In Amongst It

I remember going to see a well-cast sci-fi linguistics film in 2017 prepared to nerd out and bask in talk of clauses, semiotics and word order. What followed was anything but, though all such topics of conversation were sprinkled throughout the film like flecks of past-its-sell-by pre-grated Parmesan. A shy-of-2-hours deep meditation on the nature of time, language, and memory, Arrival felt important. It deeply moved me in a way that was at the time explicable. The friend with whom I saw the film laughed at me, but I know what I felt. I was only marginally interested in linguistics at the time - forgive me, I was seventeen years old - but I knew this film had explored something more profound than mere ink blots on a page or larynx-based phonetics. All the Hollywood tropes of villainry are intelligently semi-subverted, though Russia and China still appear to be the bad guys when dealing with the heptapods compared to our heroes, the American military. Louise Banks, played fantastically...

 I'd anticipated some lighter subjects for this blog before I woke yesterday morning and read the news about Alexei Navalny's death. When I first read it, I doubted it, dismissing it as Twitter doggerel and nothing more. That is, until respected historians like Simon Sebag Montefiore and Peter Frankopan started sharing it and commenting on it. Then people like Clarissa Ward and Anne Applebaum chimed in as well. It was in disbelief I read the varying attempts at hagiography, watched the prison video taken, apparently, only the previous day. This was a day I always knew was coming, and knew that it would come sooner rather than later. I just didn't think it would be today. I won't pretend that my freedom is under attack or that the situations that Alexei Navalny protested in any way resemble anything that I have gone through. I'm writing this in front of a TV in Dublin, Ireland. I'm not knee-deep in repression in Vladivostok or anything like that. The work of Alex...

Everything about this film's opening scene oozes intelligence. A cracking cast - Michaels Fassbender and Stuhlbarg and Kate Winslet - reads an exceptional, mile-a-minute script - Aaron Sorkin - under masterful direction - Danny Boyle - with an exceptional musical score underneath - Daniel Pemberton . If you asked a generative AI bot how to make a film about a revolutionary genius, it wouldn't be able to come up with something so accomplished. The film has a very difficult job: make the audience relate to Steve Jobs, a messianic figure who, I suppose, bears striking resemblances to Elon Musk, though that is a rabbit-hole down which I do not want to go.  The film portrays Jobs as a genius and, I suppose, I am here to judge the film and not the man himself. The film has been hit by claims it is inaccurate, but I can't speak and won't speak to those. What the film does exceptionally, if not a little painstakingly, is show the viewer that Jobs is a genius. Nothing reflect...

I can still picture the first time I sat down to watch this film. I was ten when it first came out and the buzz that the film, and its dearly departed villainous actor, generated was not before seen. I had been warned that it was "scary", that I "wouldn't sleep" for a few nights after seeing it, that it would "go over my head". And so I waited. I wasn't a comic book kid, nor was I even film-obsessed. My obsession with seeing this film didn't make sense. But then I watched the film. I was a perfectionist as a child, in certain ways. I can hear my mother disputing that sentence with case study after case study, but it is the truth. My homework always had to be perfect. My Chelsea jerseys always had to be perfect. The work I put into learning my singing lines for choir always had to be perfect. I've somewhat changed my stance on this, but it was obsessive for a time. And it is for this reason that I find myself continuously coming back to ...