the damn thing. To me, the man had already lurched into self-parody of his style in his second major novel. And that’s before we get to the ‘character’ of Catherine Barkley, who Richard Yates justly derided in his workshops as the type of masturbatory fantasy his students should aspire not to write. I think Palin produces an endearing Hemingway because he himself is so nice. Whereas Burns and Novick produce a not very pleasant Hemingway because they are not invested.
But if you are invested, you are invested. Friedrich Bagel is invested in Hemingway. I am invested in Scott Fitzgerald. And so the argument goes on. Both are important. Both drank too much and led semi-disastrous lives. But we all still have to wrestle with the writing styles of both.
It has been 75 years since an inimitable theme was first picked out on a zither and a glorious cameo and a piece of ad lib escaped from a film and took on a life of their own.
In the bombed out Vienna of 1949 Carol Reed’s masterpiece, The Third Man, unfolds. It’s a film noir drenched in moral ambiguity. The unconventional score by Anton Karas, a jaunty melody played on a zither, but capable of infinite variations ranging from violence to romance, sets the tone perfectly. Its melancholic strains weave through the narrative, a constant reminder of the city’s, and the characters’, shattered state.
Reed, a master of suspense, utilizes camera angles to heighten the film’s sense of unease. Dutched shots distort perspectives, reflecting the warped realities presented to Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a writer who arrives in Vienna only to find his old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), is being buried. As Holly delves deeper into the mystery surrounding Harry’s demise, the camera placement, often on extreme close-ups, reflects his bewilderment an outsider, a naive American thrust into a world of moral decay, surrounded by people speaking German, and three other official languages beside; all part of the fractured state of post-war Vienna.
The bombed-out buildings of Vienna are more than just a disorienting backdrop; where characters go out a window and somehow run up rubble to get to a higher street. They are a physical manifestation of the moral ruin that permeates the film. Harry Lime, initially sketched in memoriam by Holly as a charming rogue, is revealed to be a ruthless black marketeer profiting from the suffering of others. Trevor Howard’s officer, first introduced with a villain’s sinister shiny leather overcoat, is not a villain; but his willingness to use pressure points on innocent people to get what he wants certainly puts him right on the dangerous edge. That is of course screenwriter Graham Greene’s self-described home turf. The city’s crumbling infrastructure becomes a symbol of the collapse of traditional values, when even the Soviet officer shrugs his shoulders to the British officer at doing the wrong thing because what else can one do in a place like this.
As Holly unravels the truth, he is forced to confront the story he told himself to make his world make sense. Initially blinded by loyalty, he eventually recognizes the depth of Harry’s depravity. This journey is beautifully portrayed by Cotten, who captures Holly’s transformation from a wide-eyed innocent to a disillusioned man in a sense performing moral outrage to one who is then forced to choose between friendship and morality when it turns out moral outrage isn’t something you shout from the rooftops it’s something that weighs you down; even to the depths.
The spectre of Orson Welles hangs heavy over this film, even though his screen time is startingly limited. His inimitable voice imbues Harry Lime with an unforgettable charisma; which led to a strange afterlife for the character in a radio drama where he was reinvented as a sort of antihero – and whose scripts even gave rise to Welles’ somewhat addled film Mr Arkadin. Harry makes no bones about his activities; leading to the much quoted ‘Cuckoo clock’ speech. And even when he has crossed the line in cinema, killing someone sympathetic onscreen, a flicker of charm remains, a testament to Welles’ captivating performance and Graham Greene’s masterfully written script which gives us Reed’s indelible image of Welles’ fingers reaching thru a sewer grating into the street, tasting freedom but unable to grasp it, before a moment of acquiescence and strange mercy.
I jest. It wasn’t lost, just unknown to me. ‘Palin Night’ the other week on BBC FOUR featured a 2005 documentary in which the intrepid Python sallied forth to try and fill in the mysterious blank of the personal life of Vilhelm Hammershøi. Only to find that Hammershøi really was a very private person. The enigmatic paintings where often the rooms are empty or the people are turned away from the artist’s gaze were revealed to be of a piece with the man himself. Did he really get embarrassed painting nudes? Did he partake in his brother-in-law’s exuberant naturist artists’ retreats by the coast? We can’t really say for certain. But the journey into obscurity was very pleasant. I had almost forgotten, despite reading his esteemed book on the Erebus, just how good a documentary presenter Michael Palin was. The mix of politeness whimsy and doggedness, the drive to cover the actual terrain in question and to soak in the impressions that would have washed over Hammershøi, to talk to experts and random people about him. It was very nice to find a new Palin, if you will, all these years later. I can’t understand how I had never heard of it before. I can only assume it was beyond my ken in the realm of BBC FOUR, and then not repeated since that paragon of informative television swam into my ken.
The Bowdlerising of the Woosters
“We at Penguin Random House fervently oppose these attempts at censorship because we believe that books make us better, and students in particular deserve access to a wide range of perspectives.” That at least was the story given out… This same Penguin company that so nobly opposes book bans in American libraries is itself simultaneously silently censoring the work of PG Wodehouse. And the thing about censoring is that once you start the habit, it can be dashed hard to leave off. It’s not hard to see that soon Tuppy Glossop’s very name, nevermind his estranged fiance’s crack about his night-time trips to the pantry in Right Ho, Jeeves, will get the chop for being fatphobic and body shaming and contrary to body positivity. Because why not? After all, this is all done from the best of intentions, right? This guff is just exhausting. I am lucky I already own most of the Wodehouse books I want to. But gone are the carefree days of strolling into a book shop and grabbing any edition of a Wodehouse classic. From now on you have to be wary. Crack open a copy printed after 2014, and you might find some nameless editor has been a latter-day Bowdler with the text. It’s just embarrassing at this point to remember the Penguin Popular Classics of the 90s proudly proclaiming their texts to be complete and unabridged. This is Cultural Austerity. Taking away something we love, and chiding us that we have sinned. And it is actually – harmful. Apparently the only perspective we don’t deserve is that of the past. The mental habit of catastrophising is all around us, and it is only enabled by this. “This is the worst things have ever been!” Well, no. If you want proof, look at the past, we have come a long way since then. If you rob us of the past, you rob us of the appreciation of progress made, which makes it impossible to conceive of possible progress in the future. I propose a new tagline for Penguin: Censored by Cowards.
Mirror, Mirar
“Nobody could have predicted this”, say literally only people who could not have predicted this. Sigh. The New York-Dublin portal was an art installation aiming to be a beacon of transatlantic connection. And it connected people alright, just the kind of people who like to flash strangers and hold up photos of atrocities to their victims. Harry Crosbie, bless his bluntness, pointed out the obvious – the portal would have fared better on College Green or St. Stephen’s Green. But Paschal Donohoe insisted there were no problems in the North inner city. Ignore the visual evidence of the November Riots, when the image of a burning bus just a stone’s throw from the portal’s location was beamed around the globe. The first step to fixing a problem is to admit there is a problem. God help any attempts to get the city centre less unpleasant than it currently is with the likes of Paschal decrying those who dare criticise his misbehaving constituents.
B. Bradley Bradlee, roving ambassador and newspaperman, has come out of semi-retirement in Cádiz to cover the 2024 Presidential Campaign in the USA. He has been travelling with South Dakota governor Kristi Noem during her disastrous promotional tour for her memoir No Going Back, and presents this exclusive interview; which became more of a tone poem intoned as sleep talk after the Governor ingested an unwise combination of Ambien and vodka after a particularly stressful interview on Fox News.
Yeah, I’m losing my slot.
I’m losing my slot.
The guys are coming up from behind.
I’m losing my slot.
I’m losing my slot to the guys from Ohio and North Dakota.
But I was there.
I was there in 1987.
I was there at the Reagan speech in Berlin.
I’m losing my slot.
I’m losing my slot to the guys whose footsteps I hear when I get asked about dogs.
I’m losing my slot thanks to the Internet seekers who can tell me every policy I was not involved with from 1992 to 2024.
I’m losing my slot.
To all the guys in Bismarck and Oberlin.
I’m losing my slot to the hillbilly Senator in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.
But I’m losing my slot.
I’m losing my slot, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.
I was there in 1987 at the first Reagan practices in a suite in Berlin City.
I was working on the German sounds with much patience.
I was there when Reagan first thought about how to stick it to the birthmark man.
I told him, “Don’t do it that way. You’ll never make it stick.”
I was there.
I was the first one saying Tear Down This Wall to the staffers.
I said it at supper in Borchardt’s.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I’ve never been wrong.
But I’m losing my slot to really, very fine people in both states, with better ideas and more talent.
And they’re actually really, really nice.
I’m losing my slot.
I hear every donor that they know is more relevant than every donor that I know.
I’m losing my slot.
You don’t know what you want.
It was just a dog.
B. Bradley Bradlee is the fictional editor emeritus of The New York Times. He is a contributing writer for the German weekly Die Emmerich-Zeitung.
FilmFour has been showing the first Mission: Impossible movie a lot recently and I decided to check it out after watching two seasons of the original television series on Legend.
Brian De Palma’s 1996 blockbuster shows that the idea of alienating your built-in audience by subverting expectations has been going for quite some time now. I only recently discovered that Peter Graves was offered the opportunity to reprise his already once-reprised role as the team leader Jim Phelps, and not only refused when he realised he would be playing the villain, but then went on CNN to decry the film-makers’ for their disrespect. It is quite the slap in the face for fans of the show for Phelps to die along with all but one of his team (sic) in the first half hour of the movie. Especially given that Phelps’ team hardly ever had someone caught or killed during the lengthy run of the 60s show and its shorter 80s revival. But to then resurrect the character, just to unmask him as the villain who killed his own team, and have Henry Czerny’s spymaster drip irony all over the sentence “Good morning Mister Phelps” is a slap in the face with a wet fish.
With the distance of nearly thirty years it’s noteworthy that the standout sequence of the movie is also the most practical. In a series now renowned for its practical stunts it’s hard to imagine the helicopter in the Chunnel sequence being imagined and shot in the same way as in the 90s when CGI was only enhancing reality rather than replacing it outright. The influence of the show is felt most in the cold open, which calls back to many moments where someone is broken by faking a reality around them, and then in the Langley heist. This is where a double mirror comes into play. The intricate planning sequences, complete with technical demonstrations and lengthy largely silent capers, evoke the style of mid-century French crime thrillers. Think Rififi and Le Cercle Rouge, and in between the Rififi director’s English language Topkapi. And as the heist in the film Topkapi was a major influence on Mission: Impossible creator Bruce Geller’s thinking on how to present intricate heists, switches, and escapes every week in the limited time available on television it is quite something to see the film adaptation of his work so directly return to the source with Topkapi‘s heist which is also derailed by a small animal running amok.
The film’s score, composed by Danny Elfman, is another interesting point of comparison to later installments. Elfman, as is so often the case, has rhythm, but not a truly memorable melody. And he stubbornly refuses to use the memorable melody he has as part of the IP he’s working on. In the big ‘trailer moment’ when Tom Cruise dynamites an aquarium to make good his escape from a Prague restaurant the music swells to Elfman’s original melody. Much in the way that Jon Ottman’s score for Superman Returns andMichael Giacchino’s music for the Star Trek reboot shy away from utilising the iconic themes already associated with those franchises in favour of their own patently inferior melodic inventions. In Mission: Impossible‘s case, Elfman incorporates Lalo Schifrin’s legendary television theme at the end of the Langley sequence and the Chunnel sequence but is otherwise reluctant to engage with one of the greatest melodies of the past sixty years. By contrast Lorne Balfe opted to showcase Schifrin’s incredibly versatile secondary theme ‘The Plot’ in Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
But is the film confusing? Knowing the twists and having it seen a number of times it doesn’t seem that confusing. But at the time certainly it was perceived as such. And it was incredibly unnecessary. It’s an artefact of a 90s sub-trend for over-plotting what should be remarkably simple enterprises. The Phantom Menace and its gibberish about trade treaties is another lowlight. Oscar Wilde said that plot existed to give characters the opportunity to say witty things. In a Mission: Impossible film the plot only needs to make enough sense to get from one elaborate set piece to the next. Something that really only seemed to be realised when Christopher McQuarrie started writing for the franchise. And then you realise that Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, his first uncredited contribution, has two people being fooled into believing a meeting took place between them that never occurred. While in the 60s show Martin Landau’s master of disguise Rollin Hand plays both an assured molehunter and a nervous whistleblower to convince two people that they have been working together when they in fact have never even met thanks to his intercepting the crucial briefing document and switching out a photo for his own. A fan of the show has entered the building!
It could be said the film series came into its own only when it showed love for the television show.
Talking Movies 