19Dec06 — 2

Show No Mercy

Their Website‘s tagline could be the most horrible “high concept” conceivable today:

“Web 2.0 Reality TV”

Their banner photo features a twentysomething in thick-black-rimmed retrospectacles and casual wear carrying a pile of chuggable soft drinks. Their About page contains the following phrases:

“captures the promise, the perils, the pride, the pressure, the pain and pitfalls of launching a web 2.0 company”

“where else can you catch a behind-the-scenes glance of some very awesome people? “

“Nothing is held back and everything is possible. The show is packed with precarious situations wherein hilarity ensues.”

I have a cache of Nerf guns and Air Miles. Friends, we saddle up at dawn tomorrow, fly to the States, and hunt every last one of them down.

19Dec06 — 0

Why Rock Pigs Have Groupies And Music Critics Don’t

According to Technorati, one of the most listened-to albums of the moment is Hinder’s Extreme Behaviour. The cover features a red-lingerie-clad cleavage and a PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT sticker. It’s trying harder than a small-town 14-year-old with a bum-fluff beard, hanging around outside Happy Shopper waving a spliff and a can of lager. To my ears this review sums its sound up pretty accurately:

“[T]he music blares like a stereo left on in the keg room, all swear words and electric guitar blab. Hinder singer Austin Winkler is a stand-in for Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger … [T]he chorus of lead single “Get Stoned” … asserts sex is better when the participants are angry and high. They sound like a heavier Wallflowers on “Nothin’ Good About Goodbye,” and “Lips of an Angel” carries the power ballad torch complete with a soaring solo stolen from hair metal’s golden era. “Homecoming Queen” is another take on the good-girl-tarnished-by-big-bad-L.A. story; it’s also a pretty obvious rewrite of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” For the most part, Hinder is all about big dumb rock, the kind of stuff that’s happily ignorant of common courtesy or trying much of anything new musically.“

Stupid, sexist trash for adolescent males? Click on the technorati search for links to bloggers listening to the album. They’re mostly teenage girls.

17Dec06 — 3

Mantel Piece

Hilary Mantel is a novelist. I haven’t read any of her books. I have read her review of magician Derren Brown’s Tricks Of The Mind in yesterday’s Guardian. Near the end of her mostly negative assessment she tries to set up a weak joke: she “hopes” that “no intellectual snobbery” will prevent Richard Dawkins from reciprocating Brown’s admiration for the Oxford prof. This is ironic because, as you might suspect from someone who used to write for The Spectator, snobbery is Mantel’s undoing. After listing some minor errors in the text she writes:

Are these points worth making? Yes, because this book of weak jokes is serious in aim; he wants to straighten out the way we think. Some aspects of English grammar are a dark mystery to him.

Her criticism would be more persuasive if she hadn’t made it five sentences after she failed to understand the difference between the comparative and the superlative. (Does her snipe gain anything from the word “dark”? Perhaps she wasn’t lapsing into cliché but making clear that she wasn’t referring to a “bright” mystery.)

The essence of her attack on Brown is that he oversimplifies:

Brown is fascinated by how human beings work, but the flow of scepticism is all one way. He has faith in the objectivity of scientists and in the peer-review process, neglecting to say that in science you get what you pay for.

She should have a word with the petroleum lobby. Its members have several orders of magnitude more money than all the climate research institutes on the planet put together so maybe Big Oil’s shills should “pay for” a new consensus on global warming that’s a little less embarrassing for their sponsors than the present one.

He stomps brutally on alternative medicine; if a treatment can be shown to work, he says, it’s not alternative, it’s scientific – it’s really one of ours. So heads I win and tails you lose.

That is exactly why science is the most successful human endeavour ever. Scientists don’t care whether a drug is harvested from a glass retort or the roots of the chumbawumba tree. Evidence-based medicine is about the reproducible effects of treatments. It is as blind to white coats as it is to pointy black hats. That’s why it works and alternative medicine doesn’t. Evidence-based medicine is what works—and nothing else.

Here is Mantel’s horrible last sentence. It reads like an example of clumsy English from an old-fashioned grammar textbook, the sort of thing chalk-frosted schoolmasters would invite their students to correct for ambiguous antecedents and circumlocution:

It would be gratifying to think that Professor Dawkins will work through these pages keenly and add to his repertoire of card tricks, which will be the talk of north Oxford well into the new year.

Ms Mantel has more in common with Mr Brown than she thinks. It takes the swagger of a conjuror to write something like that after sneering at someone else’s prose and before a plug for your own novel.

14Dec06 — 9

Disappointed

In the hope of hoovering up enough batshit crazy nonsense for a quick and easy blog post I visited the BBC “Have Your Say” page that asked “What is your reaction to Lord Stevens’ inquiry in to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales?”. To my amazement most of the answers from members of the public that I scanned through were not mad as cheese. People of the World Wide Web, you’ve let me down, you’ve let my readers down, and, worst of all, you’ve let yourselves down.

UPDATE: In the time it took me to go to the gym, work out, and jog back, a few loons popped up. I suppose I was up a little too early.

13Dec06 — 4

Lying Neocons

Trouble at t Website
In September 2005 Harry of the Place blogged “for the last time”. Since then he’s contributed tens more posts to the site that bears his nom de guerre, thirteen of them in the month following his “retirement”.

On 1 December 2006 Oliver Kamm wished his readers a happy new year and announced the closure of his blog for “December”. That was eleven blog posts ago.

And still Baghdad burns.

11Dec06 — 8

Fighting Sexism

It appears that there is a serial killer murdering prostitutes in Suffolk. Jeremy Vine has just been interviewing Frances Curran, Scottish Socialist Party Member of the Scottish Parliament for the West of Scotland on BBC Radio 2. She argued that the victims should not be referred to in the media as “prostitutes” because this “invites a judgment” and she believes that news reports should concentrate on the men who are “using women” as they are the ones under suspicion. Applying her feminine powers of intuition she said of the Suffolk victims:

“These are women who have been murdered by men.”

10Dec06 — 1

Free As A Bird

You’ve probably seen this one already because it was on Metafilter and has been going around for a couple of days. I found it via Mick Hartley. If you haven’t yet done so, hop to the Surrey Comet Website, where readers have been invited to comment on a story about how town centre managers have hired a marksman to deal with the local pigeon problem.

Thanks to some creative account creation it instantly turns into the most bonkers comments thread I’ve read on a news site since I last dared to look at The Guardian‘s Comment Is Free. All that’s missing is a nuanced contribution from dsquared informing us that the so-called “cull” is in fact part of an ongoing civil war between militant separatist guerrilla pigeons and a heavily outnumbered man with an air-rifle. Also at the Surrey Comet online you can read about how psychic detectives are investigating the Ricky Reel murder.

08Dec06 — 6

Straydar*

I’ve just returned from another boozy early evening exhibition party. One of the exhibitors is a painter who does portraits from photographs so it was business as well as pleasure. When things finally started winding down, the last people standing were three gay guys, the hostess, one other woman, and me. At that point the gay guys admitted that they had been running a book on my sexual orientation. Two-out-of-three of them had me down as a breeder, but there had been some debate. Apparently it’s the way I stand that marks me out as heterosexual. (They did go into further detail.)

Perhaps I should get a T-shirt saying: “THE ONLY STRAIGHT IN THE VILLAGE“.

*From the Urban Dictionary:

Stray n A straight man who dress and/or acts gay. Commonly have lisps [for those of you who haven’t heard me speak: I don’t] and enjoy arts/culture. Similar to but not altogether the same as Metrosexual . Also, see British

“Although I act gay, I’m actually just stray. Which basically means the same thing, except if you try to stick anything up my ass I will knock you out.”

*From Wikipedia:

Gaydar n (a portmanteau of gay and radar) is the intuitive ability to determine whether another person is gay or bisexual.

08Dec06 — 4

Tri-band Mobile

If you are familiar with the official French attitude* to the use of English in academic (and other cultural) settings, the appearance of a state-funded TV station, “France 24”, with an English-language feed might surprise you. It did me when I watched one of their online English-language video ads a few days ago. They also broadcast Arabic.

Reading the unofficial France 24 blog, it sounds like the presenters’ language skills are wide-ranging:

[D]uring the first 40 seconds of the interview there was no English translator for France 24 English. Andrea Sanke, whose microphone was still on, was heard saying the following: “Son of a bitch… I’m really annoyed. This is ridiculous. Where do we go now?”

Perhaps she should start an official France 24 blog to get it out of her system.

Also interesting is the editorial approach described by the blog:

Andrea Sanke, the evening anchor of France 24 English, interviewed the Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, and a member of the Israeli Knesse to debate the current state of the peace process.

Her questions for Saeb Erekat were far from being partial. While Erekat called for negotiations to take place between Israel and Palestine, she reminded him that the terrorist organization Hamas is the one holding power at the current time. “How can you expect Israel to negotiate with an organization that called for the complete destruction of Israel,” Sanke said.

She also asked the Israeli member of the Knesset if the U.S. President Bush had helped the peace process. His answer was that President Bush has not done enough for the peace process in the past six years, and “made huge, huge mistakes.” However, the Knesset member is part of a political party with only five seats out of the 120 available on the Knesset.

With the peace process back on the political agenda in the United States, we can expect more debates and interviews like these.

*[I use the word “official” deliberately. French scientists seem(ed) to be pragmatic about the daft rules they are/were expected to follow.

I remember that one of the main reasons I took German at school was because I was told that, if I wanted to be a scientist, I might find it useful to be able to read German-language engineering and chemistry papers, but by the time I got to study research publications the Germans were happily putting out the stuff I had to read in English. My main set physiology text was a German work translated by German publishers.

I only read German-language scientific papers on a handful of occasions and they weren’t essential. Now I can barely read the outside of a can of Beck’s.]

07Dec06 — 3

Make Like A Tree

Yesterday evening I went to see Passenger—featuring Richard Brincklow on piano, keyboards, and bizarre Fisher-Price blowy thing—play at Komedia. They were excellent, but I knew that already. Great gig, guys. Reader, buy their single.

What I didn’t know is that Carrie Tree, the support to the support band, is astonishingly good. She completely overcame my musical prejudices and the gabbling of some of the audience to deliver a hypnotic performance. I’m ashamed to say that my first thoughts at seeing her on stage were: “Uh-oh: long-haired, high-pitched, hippie chick with an acoustic guitar singing about how someone should ‘come back’. Time to check my txt msgs.”

Then I moved into a position in the venue where I could hear her properly rather than just see her and I was, thereafter, motionless. She has the most extraordinary voice and a way with dynamics and vibrato that made me feel like a complete loser—as if I needed that. Her guitar playing was also fine and underpinned the melodies beautifully. I normally don’t enjoy the kind of music she makes, but this performance was an unbroken pleasure. If she is not massively successful within the next few years there’s no justice.

06Dec06 — 3

Not German Efficiency

I am notoriously sensitive to people revealing the plots of television series and films. As pharma geek Anthony correctly diagnosed, I watch things long after their broadcast/release, often via Amazon’s cheap and cheerful rental-by-post system, and I don’t have a TV. A side-effect is that many of my reviews here are out-of-date, but at least they don’t contain spoilers, even when the stories are well known. It might take me some time to construct my post about The Nativity.

Once again in the vanguard of cinema studies, I bring you verdicts on Munich from me and from PooterGeek’s Paris/Istanbul correspondent Claire Berlinski who saw it with her fiancé David Gross, a man who photographs mass graves for a living. Seriously. I should point out that Claire wrote the review of hers that I quote last year, when it had some kind of topicality, and that both reviews come from our email exchanges with a mutual friend.

Here’s Claire [not blockquoted, for ease of reading]:

“So, David and I saw Munich last night. I didn’t much want to see it, since I was sure I would only find it agonizing, but David wanted badly to see it and it was the only thing playing in English that looked remotely interesting. (It was playing, by the way, right across the street from Valley of the Wolves.)

“I have to say, I cannot for the life of me imagine why the movie has been charged with moral relativism. Frankly, apart from the fact that the Israeli assassins are portrayed as vaguely bumbling, this could have been a Mossad propaganda film, so vile do the Palestinians appear and so deeply moral the Israelis, both to the point of caricature. The Palestinians are depicted as gleeful slaughtering animals who are entirely willing to kill civilians; the Israelis by contrast are devoted family men, introspective to the last, deeply reluctant to take human life and anguished by any possibility of causing harm, even emotional harm, to the innocent.

“Much has been made of Spielberg’s suggestion that the Israelis felt guilty and tormented by what they did, but this hardly amounts to a suggestion that the Israelis and Palestinians are morally equivalent; indeed, quite the opposite: the effect, and I daresay the intended effect, is to suggest that Israelis resort to violent with unbearable reluctance, and take no pleasure in killing, even when it is entirely justified. The movie doesn’t even mention or allude to the one truly ghastly aspect of the operation, the killing of that hapless Norwegian waiter.

“I didn’t think it was a particularly good movie—the acting is crappy; it’s too long, and the plot makes no sense (and isn’t realistic)—but I certainly don’t think it’s guilty of what it’s been charged with.”

My group reply, almost a year later:

“I finally got to see Munich on DVD yesterday. Having done so I think Claire summed it up pretty well and I’ve quoted your/her email. The reason I think that people made the moral equivalence attack was because of that sequence where the faces of the terrorists are superimposed over the faces of the victims (or it might have been the assassins—I can’t remember which, but I do remember wincing). This happens pretty early on so I suspect that it set the opinions of a lot of lazy reviewers for the rest of the film. It was satisfying to discover from the extra material on the disc that the screenplay was by a playwright because the film had plenty of that awful clunky West End/Broadway discussion of Ideas that the sort of stupid rich people who are regular theatregoers mistake for sophistication.

“In the film’s defence, even when I was bored by what was going on I boggled at the sheer quality of Spielberg’s craft. He comes up with corny settings—the sunlit gardens full of children where the [CENSORED FOR SPOILER] hides away, the river-pad of the [CENSORED FOR SPOILER], the rain-sodden back streets of [CENSORED FOR SPOILER], the urban scrub with [CENSORED FOR SPOILER] for [CENSORED FOR SPOILER] and his handler—but he does it so much better, so much more convincingly than anyone else that you can almost forgive him. He believes in Hollywood so you believe in it too. There were so many absurdly well composed shots that I wondered if he was using digital trickery to assemble them from multiple sources. Everyone says you can’t make a good film from a bad script, but if anyone could it would be Spielberg.

“(By the way, Claire, if I blog this then can I quote you online?)”

[One of the reasons I didn’t go to see the film at the cinema when it first appeared was that I knew that it was based on a widely discredited book written about the events by someone claiming to have been part of the assassination team, and perhaps that’s why the well-known fatal case of mistaken identity doesn’t appear, but I don’t know.]

This is the sort of stuff that keeps you people coming back to PooterGeek every day. Where else could you read a heavily cut, year-overdue movie reviews, copied from round-robin emails?

06Dec06 — 40

HOW CAN PPL BE SO CRUEL TO BLOGGERS? :-(

Justin of Chicken Yoghurt is wearyingly obtuse in the comments at Never Trust A Hippy. In response to this from Paulie:

The prize for the most telling response to the Tim Toulmin /Alistair Campbell dialogue and call for a ‘blogger code of conduct’ surely goes to Chicken Yoghurt. His response is that the blogosphere….

“…hasn’t yet orchestrated a propaganda offensive (in both senses of the word) that contributed to the deaths of 655,000 people. What’s more offensive, a sweary blogger or a Deputy Prime Minister who can’t keep his hands to himself?”


Let me translate that for you.

“Why should I tidy my room when the world is in SUCH a MESS!”

Justin writes:

Nope, sorry. That’s a not a very good translation. Can you be a little clearer?

What’s your point exactly?

“What have I done?! It’s so unfair! NuLabour’s always picking on me! Just tell me, what have I done?”

Paulie’s point seems clear enough to me. Attacks on the government by bloggers like Justin—and this government needs attacking—would have a little more credibility if they didn’t read like they were written by Kevins with laptops.

With the patience of a trendy teacher dealing with a spoilt student, Paulie has taken the trouble to explain to Justin why his (and others’) behaviour is not “helpful”. Sod that for a game of soldiers. The correct response to online sulking and swearing and slander isn’t to call for regulation like Tim Toulmin; it’s just to quote examples like Paulie did in the first place and marvel at their mountainous inanity. So let’s do it again because it’s easy. Alastair Campbell says that blogs contain “offensive stuff”; Justin throws another egg at The Man:

“What’s more offensive, a sweary blogger or a Deputy Prime Minister who can’t keep his hands to himself?”

“Yeah but no but John Prescott shagged his secretary! So nerr!”

Perhaps that’s why bloggers have a reputation for not getting out much: if I unironically broadcast head-slapping, irrelevant, adolescent stupidity like that then I’d be afraid to show my face outside. Up against people so ignorant that they employ a team of librarians to do a job that could be handled by a small piece of computer code, some online commentators still manage to make their targets look good.

Here’s Kevin Justin again:

[Unlike Alastair Campbell, the blog The Devil’s Kitchen] hasn’t yet orchestrated a propaganda offensive (in both senses of the word) that contributed to the deaths of 655,000 people.

Now that is an inspired rhetorical curlicue. How can I translate it and still embed a clever double meaning like the one Justin rightly draws our attention to in the original?

“Yeah, we might cuss sometimes, but at least we didn’t kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis with our Words of Mass Destruction!”

I wish I could say I hadn’t seen its like since I was an undergraduate, but, with the state of debate these days, I can’t. Read the rest as we bloggers say. It’s crushing stuff. Turning on his PC every day to face criticism like this—its wit, its rigour, its scholarship—must have been what drove Matthew Taylor to resign.

I agree that a bloggers’ code of conduct would be a complete waste of time, but Justin’s claim that bloggers are “already self-policing” is hilarious—“self-reinforcing” more like. The members of the pouting little boy bloggertarians club, frustrated beyond reason by Blair’s continuing survival and the takeover of the main opposition party by the Forces Of Statism, deploy the English language against the UK’s establishment with the incisiveness of little girls in an Anastacia forum and police themselves by collectively celebrating the “best” online verbal abuse. And even in that department they’re pretty unimpressive. They should extend their Web 2.0 activism out from the blogosphere into the real world and set up a flickr gallery showing the Best Snotballs Gobbed at an Elected Politician in 2006.

Here’s Anastacia fan Gemma from the comments at PooterGeek objecting to criticisms of her debating technique:

“Diss diss diss diss diss diss diss diss dis diss 😛

Lmao

Getting mad now are ya?”

Here’s Justin the thirtysomething teenager from the blog post in question objecting to criticisms of his debating technique:

“To think that [Alastair] Campbell once consorted with [sic] princes and presidents and now he’s slagging off bloggers for whatever slim living it affords. I think I have an erection.”

Don’t curl your toes like that, dear reader; this is part of the Web 2.0 revolution, the new coffeehouse culture, the revival of satire. It’s punk all over again, but, unlike the Sex Pistols, Chicken Yoghurt and The Devil’s Kitchen—crazy names, crazy guys—really will smash the system this time (rather than leave Yes touring stadiums 30 years later with a separate pantechnicon for their money and Johnny “Rotten” appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here).

Today the old-timers under attack are the giant lizards of mainstream politics. The Kids have extracted DNA from Jurassic jokes—Charles Pooter, Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, Rick from The Young Ones, Wolfie Smith, and Roger Mellie—and used modern technology to create a terrifyingly dull new joke: the bloggertarian profanisaur—“self-policing”, self-regarding, self-fisking.

05Dec06 — 4

Overheard In New York

Someone at Harry’s Place comments that

Until now, I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was Welsh.”

which reminds me of being in a video rental store in NYC in the late 90s with a local. An old Tom Jones song starts playing.
“Well, I never,” says I to my native companion in my conspicuously British way, “This is the last place I’d have expected to hear that.”
The guy at the counter shouts over the video racks, “Huh? Tom Jones is one of our best singers!”
“Well, he’s a good singer,” I begin, doing that American agreeing-before-disagreeing thing, “but I’ve got to tell you that he’s not one of yours.”
“Tom Jones is English?!”

Which, in turn, reminds me of being on a train to London last week next to a white African and his Dutch friend. The African has just explained why the ritualised warfare between the English and the Australians is called “The Ashes”.
The Dutch guy pauses and says: “Yeah, but I still don’t underschtand this thing about giving up when you’ve got a really high score. Is that because you can score more points catching the ball than hitting it?”
It was a long journey.

Peter Medawar famously wrote that anyone who could understand the rules of cricket was clever enough to succeed as a biological scientist. Hmm.

04Dec06 — 0

Blood On The Poolfloor

For regulars here not also regulars at Norm’s place: the Prof is currently in Upsidedownland watching the cricket between Australia and England. Yesterday he linked to an article from The Australian about England bowler Monty Panesar. Reading it, this passage, er, struck me:

[T]he safest way to dive into the water is to keep your head low and your heels high.

But this is counter-intuitive. Learning divers often fail to summon up the required boldness, half pull out of the dive at the last minute and perform a horrible, painful belly flop. Boldness, then, is frequently the safe option.

The only time I have ever been in Australia I chose to end my visit with a “bold” dive into a swimming pool. Unfortunately the pool in question had, like quite a few in Oz, no deep end. The result of my keeping my head low and my heels high was horrible and painful. Immediately after it had happened I think I was too concussed to realise the extent of the damage, but I’m lucky that it was as minor as it was and that I’m not typing this from a wheelchair with a pointer attached to my head.

As I emerged from the water wearing only my swimming trunks people were pointing at me and screaming. “Nothing new there then,” I thought as I reached up to wipe away the surprisingly red fluid that was pouring out of my nostrils and down my chest.

Fortunately, some time later, when the resulting unintended rearrangement of my face was corrected by the NHS, I had no say in how I was going to look after the repairs. Indeed, the surgeon’s words to me as he elegantly traced out his plan for my new profile with a fountain pen in advance of the operation were: “Don’t worry; I’m not going to give you a Michael Jackson.”

Watching Mission: Impossible III the other day—like smashing your head against concrete that’s not a leisure activity I recommend—I wondered what Michelle Monaghan’s plastic surgeon said to her before he rearranged her face.

Michelle Monaghan demonstrates the dangers of patient choice

Sometimes it’s better to get a job done on the cheap. I’m no Tyson Beckford, but, since the op at least, no one’s pointed at me and screamed.

01Dec06 — 6

How To Seduce A Geek

Ten non-sexual things a woman (that is: various individual women) has done in the past that have reduced me to Pepe Le Pew:

  1. laughed at my hair,
  2. dressed like a librarian,
  3. correctly fisked my inept critique of a famous theologian,
  4. told her pupils about me,
  5. pretended not to know how to use chopsticks so that I would teach her,
  6. returned my calls,
  7. discreetly touched the back of my shoulder on stage until I remembered where I was in my speech,
  8. helped save another woman’s life,
  9. insisted that we test my account of the Monty Hall Problem empirically, and
  10. turned up.
30Nov06 — 8

NO2INSANITY

Sometimes your first instinct is to sympathise with a particular cause until you meet the people who believe in it—and find them in your local park dressed in black polythene bags and engaged in a one-sided debate with a squirrel.

Like Eurosceptics [Euroskeptics?], anti-ID card campaigners have a whole array of sound, rational arguments at their disposal. So, when they have the money to make their case, they point out that if you stick a barcode on Tony Blair’s top lip he looks like Adolf Hitler.

“Yes, Mr Smith, we have to remove the cyst to relieve the pressure on your brain.”

[Patient nods gravely.]

“If we don’t then the Lizard People will be able to send their messages directly to your conscious mind.”

[Patient runs out of surgery screaming.]

29Nov06 — 1

Mild For The Time Of Year

In the past week, two shops within two doors of each other in my street have decorated their respective forecourts with a giant fibreglass ice cream cone and a lifesize inflatable Santa Claus.

29Nov06 — 2

Calvin’s Crimes

Police find marijuana, cocaine, and a firearm in gangsta rapper’s car… …George Michael in public park, blood at O J Simpson’s place, inconsistencies in statement from Jeffrey Archer, poison in enemy of Russian Mafia and KGB, Houses of Parliament adjacent to Thames…

27Nov06 — 5

Revenge Of The Barlow

With the massive success of the new Take That single, Patience, I am praying that this is the moment when they become the post-break-up David Gilmour-led Pink Floyd and Robbie Williams becomes the post-The Wall Roger Waters. Same initials see, see?! Take that, Mr End-Of-The-Pier karaoke compere!

27Nov06 — 6

Critical Mess

Clive Davis is discouraged from seeing Casino Royale, the new new Bond, by of this review by Cosmo Landesman. He shouldn’t be. Landesman fails to grasp even the basics of the (not particularly complicated) plot and then complains that what he thinks is going on is “absurd”. It’s worse than that: understanding what is actually going on is crucial to the most important and disturbing scene in the movie. He implies that the film is racist because at one point Bond appears to kill lots of black soldiers. He doesn’t, but even if he had the whole point of James Bond is that he kills lots of people—usually white ones in jump suits standing at the top of stainless steel stairwells with machine guns—that’s his job. He says Bond “charges around like the Terminator”. The Terminator doesn’t “charge around”; it’s his plodding relentlessness that’s scary. Landesman does make one or two insightful observations about the film, the comparisons with Ursula Andress and Gollum are well chosen, but the article reads like one of those reviews written before the fact. Ignore it, Clive.

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