Cinema and Television

CINEMA AND TELEVISION Published Research (March 2013 to today) and Reviews (February 2 to December 18, 2016) Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU Cinema and television have become obsessions in me over the years and today with the large flat screen we have, with a universal, all zone and all standard DVD reader we can access all the films that are available in the whole world on a digital medium. In the following pages, which are more a book than a paper, I have brought together all the full studies published at Amazon Kindle or on Academia.edu (these studies are extensive and I only give the presentation and the front page of them. Then I have collected all the reviews published on various sites, particularly various Amazon national branches over about the last eleven months. Be sure I also have plenty of music, operas, books and other cultural artifacts in the field of research and reviews (I just finished a 13,000 word article on Benjamin Britten’s operas), plus creative writing (the lastest poetry volume is An Untellable Story, A Dramatic Confession, The Nineteen stations of Saraphic Love, Amazon Kindle, ASIN B00UP4CX88) and at the same time I go on with my basic research on the phylogeny of language with Homo Sapiens over the last 250,000 years, plus the psychogenetics of language in our modern world from before birth to adult age. For you to be able to find what is in this volume I have built a full table of contents with hyperlinks. Have a good navigation. Olliergues, France, December 22, 2016  Table des matières Jacques Coulardeau, Ivan Eve & Supernatural at Amazon (5) 5 Jacques Coulardeau & Lars von Trier at Academia.edu (36) 8 Jacques Coulardeau & Tim Burton at Academia.edu (42) 10 TIM BURTON – SEVENTEEN FILMS A VOYAGE TO EREWHYNA INSTEAD OF EREWHON 10 Jacques Coulardeau & Sweeney Todd at Academia.edu (43) 13 Sweeney Todd For Ever 13 Jacques Coulardeau & Timothy Olyphant at Academia.edu (45) 16 Jacques Coulardeau & Dexter at Academia.edu (46) 19 Jacques Coulardeau, Stephen King & Under the Dome at Academia.edu (59) 25 Jacques Coulardeau & Harry Potter at Academia.edu (64) 28 Daniel Radcliffe in Equus on Broadway 29 Jacques Coulardeau and Bruno Dumont at Academia.edu & Slideshare.net (66) 31 MISCELANEOUS FROM FEBRUARY 2 TO DECEMBER 18, 2016 32 LÉA FAZER – MAESTRO – 2014 32 XAVIER DOLAN – IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD – JUSTE LA FIN DU MONDE – 2016 33 KEN BURNS – PBS – THE CIVIL WAR – 1990 36 BRASSENS LA MAUVAISE RÉPUTATION – 2011 51 THE RED RIDING TRILOGY – 1974, 1980, 1983 – 2009 52 MICHEL PICCOLI & ROMY SCHNEIDER – LA PASSANTE DU SANS SOUCI – 1982 – BASÉ SUR LE ROMAN DE JOSEPH KESSEL – 1936 53 ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA – 1997 54 GEORGE CLOONEY – MONEY MONSTER – 2016 56 ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA – 1997 57 LANA WACHOWSKI & LILLY WACHOWSKI – THE MATRIX – 1999 – MATRIX RELOADED – 2003 - MATRIX REVOLUTIONS – 2003 58 FRITZ LANG – DIE NIBELUNGEN – SIEGFRIED – KRIEMHILDS RACHE– 1924 64 DR.DRE – EASZY-E – ICE CUBE – MC REN – DJ YELLA – STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON – 2015 66 JACK CLAYTON – THE INNOCENTS – 1961 67 FRINGE – 2008 70 THE COMPLETE THIN BLUE LINE – ROWAN ATKINSON – 1995/2001 72 STEPHEN KING – UNDER THE DOME – TV SERIES – SEASON 1 – 2013 73 STEPHEN KING – UNDER THE DOME – TV SERIES – SEASON 2 – 2014 75 STEPHEN NKING – UNDER THE DOME – TV SERIES – SEASON 3 – 2015 77 J.R.R. TOLKIEN – THE HOBBIT – TRILOGY – AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, 2012 – THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, 2013 – THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES, 2014 78 The novel WAS a masterpiece, 81 Tolkien's masterpiece deserves better, 22 December 2012 81 DEADPOOL – 2016 83 LEONARDO DICAPRIO – THE REVENANT – 2016 84 MULDER AND SCULLY – THE X FILES – SERIES 1993-2002 – X FILES THE FILM 1998 – X FILES I WANT TO BELIEVE 2008 85 MA LOUTE – SLACK BAY – 2016 88 QUENTIN TARANTINO – THE HATEFUL EIGHT – 2015 92 TONY PARSONS – MAN AND BOY – 1999 92 ALAN RICKMAN – SIGOURNEY WEAVER – CARRIE ANNE MOSS – SNOWCAKE – 2006 97 COEN BROTHERS – CLOONEY – HAIL CAESAR – 2016 99 STEVEN SPIELBERG – BRIDGE OF SPIES – 2015 100 LES INNOCENTES – THE INNOCENTS – AGNUS DEI – 2016 102 MATT DAMON – RIDLEY SCOTT – THE MARTIAN – 2015 104 SPOTLIGHT – 2015 105 Illustrations cover page and last page Annunzio Coulardeau  Jacques Coulardeau, Ivan Eve & Supernatural at Amazon (5) SUPERNATURAL, CAR CHASE OR JOY RIDE? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan EVE Illustrations Annunzio COULARDEAU CHAPTER ONE, The Tale of Two Brothers and Their Impala 67 CHAPTER TWO, Hitting The Road CHAPTER THREE, They “Are The Hollow Men” CHAPTER FOUR, Their Number Is 666 CHAPTER FIVE, And Cain did not slay Abel APPENDICES: SUPERNATURAL IS LEADING TO SO MANY THINGS - ELAINE PAGELS – REVELATIONS, VISIONS, PROPHECY, & POLITICS IN THE BOOK OF REVELATION; - ERNEST ALFRED THOMPSON WALLIS BUDGE – LEGENDS OF THE GODS, THE EGYPTIAN TEXTS; - BRIAN DE PALMA – RAISING CAIN; - PROPHECY COLES – THE IMPORTANCE OF SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS; - JOHN STEI NBECK – EAST OF EDEN; - ELIA KAZAN – JAMES DEAN – EAST OF EDEN; - TV SERIES – EAST OF EDEN – 1981; - JAMES DEAN – GIANT; -JAMES DEAN – REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE And we went down into the mental maze of this American series that turns the car into the supreme weapon to correct the Creation of God of all the mishaps it went through and all the monsters God himself created along with all the rest. What a sloppy achievement for God and what a reckless endeavor for the producers of the series! And the project of the authors was so phenomenal that it could not in any way go through academic acceptance. The endeavor was supported though for a while by some academic master minds in the field of American series but it could not survive a university reading committee in a public university that was looking for the American-ness of American TV series. This series is far beyond hamburgers, Coca Cola and Bourbon. Miles on the other side of the border of suburban American middle class comfort or mild psychosis. Thriving or smoldering in the outer space of standard normality or even digestible crime. © Jacques COULARDEAU, Ivan EVE, Annunzio COULARDEAU KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING Amazon.com/.co.uk/.fr/.de/.it/.es/etc. Publisher: Editions La Dondaine; 1st edition (March 28, 2013) ASIN: B00C3ODA0S Publication Date: March 28, 2013 $7.25 EUR 6,50 Jacques Coulardeau & Lars von Trier at Academia.edu (36) LARS VON TRIER TEN TITLES ELEVEN FILMS OR SERIES AN OVERLOOK POLITICALLY CONTROVERSIAL OR SEXUALLY AND EXPERIENTIALLY PARANOID ANTISEMITE OR SOCIALLY IRRESPONSIBLE Dr Jacques COULARDEAU https://www.academia.edu/15315513/LARS_VON_TRIER_AN_OVERLOOK In the cinema I am trying to find out if Marshall MacLuhan was right and what he would say in front of global and universal virtual communication. Would he accept the idea that the cinema or TV camera is only the extension of the human eye? I think he could say a telescope or a microscope are extensions of the human eyr, but the cinema or TV camera (is it the same in both cases?) is the extension of a lot more. Editing, acting, stage and decor designing, music and sound and many other artistic elements do not make this camera a simple extension of the human eye but of the human mind and of the human imagination. It is a lot more than an eye, artificial or not. It is a door to unpredictable communication with the world. What does it mean for the human subject? Lars von Trier is special in that direction. He projects onto his films a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome of a great originality. He is not able to overcome the idea that man is evil, sinful and that all men and women are dominated, manipulated and commanded by a criminal mind. Is Lars von Trier the apostle of the human slaves, the human beings enslaved to their desires, ambitions, crimes, criminal delights and murderous lust? Lars von Trier is obsessed by sin, death, punishment, and all his films always come to that kind of an end: someone is punished for the evil doing of humanity, or of some people around the main character. We could understand that stance if it came from some sectarian fundamentalist, for example of the Christian Born Again in Jesus Christ, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons or some other affiliation of the Christian faith, not to speak of other religions. That makes some collaborations surprising like the one with Stephen King because Stephen King is strongly optimistic about the future of the world because he believes human beings can face and probably control any nasty negative and morbid situation. In the Dark Tower what is important is not that the last page is the same as the first but that all along the members of the team of adventurous volunteers led by a gunslinger have always been able to step over any difficulty and painful task. Editions La Dondaine, Olliergues, Sep 1, 2015 Research Interests: Future Studies, German Studies, Marshall McLuhan, Original Sin, Guilt,Future of humanity, WW2, Global Village, and Seven Capital Sins Jacques Coulardeau & Tim Burton at Academia.edu (42) TIM BURTON – SEVENTEEN FILMS A VOYAGE TO EREWHYNA INSTEAD OF EREWHON https://www.academia.edu/17238393/TIM_BURTON_SEVENTEEN_FILMS_A_VOYAGE_TO_EREWHYNA_INSTEAD_OF_EREWHON Dr Jacques Coulardeau Abstract: The only question we may ask when watching so many films by one film maker covering a thirty year period is about the existential meaning of the whole set.  First let me tell you I do not give a damn about the film maker’s personality or personal data. That he had a bad or good youth with a father who was loving or terrifying;, and a mother who was evanescent or over powering is of no concern to me though we could say hat the  virtual “author” of these films obviously has an existential problematic relation with life and death. He will, I guess, excuse his morbidity, his cultish liking of death, his depressive black humor by saying he is a Halloween author. That would be short indeed. That would neglect the audience. The public, and mostly children when the films are not restricted or are Walt Disney films, are bombarded with gruesome juicy corpses in any state of decay, with frightening scaring traumatizing supernatural beings from the other side of life: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, witches and so many other curse-throwers and curse-catchers as if cursing your neighbors was nothing but a game of baseball. But in the end does Tim Burton have a vision of society that could be explained to anyone? I am afraid not. In the name of extreme black somber humor he criticizes, vandalizes and victimizes anything and anyone supposedly sacred in this society, except mind you anything really religious. In other words these horror or suspense stories are the stories of a very faithful choirboy, or choirgirl if they could have girls in that function, who has never been able to take his robes down, probably because that is his only vestment, clothing and he is nude and prudish underneath. In other words these stories, be they morbid, humorous or simply gruesome, are nothing but the expression of his total nudity under his superficial existential circumstantial diapers. He hides behind such ugly stories and tries – at times fails – to make people laugh at his funeral corpselike mind. [...] Research Interests: Terrorism, Horror Film, Horror Cinema, Frankenstein, Werewolves - Trials and Theoretical Demonology, The Fantastic, Clown, Funny Games,Fantastic Literature, Clowning, Funny People, Dracula, The Thriller Genre, Funny, Thrillers, Debunking History, Farces, and Pastiche Villain Discussion https://www.academia.edu/s/47abc1dd41 Can there be any sense in this farcical grotesque pastiche showered onto the innocently perverse world? Tim Burton turns the whole world into a funeral parlor. And even Alice in Wonderland becomes under his fingers a story of death, of dying, of getting their heads off not with laughter but with an axe. Doesn’t he know that such obsessive references could become traumatic for some children who would experience all that as a symbolical castration? In fact he knows and he must think that these boys and girls who will lose their phalluses (because even girls have phalluses according to Jacques Lacan) in contact with such stories definitely deserve that loss because they have no stamina, no courage, no daring crazy enterprising sense of adventure. If they do not like his stories – must he think – let them get to C.S. Lewis instead of Lewis Carroll Burton. So enjoy hunting the Snark in these pages and you might find a truffle here and there if you have the nose for such nice black tubers, but are they tubers really?  Jacques Coulardeau & Sweeney Todd at Academia.edu (43) Sweeney Todd For Ever https://www.academia.edu/18715858/Sweeney_Todd_For_Ever Abstract: THE BARBER WITH INSPIRED RAZORS He is the sword of God, the fire of hell and the punishment of all your sins and crimes, you, the middle men of the financial moral and hypocritical dictatorship of some kind of aristocracy. That film would have been loved by the hardliners of the communist revolution who would not have seen the poetry but who would have only excogitated in a rush and considered in no time at all the social and political justice in this revolutionary barber who cleans up society in its own blood and feeds the flesh of his own crime to the gullibility and greedy hunger of the masses. If you are not convinced about the poetry, the justice and the revolutionary meaning of this Sweeney Todd, just listen to his hymn, gospel and blues to his own razors. These are my friends.  See how they glisten.  See this one shine,  How he smiles in the light.  My friend, my faithful friend.  Speak to me friend,  Whisper, I’ll listen.  I know, I know –  You’ve been locked out of sight  All these years –  Like me, my friend.  Well, I’ve come home  To find you waiting.  Home,  And we’re together,  And we’ll do wonders,  Won’t we? Research Interests: Criminal Justice, Cannibalism, Judicial Precedent, Serial killers (Anthropology), Corruption, Razors, Social Injustice, Human Flesh Searches,Epistemic Injustice, Meat and meat consumption, Pies, Justice for All, and The Razors Edge Discussion https://www.academia.edu/s/da25529112 Here we are dealing with a famous myth of serial killing in the name of vengeance, hence perfectly sane and calculated, though it gets out of hand after a while. What interests me in such a case is how the fascination for such crimes and criminals developed in the 19th century, rather at the end pf it. Edgar Allan Poe was still considered as horror, maybe suspense, more than serial killing or crime literature. My question is then to know if this interest in crime is to be connected with a certain development of society or with a certain evolution of human psyche. This means that recent terrorist attacks could be seen in two different ways: either the resurgence of mass violence which was common several centuries ago in feudal or ancient civilizations that were not quite civilized in our modern meaning; or it is the result of the present level of development of western society that incites people who disagree in a way or another with some values or customs (and some of these can be negative and bad, like alcoholism, drug addiction or sexual promiscuity) of these various western cultures to become serial killers, to become multiple killers, to become mass murderers. I have not yet chosen which. And they might be other solutions you may suggest.  Jacques Coulardeau & Timothy Olyphant at Academia.edu (45) TIMOTHY OLYPHANT – JUSTIFED https://www.academia.edu/19893585/TIMOTHY_OLYPHANT_JUSTIFED Abstract: The whole question I am concerned about is whether a TV series, any TV series can be analyzed only at the purely technical, filming, shooting and editing, level or if it can be dealt with as a work of fiction that has to be considered like any work of fiction, as seriously as we would consider Shakespeare or Walt Whitman. I am not satisfied with all such technical approaches that only speak of ellipses and flash backs and flash forwards and the angle of the take or the camera, the zooming details and movements. I am not satisfied with those who consider a TV series, since it has to be popular, as having to be banal, hollow, void, meaningless and not being able to be analyzed the way any other work of fiction would and should be analyzed. I deeply agree with the practice of Great Britain where an actor can – and must or at least is recommended to – have a parallel career on the stage, for TV and for the cinema. I regret the USA do not have that practice. We know the result when we compare British series and American series. What’s more I don’t see why so many directors – and critics – consider film directors cannot direct a TV series, and they generally concede Twin Peaks as being an exception of a rather marginal man in the world of television. That’s grotesque. I watched all these seasons in one go, two episodes per night and I summarized some general ideas only at the end. It is thus a living experience of this series and I think that’s how TV has to be taken, as a living experience. It is not because Dexter was killed – was he really killed – in his TV series that the author Jeff Lindsay does not have the right to keep him alive and to go on with his adventures. And we had already been used with such discrepancies between the TV series and the novel series.  Yet a series has a problem with its end. It has to come to an end in some kind of flourish, fireworks, fanfare, brilliant twist. Prison Breaks is one of the best as for that, and yet two years later they are speaking of bringing it back to the screen. How are they going to revive the main character? The actor is available but the character was buried. Sir Conan Doyle has already done that with his Sherlock Holmes that he killed at least once and nearly killed several times to just bring him back to life to satisfy public demand. That was literature you are going to say, and then what! Maybe TV series are also fiction. Let me tell you here that I find it funny when some pretend to deal with history in fictional series and to have a good historian as a guarantee that all they say in the series is pure history, like Un Village Français by Frédéric Krivine and the retired university professor Jean-Pierre Azéma who found a juicy supplement to his retirement instead of teaching a few years more (65 is the sacred age at which all researchers have to retire in France, even in medicine, so that some just move to the USA to go on with their scientific work). Sorry to deceive you Mr Krivine, either you are an author and you respect the rules of fiction, and you work for television and you respect the rules of TV series and that goes against anything having to do with historical truth, especially since there is no truth, there are only points of view and Jean-Pierre Azéma is just one point-of-viewer among many others; or you are a historian and then you should be teaching your point og view about history to some university students. We are not watching your series to have any historical truth, sorry point of view, hammered into our thick skulls. Luckily, otherwise they would reinvent the Bible. Research Interests: Drugs And Addiction, Southern Studies (U.S. South), Drugs and drug culture, Cinema, Series TV, Kentucky History, Moonshine, Marihuana,Company Coal Towns in eastern Kentucky, Heroin, Alcohol Addiction, Whisky, The Deep South, History of Kentucky, Political Affiliation and Gangsterism, and Timothy Olyphant  Jacques Coulardeau & Dexter at Academia.edu (46) DEXTER EIGHT BOOKS AND EIGHT SEASONS AND THE AUTHOR IS PROUD HE MANAGED TO KILL DEXTER IN THE MOST AWKWARD WAY POSSIBLE LIKE A REAL AMATEURISH ASSASSIN ! ! ! Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Dexter's Death is a Cope Out https://www.academia.edu/20039818/Dexters_Death_is_a_Cope_Out I discovered Dexter on bus stops in Paris. Advertisements for the series. I was curious. I got the omnibus, the first three novels. Then I was infested and I ordered the first four seasons or so and all the books and since then the sequels and new seasons. I have lost some mental weight with him but I think he is becoming slightly too religious in his sixth season, and what’s more very one-sided, or should I say three-sided? I am not sure since the three religions behind it all come from the same melting pot. What is interesting is the idea that some people have a dark passenger who makes them kill, and that dark passenger is a guest that comes in when a child is traumatized in a way or another in his/her very young age. That’s slightly simple minded. But that creates a good character for a thriller, especially when one of these criminals with dark passengers has been trained or retrained – in order to be refrained – into only killing people who deserve to die because they are evil. I have already seen that in Anne Rice’s vampires, witches and recently werewolves. But what is evil, great master? Evil is what I consider evil, though killing is what makes me full, gives me happiness, and what’s more it replaces any kind of enjoyment. This darkly-inhabited social protector comes, or should I write cums, by killing and in killing. The rest is nothing but blah blah to feel better, though he will never tell anyone. And imagine your own sister seeing you in the act ! ! ! Yum, yum, I like that indeed. And pass me the knife over and pass me the salt over and pass me the red blood over.  Unluckily it got short lived on TV with its eighth season when he gets “killed” and in fact escape punishment. But he also gets killed in the eighth book and this time sloppily, rapidly, urgently. Killed, disposed of and liquidated. The author is obviously bored with his character and since a character is expendable, let’s kill him and forget about it Shame on you! No author gas that divine right of life and death! Research Interests: Sociology of Crime and Deviance, Trauma Studies, Police, Psychopathology, Brotherhood, Serial killers (Anthropology), Psychopathy, Florida Archaeology, Post traumatic stress disorder, Serial killers, Florida history, Blood, PTSS, Florida Everglades, Psychological Implications and role of sisters and brothers on identity, and Miami  Jacques Coulardeau & Downton Abbey at Academia.edu (51) DOWNTON ABBEY, BRITISH TO THE DEEPEST ROOTS https://www.academia.edu/22428790/DOWNTON_ABBEY_BRITISH_TO_THE_DEEPEST_ROOTS Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This series is a masterpiece in a way, not by its producer but in itself. Note this is true for several reasons, over six seasons of course, six the number of Solomon’s wisdom. 1- The period chosen here is crucial for the modern world. It is when the colonial mind of our European culture reached its summit and started its downfall with the First World War. After WWI colonialism in Europe was finished, even in spite of the Nazi relapse. 2- In Great Britain it was crucial the aristocracy came to terms with the social transformation of women having to be recognized as crucial in society and as having to hold jobs and social positions. Note that could also be true for the whole western world after WWI. 3- In Great Britain it was urgent they came to terms with the Irish question and it was hard in this noble family for whom an Irishman could be a chauffeur but the husband of one of their daughters, of the youngest most rebellious of the three daughters, that was an other story. 4- In the whole world it came to the surface of history that everyone had to have, has to have, a money earning job of some kind and that everyone has to live with the means they are able to earn by their work. The aristocracy has to learn that their mansions are not only theirs but they are the heritage of humanity and as such they have to open them to the curiosity of simple people, and that can become a regular income to take care of this heritage. 5- In the whole world too it is to be assumed that servants are no longer a special class serving the aristocracy – and the rich – in total subservience. Servants could never be the same and the number of servants had to go down and many had to find new social positions for which they were qualified or could acquire qualification, provided education was open to all. It is such questions and quite a few more that make this series a real masterpiece and the production is so lavish, florid, beautiful, extravagant that no one can resist and not push the door or the TV remote control’s button to start the adventure. Research Interests: Education, Service Quality, Public Health, Ireland, Aristocracy, Hospital Management, WWI, Pig Farming, Universal Primary Education, World War One, Universal Basic Education, Gender and family history; history of subaltern groups such as servants and children; questions of masculinity and fatherhood, Domestic Servants, British Aristocracy and country houses, UNIVERSAL PRIIMARY EDUCATION, and Pig Farming Business Plan  Jacques Coulardeau, Stephen King & Under the Dome at Academia.edu (59) Stephen King – Under the Dome – A Military-Industrial X-File Plot https://www.academia.edu/27025515/Stephen_King_Under_the_Dome_A_Military-Industrial_X-File_Plot Abstract: The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen Realistic Racism or Racist Realism You have all reasons to be afraid. The world, the cosmos, the universe are against you and you will fail. That’s the absolute pessimism of the series. There is no hope and your victory, bringing a dome down, is only the first step of the final invasion, just like Brexit is the first step towards the absolute homogenization of the world, homogenization in diversity, and not the fake superficial and rather limited diversity of the sexes (only two, more or less) or genders (about at least twelve with all orientations) but the diversity of absolutely all differences seen as an asset for all, including extraterrestrial differences if they exist or appear one day, brought back by some cosmonaut, astronaut or spationaut from the vast cosmos.  The novel was quite open on the extraterrestrial dimension. The series has become totally centered on that element. The novel revealed how every single difference could become the cause of some segregation or violence. The series keeps that element but introduces the concept of a kinship, supposedly of extraterrestrial origin, but that is a totalitarian organization: absolute obedience (obey or die) and dependence (be dependent and survive), total submission (submit or die), final sense of sacrifice (be ready to sacrifice your life for the survival of the kinship and survive till the time has come for your sacrifice) The book as well as the series, though the series maybe more, suggests the fact that some people are born with the gene of domination. No matter what circumstances they may find themselves in, these individuals (they are never groups of people and if we have a group it is a group of dependent people with one among them who is the real leader) will always get on top.  Successful in second hand business (second hand car dealership), then mayor of the city (or whatever it may be called, first selectman for example), then tyrant of the isolated community, and then after liberation Congressman and if you think of “House of Cards” the White House in perspective. This vision is very common and has neither been proved nor disproved, though some people seem to think you must have suffered in a way or another to develop that mental orientation of a leader. Others think you need to have a special gene somewhere like the Wanderlust gene DRD4-7R. Some also believe these individuals have been inspired by some divine force or cosmic influence, and this last approach has very popular forms like believing it was raining intelligence when someone was born. We are dealing here with some modern science fiction that should bring up myriads of questions beyond simply enjoying the show. Research Interests: Gay And Lesbian Studies, Horror Film, Science Fiction, Dictatorships, Crime, The X Files, Horror, Fantasy Literature, Children's Literature and Science Fiction, Serial Murder, Tyranny, Special Operations Forces, Drug Dealing, Law Reform, Harm Reduction, and Prisoners Families  Jacques Coulardeau & Harry Potter at Academia.edu (64) Harry Potter LIMITLESS – BORDER FREE – DEBONDED https://www.academia.edu/27975961/Harry_Potter_LIMITLESS_BORDER_FREE_DEBONDED Abstract: J.K. Rowling had sworn she was finished with Harry Potter, sworn so loud that everyone knew it was a lie. She tried some other styles but it did not work really.  So revive that poor dead and buried Harry Potter the author changes media and shifts from the printing press to the theater stage where she finds two people who are going to help her in that new venture, a playwright and a stage director. The play in London was and is a success but the book, though bestselling is going to be disappointing to the readers who have not seen the play. The money-making logic of the venture will lead the producers of the play to releasing a DVD-Bluray capture of the stage production as fast as possible for the millions of people who want more than a few stage directions. She might be tempted to shift directly to a cinema production but that will frustrate the readers the same way since a cinema production cannot be compared to a play. It is like moonshine and starshine in a fully sunny sky. The film will have to betray the play to be realistic in its special effects. But what I discover is that the author, from the very start, is obsessed by trilogies, triads, ternary structures, and so on. Research Interests: Literature, Magic, Drama, Theater and film, Harry Potter, Cinema, Popular Literature, Witchcraft (Anthropology Of Religion),Beyond Good and Evil, Dark Triad, Magician, Catholic Trilogy, Triads, Potter Harry and Voldemort, Alternate Worlds, and Black Magick Discussion https://www.academia.edu/s/80795ca814/harry-potter-limitless-border-free-debonded Popular literature is the mirror in which the standard literate audience of any country, even the world, is looking at itself. The authors are only the go-between and the intercessors. There is no hope for anyone in this globalized world if we do not have some popular literature, becoming films, TV series and whatever can reach the WIDEST audience that enables people to dream and be haunted by the liberating cathartic vision of a multi-layer world. J.K. Rowling is a ternary mind (probably from too much Christian education), so she sees a world cut in three tiers. On top the muggle world, the one you and I can see everyday. Under or behind the world of wizards and witchcraft, but the good one, that of Harry Potter and consorts. Finally even deeper or farther behind the world of Voldemort, the wizard turned wicked, evil and morbid, the populist wizard calling for the persecution of muggles, the cult of pure bloods , the full domination of everyone by his dung beetles and Shadows of Death. It is a nightmare that we have to keep in mind all the time. It takes very little for this world of evil populist fascistic isolationist and imperialistic policies to become true any time and start a burkini witch hunt. That's why Harry Potter is the catharsis we need for us not to vote for the lethal and death-bringing trompe l'oeil politicians that try to hypnotize us into locking the doors and the windows, even the chimneys of course, to anything that is not pure, meaning purely us and nothing else. https://youtu.be/pligNfpZJRU Daniel Radcliffe in Equus on Broadway  Jacques Coulardeau and Bruno Dumont at Academia.edu & Slideshare.net (66) BRUNO DUMONT, IL RESTERA TOUJOURS LES 40 VOLEURS https://www.academia.edu/28846467/BRUNO_DUMONT_IL_RESTERA_TOUJOURS_LES_40_VOLEURS http://www.slideshare.net/JacquesCoulardeau/bruno-dumont-il-restera-toujours-les-40-voleurs Abstract: All the films of Bruno Dumont up to 2016. The films show a tremendous gross and perverse reality based on inbreeding, locked up communities, racism and rejection of anything from outside, lack of any education, mental  corrugation, psychological and psychiatric distortion.  This "reality" is of course only in Bruno Dumont's mind but it finds an audience that revels in the most obscene and gross details that are accumulated on the screen from incest to cannibalism, from jingoism to extreme sexism and genderism. The rhythm is at times so slow that we nearly have some still vision frozen on some of the grossest elements Such films will pass rather fast because they do not even represent a real reality. It is purely fantasized but it pretends by its realistic treatment to be the ["""truth"""]. Except for the last 2016 film whose review  is in two languages (French and English) all reviews are in French. Enjoy the difference. Research Interests: Christianity, French Cinema, Depression, Cannibalism, Islamic Studies, Islam, Cinema, Depression (Psychology), Economic Crisis, Catholic Church History, Hopelessness, No Hope, and Inbreeding  MISCELANEOUS FROM FEBRUARY 2 TO DECEMBER 18, 2016 LÉA FAZER – MAESTRO – 2014 Un Film d’auteur sur un cinéaste qui ne faisait que des films d’auteur et auquel on se doit de rendre hommage. Le film d’auteur derrière tout cela c’est « Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon » d’Éric Rohmer de 2007. Il en existe même une version anglaise, « The Romance of Astrea and Celadon ». Rustique, merveilleux, rupestre, bucolique, bergers et déesses se la coulent douce et se distraient du mieux qu’ils peuvent sans rien d’autre que leur peau, leur chair, leur lubricité qu’ils appellent bien sûr amoureuse. C’est merveilleusement artificiel. Ils parlent la langue de la cour en alexandrin et autres vers rimés et cadencés. Ils jouent du biniou, de la cabrette ou je ne sais encore quel autre instrument primitif. Tout est fondé sur le langage et donc sur l’artificialité des personnages et des situations. Une femme peut être un homme, l’amour n’est qu’un concept verbal, et même, disons le clairement, verbeux qui se consomme avec du lexique et de la rimaillerie. Il suffit de penser à la « Fille de l’ouvreuse et du sapeur pompier » pour qu’aussitôt Phèdre se dresse impériale et majestueuse devant nous drapée « de Minos et de Pasiphaé ». Tout n’est qu’artifice et donné ainsi aux porcs à la fois jouissifs et culinaires, ni cachère ni hallal, c’est vraiment de la confiture donnée aux pourceaux. Mais que faire de cette confiture de fruits rares et de senteurs douçâtres et mielleuses ? Que faire de ces scènes qui en deviennent risibles car tellement artificielles ? Tout n’est qu’apparences et il faut les sauver du mieux qu’on peut. Malheur à l’acteur ou à l’actrice qui ne sait pas faire semblant et qui se donne à son rôle comme si c’était réel et vrai, j’entends bien sûr entre les personnages pas entre les acteurs. Le script dit d’embrasser, j’embrasse, même si ce que j’embrasse n’a de nom dans aucune langue civilisée. L’acteur est comme un labrador qui doit être dressé et qui fait ce qu’on luit dit. Et les actrices ne sont pas mieux mis à part qu’elles pleurent comme des madeleines de Proust. Alors princesses embrassez toutes les bêtes de l’Apocalypse et vous nous sauverez d’une catastrophe. On rit aux bêtises d’un tournage qui n’a rien de réel mais qui a tout d’irréel et cela doit faire rêver quiconque sait qui est Verlaine, vous savez ce poète au genre ambigu qui aimait Rimbaud d’un amour pas du tout ambigu et dont le révolver dont il a blessé Rimbaud vient de se vendre un demi million d’euros. Mais ce que je dis ici est un crime de lèse majesté des poètes pérambulatoires qui hantent nos classes de terminale et nos arrière-cours renaissance. Ils ne font que les hanter car ils sont des spectres sans la moindre réalité. Car en définitive au plus profond du malheur de cette humanité notre sort est celui de Caïn. Tuer d’abord et subir ensuite. « On fit donc une fosse, et Caïn dit ‘C’est bien !’ Puis il descendit seul sous cette voûte sombre. Quand il se fut assis sur sa chaise dans l’ombre Et qu’on eut sur son front fermé le souterrain, L’œil était dans la tombe et regardait Caïn. » (Victor Hugo) Cela me touchait à 15 ans plus que les bergeries de Marie Antoinette et les rupestres pitreries des poètes de cour de Louis XIV. « Par dieu, cachez ce sein que je ne saurais voir. » Quant à le regarder, tout à loisir tout du soir et de la nuit mais à condition de ne pas toucher. « Mais n’te promène donc pas toute nue ! » Toujours à 15 ans je préférais le Capitaine Nemo, digne ancêtre du Capitaine Haddock, ou encore Lagardère, bossu ou non. Mais ces bergers qui font des chichis pour savoir s’ils doivent regarder la bergère dans la rivière ou bien détourner les yeux pour regarder le berger dans la meule de foin, et entre les deux mon cœur balance, ces bergers dis-je me laissaient pantois et pantelant sans que j’ai jamais su de quel côté mes yeux clignaient, sans compter que comme je louchais je pouvais même me permettre de ne pas choisir. Mais il est vrai que sans faire de manières quand le vin est tiré il faut bien le boire. Mais je suis sûr que vous trouverez quelque charme à ce film négligemment batifolant dans les prairies de certaines montagnes moyennes entre un mouton et une licorne. Les deux bien rôtis sont excellents. Ajoutez-y un acteur ou une actrice, mais eux vous pouvez les consommer crus, bien qu’il soit ou fût conseillé de les déshabiller d’abord. Bon appétit. XAVIER DOLAN – IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD – JUSTE LA FIN DU MONDE – 2016 ENGLISH/ANGLAIS That’s a film I would recommend to neurotic people who are slightly paranoid and consider they are misunderstood and unable to communicate with anyone. And when they try it’s the end of the world because they can’t speak more than three words and because they dare address people directly and personally. Add to this Asperger syndrome the fact that we are in a family with a compulsive speaker, the mother who tells always and over and over again the same stories that everyone knows but that everyone is supposed to listen to and appreciate. Add to that we have an elder brother, Antoine, and a younger brother, Louis. And one more re-visit to Cain and Abel. The elder brother is the one who works in a factory, like Cain after his crime. Louis is apparently writing plays in a big distant city and he is successful, just like Abel was with God for his well grown vegetables, these things that you have to sweat to grow, whereas Cain, before his crime was just looking after herds of animals, no sweat or not too much anyway. Bad boy! And the symbols are crossed, mixed and we have lost the light of the divine curse in the meantime and replaced it with a simple human curse. Add to those a sister, Suzanne, who is apparently completely locked up in her room, doing nothing, living on her mother and with her mother, sketching nice little drawings that she will never bring out to any fame. She is a recluse of sorts. Antoine is married and his wife, Catherine, is a mother of several children. If I have understood properly there is a son who is called Louis, not like the younger brother but like the father who is cruelly absent from the present situation, and one or two girls. The relation between Antoine and Catherine is explosive all the time because Antoine does not like to speak and he does not like to listen, so he does not like people who speak, particularly about things that may concern him. Louis has come to say something but in the end he will say something that is not what has any importance, and is probably not what he wanted to say and he will not say what is so important for him at this moment and why he has come back “home.” In some short sentences here and there and not more than here and there, we learn he was living in the gay area of his city, but he has moved out though he has kept the address. He gets a phone call some time in the afternoon but we cannot know who it is from. He has a flashback about a love scene in the old place of his family, when he was a teenager, and we assume that we are dealing with a man by the body language more than anything else, and Antoine will tell him at the end of a car ride that was difficult that Pierre Jolicoeur just died of cancer, “Your Pierre!” That’s all we know. Louis’ departure is very difficult because Antoine wants to drive him to the airport but everyone finds this departure slightly too fast and Antoine becomes violent with Louis, so the mother takes Antoine out, the sister disappears and Catherine goes out to rejoin Antoine and the mother on the back terrace. Typical film by Xavier Nolan who is just, with age, getting more discreet about gayness and gay life but it all turns around the same thing: two brothers or two young men who are related in a way or another and a third one that becomes the lover of one of the two, causing the jealousy of the other and some kind of death falls onto the third one, the lover who is here called with the nice name of Jolicoeur, or Fair-heart. The style is very slow moments entirely centered on one or two close-up shots of faces and their facial language that is telling more than the words which are limited. With now and then one very short sequence of violence in words or in body language or in physical gestures. And yes in such families the end of the world could be happening outside they would not be able to see it. And in this case we will never know what important thing Louis wanted to tell, except that he had an episode of vomiting in the bathroom implying what he wanted to tell was serious, had to do with his health, but we will be frustrated for ever, and it can’t be morning sickness since we were told he can’t have children. FRENCH/FRANÇAIS Ce film est tellement typique de Xavier Dolan que j’ai envie d’en finir comme Louis en deux fois trois mots comme: “C’est plutôt moche ! » ou « Pourrait faire mieux ! » Mais après tout je peux délayer ces pépites tri-morphiques et vous en donner un peu plus. Loin de la grande ville d’où Louis vient on découvre une famille Québécoise plus que dérangeante. Une mère trône au centre et est une parlante compulsive qui aime à raconter toujours les mêmes histoires que tout le monde connait mais que tout le monde doit apprécier. Ce qui n’est pas le cas du fils aîné Antoine qui travaille dans une petite usine locale à faire des outils. Le père est absolument absent, probablement mort, mais qu’importe. La seule chose que l’on apprend de lui est qu’il s’appelait Louis. Le fils aîné Antoine est marié à Catherine et ils ont plusieurs enfants dont un fils nommé Louis du prénom de son grand-père (tradition oblige) et pas de son oncle. Il n’aime pas parler et il n’aime pas écouter si bien qu’il devient vociférant et linguistiquement violent quand les autres parlent, particulièrement son épouse. Ambiance de luxe. Le fils cadet a quitté la famille il y a longtemps. Il a 34 ans et est revenu pour dire quelque chose d’important. Il s’appelle Louis, montrant ainsi que le père était un personnage secondaire puisque la tradition du nom du père au fils aîné n’a pas été respectée. Ce fils Louis est allé à la grande ville et il écrit des pièces de théâtre. Il vivait dans le quartier gay mais il dit qu’il l’a quitté tout en gardant son adresse là. Il a un coup de téléphone dans la salle de bain dans l’après-midi avec une personne qu’on ne peut pas identifier. Mais à la fin d’une ballade en voiture Antoine dit à Louis que Pierre, Pierre Jolicoeur, est mort. Cancer. « Ton Pierre ! » On avait déjà eu un flashback peu avant d’une scène d’amour entre Louis jeune et un homme qu’l’on ne peut identifier comme tel que par le langage corporel. Il venait dans la chambre de Louis en passant par la fenêtre et en partant dès que c’était fini. Ce flash back était venu après un épisode de vomissement de Louis dans la salle de bain, ce qui laissait entendre qu’il avait à révéler un état de santé délicat, et ce ne pouvait pas être une grossesse et sa maladie du matin. Quand il finira par dire quelque chose cela tournera si mal qu’il ne dira que des incongruités et n’aura pas le temps d’arriver aux choses sérieuses et comme il doit partir rapidement Antoine le brusque un peu pour le voiturer jusqu’à l’aéroport. La scène d’adieux devient violente car la sœur Suzanne, un être renfermé sur elle-même ,et sur sa chambre, devient véhémente. La mère s’en même, et même Catherine y va d’un mot ou deux. Antoine devient alors violent à l’égard de Louis et c’est la mère qui calme le jeu et entraîne Antoine dans le patio derrière la maison, suivie de Catherine, et Suzanne descend dans sa chambre de recluse. Louis partira seul sans avoir dit ce qu’il avait à dire. On a là comme une matrice féconde pour Xavier Dolan. Deux jeunes hommes et un troisième qui se glisse entre eux, le troisième étant clairement gay. Le frère aîné dans ce cas devient jaloux et cela explique le départ précipité du cadet. Mais la mort punira Louis, Pierre Jolicoeur est mort. Autre matrice féconde mais routinière : la mère seule avec le père absent et deux jeunes hommes, frères ou pas, sur les bras et des frustrations hormonales multiples qu’elle ne sait pas guérir. Le film est techniquement très beau du fait des longues scènes lentes centrées sur un ou deux gros plans de visages avec des expressions faciales riches, mais ces longs moments lents qui sanglotent comme des violons dans un arrière plan invisible sont entrecoupés de moments brefs mais rares de violence verbale ou corporelle et même physique qui hache l’impossibilité de communiquer. Dans une famille comme celle-là la fin du monde pourrait être en train d’arriver dehors ils ne s’en apercevraient même pas. Et Louis repartira sans avoir dit ce qu’il était venu dire. Merci maman, mais pas merci papa. Notons bien la réincarnation et l’inversion de Cain (qui a été banni par Dieu) et Abel (qui a été tué par Cain) avec Antoine qui reste dans son trou à rats, se marie et a des enfants et Louis qui est exilé, revient mais repart encore plus vite et il n’aura pas d’enfants, nous dit-on. Tiens donc et son vomissement alors … ? KEN BURNS – PBS – THE CIVIL WAR – 1990 This film, or series since it has nine episodes, is crucial for people, particularly young people and people outside the USA, to understand the nature of the Union behind the USA and why this Civil War was the real corner stone of US history. We always refer to the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution but we forget a simple fact: the USA is a centralized country that has mapped the various political fields between the federal government and the various states. The US Constitution itself clearly states that all competences or fields of political action that are not attributed to the federal administration can only be dealt with at state level. Recent US Supreme Court cases have shown that this principle is basic. For example the US Supreme court intervened in the case of gay rights because the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was negated by some legislative rulings in some states, particularly cases that crossed the border between several states. And it is the reassertion of the 14th amendment stating all Americans are equal in front of all public agencies or services and that they all deserve equal protection against the negation of their equal rights that enabled the sweeping generalization of the opening of marriage rights to any couple whatsoever since it could only be solved at state level since it is not a competence of the federal state, both the government and Congress. That’s why the Defense of Marriage Act was repealed by the Supreme Court since it was beyond the competence of Congress. This being said we can now understand why secession could not take place and could not be accepted on the basis of the US Constitution. If a state wants to get out of the Union it has to negotiate it with the Federal State, both government and Congress. It cannot secede on its own initiative and under its own authority. What is surprising is that the war started on that argument in the north: self-declared secession is illegal and anti-constitutional. So it has to be fought against including with military might. And yet it could not be won on that single argument because it was a lie. What was at stake was the principle of the equality of all Americans including the Blacks. For the south the Blacks were slaves and as such not Americans and certainly not citizens. So for southerners they could not be considered as equal because they were not human. For northerners the Blacks were human beings and had to be considered as equal because they were created by God the same way as the Whites. Note the reference to God and creation in the declaration of Independence is bothering since it refers to one particular ideology, religion, that is always under the control of churches and both democracy and hierarchical organization in these churches can easily make the racial problem a religious problem. We must remember that in the south Blacks were excluded from churches and were even excluded from religion. That was the main difference between English colonization and French or Spanish colonization. Actually we could consider the film is timid about this religious question. It sure considers the racial side of the war and the crucial emancipation of Black slaves, but it does not really consider the fact for instance that Louisiana went back into the Union rather early in the war because of the French tradition that had left behind a vast community of free Blacks and mulattos and a religious tradition with the Catholic Church that integrated the slaves into their religious rites and practices from the very start. Code Noir was a colonial tool for sure but all religious rights were asserted and recognized by it, including the obligation for slaves to be married and the obligation for slave owners to provide every week a day for matrimonial duties if the two members of the married couple were not on the same plantation. And the vote of Louisiana was crucial to ratify the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution and the vote of this Amendment with a one vote majority (two third majority mind you) is not even mentioned in any detail. In fact the film insists too much on the opposition in the north against this racial development in the war which left the 55% majority of Lincoln in the 1864 election unexplained. It is quite obvious that the racial dimension was crucial and positive in the north. But that is not the first time the racial question is under-estimated. Even by 1990 when this film came out. But since then many examples can be quoted of this persistent under-estimation of the crucial character of the racial question; In 2012 for example practically all opinion polls announced Obama as defeated because they considered the Latinos as white, which they are, but they forgot that these white Latinos were not going to vote the same way as European whites, and they did not vote the same way as European whites so providing a majority to Obama. On another side the film insists a lot on the gory character of this war. It was absolutely horrible but that was the fate of all wars in the 19th century. Napoleon’s wars were particularly bloody too. Dying of sickness or starvation as fighting soldiers as well as prisoners on both sides was common place, and too often both sides forgot to take prisoners or to collect the wounded from the battle field after battles. At times too the film insists too much on “facts” or “events” and does not see and mention the historical perspective. It is too easy to just menton the industrial development of the north and the blockade against the south but that was not the only dimension, or it was too circumstantial. The industrial north needed the southern market, including the Blacks, to make their industry profitable since they had to expand their market all the time, whereas the south needed exports to make their cotton profitable since they did not develop any textile industry for the simple reason that they could not use slaves in such an activity and they did not know anything about industry, apart, maybe, tobacco. But was tobacco in 1860, before the existence of cigarettes, a real industry? It is obvious the French of Spanish practices were different and enabled the development of sugar factories next to the sugar cane plantations with Black labor. And Cortez in the 16th century developed the first of these in Mexico. Such plantations then had a church for Black slaves, or provided them with the possibility to go to one on Sundays and they had their own cemeteries for Black slaves. The film did not explore enough the role of Blacks in the Union army, and the great difficulties they were confronted to. At the same time they did not explore enough the common culture between the white soldiers of both armies since most of the soldiers on the south side were not slave owners but simple white workers or shopkeepers from the cities. The only common cultural item mentioned is the song Lorena, though it is not mentioned as a rewriting of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem Lenora. The song is nostalgic about the past love between the singer and his love Lorena and every stanza can directly be applied to the war, but let me quote the last stanza that soldiers sang on both sides: “It matters little now, Lorena, “The past is in the eternal past; “Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena, “Life's tide is ebbing out so fast. “There is a Future! O, thank God! “Of life this is so small a part! “Tis dust to dust beneath the sod; “But there, up there, 'tis heart to heart.” Apart from these remarks we have to understand this film was crucial in 1990 and still is important. It is of course not aware of anything like Post Traumatic Slavery Stress Syndrome or Disorder because it had not been stated yet by Black psychologists or activists yet. And that explains how the end of the Civil War is too much identified for the Blacks as the end, liberty at last. We seem to forget Black officers in US Armed Forces were still very far away in the future, in fact practically 80 years away. The mention of the Ku Klux Klan at the end is not enough to explain what happened after the war: the soul wound or the long historical trauma is not explained and the way Black slaves resisted against the worst practices of slavery is not really detailed though the book “12 years a Slave” was a best seller in the 1850s and it gave, and still gives a lot of examples of the little things the slaves did to improve their lot and to keep the slave owners literally checked, and he gives the example of a woman who is the best in the cotton field and systematically does a lot better than the others who are working at a homogenized speed thanks to ,their chanting along, and this woman is repeatedly abused by her master and victimized and whipped in all possible ways at the instigation of the slave owner’s jealous wife. It is certainly not enough to do better than others to be appreciated, except of course as a live whipping body, if not simple prop. This film is thus a vast basket of possible reflections of all sorts. Including the music of this period, though it is rather repetitive in the film. RESOURCES "Lorena" is an antebellum song with Northern origins. The lyrics were written in 1856 by Rev. Henry D. L. Webster, after a broken engagement. He wrote a long poem about his fiancée but changed her name to "Lorena", an adaptation of "Lenore" from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven." Henry Webster's friend Joseph Philbrick Webster (February 18, 1819 – January 18, 1875) wrote the music, and the song was first published in Chicago in 1857. It became a favorite of soldiers of both sides during the American Civil War. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time. [Note:  Western Writers of America (2010). "The Top 100 Western Songs". American Cowboy. Archived from the original on 10 August 2014.] Oh, the years creep slowly by, Lorena, The snow is on the ground again. The sun's low down the sky, Lorena, The frost gleams where the flow'rs have been. But the heart beats on as warmly now, As when the summer days were nigh. Oh, the sun can never dip so low A-down affection's cloudless sky. A hundred months have passed, Lorena, Since last I held that hand in mine, And felt the pulse beat fast, Lorena, Though mine beat faster far than thine. A hundred months, 'twas flowery May, When up the hilly slope we climbed, To watch the dying of the day, And hear the distant church bells chime. We loved each other then, Lorena, Far more than we ever dared to tell; And what we might have been, Lorena, Had but our loving prospered well -- But then, 'tis past, the years are gone, I'll not call up their shadowy forms; I'll say to them, "Lost years, sleep on! Sleep on! nor heed life's pelting storms." The story of that past, Lorena, Alas! I care not to repeat, The hopes that could not last, Lorena, They lived, but only lived to cheat. I would not cause e'en one regret To rankle in your bosom now; For "if we try we may forget," Were words of thine long years ago. Yes, these were words of thine, Lorena, They burn within my memory yet; They touched some tender chords, Lorena, Which thrill and tremble with regret. 'Twas not thy woman's heart that spoke; Thy heart was always true to me: A duty, stern and pressing, broke The tie which linked my soul with thee. It matters little now, Lorena, The past is in the eternal past; Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena, Life's tide is ebbing out so fast. There is a Future! O, thank God! Of life this is so small a part! 'Tis dust to dust beneath the sod; But there, up there, 'tis heart to heart. The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe Volume II. Poems and Tales Lenore Hymn→ LENORE. Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!— An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young— A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young. "Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride, "And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her—that she died! "How shall the ritual, then, be read?—the requiem how be sung "By you—by yours, the evil eye,—by yours, the slanderous tongue "That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?" Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong! The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside, Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride— For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies, The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes— The life still there, upon her hair—the death upon her eyes. "Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise, "But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days! "Let no bell toll!—lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, "Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damnéd Earth. "To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven— "From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven— "From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven." L E N O R E. BY EDGAR ALLAN POE. ILLUSTRATED. BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY ESTES AND LAURIAT. 1886. Copyright, 1885, By Charles E. Wentworth. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Baltimore in 1811. He graduated at the University of Virginia in 1826; and having spent a year in Europe, he returned to America, and was for a number of years editor of different magazines, among which was the "Broadway Journal." The poem of Lenore was always his favorite, and above his desk always hung the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore. He died in Baltimore in 1849. ILLUSTRATIONS By Hy. Sandham, A. R. A. Drawn and Engraved under the supervision of George T. Andrew. LENORE. Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll! — a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? — weep now or nevermore! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read, the funeral song be sung! — An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young, — A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young. "Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride, "And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her — that she died! "How shall the ritual, then, be read? — the requiem how be sung "By you — by yours, the evil eye, — by yours, the slanderous tongue "That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?" Peccavimus! but rave not thus, and let a Sabbath song Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong! The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside, Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride, — For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies, The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes, — The life still there, upon her hair; the death upon her eyes. "Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise, "But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days! "Let no bell toll! lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, "Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damnèd Earth. "To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven, — "From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven, — "From grief and groan to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven." BRASSENS LA MAUVAISE RÉPUTATION – 2011 C’est un film plus émotionnel et nostalgique que profond. Il donne un portrait du jeune Brassens qui mérite le détour et qui devrait vous émouvoir un peu, beaucoup ou même à la folie. Le film balaie quelques ignorances sur le chanteur. On savait qu’il était de Sète. On savait qu’il avait été un mauvais garçon. On devait peut-être savoir que son père était maçon. Vous savez comme La Chanson du Maçon de Maurice Chevalier de 1941. On pourrait même savoir que sa mère était italienne et son Auvergnat de Paris n’était pas auvergnat, mais qu’importe ce n’est pas là l’important. Quelques mythes tomberont. Brassens a été au STO en Allemagne et en a déserté après une magouille pour obtenir une permission. Il fut anarchiste extrémiste après la guerre et fut même jeté par les hiérarques libertaires de Paris qui sont anarchistes mais pas au-delà du seuil de leur maison, ou de leur boutique. Car tout est un commerce, n’est-il point ? Vous apprendrez qu’il attrapa une maladie inavouable d’une jeune dame qu’il rencontra dans un café et que cette dame voulut s’imposer. Vous apprendrait qu’il eut une liaison sérieuse avec une autre dame qu’il avait repérée et rencontrée pendant la guerre et qui avait disparu à l’arrivée de militaires allemands. On ne dira pas pourquoi dans le film. Elle dira simplement qu’elle était partie très loin. Un doux euphémisme pour . . . quoi au juste ? Juive, résistante, déportée, qui sait, qui saura ? Personne après ce film. Le plus intéressant concerne ses débuts de chanteur, pendant son STO avec les autres « volontaires désignés » français de son camp en Allemagne. Puis à Paris après la guerre, et là ce ne fut pas facile. Il fut jeté, rejeté et même pire par les producteurs de ce temps-là et c’est grâce à ses amis du STO qu’il réussira a avoir une vraie audition devant un public invité par Patachou dans son cabaret. Le coup de pouce dont il avait besoin. On sait la suite. C’est que Patachou aimait donner la gougoutte à son chat, ou du moins aux petits jeunes artistes qui avaient quelque faim pour la gloire Ce film montre avec ténacité et douceur combien les débuts d’un artiste sont difficiles et décourageants parfois. Les choses ne sont pas plus simples aujourd’hui bien au contraire mais elles sont beaucoup plus inhumaines, déshumanisées. On n’a pas affaire à des hommes mais à des écrans, des ordinateurs, l’Internet. On doit se faire soi-même bien qu’il faudra toujours à un moment ou un autre se coltiner un producteur pour monter sur scène devant un vrai public, même si c’est un robot informatique, ou même un robot humain, vous savez un de ces humains pressés qui a toutes les réponses avant qu’on lui pose les questions. Un gentil film émouvant et tendre, d’une certaine façon, sur un artiste fétiche qui ne fut jamais vraiment potiche, mais qui n’aimait pas vraiment les gorilles, surtout à roulettes. THE RED RIDING TRILOGY – 1974, 1980, 1983 – 2009 Vicious, disgusting, more than gory, just gross, and yet so true to “life” if this is life. It sure is Yorkshire, accent, desolation and misery (more than plain and simple poverty), cruelty, pollution, greed, vice, perversion, etc. spread all over. All evils in one pouch, one bag in West Yorkshire and the motto that “this is the north, where we do what we want,” that’s the great beauty of ugliness. It will take you three long episodes to reach the culprit and you won’t be surprised at all when you finally come to him. In the meantime the police would have revealed itself the most odious, ferocious and mentally cannibalistic institution you can imagine. Asking a question for them is necessarily hurting, torturing and a few other things of the sort: breaking fingers, crushing burning cigarettes anywhere you can imagine, stripping the suspects naked, and the films do not show them naked (prudes!). There is not one single person in the police force that is able to do anything regular like find a culprit that is really guilty and bring that one to justice. One journalist is driven to craziness and some deadly justice enforcing spree, and yet you will know if he was right in his choice of targets at the end of the third film. Another young man, slightly spaced out will be convinced under duress by everyone, probably only in the police, that he killed the girl. And he will end his life in prison. With little chance to be retried since he signed a confession and pleaded guilty. And quite a few are questioned that way and yet the crimes are going on: kidnapped girls, then raped, and in many ways cut up and carved up and more or less endowed with wings and feathers. And all that in a society that is rotten to the core, that speculates on the death of as many people as possible with pollution and the exploitation of them as long as they live with projects that are as crazy as they are greedy of shopping malls with cinemas and all kinds of entertainments to empty the billfolds of the gullible submissive slaves of the public till they are empty and they can then commit suicide or die young of any kind of hazardous escaping tentative or industrial pollution. And for the girls and women prostitution and promiscuity are the main two udders of everyday suspended death. You can imagine what the other two are. And be sure that all the cadres of the police and the most respected people in this society, lay and clerical, are among the small circle of speculators and their only aim is to make money and thus to keep the surrounding society going because you cannot squeeze money out of marginal miserable derelict and impoverished proletariat. No matter what, they must have just a little bit more than their basic needs to be able to spend that little bit more in the traps of the entertaining plotters. Is it a great trilogy? I do not know but one thing is sure even if at the end the killer is finally put out of the way all the corrupted elite of this part of Yorkshire will not be in any way even questioned, not to speak of prosecuted. After all corruption is the basic human dimension: the survival instinct of the more corrupted declared the fitter, by all means, even selling their parents into slavery and feeding their own children to the industrial sharks of our certainly not post-modern society but definitely pre-modern jungle. MICHEL PICCOLI & ROMY SCHNEIDER – LA PASSANTE DU SANS SOUCI – 1982 – BASÉ SUR LE ROMAN DE JOSEPH KESSEL – 1936 Ce film pourrait être fondé sur une histoire vraie car la situation décrite est en quelque sorte plus vraie que la réalité vécue par tant de victimes de l’Allemagne nazie, qu’elles furent juives ou non, militantes ou non, démocrates ou non. Il fallait peu de chose pour se retrouver du mauvais côté. Ici on commence avec un incident antisémite dès 1933 (et il y en eut avant) qui laisse un enfant estropié devant son père exécuté froidement par des SA. Cet enfant est sauvé par une femme qui le recueille avec son mari, un éditeur littéraire et libéral, on dirait aujourd’hui progressiste. L’enfant et la dame, Madame Elsa Wiener, partent pour Paris. Le mari Michel Wiener reste derrière et mal lui en prend. Arrêté il sera envoyé dans un camp de concentration et en sera libéré grâce au sacrifice de son épouse à Paris qui se donne au conseiller de l’ambassade d’Allemagne. La libération et l’arrivée de Michel Wiener à Paris est suivie de près par les agents de l’Allemagne Nazie. Elsa et Michel Wiener sont abattus par ces agents devant le Sans Souci dès qu’ils sortent du taxi qui les amène de la Gare de l’Est. L’histoire devient moins banale quand l’enfant, Max Baumstein, une fois grandi, adulte, devenu un homme d’affaire et un militant des droits de l’homme, cinquante ans plus tard, reconnaît dans l’ambassadeur du Paraguay le conseiller de l’ambassade d’Allemagne qui a fait exécuter Elsa et Michel Wiener à Paris dès que Michel Wiener eut été libéré. De sang froid il abat dans son bureau le dit ambassadeur, Nazi recasé en Amérique Latine. Le tribunal français qui le juge le condamne à une peine de prison avec sursis. Le film se termine avec l’assertion que Max Baumstein et son épouse ont été abattus en bas de chez eux à Paris en 1980 ou à peu près. Ce dernier élément est possible mais pas nécessairement réel. Le film transporte des idées fondamentales sur une période particulièrement agitée, troublée, criminelle dans tous les sens du terme. En douze ans le monde est transformé par cet épisode nazi qui accélèrera les mouvements de libérations dans le monde entier. L’antisémitisme est clairement identifié mais n’est pas posé comme le centre du problème. Il est justement rappelé que beaucoup d’autres que les Juifs furent des victimes de cette période. Le film savamment évite toute réelle et directe mention des communistes qui pourtant à Paris à cette époque là sont centraux, même si en 1980 ils le sont beaucoup moins. Cela évite le parallèle facile Hitler = Staline. Le film devient alors un film presque intimiste car il décrit les sentiments complexes des personnages dont l’un est un enfant de 12 ans transporté par le temps filmique à l’âge de 62 ans. Ce court-circuit, ou cette ellipse en forme de flashback ou de flash-forward, permet une forte charge émotionnelle des événements passés comme des péripéties présentes. Romy Schneider est magistrale dans son double rôle d’Elsa Wiener et de l’épouse de Max Baumstein, et Michel Piccoli est simplement admirable de calme et de distance devant l’horreur de son passé et de son acte présent. Il assume son crime sans vouloir l’excuser tout en acceptant de l’expliquer. Bien sûr il est largement concurrencé par l’enfant qui joue son rôle à douze ans, Wendelin Werner. C’est un film simple, clair et clairvoyant qui évite la leçon de chose politique et se centre sur la dimension humaine – et inhumaine – d’une situation historique exceptionnelle, tout en sachant sans nous en assommer que des millions de situations du même genre ont existé dans cette période et continuent d’exister dans le monde actuel. L’homme est un loup pour l’homme bien que j’ai plus souvent envie de le voir comme un requin avec plusieurs rangées de dents acérées. ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA – 1997 This set of four DVDs would have been great if they had not been heavily overloaded with four introductions that are sectarian, one-sided blabbering attempts to make us think that what these films are about is evil, devilish, ugly, despicable, and a few other things like that. All countries are doing that kind of propaganda, some even call it agitprop, which is a dignified genre in literature and theater with among other names Bertolt Brecht but our democrats generally wrap it up in some kind of patriotic and even artistic garb that means something like garment, clothing, wrapping, etc, and has little to do with garbage. Though indeed in reality . . . ! The films are most of them short, more or less short from very short to rather short and they all have qualities due to the techniques used to produce them, the editing used quite freely and the creativity at times to have special effects even before they existed. And do not believe Méliès invented special effect. He invented accidental cut and accidental editing that turned a cow into a tram because the camera had stopped on the cow and had started again on a tram. We have here real special effects and great editing, without speaking of the animation that is at times frankly creative and even avant-garde, and of the voices and music when there was music (composed by rather inspired composers) and voices after the silent cinema gave way to the talkies. The film on Mayakovsky for example is a great example of animation and voice performing. The moralistic tone might irritate westerners because it advocates Soviet morality and history, but just watch the Walt Disney film on Pocahontas and you will have a remarkable film of colonial propaganda justifying the extermination of Indians, once they had been exterminated. There is no contrition at all about her being forced to marry someone she hardly knew after being abducted, Christianized and having given her knowhow on how to grow and cure tobacco. Anyone who is interested in animated films and in the history of the Soviet Union has to get these DVDs and watch these films. Just use the menu and jump over the introductory political lessons from some western servile writer. Two films, or collection of films, of propaganda!!! The first against wild capitalism but from a populist point of view, progressive or reactionary doesn’t matter, does it? The second for the Soviet Union, as set of agitprop declared as such, beautiful artistically for some of them and supporting a simple point of view, though I must say the use of Gounod’s Ave Maria in the early 60s to show the atrocity of the Vietnam War is an astonishing and bewildering beautiful image. GEORGE CLOONEY – MONEY MONSTER – 2016 The film is well built as a thriller. It is also well built as an argumentative film on a highly political subject. To give the list of the subjects it considers is just enough to cover the seriousness of the discourse. 1- The criminal financial manipulation and machination of some big financier who can in one click of a finger hijack 800 million dollars causing a tremendous crash for a company and buying cheap the shares of a mining complex crippled by a strike that is financed by the said financier. That and I should emphasize that “that” into “thaaaaat” financier really does not care about the million of people he has ruined overnight and all the suffering that goes along with it. Of course as soon as he has bought the mining complex he wants he will break the strike by famishing the leaders he more or less bribed and who will then discover there is a second level in the fact the money is in worthless bonds or because he will bring in some private – or public – police force to break these strikers. You know the tactic: “Kill them all, and ask questions afterwards.” 2- The police who are supposed to protect simple people consider that anyone who steps out of the simple path and behavior they are supposed to have and keep is a criminal and once again the same principle comes up: “Kill them all, and ask questions afterwards.” With maybe a slight nuance in color, like “especially if they are dark-skinned.” But that is not shown here. 3- The media are rotten, and yet in front of some emergency, some people, reporters, cameramen or anchorpersons may reveal themselves as heroic and even ethical. Rotten financiers expect these media people to be only interested in the glory and limelight of their position. The police and other bureaucratic armed forces expect media people to stay out of the way and resent when they dare do something that questions their police integrity. Don’t tell me about politicians. Ask François Hollande for one how he likes two journalists publishing his private remark about the judges and other judicial personnel in France being a set of cowards. Let these two journalists have some kind of hideout or even underground shelter. They will not be welcome in the next press conference of the said president. 4- Then the mass of the people are just supporting the one who wins. If it is the criminal they support him. If it is the reporter they support him. If it is the financier they support him. The people are easy to manipulate and to blindfold in some lie and tall tale. They always support the winner. And that’s where the film is weak because the “criminal” is not explored in his real motivations. His pregnant wife is typically covering her backside by rejecting him in an extreme diatribe. The anchorman is not really explored at all, just given as a showman. Around him it is the same. The financier is just bluntly and brutally rejected as the real rat in the granary. And his public relation officer is betraying him and at once runs away from that sinking boat leaving the rat of her boss sink with it. In fact it is so clear-cut and unquestioning that we could consider that is pure propaganda for populist movements like Podemos in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street in New York. Unluckily it is the same kind of discourse that would be used by the extreme right populist movements all over the world. The difference between progressive and reactionary populist discourses is in the detailed exploration of the motivation of the protagonists. None of that here! In other words the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution is not exactly respected. ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA – 1997 This set of four DVDs would have been great if they had not been heavily overloaded with four introductions that are sectarian, one-sided blabbering attempts to make us think that what these films are about is evil, devilish, ugly, despicable, and a few other things like that. All countries are doing that kind of propaganda, some even call it agitprop, which is a dignified genre in literature and theater with among other names Bertolt Brecht but our democrats generally wrap it up in some kind of patriotic and even artistic garb that means something like garment, clothing, wrapping, etc, and has little to do with garbage. Though indeed in reality . . . ! The films are most of them short, more or less short from very short to rather short and they all have qualities due to the techniques used to produce them, the editing used quite freely and the creativity at times to have special effects even before they existed. And do not believe Méliès invented special effect. He invented accidental cut and accidental editing that turned a cow into a tram because the camera had stopped on the cow and had started again on a tram. We have here real special effects and great editing, without speaking of the animation that is at times frankly creative and even avant-garde, and of the voices and music when there was music (composed by rather inspired composers) and voices after the silent cinema gave way to the talkies. The film on Mayakovsky for example is a great example of animation and voice performing. The moralistic tone might irritate westerners because it advocates Soviet morality and history, but just watch the Walt Disney film on Pocahontas and you will have a remarkable film of colonial propaganda justifying the extermination of Indians, once they had been exterminated. There is no contrition at all about her being forced to marry someone she hardly knew after being abducted, Christianized and having given her knowhow on how to grow and cure tobacco. Anyone who is interested in animated films and in the history of the Soviet Union has to get these DVDs and watch these films. Just use the menu and jump over the introductory political lessons from some western servile writer. LANA WACHOWSKI & LILLY WACHOWSKI – THE MATRIX – 1999 – MATRIX RELOADED – 2003 - MATRIX REVOLUTIONS – 2003 It is vain to retell these films, or this trilogy. But I would like to insist on the general structure of the world that is depicted in these movies. There are three worlds. First of all the normal human world we know, New York essentially, that is in fact only an illusion created by the matrix, a program or a vast set of programs invented by the Architect who does not have any other identity and who pretends he is not human at the end. This illusion of a normal human world in which billions of people live has been created to simply control humanity in their growth, development, everyday life, etc. In other words we have a total digital dictatorship of which no human is conscious, well nearly no human is conscious. To keep this world in place and in peace the Architect has invented a set of Agents all called Smith, all similar, dressed the same, physically the same, etc, who have special powers to transport themselves at will where they want and to penetrate and possess any human being. There is then Zion, the resisting human underground world in vast caves mostly artificial and with some kind of metallic skeleton. This world is human because the people living there are humans, but otherwise it is an artificial world, but it is managed by a council of representatives though we do not know how they are selected or appointed. Apart from this council the main institution is the armed forces since this underground world is under attack and in the midst of a war with the third world that seems to be in some kind of objective alliance with the matrix world. Note this human world is so cut off from the normal human, world, because of the matrix, that the only way is to jump from the underground world to the matrix world and the very few who can cross have to be plugged on some kind of digital program that transfers them, body and mind, to the over-ground world and yet keep their bodies underground, though they are then connected to the underground managing unit, though it seems this managing unit for that kind of transfer is on board of one vessel or ship that is some kind of space ship that can get out of the underground city and circulate outside though they cannot normally reach the matrix world and they believe they can’t reach the third world. The third world is the world of machines. Apparently they raise human beings to get their energy and thus fuel their machines. Only at the end the main hero Neo will reach Machine City and cast a deal with the representative of this machine world. That deal will enable Neo to get some kind of truce in the war that is raging at the very moment, then an alliance between the two worlds, Neo’s and the machine world, against the Matrix because the Smith program has gone out of hand and the original agent Smith has multiplied to millions and has been able to simply take over the matrix world with only one clandestine link between the matrix world and the underground human world entirely controlled by a Frenchman, the Merovingian, who uses the Trainman and his train to smuggle things from one world to the other. With this alliance Neo is able to be sent to the matrix world that has become Agent Smith’s world and to have the final fight with the original Agent Smith that will decide of the end. The color of the matrix is green, like all the lines of codes on the computer screens, lines that work from top to bottom and then it is not clear if it is from left to right or from right to left. Green is the matrix color, though the Architect is dressed is some light creamy white suit. The illusion of a human world created by the matrix is multicolored like our own human world. The underground human world is highly dominated by brown and all brownish shades of brown, and there are quite a few: the people are vastly diverse in ethnic origins and heritage. They are dressed in all shades of brown, with an alternative light grey. Agent Smith is dressed in black and is white, a color intending to imply we are dealing with a very pure white world. He is dressed in black and wears black glasses more like some kind of blind man than sunglasses. Finally the machine world is all kinds of dark grey and black but with systematic red eyes because these machines have red eyes, have eyes. At the end it is revealed that blind Neo is able to see this machine world as pure light from white to bright yellow and bright orange. The stake is thus to liberate the human world we know of this digital dictatorship of the Architect and let it go back to the normal palette of colors we know from sunup to sundown. It is clear too that modern civilization, science and technology can only produce what H.G. Wells already described in Time Machine, an industrious and industrial world living in total darkness and genetically descending from the working class, the Morlocks, exploiting and raising for meat a human species descending from the bourgeoisie, the Emoi, except that this machine world has no human presence at all, except as an animal raised to produce energy. On the other hand in its digital branch this modern world, science and technology can only enable one man to control the whole world and even to create a police of “thought,” an omnipotent corps of robotic androids. Imagine an army of millions of nanobots in all human bodies, all nanobots connected to one central unit managed by one man. The digital evolution leads to that. But there is hope because some humans will resist, and yet they need the vision of an oracle (a black lady that ages fast) and of a One who is a white man who can save the world with the help of Trinity, a white woman he is in love with and who is in love with him. This trinity of Oracle-One-Trinity is not the only trinity. The Oracle goes along with an East-Asian Seraph and a little South-Asian girl. We have there a strong reference to Christianity. Trinity and Neo will have to be sacrificed for the prophecy to come true and the matrix to be defeated. The sacrifice of Neo is typically in a crucifixion form, arms outstretched perpendicularly to the body and light effects are super-impressed on him in the form of a roman cross, and this roman cross will turn into a Greek cross of light. This Neo is thus a new Christ. This very strong Christian reference is founded on three worlds: the human world controlled by the matrix, the underground human world of the resistance and the distant machine world. Add to this that most teams in this trilogy are groups of three people. It is a ternary vision, though the digital world is based on a binary language. The dominance of the ternary figure is thus very clearly ideological, meaningful. All in all it is a very fatalistic vision with a touch of hope in the form of a blind Messiah and an Oracle. THE MATRIX – 1999 - Human cattle enslaved as Duracell batteries The film is science fiction. We know every thing about this. The principle is simple. What we think is reality, real life, is a world of flesh and bone that is entirely controlled by some matrix, some entirely mechanical principle and intelligence. Human beings are nothing but some species of mammals that are raised like cattle but they have no freedom, no control over their life, nothing at all, not even the freedom to breathe that can be denied any time without any possible protest. Against this totally inhuman world there is a resistance, a resistance of super machines that are controlled by men, of super heroes and supermen who are faster than the lightning, and even the light itself, not a new species of human beings, just the good old stock that modern life and consumerism had killed. They are ready to sacrifice everything for the freedom of their human brothers and sisters. To achieve this they have special powers that have been worked into them through some mechanical procedure and mechanical device. They are human beings in feelings and courage made machine in power and velocity. Then there must be transportation channels between this resistance and the real world controlled by the machines. These transportation avenues are the information highways of the telephone and computers, in other words the Internet. And that's where the film becomes more interesting. We do not know after a while where real reality is and where virtual reality starts and ends. We have to believe that we can retain in real reality some of the capabilities we have in virtual reality, and in virtual reality some of the human sentiments and feelings we can only experience in real reality. Then the film becomes an imbroglio of various realities that are so intertwined and interlaced that we do not know any more which one has spliced into the other and which one has been spliced onto another. If you get lost in this interwoven splicing, it is the proof that this film is disquieting and should be shown to all kids in the world for them to maybe realize that the world is not what it looks like nor life what it tastes or smells like. It may stink at times, and yet that stench is just the beauty of life because if there were not bad smells we would not even know what a perfume may be. MATRIX RELOADED – 2003 - Getting ready for the final battle We know what the matrix is, altogether, since we have seen the first episode. We know that machines have taken over the world and have decided to control all human life. Humans are slaves serving machines. Nothing very new. In this second episode we enter the final phase of this machine-controlled world : the eradication of human life, and first of all of Zion, the city that is a concentrated vision of human and urban life. The human race is trying to get organized to resist this final apocalypse, but human beings cannot much without machines and their machines are not that good when compared with the machines of the other realm. Yet some human beings, a small team of them are following a prophecy and have the capacity to navigate mentally but in a pseudo-physical state from their back world into Zion and the human world. When they thus navigate between layers of material life they leave their heavy and hard bodies behind and enter new bodies that have tremendous powers. It is these powers they need to defeat machines. This second episode of the saga is interesting because it enables us to meet with the mathematician who has constructed the whole matrix. First he is human and no explanation will be given about how he can survive in the realm of machines, and how he can expand his life into some timeless eternity. Second he announces that he programed everything, including the prophecy that is then a lie, and that Zion and its destruction is necessary to keep the balance of this matrix and that the final destruction that is announced will be the sixth destruction. We note that there is no explanation about this number six, about why and how Zion can survive every destruction. The most surprising is of course the number six, the number of Solomon that has nothing to do with the end of the world. Yet Zion leads us to the bible and the main prophecy we can think of is the Book of Revelation. But then the number of this apocalypse is not six but seven. In other words we are not in any kind of a meaningful allusion to the bible. The film is only using these allusions to create an atmosphere of secrecy, of spirituality that helps making the film a lot less pure action. It gives some inspiration to what would otherwise be nothing but brutal movement. Third this film transforms battles, fights and action into some kind of 3-dimensional ballets that can be very pretty at times. These ballets can be set in any place whatsoever : in an open square, in the hall of a Renaissance mansion, or on the roof of a truck on a highway. The general impression is that one or two heroes are fighting against a never-ending and constantly reinforced army of cloned individuals than can become hundreds in one instant and multiply to thousands in less than ten seconds. Just the time it takes to open a door and to bring them out. And yet these ballets have some beauty even if it is a little bit repetitive hence slightly long. But what can the meaning of this film be ? We will probably come to the final meaning in the third episode. But here we do have a very negative vision of a mechanized world in which human beings are becoming completely dispossessed of their life and of their future. The human race is also tremendously reduced in vision and even the will to really fight for their survival seems to have been tremendously reduced. The future of the world, when it is menaced with utter destruction, lies in the hands of half a dozen people at the most. That does not make a crowd, does it ? Then there emerges from the film a tremendous sense of fatality. Is there any hope ? If we believe the two or three who say yes, but if we look at the real and hard facts given in the film, no, absolutely no. And this fatalistic vision is emphasized of course by the nearly black and white pictures that are in a way filmed in all the possible shades of grey. THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS – 2003 - Fascist manipulation debunked The third film finally gives the secret. For one, it is probably slightly better as for the fights because they are more in the air and that makes them look like surreal comic strip fights. The technique is superb and the cameras are sublime. There is not one strange and normally never used shooting angle that is not used at a moment or other in the shooting of these fights. For two, the machines are brilliant. Of course we all think of Aliens because some of the fighting equipment looks a lot like what we had in Aliens. But the beings, the machines, the mechanical fighters are absolutely unique and they look both very elegant like some giant sea creatures Octopuses maybe but with so many more legs. Machine City is also great with the allusion to these machines not being able to live in the sunshine. Follow my eyes and read my lips. H. G. Wells is not very far with his time-traveler. The will to show schools of them flying or floating through the air makes these creatures more computer animated and governed because they get involved in some pretty heavy mass movement. But that's great. The master machine is given some kind of a human face and voice, why not since machines are born slaves and slaves imitate their masters. But this meeting with the master machine finally leads us to the real meaning of this saga. But before getting to that it is important to speak of the characterization of the main characters: they look human, they are very expressive in their faces and gestures. They do have the face and body language they need to make us believe we are in real danger. But of course, the main point of them all is the meaning the way it comes up. The machines not more than the humans want to go on with the war that is supposed to destroy the human race. It becomes very clear that the matrix was planned and produced by some human minds in order to make human life ever better than what it had ever been by giving all the dirty and heavy work to machines all maintained and locked up in Machineville. This idea is typically western in thinking, even though it is implied that humans being what they are doomsday is possible everyday of the week. It is a rewriting of H.G. Wells' Time Machine. Actual working and producing was the task of an underground race living in darkness. The change is that these producers are here machines and nothing but machines. The human race then can have it easy at enjoying life. That's a change from H.G. Wells again because for him daytime humans had become unable to do anything except enjoy living and being hunted by the underground species like wild animals or rather submissive cattle. What went wrong is that a special species of men have taken over the control of both human and machine worlds for their own interest and somewhere pleasure. They have highjacked the computer program that is behind the Matrix. The fight then takes place between Neil, aka Mr Andersen, and Agent Smith. Agent Smith has the power to clone himself into any other human being. So he has become an army and he controls the world and he has decided to get rid of the human race. Against him an Oracle, a black human woman who knows more or less what is going to happen, and Neil who has special powers too and can stop Agent Smith, but no more than stop. So he has to trap him into a common ending, a common death because he has to destroy himself if he wants to destroy the fascist. The rest is for you to discover. Very effective. So the world can survive for an unspecified period of time. Peace has been concluded through this final sacrifice. Here we have some good old Christian allusions. First of all the long cassock looking robes he is wearing, our Neil. Second his sacrifice for the survival of humanity. But there will be no resurrection, no rebirth of the world because his girl friend dies before him. No Mary Madgalene secret. And then there will be no surviving procreating couple to reinvent humanity. Humanity has been saved for a while. No Apocalypse. But a victory in the war against the machine like in Frank Herbert, but the machines are not destroyed, the equilibrium of this mechanized world is not changed, there is no promise of a savior one day. The Christian allusion is thus reduced to a dire minimum. The meaning is also reduced to a dire minimum : for humanity to go on enjoying life we have to get rid of all machines, productive work and pollution far away from us and we have to have a few courageous and inspired warriors that are ready to sacrifice their lives for humanity to go on living. In other words good old traditional patriotic courage. That does not make this trilogy the piece of imagination that will revolutionize the world, but it is an entertaining film. And if you really get into it try to identify all the allusions to Stephen King's novels. I can tell you there are many. FRITZ LANG – DIE NIBELUNGEN – SIEGFRIED – KRIEMHILDS RACHE– 1924 A very beautiful film. We may wonder how Fritz Lang managed to get to that level of quality of picture but also that width of picture with the camera of the time. But he managed at least to give the impression he had wide pictures of landscape and movement, particularly galloping horses and masses of people. The film is not in black and white as expected but in gold and black and that gives it a tremendous impact since it is color without being color. It is warm whereas white and black would have been cold. That establishes a relation with the audience that is close like some story telling at night in front of some fire in the winter. We are inside the story. Another quality is the costumes. The luxurious costumes of the Nibelungen from Burgundy and the city of Worms are strikingly imposing and even forbidding. Hagen Tronje’s rough costume and extravagant helmet make him look like a barbarian, violent by principle, treacherous by nature. He is the man apart that will never be betrayed by the clan, in spite of all the misery he will bring down upon them. In the same way the Huns are shown as primitive, mostly have nude, and children are shown as systematically nude, living in some kind of huts or tents, at times troglodyte caves, though at the same time they have a palace in the “city” and that palace is in a way beautiful though rather massive and heavy but quite comparable to that of the Nibelungen in Worms which is maybe vaster and more richly decorated and has a cathedral. The restoration of the film has a lot to do with the quality of the picture but all the rest is really Fritz Lang’s. The question this film brings up is the motivation of Fritz Lang when he directed and produced this film. The film goes back to the traditional Germanic more than German legend of Siegfried and his wife Kriemhild. This version is not the only one in Germanic culture with some others more Scandinavian in which Siegfried is named Sigurd. This film is centered on Burgundy seen as German and the Huns in the East. This redistributing Europe to the benefit of Germany is typical of the post World War 1 atmosphere, the desire to step over the defeat. At the same time the Nibelungen are run amok because of one of their allies who is untrustworthy, and yet they stick to him. That leads to all the Nibelungen being destroyed by the vengeful will of one of them, hence some kind of a traitor, Kriemhild herself who wants to avenge the murder of her husband, though she forgets to remember she gave the killer the information he needed to succeed. She wants at least everyone to forget. And she will get her vengeance, but she will be destroyed by one surviving member of the clan. That means the defeat comes from inside because the Nibelungen were not able to respect and protect the hero they had welcomed in their clan. You see the myth behind, the lesson to the German audience: be faithful and support your heroes. Just nine years later it is this mood that will produce Hitler and the full German support to him. The Germans did not do the same mistake as in the old days. Surprisingly enough the lesson comes from a Jew, the main victims later on. The vision of the East, the Huns, Attila, is the vision of a primitive and extremely barbaric people but yet courageous and dedicated to themselves, the Huns, with waves and waves of simple people turned warriors without weapons or equipment, dying in great number but finally overwhelming the well equipped and well trained Nibelungen. True enough the killing idea came from Kriemhild: burn them all in and out, but yet it is the Huns who did it, burning down their own palace to roast the Nibelungen inside. At the same time the motivations were clear: they wanted to avenge the killing of Attila’s own son by Hagen Tronje. They were justified since Hagen Tronje killed an infant out of pure spite. We can wonder if this film, a lot more popular medium than the rewriting of the myth by Wagner’s operas, though Wagner could now be heard on the radio in the 1920s and 1930s, if this film did not contribute to build the atmosphere and motivation that brought Hitler to power. One thing is sure: the film is a very compelling call to the Germans to reunite and get inspiration from their mythology or past and at the same time to unite behind their heroes not to make the same mistakes again. In 1924 Hitler was still unknown but yet the momentum that was going to bring him to power was already moving and building up. This film is one piece of the puzzle. And it’s probably for that reason that we had to wait so long before getting it restored to some glory. Some historical facts of the past are at times difficult to digest by modern people. DR.DRE – EASZY-E – ICE CUBE – MC REN – DJ YELLA – STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON – 2015 This film is first of all nostalgic and that is good because we do not live on bread and water but also on recollections, as much as on dreams and projects. You will get the allusions to and mentions of “Boys in the Hood” and the famous video of the beating of Rodney King by the police in LA in 1992. You will have the right to wonder if anything has changed since now young black males are just shot to death by the police practically every week and just like in 1992 the police officers so far have gone through a judicial procedure that has cleaned them up of all charges or nearly. You will also find the very strange community life in Black ghettos in America and the systematic raids of the police (be the policemen Black or white) to harass the young Black males they can see anywhere including in some Black neighborhoods. But the film is a lot more than just that. It is the real history of a group of rap music, N.W.A., that was probably the first to dare produce that music with these lyrics, the lyrics of the real street reality of Black ghettos and attacking the white dominant society for being racist, criminal, lethal and a few other nice totalitarian and dictatorial characteristics. Their most famous song was “$...K the police” of course. They were arrested in Detroit for it and they defended their first amendment rights, their total freedom of speech. That is the most important element at this point: the first amendment to the US constitution was understood at the time as being only for whites. Things have changed. But have they really? Note the freedom of speech is one thing, but the freedom of the distribution and circulation of all personal expression is far from being true because most people don’t have the slightest possibility to really be circulated and distributed as much as Trump or Clinton, even with the Internet. The second element that is interesting is that showbiz is a big stealing industry. You always find a producer who will help you though he will help himself first. But at the same time in your group there is always one who is going to help himself slightly less equally than the others since he is the one who has the power to sign all documents and checks. You will also learn that there is no contract for years because as long as you are not untouchable you are not someone who cannot fail tomorrow. So the producer prefers no contract since then he has none to break if there is some kind of difficulty along the road. The third element is that artists like money but they sure do not know what investing and saving are. They get it, then they have to spend it, and spend it they do on parties, women and who knows what. So that Easzy-E is HIV positive and dies of AIDS because since he was not gay he did not have to take any precaution, did he or did he not? As the doctor told him a long time too late: “You can get the virus from a heterosexual unprotected relationship.” Add to that alcohol and drugs and you have it. I guess 80% of the income is wasted on mostly useless and vain expenditures, including crazy ego-boosting cars and houses. Stardom in such cases is a long shorter than the stardom of a real star in the sky. It is true it cannot be taken to paradise in a backpack, but even so… If all industrialists were like that we would still be living in caves. The most fascinating fact is the music. Some pretend that rap or hip hop is no music. It is just humdrum drum machine noise plus a DJ scratching records in all possible ways. And worse of all the songs are not even sung, are they? Or are they not? For me it is an extremely strong and powerful form of music because the language is “manipulated” with the lips, tongue, larynx and glottis to get a special rhythm and a special cyclical flow punctuated by strong syllables or words generally carrying rhymes. Maybe it is not what the “experts” will call operatic singing. Maybe it is not what the connoisseurs will call music hall songs or even musicals songs. But it is tremendous work on language, on rhythm and even at times the use of melodious tunes on a guitar or some other instrument. This leads me to say that when Blacks were slaves they used such rhythmic chanting to make all the slaves work at the same rhythm to avoid as many whippings as possible in the evening when the final cotton collection was measured, slave by slave. That insistence on rhythmic speech and rhythmic music is the purest African tradition that used to have the only polyrhythmic music in the world before it started spreading to the Semitic world first and then to all the places where African slaves were imported. Rap and hip hop is the very soul of African slaves and we can understand why in Europe so many second generation forced immigrants from the Maghreb or Arab countries find in rap and hip hop a way to express their soul wound, their historical alienation, their holocaustic traumas (colonization, forced deportation to Europe as overexploited menial unqualified workers, total alienation and deculturation of their own culture and the absolute acculturation in the standard European culture of the various countries where they are used as salaried chattel. We are here at the root of the future because the victims of these soul wounds and of these historical traumas and genocidal holocausts are the future of this world. That’s why gangsta rap is at least as important as Beethoven’s ninth symphony or Verdi’s Aïda. JACK CLAYTON – THE INNOCENTS – 1961 The film is a marvelous black and white film. It Has the magic of black and white; It has the depth of buildings, inside and outside, only seen in shades of grey, particularly dark grey. It has the perspective of shade and shadow and the menacing, awesome, fearful, fathomless profundity that implies some gravity in the drama. Cast in this partly old Tudor and partly old Georgian mansion this black and white “coloring” or absence of “coloring” is frightening, disquieting, perfect for the atmosphere that is expected from the story. We are entering a horror story. The film chooses to emphasize one aspect of Henry James’s story. The absolute paranoia and even maybe worse, something like psychosis, of the main character who is given a name she never had in the novella, Miss Giddens, giddy indeed from even before the very start. This naming the unnamable makes it more normal whereas the whole film is going to show she is absolutely berserk, from the very first instant we see her. I will regret the age of the actress. This governess is supposed to be hardly 20 or over by one or two years maximum. The actress does not fit that assumption. She cannot be in her first job just out of her family. She is too old and she behaves and acts too old, and her immature psychosis in front of some fear that is her own and she turns into a fright, a panic, or even worse, does not fit with this too obvious age. Apart from that, right from the beginning she seems immature and emotional, like for example having the coachman stop at the gate for her to proceed on foot is absurd when you know everyone is waiting for her at the door of the mansion, servants and children (even if only one child at that moment). The fact that she finds the girl in the park around the mansion though she should have been at the door waiting for the arrival of the new governess is unacceptable even for a house where there is no master, except a housekeeper. The governess is at least surprisingly unaware of what she does not do right, but there is something wrong in the general picture. And sure enough the film insists on her becoming more and more deranged by all kinds of noises and fears she develops in an old mansion she is convinced is haunted in a way or another. The two dead members of the personnel become her fixation: the previous governess who killed herself in the lake, which is not the original version, and the valet turned house manager whose death is not made explicit in the way it happened. But the innuendo about an unacceptable pregnancy is pushed aside. It is even hinted that the previous governess was old and not so beautiful. The insistence on the relation between the children and these tow people is excessive and at the same time meaningless because the cause of the two kids coming under the guardianship of their uncle is not clarified enough and the two kids are not shown as they should: traumatized by the death of their parents, traumatized by their uncle sending them to this country mansion in some sort of exile, and traumatized by the death of the two people they had built a transference relation with. All that counts for nothing because it is not used except to build the phantasm of some haunting ghosts in the mind of Miss Giddens. And anyway what is wrong with a man teaching a boy how to ride a pony? You have to be particularly perverse to see some evil in that kind of action. As for the children being possessed by the ghosts, the film does not show it really. They are close and that is normal since they have survived together at least three traumatizing losses, and they feel Miss Giddens is not entirely sane from their very first encounter. Miles will even say so and Flora in her final temper tantrum says about the same thing. In fact the children are just at first testing the woman and then playing with her when they find out she is haunted by some fright of some ghosts she imagines around her. They may be cruel but they are not haunted. Miles is depicted as cruel as cruel can be when he pushes the woman into her most vulnerable unacknowledged mysterious psychological layers by kissing her on the lips. Note this game is maybe a little bit too strong for a ten year old boy, and it is not what the original novella says: Henry James showed in details how the nameless governess was emotionally attracted and that this attraction was sexually haunted by the belief that anything physical was wrong, especially for children, and yet at the same time this nameless governess was physically attracted by the boy she kisses and hugs at least profusely. Then the final death of Miles, rejecting Miss Giddens who is insisting on the presence of Quint’s ghost, remains unexplained really. It appears as if it were a way to protect himself against Miss Giddens but that is overreacting really and the final scene of Miss Giddens kissing the dead boy on the lips is just absurd. She likes her children dead so that they run no risk to be perverted . . . by her, and yet she desecrates Miles with a necrophiliac kiss. The psychology of these two traumatized children is overlooked and the perverse desires of Miss Giddens are underrated, so that the film seems to have no real explanation: we are dealing with some unexplainable events, though these events can be entirely explained with a little of help from the first psychiatrist we can come across in the underground. The film is of course from the very early 1960s and that was a time when we considered psychiatry as a science of psychological diseases and we refused to consider non-clinical psychiatry explaining the behavior of people in a more meaningful way than behaviorism. And unluckily that’s the final explanation that floats on top: the mansion is haunted and it took possession of its inhabitants, the children and the new weak and very obtuse governess. FRINGE – 2008 This series is centered on six actors that play six characters: 1- Anna Torv plays Olivia Dunham; 2- Joshua Jackson plays Peter Bishop; 3- Jasika Nicole plays Astrid Farnsworth; 4- John Noble plays Dr. Walter Bishop; 5- Lance Reddick plays Phillip Broyles; 6- Blair Brown plays Nina Sharp. It is a number attached to wisdom, the wisdom of Solomon. This series is in five seasons, a pentacle in other words, hence slightly diabolical. And diabolical, devilish and other satanic creatures and worlds will be discovered, explored and suffered over and over again. This series is a real trip in insanity in the name of science fiction and pure science. Insanity and schizophrenia, both are seen as normal, standard, basic. You have to be insane to accept to live in a world of absolute manipulation and domination. Even the end is the absolute success of this manipulation-domination even if it presents itself as a rebirth, renaissance, renascence. It is not since it is the result of the ultimate but with no reason to be final episode of this subservient acceptance of scientific ranting and raving whose slaves we are. This series is fascinatingly obsessive and compulsive. It is schizophrenic but it avoids any simple binary reduction. It is based on the binary existence of our world and a parallel universe that is nothing but our own world blocked so to say before the Twin Towers were brought down, hence before September 11. This other world has the same basic six characters but they are different because they live in a different system. Our world is supposed to be rational and democratic. So crazy scientists are put in some psychiatric institution or used in the wings behind the public scene and hidden away from public attention and view working for some marginal clandestine though absolutely official branch of the FBI. In the parallel world the crazy scientist is the Minister of Defense. Both of course are two versions of Dr Walter Bishop. This parallel world blocked in an ancient state of development is undemocratic. It is typically some kind of East German police industrial world with an ever present super security unit called FRINGE. But in this other world this security agency is visible, hyper visible and even overwhelmingly dominant. If it were only these two universes it would be banal. But systematically the series is based on triads of characters and situations. The scientific pole of this utopia/dystopia is ternary: Dr Walter Bishop, Nina Sharp and Dr William Bell. The two scientists are in love with Nina who is the industrialist of this triad of crazy minds. She builds, constructs and realizes all the most undreamable fancies and plans of the other two. Then there is a third universe systematically referred to and never actually described in which David Robert Jones who escapes from his German prison by using some technology invented by the other two, Dr Walter Bishop and Dr William Bell. The first one is a thief for sure but without the other two he is nothing. He will even become the associate of Dr William Bell, when this one will have to leave the alternate universe of ours where he had taken refuge away from Dr Walter Bishop when he was institutionalized. Such triads are quite common and basic. The two essential universe are under the observation and then finally under the colonization of another parallel world that is not specified. This world, a fourth world, the world of the Observers, is a world of utter genetic manipulation, artificial for plain humans who are implanted some enhancing device in the brain, and purely genetic afterwards with the child, Michael, who is produced without any sexual intercourse. In fact the world of the observers is a purely and entirely male universe and it will have to be defeated in a way or another because it is a dictatorship. This destruction is centered on another triad: Dr Bishop, Michael and Michael’s father known as September when he was an observer and now Donald since he has been deprived of his cerebral enhancing unit. This triad is essential since one adult man has to take Michael to some point in the future where he will be able to change the past and reset the world to before the invasion of observers and at the same time get rid of them altogether. This is the central theme in this series: the role, power and sacrifice of fathers. Michael’s father, Peter’s fathers (there are two Peters originally: the one in our universe who dies as a child and the one in the parallel universe who is dying but our universe’s Dr Walter Bishop crosses the frontier and steals the second Peter from his parallel parents, bringing the other Dr Walter Bishop into his vengeful mood that will turn the other universe into a hostile fiend.) and even Peter when he becomes a father with the Olivia Dunham of the parallel universe (in fact his original universe) and even when he becomes a father with Olivia Dunham in our universe: and yet the first child (a boy) just vanishes from the series, sacrificed to Peter choice to remain in our universe, and the sacrifice of the second child (a girl) fighting against the observers will have to be reversed, and the girl saved. But a father has to be sacrificed (not a son: inversion of the Christian myth), one for the opening of a bridge between the two universes, one to accompany Michael to the future. There are always two fathers or father figures and only one will live the moment through, though in the end, in the final end, the survivor of the first pair will be sacrificed in his turn. No hope, dear fathers: you have to die. And yet the last episode turns this dystopia into the most enlightened happy utopian ending. But this is a last scene or sequence and we know it is pure closing up time, last drink gentlemen and this last drink is heavily diluted in syrup: If time is brought back and the observers are gotten rid of, then at this happy moment somewhere in 2015 or so Dr Walter Bishop in our world should be alive and kicking. So his selfless sacrifice is in fact an extremely selfish nice little trip to the future to be healthy and happy when back to the present. We knew from the start that there is no possible trip back to the future if it is not aiming at blissfully surviving in the present. Never ever believe a mad scientist: crazy for sure but egotistically umbilical. A series for people who really want to believe in phenomenal X-files and the existence of innumerable parallel universes. But be careful: it is hypnotic, hence habit forming THE COMPLETE THIN BLUE LINE – ROWAN ATKINSON – 1995/2001 It was a time when hard-of-hearing people were not respected. So, sorry folks, no subtitles. Apart from that lack of empathy it is a typical comedian act from Great Britain. They have never been within the limits of anything in the world and they dare exhibit pure, intense and dense bigotry that is supposed to make you laugh. At times it is funny. Ah! Ah! or Strange? I can’t say. In other words hilarious humorous Brexit fifteen years ago. Advanced, ain’t they? We are within a police station in Gasford, or something like that, in London and it is the population of this police station that is at stake. Rowan Atkinson is the boss and he is a grimacing, twitchy old hetero (though not sexual) male chauvinist pig, and he deserves this animal personification, though the animal does not deserve the police-gentrification of that character. Ex-married with a grown up student-son or son-student whose only part we see is his bottom in his underwear – quite a limited vision though slightly too chubby, or is it wrapped up or fat, for 20 or so – this police chief lives with a girlfriend who is more satisfied by her dog than by her boyfriend. Interesting! The old spinster revisited here as an old neglected unmarried home-feature piece of human furniture. She should try the plumber, strangely absent in this series. Then you have a constable who is openly heterosexual lusting on his female Asian colleague and behaving like a gay cliché strutting around in all kinds of supposedly homosexual antics. Openly anti-gay in its humorous covering of extreme behavior that even children under five would consider slightly off the point and unacceptable. Certainly not funny! Then you have another one who is black because you need to have a black man on a series, but he is also a male chauvinist pig in his own way with crazy stories at times about his wife and how he ordered her around till he was led to submit to her authority which meant more or less putting herself and him at a mutual shared distance. Then you can add in the same line the female Asian constable who is supposed to bring some feminine sexy charm in this comedy and of course the necessary Asian coloration for the series to be racially correct. Add to these the girlfriend of the boss. She is at the desk all the time, or nearly, since she must be a sergeant or something like that. But the CID (is it Crime Investigating Department?) of this police station is a pair of fat slobs pretending to be male and masculine and sports-like and beer-guzzling and farting all the time and burping in-between farts and of course testicular male chauvinist hogs, not to overuse pigs. The main charm though is none of these caricatures. It is the delirium linguistica of some if not all the characters. They speak in a lingua – not franca at all – that has nothing to do with standard civilized English, certainly not the Queen’s type. It is a completely revisited cockney reinvention based on accumulation of words that mean nothing really except that they play on echoing sounds and gross, frankly at times sickening, innuendo and implied meaning though they have little meaning per se. If you want it could be qualified as cop-minded wife-beating universally-incorrect white-shaded cockney-colored gangster rap, at least if cops can use gangster slang. You might find it funny at times though it is more sickeningly exuberant and closer to the Tourette scatological syndrome than to any sane discursive expression. STEPHEN KING – UNDER THE DOME – TV SERIES – SEASON 1 – 2013 The book was good. The series is just as good. Special effects are best that make what was only evoked in the book really visible. It is easier for us as viewers, than when we were plain readers. These special effects are so vivid that we seem to forget the book and be just confronted to the TV series that looks different though we cannot be sure of anything. So we let ourselves drift into the own logic of the series. The dome isolates a community for an endless period of time. The event reveals every single inhabitant out of their hiding places, into the open. The most striking revelations are negative and mostly and most powerfully when concerning local VIPs. And they fall one after another, though the brain of this gang of traffickers, the local politician naturally, is the hardest to bring down. He knows how to manipulate people as if they were play-dough. And play-dough they are, even the mayor, when you know who is playing. The local preacher will fall first because he tries to redeem himself and being an accomplice to the main drug dealer, he is also one of his first victims: the drug dealer must eliminate everyone who may understand his game, and primarily his accomplices and partners. But the best part of this series, just like the book, is to reveal the real personalities of every single inhabitant. Greed, ambition, love of power, cruelty are the “passions” this situation reveals. If you want to see how muddy, dirty, rotten a god-fearing law-abiding community is, here are typical cases and the death of many people in the past and under the dome now are suspicious, and frankly not accidental or natural at all. The good revelations, the positive people accept to die to help their neighbors, to spread the truth the way they discover it, to stand tall in front of some injustice. Women are essential (though there are a few negative females), even two mothers and their common daughter, a rare case of a lesbian relation on the good side of the story, though one of the two mothers dies early because she is diabetic and insulin is not available. The second mother is black, the one who survives. She is not the biological mother of the daughter but that does not prevent a normal mother-daughter relation. Stephen King still has to have a gay relationship in one of his novels. So far he has not gotten that far yet. Among the positive people the core squadron is a septet of young men and women. The inner core is a quartet, two boys and two girls with two women and one man just behind. The four young people are the key that manages the solution of the essential mystery about the dome, its generator. They are able to dissolve the dome of this generator, liberate the monarch butterfly that hatched inside this dome, the messenger of the dome, or anyone behind the dome=. It selects the person who has to start the cleansing of Chester’s Mill. The monarch butterfly chooses Julia, one of the two women behind the four young people and she starts the beginning of the end at the end of the last episode of the first season: She causes the pink stars to start falling down from the sky of the big dome. But the genius of Stephen King has no limits. One of the four young people who are the key to the solution still to come is the very twisted, even perverse son of the mayor, a born dictator, drug dealer and trafficker himself. The father wants the son to follow in his steps. Yet that is not necessarily easy. Concerning this warped young man in the hands of his twisted perverse father an essential ellipse is not really clarified. His mother died in an “accident” which was no accident of course, without us knowing for sure. She was an art teacher. Before dying she painted a picture of her son in front of a house in the village with pink stars falling from the sky. The prophetic phrase “pink stars falling from the sky” is from her. The first time the son shows the picture to his violated girlfriend he is in the picture. The second time the father shows it to the female cop who has become the sheriff due to the sheriff dying due to his accidental proximity to the dome, the son has been replaced by a big black egg, like the one at the heart of the little dome that “generates” the big dome. This ellipse should be made explicit. Does it mean the son is the “savior” of the rotten apple in te basket? The personality of the stranger in this village known as Barbie is not clarified yet in the series. He is the third person standing behind the four young people, next to Carolyn, the black second mother, and Julia, Incidentally a journalist (Stephen King loves newscasters: the local radio woman is shot dead by the mayor: it is difficult to be a newscaster of any type). And this season ends with Barbie standing on the trap of hanging gallows rope around neck, hands tied up in his back, the mayor loudly giving the order to open the trap to his son who has his hands on the lever. And during that time the pink stars are falling from the sky of the dome. Dramatic suspense, definitely blue as for the sanguinity of this T-bone steak of a story! Good appetite, folks, engorge yourself on such heavily terrifying gross images of horror. Let’s regret though that the cow sliced in two by the falling dome looks more like a pomegranate than like a real body. STEPHEN KING – UNDER THE DOME – TV SERIES – SEASON 2 – 2014 The first season had changed a few things in the trajectory of the plot. The second season changes the plot radically and opens up onto a third season for more changes in the plot line. The extra-terrestrials of the book are this time completely pushed aside. We are dealing with more concrete and material elements typical of Stephen King’s vision of a society where danger is institutionalized behind uniforms, and at the same time hope can only be found with the help of people from these uniformed institutions. Think of The Stand or Golden Years. The egg becomes the center of the plot, the egg deposited in the perimeter by a meteor some 25 years before or ago. At this time this meteor and this egg discovered by four high school students (probably seniors) caused the death of a young woman accidently killed by three people. These three people have to come back and the dead one has to reappear on the crime scene. This season brings two of the three survivors found in the perimeter itself under the dome and the third one has to be brought back into the perimeter under the dome. One is a crazy preacher, the other is the uncle of Big Jim’s son, and the third one is the mother of Big Jim’s son who is supposed to be dead. You can already feel and smell how important this Big Jim family is becoming. Big Jim was on the verge of hanging Barbie at the end of the first season. Things become a lot more treacherous and tricky for him at the beginning of the second season and all along. Barbie is revealed as the son of some important industrialist in Zenith, the city on the other side of the dome. That industrialist is in energy production and his projects have to do with this egg. They are planning some kind of high security action. This father has his own security force but at the same time some invisible governmental force is controlling this private security force. This makes the clandestine secret operation extremely tricky and dangerous since there is no real control over it because of the rivalry that comes along with this double allegiance. From climbing into the small hills of the perimeter under the dome and managing to get the dome lifted by the extra-terrestrials who are playing cosmic electronic games on earth, we shift to underground tunnels with a way in and a way out. The egg is the key to these ways in and out. Big Jim plays it alone and of course disrupts everything and brings havoc. He makes himself sheriff and you can imagine his sheriff style: shoot even before shooting before asking questions. Preventive (preemptive as Bush used to say) shooting to prevent the police force from having to shoot before asking questions. Then the second season suggests a way out of the dome but underground and leading to a place that is not identified as perfectly human and the nature of that outside escape world is the cliff hanger of this season. Wait one full year for the next season and the discovery of where these escaping people find themselves and what happens to the three they left behind and what happens to Barbie’s father on the other side who is arrested by his own private security force that receives orders from a higher level that is not identified. Chester’s Mill has become the center of all cosmic anxieties on earth with the other side of death coming alive on this side of life locked up under the dome. We can recognize under this frantic series the executive hand of Stephen Spielberg who is pushing Stephen King into his very last horror bunkers. And the final holocaust has not yet started. Let alone the final epiphany or salvation. In fact we do not even know how many people will have to be sacrificed to bring that final epiphany, if it is an epiphany. The series becomes then a parable of our modern times: you have to kill millions of people, or you have to let millions of people die in horrible conditions of war and terrorism for maybe some light to appear under the rim of the dome that may bring some alleviation of our evil, some releasing of our tension, some freedom of happiness but that happiness does not come free and a hefty price has to be paid for it. Only naïve nincompoops may think differently. But they are a lot of naïve nincompoops in this world. STEPHEN NKING – UNDER THE DOME – TV SERIES – SEASON 3 – 2015 The second season had diverged from the original novel by Stephen King, diverged quite a lot. But the third season is a complete U-turn from the novel. The dome is no longer some video game played by some cosmic extra-terrestrial kids who find it funny to play such games with real characters, especially humans who are both so sadistic and so creative, including in their sadism. This third season is the merging of many modern hype trends and fashions in literature and TV. Imagine a Harry Potter who would be both sadistic and masochistic, sadistic because the suffering of other people is funny and masochistic because the pleasure of those who make you suffer is exhilarating, especially when you get your vengeance. The dome is the supreme revealer and the end of the dome brings the most supreme blissful and intense hormonal pleasure Imagine the X-files at an exponential dimension of cosmic magnitude with three themes perfectly associated and knit together: a corporation that is practicing some experiments that turn sour: then kill them all. Then an invasion of extraterrestrials mongrels that are in fact humans infected by some spore, disease, or whatever coming from the cosmos. And finally some armed forces that are both organizing the cover-up of this extraterrestrial saga and at the same time the planning and experimenting that it enables them to do on containing some group of people for no reason at all, and in fact any reason you can imagine. Corporations are sinful. Extraterrestrials are beyond good and evil. The armed forces are courting with sin by principle: there is no war that is not motivated by some sin: let’s explore and experiment on sin under all circumstances. Fox Mulder is thus some kind of naïve virginal choirboy when compared to at these abnormal, supranormal and subnormal, not to speak of paranormal events. The best being the amethyst that is more than one cubic meter, or 30 cubic feet, that they dig out of the undergrowth of some forest. And of course we do have Supernatural in mind. Who is Dean? Probably Barbie. Who is Sam? Probably Joe. You will have some difficulty with Big Jim and Jim Junior, but you can choose all the bad guys you want, and of course the women are problematic since Supernatural has no real woman in no real important and permanent role. But they are dealing with monsters of all types and the worst monsters are those who are living deep in our flesh and bones, most of the time unknown of us but that can reveal themselves when the circumstances are becoming kind of tense or intense. You have to add to this some traditional themes like drug dealing and embezzling, not to speak of plain hypocrisy, of the clergy, the teaching personnel, the medical profession, and all politicians, especially if they are second hand car dealers. And yet you find Stephen King in the way there are several levels of life and existence, of reality and paranormal reality and people can shift from one to the other provided they have the proper key and the blind courage to get into the boat that will cross the lake to get under the surface and to the other side of this dome that is nothing but the divide between this reality and the other supra- or sub-reality. The end though is more Richard Bachman-like than Stephen King-like. You’ll tell me the two are the same, which is formally true. As some advertisement says in France: “If you want to change worlds, just change you underwear.” And sure enough at one level we have Stephen King and his way of never ending a story and leaving some dangerous pawns alive after the end. A future volume is coming though here it is a fourth season that is not announced yet. At another level we have Richard Bachman with a father killing his son and a father killing his daughter. or some lieutenant of the Queen of Insanity leading a file of more than twenty oldies walking into the lake to drown, and the same lieutenant trying to do the same thing with more than twenty children. The kinship requires sacrifice. In this case it is rather a holocaust, though they are not burnt but they are drowned by their self commitment to their sacrificial duty. That reminds me of some Cold War jokes when Mr. K meets Mr. K. But you know them all. And the final image is on one hand “The Queen is dead! Long live the Queen!” and on the other hand “I love you! Me neither.” If you really want to enjoy your summer or some long dark night in the winter, take the series and watch all the episodes of the three seasons in one go. I am sure you will survive, though you might be slightly berserk and corrugated by the experience. God really bless the child! Enjoy the tense and intense sadistic voyeurism of the masochistic camera. J.R.R. TOLKIEN – THE HOBBIT – TRILOGY – AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, 2012 – THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, 2013 – THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES, 2014 I was very critical of the first part of this trilogy that I saw in the non-extended version. You will find this critique under the first title of this trilogy. Here I am going to consider the full trilogy. I maintain the idea that it was a bad idea to dilute the very short and dense novel by Tolkien, The Hobbit, into a never ending trilogy. Of course we are told it is not an adaptation of the novel but a film that is realized after the novel by Tolkien, and I must here say the dilution is important and it does not respect the intensity of the original work. But why not after all? That’s just the right question to ask. The psychology of the characters is very often reduced to some simple sketches that are more part of the costume the actors wear, part of the characters and not something having any depth, any contradictory inner voice. Even the Hobbit himself is rather sketchy. He is predictable. He is in no way moved by deep sentiments that are expressed in a way or another on the screen. He does not have time to do this since he is absolutely all the time taken in a wild action that has no pause whatsoever, reducing the dialogue to nothing most of the time, grunts and growls most of the rest of the time, and here and there a few words often spoken in vain. And that is the main characteristic of this trilogy. It all starts with a Rune written on the Hobbit’s door by the wizard on his first visit. This Rune is “Fehu” under its Germanic name or “Feoh” under its Anglo-Saxon name, and it is not reversed. But we are not explained the meaning of this Rune. The basic meaning is “cattle” which relates it to the post ice age agricultural evolution, the domestication of the wild bovines and thus the evolution of that new species that will provide food and comfort to human beings. It is easy to understand then that it means “wealth” and all that can be derived from that concept, such as ‘”fulfillment,” not only the satisfaction of one’s hunger, but also the satisfaction of all basic needs and further on the satisfaction of one’s call to the wild and adventure. This is basic in the whole vision provided at the beginning, though it is not explained clearly and it is not explained again at the end when the Hobbit arrives home and finds out all his accumulated wealth has been sold to everyone who wanted it. Satisfied in adventure and fate since he fulfilled his destiny, he is totally ruined in his material possessions and his house has been legally and commercially looted. That’s the kind of meaning we do not get and that’s how we can say that this rune represents this motto: “Every beginning has within it the seeds of its own end.” And the seeds can be the negation of the beginning, or its reversal because a Rune can always be drawn upside down, reversed. In other words it is perfectly representative of the ambiguity of runic culture, the very culture Tolkien is looking for in his novel. This “fehu” rune is the symbol of the call to some fate that leads to a dragon through fire, seas, storms and all other dangers from armies and other species and the “fehu” destiny is to kill the dragon. The killing of Smaug was contained in that rune written on the Hobbit’s door by this visiting wizard. I did not find one moment when this was explained. You can tell me that’s the whole story. Sure. But in Tolkien’s mind and in his creations, there had to be some pondering and understanding of the ambiguity of these missions and of their greatness in their being ambiguous, hence requiring at any moment, at any step a resourcing of oneself into the power of the mission, into the blood of the dragon. But my main criticism is that action is made dominant. There is nothing but action, meaning danger and violence. Even the Orcs must have a mind and must have some psychology. They are reduced to an army of brutal and brutish automats, the perfect killers who cannot die, though on the screen quite many will die at high speed. This insistence on the warlike aspect of the story erases the magic of the wizard and even the courage and imagination of the dwarfs and the Hobbit. Then it is all special effects that are supposed to be so striking that we are stunned into deafness, which explains why there is no dialogue. Why should there be in a story that is reduced to calamities and military fighting with in-between all types of other fighting, always for life, always to death. And the thirteen original dwarfs, squared up by the Hobbit who makes them fourteen, and the wizard who makes them fifteen, will only be ten left squared up to twelve by the Hobbit and the wizard. And that dozen is of course so symbolical of perfection that we cannot in any way hesitate: we have reached salvation though there is no prophet, no God, no Son of God, no Holy Virgin either. This parable of Christianity does not find the religious and ritual dimension it could not ignore in Tolkien’s world. This film is alas absolutely deprived of any religious and spiritual dimension. If you like special effects, that’s your trilogy. If you like spectacular battles, that’s your trilogy. If you like simple people who do not question the universe too much, that’s your trilogy. And to make it square: if you like films that do not contain anything erotic, sexy or even simply fleshy, hence if you like puritanical human beings, that’s your trilogy. It does not matter if Tolkien is betrayed in this trilogy, since Tolkien’s son made a tremendous amount of money. To defend himself he explained that he had donated a lot to various charities. Good for him. But Tolkien, his father, deserved a better service, more spiritual, more inspired by love, friendship and empathy instead of the light sprinkling of these seven and a half hours with rare and extremely superficial and evanescent references or simple allusions to such human feelings, certainly not actions or behaviors. The dragon is beautiful but he is absolutely unlovable, and actually unhatable because one cannot hate something one does not love. OLDER REVIEW OF THE FIRST FILM, “AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY.” IMdB AND AMAZON.COM The novel WAS a masterpiece, Tolkien's masterpiece deserves better, 22 December 2012 That's not a serious film about Tolkien and his "The Hobbit" novel, the novel before the "Lord of the Rings" series. That's a movie for young teenagers. Action is primary and slightly primitive too. And what's more they cut up a one volume book into slices. Apart from that disappointment, we have to say it is well done and the special effects are perfect but they are nothing but special effects and they produce no sympathy, empathy or compassion. They just produce surprise and movement. So what about that Hobbit Bilbon Sacquet, one of these simple short men who live somewhere underground among the roots of some trees, who dedicate their lives to studying and accumulating knowledge about everything and the rest. Scholars, savants, scientists, how can he go on roads and run after adventure? Hobbits just can't, full stop, period, endgame and endpoint. So what about this particular Hobbit who is literally kidnapped by shame into joining an adventure in which he is not really wanted but just opportunistically needed. But his presence is resented by some of these dwarfs he is supposed to travel with and help re-conquer their own kingdom out of which they have been ousted by a fiery dragon Smaug a long time ago and are since then chased by all kinds of monsters like trolls, goblins, orcs or whatever these monstrous monsters are. The elves are beautiful and charming, grand and elegant, cultivated and prudent and yet they are not used to the utmost level they could have served. They are just nearly an obstacle on the road, along the way, that has to be pushed aside and then a beautiful butterfly will bring the big birds who will save the situation in its last dire strait but nothing is made as clear as it should be. We are just piling up or stringing down one event after another in some kind of pearl necklace. Too bad because this novel by Tolkien is by far a masterpiece, but not the film, in spite of its length for just a first slice. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU AMAZON.FR La Bouteille sans l'Elixir, le 22 décembre 2012 J’attendais beaucoup mieux de ce court roman, l’ancêtre du Seigneur des Anneaux, par Tolkien, le grand Tolkien, et ce court roman est un chef d’œuvre qui devient un film pour jeunes ados pas même encore boutonneux. S’il n’y avait pas les effets spéciaux, ce serait un bien pauvre film. Les effets spéciaux sauve la chose mais ils ne donnent ni profondeur ni densité au film et ils ne créent ni sympathie, ni empathie, ni compassion. Ils n’apportent que de l’action et de la vitesse. Rien de bien sublime pour les spectateurs qui aiment les émotions humaines et fortes. Ce Hobbit Bilbon Sacquet, un petit homme qui vit dans les racines de quelque arbre, en totale isolation du monde, ou presque, consacrant sa vie au savoir et à sa collecte, un savant, un lettré, un érudit, un maître de l’esprit, un philosophe, et quoi encore ? Tout le reste. Il n’a aucune envie d’aller à l’aventure mais il est piégé par une bande de nains qui le provoquent dans sa dignité et sa vanité. Et en plus il n’est pas vraiment désiré. Il est simplement nécessaire dans la mission de ces nains qui se sont fixé l’objectif de reconquérir leur royaume perdu sous les flammes d’un dragon Smaug il y a longtemps et qui sont pourchassés par des gobelins, des orques et quelques wargs sans compter les toutes nouvelles araignées géantes et quelques sorciers maléfiques, ainsi risquant de mourir sous les dents de ces êtres monstrueux qui n’ont d’esprit que de grandes gueules et de cerveau que de grandes dents, et je ne dirait rien de leur psychisme réduit à leur salive et leurs crachats de morve mortelle et vénéneuse. Et c’est pourtant ce petit voleur de Hobbit qui va donner une leçon de courage aux nains trop rapidement découragés devant l’hostilité du monde. Mais ce que je regrette le plus c’est que malgré la longueur du film le réalisateur a réussi à couper un petit roman en tranches et vous n’aurez donc que la première étape cette année, en espérant que celle de l’an prochain sera la dernière, mais je n’en jurerait pas si j’étais vous. Alors allez jouir des effets spéciaux et des cabrioles numériques et numérisées, et d’ailleurs fort nombreuses, sorties tout droit des ordinateurs des studios d’Hollywood. Même les beaux (et enfin une femme dans tout ce film, on ne peut pas dire que l’on soit envahi par la sexualité et le désir), graciles, légers, élégants mais aussi prudents qu’une bande d’ermites au fond de leur caverne dorée ne sont pas utilisés comme ils le devraient et le papillon qui va chercher les grands oiseaux qui sauvent la mise n’est ni clair ni expliqué. Dommage. On aurait pu faire tellement mieux sur ce chef d’œuvre de littérature fantastique. DEADPOOL – 2016 A marvel of a Marvel anti hero or maybe superhero, or perhaps simply a hero brought up in the man by the right girl. Just let him be the hero he wants to be since anyway we know from the start that he will get the girl he loves and that he will defeat his main enemy, even kill him if necessary because she will forget his looks and only hear his heart. Romantic the way Hollywood likes it. Romantic and sexy, you could even say obsessed and obsessively obsessed with his flesh at that. It could have been an erotic film if he had not decided one day to live his life and get on the way where he met the worst possible people and first of all that demon Francis. I thought Francis was a Saint, but after all nothing proper in a proper name that is not common in a way or other. And common he is that Francis. A good séance of torturing to heal a cancer that is un-healable and the whole story ends on the other side of the divide between reason and insanity. His cancer is healed for sure, but he lost his good looks and he went through a mutation that made him immortal, not exactly in fact but unable to be killed, unable to die and the result is quasi-immortality. For someone who just wanted a love affair with his girlfriend, the cancer sauce and the hot chili peppers of a treatment made the future quite different. He will get his vengeance and he will recuperate his girl friend back but in the mean time half the city will have been destroyed, dozens of bad guys will have been killed or maimed, what was a disastrous building site will become a pitiful field of ruins. But our Deadpool will have his girlfriend and his love story, slightly more than a simple love affair, after all. If you have a hormonal teenager in you, that’s the film for you. If you have a liking for special effects, that’s the film for you. If you like happy endings, that’s the film for you. Just let the merry-go-round of the If clauses continue its circular route to the end of time. But don’t come and tell me I did not warn you: it is not an intellectual and social minded exploration of human life and society. So have a good trip on the other side of the looking glass. LEONARDO DICAPRIO – THE REVENANT – 2016 In a way it is a film for nothing, except an Oscar for the main actor. We are in Pawnee country some time in the 18th century, at the divide where the French and the English more or less meet. With the Indians in-between, around, behind and in front, at times under (a couple of feet under) or even over (from their horsebacks). The French are trying to play it commercial and buy pelts and other Indian natural products but they can’t always have their terms and at times are obliged to give some horses, even when the season is advanced and the horses are the guarantee to survive. Some will die. The English are more in burning the Indian villages and looting what’s left and even killing the survivors, even when there are none. Kill them twice for good business. Add to this the fact that some Indians, especially those who have managed to get horses can become a real permanent pressure and an arrow is silent, efficacious and reloading is easy. Think of an arrow sniper in the trees. Then you have the unhealthy, sick, vicious, criminal minds on the European sides. On the French and English sides they may consider an Indian woman is like a pet you take away without asking for permission. And the film widely shows how the English with their forts are rotten from the inside by the thieves, the immoral beings who take advantage of the frontier to realize the worst trends in their personalities: they can kill, rape, steal and many other things as much as they want. This film is the fight to the finish between two such English “pioneers,” one being on the sinning side and the other on the punishing side. They call that vengeance, and vengeance;, as is well known, is always on God’s side, and sure enough the assassin, murderer, thief and a few other things, among them rapist, will be finished by the Indians who will pass on their horses leaving the good one to die in the snow since he is wounded and his horse, if it is still there, has been left behind several miles of deep snow away. No salvation, no real vengeance. Just violence for the sake of surviving and for the pleasure of shedding blood. That shows the resilience and the viciousness of human beings. They love destroying, killing and a few other things like that. Really a film for nothing, except an Oscar for the main character, oops! Sorry actor. MULDER AND SCULLY – THE X FILES – SERIES 1993-2002 – X FILES THE FILM 1998 – X FILES I WANT TO BELIEVE 2008 THE SERIES 1993-2002 A series that lasts nine years has to cross many fields and terrains and meet many challenges if they are not terminating dangers or potentials. The general idea is in itself submitted to such eventualities, either Fox Mulder is menaced in his integrity, in his life or in his FBI position and we end a season on a cliffhanger that is uncomfortable and then tricky to solve. This very long series correspond to the strangest period in the history of the USA – and a little bit, a very little bit the world often reduced to Russia. It is the period covering Bill Clinton’s presidency and the first two years of George W. Bush’s own presidency, hence up to the campaign against Afghanistan and Iraq, the lies in the United Nations and the perverted objectives and ambitions that have set the world upside down. The conspiracy, if conspiracy there was or might have been, could no longer be seen as coming from inside the US government, the unseen dark aisles behind and under the Pentagon and the State Department. So it had to go back to an older fear, and that was extraterrestrials, the War of the Worlds and other Martians story but on the bleak side. No Encounters of any third type. Just plain hostile and warlike. The general idea is that some obscure committee composed of a camarilla of obscure biggies in the world came together just after the Second World War – we are of course speaking of the West as opposed to the Communist block reduced to being the USSR often called Russia or Siberia in this later period – to face a danger of a new type: the famous extraterrestrials that landed in Roswell. The general idea is that humanity as such is of extraterrestrial origin – note this forgets to answer about the origin of this intelligent life that was able to roam in the cosmos some millions or billions of years ago, making God the Creator an extraterrestrial himself – and those in 1946-47 started plans with some humans to prepare some mix of human and extraterrestrial genes to produce the people who will be needed to take over the planet again when ready, or to produce super soldiers in another shade of the tale. This nostalgic comeback, nostalgic on the side of the extraterrestrials but also on the side of the aficionados of the war of the world and Orson Welles, is modified from time to time with the principle that an extraterrestrial virus is being spread in the world via bees, corn or whatever, after a great number of humans had been abducted to be implanted with a controlling capsule, and even by the hypothesis that it won’t work anyway and it is better to plan the termination of the human race. The gist of the problem is that “the truth is out there” which means it is not in us, the humans. Yet “out there” has many meanings. It can be out there in the cosmos with the extraterrestrials, or out there in the black, dark and inscrutable alleys and aisles of the federal government buildings where some monsters may be roaming. To make them dark plotters allied to extraterrestrials look bad all means are used: a major one is a chain smoker. The others are either obese or on the very fat side, and they have heavy non-American including British accents, etc. The whole story then is that of a plot of some humans with extraterrestrials for these extraterrestrials to recuperate their extraterrestrial investment on earth by re-conquering earth, and these plotters use all means to control as many people in the state apparatus as possible. What is not explained is why the FBI, part of the innermost circle of power, decided to create a special department with only two agents but with great powers, to study all paranormal phenomena, and of course first of all the most paranormal if not the most abnormal phenomena having to do with extraterrestrials. It will never be clear if it was some guilt covering decision, or if it was some real anxiety of what may happen if it were true, or even if it was a way to sidetrack some agents and to satisfy the career-minded social climbing of some unscrupulous agents. Probably a little of all and many other motivations all around. What makes the series strange and fascinating is the fact that they deal with phenomena that really look at first sight banal. It is always dealing with some strange death or unexplained disappearance and/or abduction. Instead of solving the crimes in the good CSI line, or instead of clearing the plate in the good Supernatural tradition, it always has the bias of an obscure shady plot from inside the government of the US always having to do with extraterrestrials and only paralleled to the same but a lot more obscure dealings of the Russians in Siberia. The systematic victimization of the two main agents and their substitutes in the last season is also a hallmark of the attraction of the series. Just think of all the marginal political movements that have invoked in a way or another an unredeemably bad plot from the military forces, the police, the capitalists, corporations, high-tech companies, the you-name-them-you-have-them muddy and deeply egotistic groups. It is always such an idea that is behind all the protest groups in the world. At times it is rather realistic but in many other cases it is the sign of the paranoia or the schizophrenia of a vast number of people in our world. In older centuries that kind of ideology was covered by the street corner preachers announcing the end of the world or the apocalypse. Nowadays it is easier to mobilize at times big mass of people, at times a majority in elections or a referendum, against a supposed plot from any one establishment you may think of. On the entertaining side this series is a perfect example of this fantasized world of politics. And you can be sure there is no truth in it all, since truth is out there so it cannot be here in the stories. All religions started the same way: the truth was over there on Mount Olympus, or on Mount Sinai, or simply in the vast cosmos where God himself, and his spirit, lived over there on the other side of the divide between life and fantasy. Nothing has changed, except the medium transporting this new religious delirium: television it is, and this medium makes it extremely entertaining though little mesmerizing, or at least not at all in any kind of religious meaning. Mulder might be a Fox, but he sure is not a Messiah, and Scully is certainly not a Holy Virgin. Enjoy the trip. TGE X FILES, THE FILM - 1998 This first film, when the series was at its highest point of prestige and ascent, is only some kind of variation on the themes of the series itself. Nothing new under the sun, or the full moon as for that. It got some inspiration from some Predator, Aliens or Terminator films of some kind with a super flying saucer buried deep in Antarctica and collecting abducted human beings and keeping them frozen to transport them eventually into space. Of course Scully is abducted in such a program and finds herself frozen for transportation in this flying saucer. But Mulder will save the plot by entering the flying saucer through some backdoor, showing by the way how minimal security is for these extraterrestrials. The film is not that great about the theme. It uses a lot of clichés that had had plenty of time to settle in five years of the series, including the famous nameless cigarette chain smoker. But this film has the main defect of a TV series turned cinema. A TV series has to be cut up in short section of 6 and a half minutes for advertising, and it is shorter than a film since it lasts less than an hour, often not more than 45 minutes. In the film they more or less respect that format though they make the sequences slightly longer and that makes the film slow altogether and slowness is a defect for an action film. So it is some easy entertaining but nothing thrilling. THE X FILES I WANT TO BELIEVE - 2008 Ten years after the first film and six years after the end of the series, a second film is brought up. Scully and Mulder are no longer FBI agents and dealing with the X files that must have disappeared. Yet they get mixed up in a strange story of a missing FBI agent who comes to the attention of Dr Scully in her hospital work because of some kind of psychic who pretends he sees the missing agent. Just that level of fable and the resistance Mulder airs are quite banal and in no way surprising. Yet of course the two will get involved in this abduction or disappearance. But it will become very gross and typical of George W. Bush’s paranoia about the world and Russia in particular. The FBI agent was abducted because she was the proper genetic stuff to provide a body to the head of a man who would have been dying if he had not been hosted by a body that is worth little. No surprise of course that the head is that of a man, and the new body is that of an abducted female FBI agent. I guess in 2008 no one was particular about gender orientation any more, in spite of Proposition 8 in California. The worst part is that this Frankenstein research was performed by some Russian doctors who experimented on dogs, transferring one head to another body and vice versa, producing mongrels of another nature. Apart from the gruesome and out-grossing pictures, situations and ideas, this film has little to do with traditional themes in the X files. It is not even in any way paranormal since it is perfectly imaginable today, even in 2008, that such grafting techniques were possible. In the same way as the other film adapted from the series, this film is too slow in rhythm. I guess it takes some imagination to understand that the two media, TV and cinema, do not have the same logic and thus do not work the same way. For one, the screens are not the same size and the definition is till different. MA LOUTE – SLACK BAY – 2016 ENGLISH/ANGLAIS Let’s fall in the hideous, disgusting, sick and bleak mud of a marshy coastal bay somewhere between Boulogne and Gravelines in France, you know where the refugees are slowly rotting away waiting for a miracle to take them across the Channel. The action is at the beginning of the 20th century, before the First World War for sure and the first social upheaval in Nord Pas de Calais in 1906 after the mine accident in Courrières that caused a strike that was broken by Clemenceau’s supposedly republican army, but after the first anarchistic upheaval in the coal mines at the end of the 19th century so perfectly described by Emile Zola as a call to all capitalist bourgeois to move their consonants around and become paternalist if they don’t want to finish burned up at the stake or broken through on the wheel by the emerging Marxists already known as communists. The film in this no man’s land of “Who-Know-Where” concentrates on three sets of people. First the local sailors just pick mussels from the rocks along the coast but do not have any boats to go fishing out at sea. And in the summer they make some centimes, meaning some pennies, by carrying tourists, vacationers, rich bourgeois from Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing across the bay in their own arms. To improve their starving diet they just kill one or two from time to time to add some meat to their poor regimen. Cannibalism, you will say. But you are wrong about it. It is plain survival of those who have the sharpest teeth. The big family of textile bourgeois from Tourcoing, is so inbred that we could doubt they are nothing else but a reborn personification of Tutankhamun, the twisted, humpy, sickly descendant of several generation of inbreeding from brother to sister. The master of the family has a hump and walks like a half-crushed beetle. His wife is hardly better though she is apparently coming from a slightly more distant branch, many second removed cousin, though her brother who is maybe brother in law of the head of the family, or maybe just cousin, or maybe nephew, who knows really since it is the same thing anyway, is not brilliant either and is probably slightly autistic. The head of the family and his wife have two daughters and nothing special about them. The sister of the head of the family has a son, Billie, whose father is doubtful and could be either her own brother or their father, meaning the woman when a teenager was used both by the brother and the father of the lot. That son Billie is the most beautiful perversion of incestuous inbreeding. He is a boy who dresses like a girl and at times when he is bored he is a girl who dresses like a boy. He is courting the adult son of the local fishing family, till that son discovers that girl who dresses like a boy is actually a boy. Add to that the secondary little servants of this rotting society. The priest is innocuous, except that he uses his French language haphazardly. He says “Pêchez en paix!” as if he did not know that may mean both “Fish in peace” or “Sin in peace.” The point is he probably means both which is untranslatable in English. The cops, an inflated fat detective, Mr. Machin, meaning, among several dozens of words, “contraption,” “doohickey,” “gadget,” “gizmo,” “thingumabob,” “thingumajig,” “thingummy,” “contrivance,” and his assistant, definitely fit and slim. And the detective is so full of air that he ends up flying in the sky till some bored soldier shoots the air out of him and makes him descend back onto the surface of the earth. The soldiers are innocuous and valueless except that the colonel at the head of them does not know how to play the bugle he faithfully pretends to sound. And that’s it, plus finger-licking nice choice morsels from human bodies cooked in their own blood. Who wants some more foot? The satire is so thick with innuendo and grossness that you will be grossed out. Full stop, period, end of the game. As for the French they speak it is either some snobbish French or some local Picard dialect, anyway, the one like the other, out of reach of any normal humane and civilized person. Don’t you try to understand the two linguos or linguas, or you may end up finding out it is even more disgusting than you may have ever thought. Treat it as the language of the prehistoric animals that came before Homo Sapiens and from which we are “unluckily” descending. FRENCH/FRANÇAIS Bienvenue en enfer, je veux dire en Nord Pas de Calais, le littoral entre Boulogne et Gravelines, là où aujourd’hui on laisse pourrir des milliers de réfugiés sans hygiène et à peine de quoi ne pas mourir rapidement de faim; le petit feu est la loi ici. Ce pâle horizon est une baie marécageuse et boueuse dans laquelle la raison s’enlise avec le plaisir de l’interdit. La faune locale en cet été de vacances – pour les bourgeois de Tourcoing – se décompose en trois segments. D’une part les locaux, marins ou mariniers, sans bateau de pèche mais qui ont simplement deux barques, cueillent les moules sur les rochers de la côte, le seul commerce qu’ils peuvent ambitionner : vendre des moules bouchots pour la Braderie de Lille en septembre, après les vacances, le paradis des antiquaires, qui pourraient nous faire oublier qu’ici nous sommes dans l’enfer des anti-care. Ces mariniers désœuvrés doivent bien enrichir leur menu amaigrissant avec des protéines animales. L’été est le meilleur moment pour ajouter la chasse à la pèche, une chasse à coups de rame, la parfaite alliance entre la terre et la mer, le solide et le liquide, la roche et la flotte, bref la boue marécageuse dans toute sa beauté. Et pour avoir quelques piécettes pour la ducasse de l’automne, ces marins sans bateaux transportent les touristes dans leurs bras à travers la baie qui n’est jamais plus profonde que quarante centimètres. Embrassade intéressée menant nécessairement à la satisfaction de l’appétit duodénal et stomacal de l’âme de ces êtres pré-Homo Sapiens. Ensuite les bourgeois de Tourcoing, une famille, un conglomérat de deux générations, avec une troisième en arrière, entièrement contenues en elles-mêmes sans jamais en sortir. Consanguinité consensuelle et compatissante pour construire les grandes familles industrielles du textile de Lille Roubaix Tourcoing. On est en un temps où le patronat textile prend le contrôle des mines de charbon, après les grèves de la fin des années 1880 (voir Emile Zola et Germinal) et les grèves d’après la catastrophe de Courrières (1906) brisées par l’armée républicaine de Clémenceau. Le chef de la famille, bossu, tordu et marchant comme un crabe cul de jatte. Son épouse qui est un tout petit peu plus éloignée et doit être une cousine de deuxième rang. Sa sœur qui a un fils dont elle ignore le père, en fait dont elle ignore si c’est son frère ou son propre père qui en est le père. Plus incestueux que cela, même Toutankhamon n’en survivrait pas. Le chef de la famille a deux filles. Sa femme a un frère qui est lui plutôt du genre autistique avancé. Et le fils de la sœur est le prodige de perversion très à la mode tant que cela reste du travestissement. Il est un garçon qui s’habille en fille, et quand il en a marre il devient une fille qui s’habille en garçon et qui de toute façon fait la cour au fils adulte de la famille de pécheur d’à côté, le bien nommé Ma Loute avec tout le sens absolument explicite au niveau de l’obscénité de ce cannibale qui ambitionne se gaver de ce garçon-fille-garçon tant qu’il reste dans le domaine féminin, bien que loin en dessous de l’âge normal d’un tel rapport mais nous n’en sommes pas à un acte pédophilique près, n’est-il point, comme dirait Astérix, enfin ses cousins du Brexit. Jusqu’au jour où une main volontairement mal placée découvre le pot aux roses, en l’occurrence deux « roses » qui font tomber toute illusion d’une fille habillée en garçon. Inceste, consanguinité et toute autre type imaginable de transgression de la transparence qui devrait régner dans les rapports humains. Mais comme le dit le prêtre local : « Mes frères et sœurs, péchez en paix ! » Avec bien sûr les deux sens de ce pécher-là. Le troisième groupe de ce charivari social est le détective si plein d’air et enflé de lui-même qu’obèse est un euphémisme. Il finit même par voler, un comble pour un agent de la force publique judiciaire, par s’envoler veux-je dire, au-dessus de la petite falaise crayeuse de la côte. Heureusement un soldat de service fera se dégonfler la baudruche d’une paire de coups de fusil bien placés, et le détective retombera sur terre, lui qui n’est qu’un Monsieur Machin, bref un truc, un bidule, une bidouille. Superdupont ou Raymond Calbuth, en marcel et en caleçon, sans chemise et sans pantalon, réduits à la plus simple expression de leur animalité, produisant des monstres en n’associant que des meilleurs avec des meilleurs, et il n’y a pas plus meilleur que soi-même, ou peut-être mon frère ou ma sœur. Si vous avez l’estomac fragile dispensez-vous. La langue quant à elle n’est qu’un fatras de français artificiel de frères et sœurs consanguins depuis trois ou quatre générations qui « s’aparlent » sans vergogne, mais aussi sans grammaire, le tout mêlé à la langue locale qui se veut plus ou moins un baragouin chtimi à moitié descendu du Picard et de la poubelle de la fumerie d’opium du coin de la rue. J’adore, le pied en plus. QUENTIN TARANTINO – THE HATEFUL EIGHT – 2015 A blizzard in Wyoming. Quite a few survivors of the Civil War after the Civil War who are just moving west to make a fortune. Four of them in a first stage coach are a band of thieves and murderers plundering the area. One girl of the gang has been captured by a bounty hunter and is to be hanged in the next city. The gang is there to catch the second group and liberate the girl. A second group of four in another stage coach with that girl, the bounty hunter, a Black officer of the cavalry who was in Baton Rouge and a last one coming to the next town to become the new sheriff. The meeting in Minnie’s haberdashery is a real massacre. The massacre of all the women taking care of the place by the gangsters before the arrival of the second stage coach since the plan is that the brother in the gang is going to free the sister who is going to be hanged. Then the arrival of the second stage coach with four people instead of two, as they expected, makes things more complex. The whole trick and interest is the great inventiveness of Quentin Tarantino’s imagination as for how to have them all kill one another till the last pair who will die alone from bleeding and cold since there will be no one coming for days because of the blizzard. This film made a scandal in some circles. If it had been for the N*** word, that could be understood, though after the Civil War the escaping southerners as well as the escaping northerners used the N*** word more often than God and Satan. But it made a scandal because what it says about justice and police work on the frontier somewhere around 1866 or some months later is not very brilliant about the state of police work and justice in the USA at the time. Unluckily, knowing Tarantino, we can imagine that was a parable or a metaphor to speak of the present that is not at all brilliant in that field. So what! Let the police trade unions protest: that’s the best thing they know how to do, apart from shooting at anything moving before verifying what or who it is. Apart from that the film has little interest and it does not want to be anything but entertainment. It is dense enough in twists and warps for the audience to enjoy it though it will gross out many sensitive souls and stomachs. But well we cannot have a far west omelet without shedding some blood. TONY PARSONS – MAN AND BOY – 1999 A love story of a completely different type, maybe unexpected, and it has not aged more than one single iota in the nearly twenty years that have elapsed since publication. It was adapted to television by and for the BBC. This iota has to do with the father’s attitude toward not getting primary residence for his son. Today courts are a lot more open on the question and some real sharing can be envisaged. But what makes this book special to the point of being translated into thirty languages? A lot of elements could be listed. I will just give a few. First the center piece of the novel is a young couple with a four year old child. The wife has sacrificed a career that she had never started to her family, a family that is so nuclear that she becomes a zombie from such nuclear fallout. Note even after six months of trying having such a career she will come back to the mould, request primary residence for her son and that will be it with maybe a second child later on with the new husband. As for the mother the book has tremendously aged. But back to the story line. She picks the first pretext she can find to run away. An easy task since boys will be boys and men will be men: they cannot escape the curse of the knob, as the husband Harry calls it, that makes them masculine. They have to rub it and to dip it into the first sheath available. Then the story centers on this man and his son. Harry learns how to take care of his son Pat. He becomes a single parent father. And he is successful at it. And yet the boy misses something. Guess what. The mother is in Japan having her own life with some Richard American expat, or something like that since it is not important who he is, his name, his position. He is just the man this frustrated woman picks to step back down into nuclear frustration. Poor Pat, and he is not the postman. Third, the author doubles this picture with a second mirror image, hence inverted which makes thing “normal” meaning straight. A woman, Cyd, an expat from Texas who has kicked her British BMW motorbike monster of a husband out of her immediate life and lives with her/their four year old daughter Peggy. Poor Peggy who is also missing something, a father probably. This makes the film utterly moralistic as for the definition of the parents of a child. There is no same sex marriage and no children with two fathers or two mothers, and children with single parents are seen as victims. A child has to have two parents and these have to be a man and a woman. Full stop! No question asked, hence no question answered. At the very end, in a club, there is a vague mention of gay men, but it sounds like some frustration on the part of the main character. Fourth. With that stuff the author makes a novel that is definitely new with some novel (new and not resembling something formerly known or used) ideas. It is true a lot less novel today. He now centers the novel on the father first and his efforts at becoming a true loving father and at providing his son with a new mother and a sister, Cyd and Peggy. But Cyd and Peggy are running away from such a choice, at least Cyd is, and Peggy follows. Pat just makes a new friend, but this time a boy whose identity is meaningless, except that we go back into a cliché: a boy with a boy, girls are for later. Yet the author avoids the soap opera with tears and whining mice and rats inter-devouring one another. Just one episode is important for the story: the relation of Pat with the parents of his father. The grandfather plays a role and particularly when he dies of cancer. The boy Pat at the age of five discovers death in a man he likes. Yet that loss is not exploited beyond the plain anecdote. For a child this age such an event is a trauma, and cannot be anything but a trauma. She child may be deeply disturbed, especially if he does not seem to be really shocked because he should. But of course it would have been another novel. So why introduce this death if it is not exploited? There is absolutely no reason why this grandfather has to die in this novel. It does not change the course of events at all, at least for the child. The novel at least avoids that possibility. So why mention the anecdote. Sixth. This death provides the “end” of the novel, but not in the child Pat, rather in the child Harry, because at this moment the father regresses to what he used to be as a child and he is deeply hurt, shocked and transformed by this death. Not on his own but thanks to the mother who has a tremendous power of adaptation. Harry’s mother goes through the funeral, survives her solitude and confides her secret to her surprised son. “Love means knowing when to let go.” Love then becomes a deep emotion that never leaves the one who lets go and it becomes the deepest inspiration for the one who goes, who is let to go, in this case Pat who is let to go by his father Harry. The book though does not seem to see the difference between letting go a dead man into death and letting go a child into a recomposed family. But I guess such contradictions are part of the genre. And the father drops all desire to get primary residence for his son and he lets the son’s mother and her recomposed family have it. Note the child becomes then a pure possession. This is heavily emphasized by the reference to the film “Cinema Paradiso” (Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, 1988) by Giuseppe Tornatore. Harry sees the film in a cinema with Cyd and the author summarizes it slightly skimpily: “. . . an Italian film . . . about a young boy’s friendship with the old projectionist at the local movie house. . . at the end when the gruff old projectionist, now blinded by a fire in the cinema, tells the Bambi-eyed young boy, now a teenager, to leave their village and never come back. The boy, Toto, goes away and becomes a famous film director and doesn’t come back to his little village for thirty years, on the day that they are burying Alfredo, the old projectionist who taught him to love the cinema and then sent him away. . . Because Alfredo knew that Toto would never find the things he needed in that little town. . . He had to break free so that he could learn what Alfredo already knew Life is not what you see in films – life is much harder. [dixit Cyd]” (p. 257-258) I regret the skimpiness of this summary because it misses absolutely everything important about the son Pat, because it cuts out Toto’s dead father, Toto’s sister nearly killed by a fire in the cinema, Toto’s mother, the two fire incidents in the cinema, the rebuilding of this cinema, Toto’s love affair with Elena, a rich man’s daughter, etc. In fact the film should have led the novel into another direction, but life is not what it looks like in films. Surely it is not, but the cinema teaches us great ideas and truths that life at times forgets to teach us and here the main idea is that Salvatore (Toto) has no father, needs a father substitute and finds one in Alfredo the projectionist. Toto is fascinated by the cinema (as an art and communicational medium) but his sister nearly dies in a fire in that local cinema (as a plain building that is inflammable). And Toto needs this father substitute to tell him: “OK, boy, it is time for you to go and realize your dream, live your life!” But Alfredo cheated in a way, and yet Salvatore would never have realized his dream of becoming a film director if Alfredo had not cheated and had not decided to lose a friend in order for that friend to become what his potential made him capable of becoming, and that future man will be able to hyg Alfredo on his deathbed if not in his coffin. To expand this theme let me quote the full synopsis of the film as given by the users of IMDb. “Beginning at the end, the movie opens with Salvatore's mother trying to inform him of the death of Alfredo. Salvatore, a filmmaker who has not been home since his youth, leaves Rome immediately to attend the funeral. Through flashbacks we watch Salvatore in his youth, in a post WWII town in Southern Italy. As a young boy he is called Toto and he has a strong affinity for the cinema. Toto often sneaks into the movie theater when he shouldn't and harasses the projectionist, Alfredo, in attempts to get splices of film that are cut out by the church because they contain scenes of kissing. Toto has a younger sister and war widowed mother who often struggle due to the loss of Toto's father. Toto is banned from the movie theater by his mother when his film bits accidentally catch fire and nearly kill his sister along with burning up the only picture Toto has of his father along with other family photographs. Eventually he sneaks his way back and forms a father-son bond with Alfredo, despite Alfredo's reluctancy, Toto even learns how to run the projector. Meanwhile one of the townspeople wins the lotto and becomes a rich man. One day in the cinema, after Toto leaves to watch the movie with his friends below, the film catches fire in the projector and knocks Alfredo out. Young Toto rescues Alfredo from death in the fire, unfortunately the cinema burns down and Alfredo loses his sight. Lucky the lotto-lucky-townsman pays to have a new cinema put up. Since Toto already knows how to run the projector he works with Alfredo in the projection room. Some years pass and Salvatore is now a young man. A rich girl, Elena, comes to town and Salvatore and his friends vie for her attention. Salvatore films her and begins to fall in love. Alfredo advises him to steer clear of love because it only causes pain. Despite his warning, Salvatore confesses his love to Elena, whose reply is that she does not, but she could. So he waits, every night outside her house for her reply. One day he gives up and trudges home depressed and upset only to soon discover that Elena does love him in return. They begin a passionate romance, like that of two newlyweds. Unfortunately, Elena's father doesn't approve and so he takes Elena away. All summer they try to meet, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. On one particular day he tries to reach her and she him but their paths don't cross. As we discover later, Alfredo catches Elena and convinces her to leave Salvatore alone out of love. Salvatore then wanders without purpose and eventually joins the military due to the requirement by Italian law that all male youths serve for a period of time in the army. When he returns to his home town, all has changed and he cannot adjust. Alfredo urges him to leave and tells him that if he were to ever return, he would not see him. Obviously Salvatore goes on to become a successful filmmaker. As he wanders the remains of his town after the funeral he sees a vision of Elena just as she was when they were young; he realizes it is Elena's daughter and follows her to Elena's home where he sees that she married one of Salvatore's childhood friends, a dunce when Salvatore knew him. He confronts Elena and they meet. They talk and she reveals to him that she didn't miss out on their fateful reunion but rather that Alfredo convinced her to leave. Salvatore realizes what a role Alfredo had in shaping his life and that Alfredo knew that if he stayed with Elena he would have no chance to pursue his love of film and so by going to Rome to become a filmmaker he sacrificed his love for Elena. Salvatore and Elena say farewell and go their separate ways. Salvatore returns to Rome with a can of film left to him by Alfredo. It contains all the splices of the kissing scenes from Salvatore's youth.” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095765/synopsis, accessed May 13, 2016 ) You can now realize how much the author missed, how many opportunities he missed on the side of Harry as well as on Toto’s side. The fact that Harry had been invited by Cyd to see that film with her in Soho is also extremely meaningful and the summary Cyd gives is so far from what is relevant: desire is one thing but it has no future in itself whereas love is not desire and it is able to see beyond the emotion the interest of the loved one who has to move away on his or her own road to eventually fulfill his or her promise, potential, future. We have our future in our own mind and brain but our body’s desires may tie us up so strongly at crucial moments in our lives that we miss the train and we reach the station too late. If we are lucky we can see the red lights of the train moving away and maybe learn a lesson for next time we try to catch a train: don’t linger satisfying your bodily functions and rush after your spiritual potential. Life is cruel if you do not do the latter. Life is beautiful if you do. I thus dedicate this review to a young man who has been my assistant for seven years and has to go on his own road. Don’t miss your train in the name of what is good now. Your train will not wait for you. Finally this novel has a happy ending for “everyone” though we could doubt the happiness of this ending but I won’t reveal it. It is good at times to run amok in a love story in modern garb, but please do not throw cobblestones on the pianist. He is only an entertainer. ALAN RICKMAN – SIGOURNEY WEAVER – CARRIE ANNE MOSS – SNOWCAKE – 2006 This is a film that will not age, at least not really. It is the second film on the subject of autism that has the status of a classic. The first one was Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man. This one centers on the same problem, autism, but for a woman, which is a minority case for this disease. The situation is slightly more complicated because it starts with the daughter of this autistic mother and we will only learn later in the film, close to the end, from her own parents themselves that at the time no one understood what actually happened though her father believes she must have been forced, which is in no way certain though, because the idea of an “experiment” might be just right. The man must then have taken advantage of the curiosity and of the experiment. The beginning of the film is dramatic because of a road accident in which a truck rams into a car and kills the daughter of Linda, the autistic mother, hitchhiking to visit her mother. Then the driver of the car goes to Linda’s to try to explain her what happened and we discover in a few days spent there till the day after the funeral what kind of a life this autistic person is having in her community. And that’s where we are surprised. She has a job in a supermarket in phase with her handicap: she puts merchandise on the racks, items that have to be set in rows and well aligned. Nothing difficult but something she can do without any problem. She is a very solitary person, meaning that she often closes herself onto herself and lives in her own world. She does not reject the outside world. She just retires inside her own mental world. In this Wawa town the neighbors know about her and they all take care of her, look after her, without ever invading her “privacy.” She accepts that help though she would never solicit it, though she does for the garbage from the driver of the car in which her daughter was killed and she has invited to stay in her home for a few days. She does not always thank people for that help, though she does in her own way. It is true some people do not understand that and try to invade that personal field and bring her back into some “normal” behavior. But these are very fast put back in their places and told not to meddle. In a way, when everything is organized very clearly she can cope with life that becomes a routine and she can even cope with things that come unwanted and unannounced and that she integrates in her routine. That’s the real interest of this film. To explore Linda’s personal mental world, which we will never be able to know for sure since she does not explain and express that inner world, but we can explore it through what she does, her reactions, her actions, her own ways to cope with a situation that is maybe beyond her own comprehension, at least a comprehension of our type. The situation is serious since it is the death and funeral of her own daughter. She has a room entirely dedicated to her and she reacts in such a way that we know she knows it is important but she cannot mourn or grieve the way we do. She will just start dancing on a music her daughter liked and the film maker makes us understand at this moment she dances with her own daughter though she only dances with herself in our own eyes. Is it truly what happens? We cannot know. The only important thing is that autistic people must not be institutionalized but must be provided with living conditions that enable them to have an active, and even productive, life adapted to their own means, their own interests, their own capabilities. Of course it is the capabilities they can invest in our social and economic life, but that enables them to have the time and the autonomy necessary to live their mental life in some kind of freedom under the loving and attentive care of people around who are there to help, not to command, govern or control. One thing is missing in the film. Linda has a full calendar for the month of April with her schedule properly written day after day. We assume she can read but it is not said that she must have a social worker who helps her write down the schedule of the month. The film though assumes she can read and maybe write, but there is no visual indication that she can actually do it: she does not write and she does not read in the film. The film is already old and today we have discovered that computers can help tremendously because autistic people might be limited in oral and written communication, but they can be trained into computer literacy and that enables them to communicate a lot better, even to express their feelings and their experience, though we are not advanced enough to be able to say if it is true for all autistic people, though we can say that the earlier the better and in the US they diagnose the disease as soon as 6 months and start acting on it as soon as they have such a diagnosis. COEN BROTHERS – CLOONEY – HAIL CAESAR – 2016 A small film that makes fun of Hollywood and the modern world, though it speaks of the old times. Some scenes are funny though altogether this humor is slightly warped. The western cowboy actor is funny and the scene of “Lazy Ol’ Moon” is hilarious. And the song is so sad and nostalgic. He sounds like my Swedish friend City Cowboy singing Peter Pan (https://myspace.com/city-cowboy/music/songs) : nostalgia of the good old days when we were young, children, toddlers. The kidnapping or abduction of the Roman legionnaire (Clooney) by some communists and his instant Stockholm syndrome is funny and the treatment of this PTSS by his boss at the studio is even more than funny since he is treated like a child with four slaps across the face. Which does not make him lose his Latin, but definitely makes him lose his faith. The deeply superficial discussion of Jesus by four people, a rabbi, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox patriarch and what is going to be assumed to be a simple Protestant Joe Blow is absurd but so cut off from reality and from the real question about Jesus that we feel we have been dumped in some loony-bin. I just wonder why the children of Ismail, Abraham’s first son, in other words the Arabs, in other words the Muslims have not been included. Or is that not kosher enough for the Coen Brothers? The sudden conversion of the Roman Legionnaire to Christianity, though the actor has just been boxed over the ears by his boss and told to please do the only thing he is paid for, be a star, would have been convincing, nearly convincing, at best hypocritical, if he had not lost his faith. You see god exists and he is looking after us and the dumb things we may be doing or saying. The Soviet submarine in Malibu is so unreal and all that happens then is so absurd that we wonder if the Coen brothers are laughing at the Russians, hence Putin, or the West, hence NATO and the USA. One thing is sure the red danger is quite a farce and the only danger we are running into is just forgotten. It is true Jesus dies at the 9th hour and he is buried at the 11th hour. Are the Coen brothers making fun of our fear in aftermath of 9/11 though we use 911 at any moment in the daytime and at night for any little trivial family affair or marital disagreement. The Russian songs used in the film though are of course the Red Army’s rendition of them, and I loved Kalinka that I taught in Russian to my French students and to my colleague’s Spanish students in Dunn, North Carolina, in 1970. The Americans have always loved those popular and traditional Russian songs and the Red Army here is probably the only real, realistic and true note (for music it is the good word) in the film. Let’s say authentic. STEVEN SPIELBERG – BRIDGE OF SPIES – 2015 We all remember, from our history text books at least, the events from 1957 to 1962, the total hysteria of the USA about Soviet spies which had led to McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenberg husband and wife. The fall of Cuba out of their zone or sphere of influence was a trauma they are just right now trying to put behind. The spying was primitive with those spying planes that had no chance what-so-ever to get through: the first one was the last one. On both sides they ended up with spies in their prisons kept nicely warm to be used in some political negotiations as leverage. Consider the case of a Soviet spy in New York and that of an American pilot of a spying plane shot down over the USSR, plus the fact that East Germany turned tricky and led to the construction of the wall, and to top it all like the cherry of the cake one naïve American student preparing his PhD on communist economic policy in eastern Europe was at the wrong place at the wrong moment and got arrested and prosecuted as a spy by the East Germans. But the East Germans hated the Russians who had for sure liberated them from Hitler, but who had also destroyed Berlin in the most ruthless way possible, though the Palace of the Hohenzollern was pulled down by the East Germans. Tricky situation indeed to negotiate the release of two Americans, one of whom is a real security risk in exchange of one Soviet spy. And it took some time and a lot of patience, including against the CIA who only wanted to recuperate the security hazard out of Soviet hands before he cracked. It took a lawyer from Brooklyn, a pure Irish descendant to manage to bridge the two or three divides to get what he wanted. All those among you who have actually lived this period will remember the stress, the danger, the fear amplified by what the film does not tell: the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961 and the Soviet missile crisis in Cuba in 1962. We went through a few years of absolute scare about the possibility of a nuclear war. We can have a nostalgic look at the past. I was in East Berlin and East Germany for the first time in 1963. I worked in a mine near Leipzig then, in Borna. There will be more trips. The most dramatic will be in 1968 after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. My own son will go once in the 1980s I just wonder how Donovan managed to get lost when coming out of Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof which is practically round the corner to Unter den Linden. Well some must have some fun now and then. And it only cost him a coat and a cold. We can also measure the immense change we have been through: reunited Germany; united Europe (nearly finished though Russia will always be on the side); free and emerging Vietnam; China the second economic power in the world; apartheid gone with the wind; Cuba accepted anew by the USA; the banana republics of South America also gone. And yet the dangerous places have just moved to other areas and mostly because of the dumb policy of one US president who decided to solve the problem he had with his own father by proving to the world the USA could create havoc in the Middle East, and they did. And North Korea is the answer of the shepherdess to the shepherd: a perverted and fouled love song that prolongs the Korean War that was a total failure in the objective of the time to get Mao Zedong and the Communists in China down. Is the world really a better place today than it was in 1957-1962? You have to be naïve to believe that. The main difference is that spying is no longer that crucial and it has been replaced by the protection of intellectual property against pirating. Pirates and Hackers are the two plagues or our modern world. More than ever the danger is no longer from the outside but from the inside. Let’s move our minds and backsides a little bit and let’s clean up the mess Bush Jr. did and all European countries, especially the super-duper secular ones who pretend that everyone has the right to be a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian, or whatever, provided it is kept absolutely invisible in the public sphere, are today confronted to the bill. Dematerialization and castration of at least two generations of immigrants in Europe from previously colonized countries, which means at least three, four or more centuries of colonial alienation, exploitation and extermination when necessary leading to uprooting them from their countries and transporting them into countries that refused to recognize and respect the fact that they are different. As the fundamentalist secularists would say: “They can believe in what they want provided I do not see it.” And the hazardous population is not outside but inside our borders. We have walled them up in our backyard without any rights whatsoever as for opinions and religions. The old Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome we all in Europe inherited from centuries of wars and the two world wars was turned into a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome called the Cold War and we are still in that mood. We see the danger outside when it is inside, and not inside our territory only but inside our minds. The new situation is that the PTSS of the Cold War is confronted today to the Post Traumatic Colonial Stress Syndrome of the uprooted millions of previously colonized people who we have brought in our countries for salaried slavery. And we think that by mocking the religion of these human beings who are suffering in their inner essence we will free them of their PTSS. Only Charlie can be that dumb. I am sure that kind of anti-empathetic attitude would have turned the 1957-1962 situation into a holocaust. And that’s the real danger today. The Islamic State will be defeated but what do we do afterwards? Cartoons of the Prophet dicing onions…? And I am trying hard to remain polite. I guess some secular fundamentalists do think so. Papaoutai? Really this time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiKj0Z_Xnjc. Stromae help us out of this diabolical fix! LES INNOCENTES – THE INNOCENTS – AGNUS DEI – 2016 An extremely disquieting and disturbing film at first that turns pacified and pacifying in the end. Imagine Poland in 1945 liberated by the Soviet Union but practically occupied by the Soviet army, waiting for some Polish government to come into power. Imagine a nunnery, a convent in other words, with nuns being searched by rough Soviet soldiers who search everything particularly the nuns and not with their fingers, mind you, and these rough visitors leave seven of them pregnant and one with syphilis (the abbess). Imagine a mission of the French Red Cross there, under the command of a Colonel who used to be an extreme right militant before the war, with a Jewish doctor, the last survivor of his family, and his assistant, a young woman from a communist family. The woman and then the man get involved in the situation in the convent in spite of the abbess who is a fundamentalist and imposes rules from another time: the nuns are not supposed to show their body and be touched physically, even by a female doctor. The rapes are a stain, a sin and the nuns are made to feel guilty about it: the trauma of the rape is turned into an inescapable practically unhealable form of psychotic PTSS. Seven children will be born. The first two will be taken by the abbess and she will – in absolute secret – entrust them back to God, in other words expose them in order for them to die. She commits a crime that is also a sin (Thou shalt not kill) in order to cover the situation. She is discovered as a murderess by the other nuns in time for the last five children to be born and saved by one younger nun who is the actual caretaker of the convent and who can count on the help of the French communist lady doctor. The end is optimistic. The convent is turned into an orphanage. They host orphans living or surviving in the street and that covers up the fact that the babies are the children of rape. If the end is maybe too optimistic the film shows very well what happened in Poland from 1943 to 1946. The Soviet army was ruthless as soon as it moved west pushing the Germans back. It took absolutely no prisoners among the German troops, which I know from experience due to the testimony of my mother-in-law whose first husband was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht on the Polish front in 1944. At the same time they got rid – or let the Germans get rid – of the Jews from the ghetto in Warsaw. In the meantime they trapped the remnants of some Polish liberation army and managed to have them all shot in some forest east and they respected no rights of no Pole. Looting, pillaging and raping were the little brothers and sisters of the big siblings WAR and NO QUARTER. Supreme Lord have mercy on us. We have to think of Led Zeppelin’s song: Close the door, put out the light.  You know they won't be home tonight.  The snow falls hard and don't you know?  The winds of Thor are blowing cold.  They're wearing steel that's bright and true  They carry news that must get through.  They choose the path where no-one goes.  They hold no quarter.  Walking side by side with death, The devil mocks their every step  The snow drives back the foot that's slow, The dogs of doom are howling more  They carry news that must get through, To build a dream for me and you  They choose the path where no-one goes.  They hold no quarter. They ask no quarter.  The pain, the pain without quarter.  They ask no quarter.  The dogs of doom are howling more! And out of that carnage and mess a government will come up under the leadership of the Polish United Workers’ Party, in other words a quasi communist party, supported by the Soviet Union and this government will tolerate and let live the Catholic Church and its institutions, including convents and monastery. So the happy ending might be considered as possible. But the whole of Europe went through the worst imaginable traumatic experience in those years, which is still surviving today in the European consciousness and culture. MATT DAMON – RIDLEY SCOTT – THE MARTIAN – 2015 It is not a masterpiece but it is a good film though. One man abandoned on Mars because he was wounded in a strom and he was thought dead. Then the film is the discovery on Earth and on the spatial mission where the team that left him behind is that he is alive and then the decision to rescue him, on one hand. On the other hand that man, alone on Mars, takes care of his wound and then is playing Robinson Crusoe on the planet, inventing agriculture on Mars and solving all kinds of problems including communication with earth and with his team on their mission. Of course such an adventure is highly improbable but the educational dimension is important. It wants to show that when death is in front of you, you can just accept it and find your peace with that, or you start working on and solving problems, one after the other, in order to survive as long as possible because there is always a chance that a rescue of some sort might come, or that you would be intelligent enough to survive by yourself with your own creativity and inventiveness. It is also educational about the absurdity of different countries, here the USA and China, not working together and sure enough the film heavily suggests that they do and they actually do, which could have saved the marooned man and will have positive consequences on the future. Educational again with the position of women. The commander of the mission is a woman and she is not alone on the mission. At NASA it is less clear since all the main characters are men, particularly the director of NASA who appears as a cold, calculating man who does not accept any disobedience. It is also educational with the team that has left one man on Mars. We are clearly told that no matter what the consequences may be one person as well as one team have to do what is ethically good, here rescue the man, and not obey orders going the other way. Mutiny is necessary when ethics are on your side. And sure enough they are shown as going on the next mission because the rescue is such an international global effort and success that no one can go into reprisals and penalties. The Martian landscapes are beautiful though they are not Martian at all. The actors, at least the main actors, or even maybe the main actor in the singular, are good and the heroics are spectacular. Apart from that all the details are farfetched but one does not check a gift horse in the mouth. We let ourselves go into the action, the suspense (there is none since we know this poor Robinson Crusoe will be rescued just like Robinson Crusoe was because Robinson Crusoe’s always are, and that is pure entertainment. SPOTLIGHT – 2015 I will try to be short because the subject of this film is so important, so dramatic, so horrific that we do not need many words to speak of it. My first remark is that it concerns Catholic priests in the area of Boston, but it could – and probably does – concern the whole world, and not only the Catholic church, and not only churches or teachers and schools; or UN troops in the Central African Republic. It is all the more shocking when it deals with an ethical institution like a church or a peace-keeping corps of the United Nations or an educational institution because these three institutions have an ethical definition and the respect of the integrity of children is one basic principle of these institutions. You could add the medical institution with orphanages, psychiatric wards or hospitals, retirement homes (because sexual abuse MUST NOT be only considered when the victims are children), etc. Sexual abuse, of children particularly but not only, is a crime against humanity. My second remark is that in any society at large, in any social group in particular some abuses are often hidden under the carpet and even at times tolerated not to stain the reputation or the identity of this society or these social groups. There is in all social community an identity dimension for the members and they may feel negated in this identity of theirs if the public image of the community were criticized in a way or another. Such criticism leads in certain cases to racism, segregation, discrimination and of course exploitation, rejection and victimization. Better keep the “small” defects secret so that it would not leak out in the public around. And the members become silent, blind, deaf, and a few other sensual impairments. And the family is such a social community. The third remark is very well explained in the film by some victims. Children, often, but not only, from disrupted families with marital violence, with parental violence, with poverty and even divorce, if not divorces, and casual male or female partners going through the home, not mentioning drugs, alcoholism and a few other intoxications, children, boys as well as girls, in such situations from 6 to 14, at times later, look for some parental model, be it a man or a woman, a substitute father or mother. When they have some adults who are close and as such have a high level of prestige, a priest, a teacher, a coach, or at times simple neighbors or even relatives, they can fall into the trap of sexual attraction or sexual abuse. But even if sexual attraction there is, in the child the experience of abuse, the sexual experience with an adult, will be traumatic and will leave serious damage behind at the mental, psychological or ethical levels. The film did not try to explore what the strategies of children in such situations are or can be. Some are protective and enable the children to suffer the abuse as it it were something from another world than their own, the one they build in their psyche. Note this is very difficult when the abuser is a priest, a teacher, a father, a brother, a mother, a sister, that is to say people who are essential for the growth, development and maturation of the children. The film was in fact too short on one issue. They insisted on the number of surviving victims (without specifying the mode of this survival). But what about those that did not survive? How many, how bad they ended, at what age, etc.? The film is essential to show a vast problem but the concentration onto only the victims of Catholic priests may appear as a way to avoid speaking of pedophilia in our countries, and in the world. There might not be 6% of pedophiles in our societies, male or female, but it is indispensible to understand our modern rejection of pedophilia is a very recent evolution in the West, that is to say mostly among Western Christians and Jews. It sure is a crime against humanity but this is recent. Marriage was set at the age of 13 for girls in England by a law in Parliament in the 18th century. We would not even think of it today, though some studies do say a fair proportion (40%?) of people between 14 and 16 have had or regularly have some sexual activity. Nothing is said before 14, except in doctors’ offices. It would be fair to consider that sexual activities between young people at the early age of 14 leading quite often to teenage pregnancies are also a form of pedophilia. That is to say there is quite a long road ahead if we want to get rid of sexual activities among minors. Is it abuse? Not all the time, but quite often yes, with some drug use, some alcohol and just some carelessness. I would suggest to read my own poetical fiction on the subject: “AN UNTELLABLE STORY, A dramatic Confession, THE NINETEEN STATIONS OF SARAPHIC LOVE,” Kindle B00UP4CX88. A fascinating film that has to be widened in scope not to appear like a pamphlet against the Catholic Church that neither deserves it nor is able to avoid the “problem” because it is simply the predator nature of any man or woman that actually comes out in any situation and may come out in any person when circumstances permit, like UN peace keeping soldiers of French citizenship in the Central African Republic. 93