A review of the 1989 classic movie “Do The Right Thing”

May 25th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

African-American Spike Lee is absolutely an auteur. In this, his most seminal film, he is writer, producer and director and takes the role of the viewpoint character.

Set on one, blisteringly hot day in Brooklyn, we follow Lee’s Mookie, a 25 year old delivery man for a local pizzeria run by an Italian-American family headed by Sal (Danny Aiello). From the very beginning with a hard-hitting song from Public Enemy, this is a film shaped by rap music and informed by righteous anger and the tension builds to an explosive and tragic climax. Yet there is humour and kindness too.

We are introduced to a whole range of colourful – in both sense of the word – men, women and youngsters who interact in a variety of ways that illustrate different views on race, religion and human nature. The background is literally the most colourful feature of the film with a a vibrant use of pigments from the palette.

The result is an immensely powerful and memorable work. Some have seen it as a ‘call to arms’ but Lee makes in clear, especially in his end quotes from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, that ‘the right thing’ is to reject violence.

If you view the film on television, you might want to use the subtitles because the dialogue is fast and vernacular. Also be warned that a good deal of racist language is used and a particular four-letter word is almost ubiquitous.

Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)

Is Thursday the new Friday?

May 25th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

I finally retired shortly before the Covid pandemic hit us, so I have no current experience of the workplace. However, I live in central London so I see a lot of office workers and I talk to a lot of people in hospitality.

It seems to me that, since the ‘end’ of Covid, many people have adopted a blended work pattern with several days in the office and several days working at home. There appears to be a common pattern of working in the office on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and working from home Monday and Friday to make a long ‘weekend’.

This means that, from the point of view of the hospitality trade, Thursday has become the new Friday with Thursday evening being the peak time for visits to the pub and the restaurant.

What I see in central London appears to be confirmed by this article which states:

“Office workers in central London are spending on average 2.3 days a week in the workplace, according to a report that warns against a wholesale switch to working from home.
The thinktank Centre for Cities carried out polling of office workers in the capital and found they were spending 59% of the time in their workplace compared with pre-Covid levels.
The study showed the most common working pattern was two days a week, accounting for 31% of respondents. Almost half of workers were in the office more often than that, however – three, four or five days a week.”

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)

Does Artificial Intelligence need a global regulator?

May 24th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

The leaders of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI have called for the regulation of “superintelligent” AIs, arguing that an equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency is needed to protect humanity from the risk of accidentally creating something with the power to destroy it.

In a short note published to the company’s website, co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever and the chief executive, Sam Altman, call for an international regulator to begin working on how to “inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, [and] place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security” in order to reduce the “existential risk” such systems could pose.

You can read the company’s short statement here. We need to move fast.

Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)

What are the strengths and weaknesses of humans as a species?

May 23rd, 2023 by Roger Darlington

“Humans are an exquisitely intelligent and capable species of ape. Our physiology has been fine-tuned for efficient long-distance running; our hands are elegantly dextrous for manipulating and making; and our throats and mouths give us astonishing control over the sounds we make. We are virtuoso communicators, able to convey everything from physical instructions to abstract concepts, and to coordinate ourselves in teams and communities. We learn from each other, from our parents and peers, so new generations don’t have to start from scratch. But we’re also deeply flawed, physically and mentally. In many ways, humans just don’t work well.
We’re also riddled with defects in our biochemistry and DNA – data-corrupted genes that no longer work – which means, for instance, that we must eat a diet more varied than almost any other animal to obtain the nutrients we need to survive. And our brains, far from being perfectly rational thinking machines, are full of cognitive glitches and bugs. We’re also prone to addictions that drive compulsive behaviour, sometimes along self-destructive paths.”

These are the opening paragraphs of a long read article in the “Guardian” on human use of recreational drugs with particular reference to the historic opium trade in China.

Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)

A review of “All Quiet on The Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque

May 18th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

Having seen both the American (1930) and German (2022) film versions of this famous novel, I thought that it was time to read the original work (1929) in an excellent English translation (1994) by Brian Murdoch.

The novel contains less narrative but more reflection than the films and has lost none of its power and punch. Yet the book ends not with a bang but a whimper: “there was nothing new to report on the western front”. Indeed the title that we all know came from an English translation in 1929 which Murdoch has chosen to keep because it has “justly become part of the English language”, but he explains that a more literal translation of Remarque’s German title would be “Nothing new on the western front”.

The viewpoint is that of 19 year old student volunteer Paul Bäumer. Remarque describes the debilitation of lack of food, water and sleep, the ubiquity of rats and lice, and even the degradation of excretion. He presents a brutally graphic description of how bodies can be ripped apart in different ways by shells, shrapnel and snipers. But he highlights “the best thing that the war produced – comradeship in arms” and asserts that “you can cope with all the horror as long as you simply duck thinking about it – but it will kill you if you try to come to terms with it”.

After the publication of his stunning novel, Remarque was exiled from Nazi Germany and deprived of his citizenship, but today all German school children study his writing and honour his name.

Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)

How processed food is killing us

May 17th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

“Strange as it may seem, food has replaced tobacco as the leading cause of early death globally. Each year, more people die in America from illnesses caused by poor diet than were killed fighting in every war in US history combined. In the UK the situation is equally dire.
Officially, the health effects of food are entirely due to its nutritional content – the amount of fat, salt, sugar and fibre it contains. The current system leaves it up to you to read the detailed information on the pack and decide how much to eat based on recommended values, and if you have children you’ll need to know the values for them too.
This is nigh-on impossible for most people – but even if you were able to calculate exactly how much fat, salt and sugar you were consuming in each mouthful, you would still be neglecting one vital determinant of health – how the food was processed.”

This is the opening of a “Guardian” article on processed food.

Posted in Environment | Comments (0)

Do aliens know that we’re here? They should.

May 15th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

Aliens on nearby stars could detect Earth through radio signals leaked from the planet, new research suggests. Scientists from The University of Manchester and the University of Mauritius used crowd sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers to determine what alien civilisations might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard’s star, six light years away from Earth.

The research, published in the “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal”, found that only more technologically advanced civilisations would be able to detect the current levels of mobile tower radio leakage from Earth. However, as most alien civilisations are likely to have more sensitive receiving systems and as we move towards more powerful broadband systems on Earth, the detectability of humans from other intelligent beings will become more and more likely.

Professor Mike Garrett, Team Leader of the project and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at The University of Manchester, said: “I’ve heard many colleagues suggest that the Earth has become increasingly radio quiet in recent years – a claim that I always contested.

“Although it’s true we have fewer powerful TV and radio transmitters today, the proliferation of mobile communication systems around the world is profound. While each system represents relatively low radio powers individually, the integrated spectrum of billions of these devices is substantial.

“Current estimates suggest we will have more than one hundred thousand satellites in low Earth orbit and beyond before the end of the decade. The Earth is already anomalously bright in the radio part of the spectrum; if the trend continues, we could become readily detectable by any advanced civilisation with the right technology”.

Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)

A review of the Korean-set film “Return To Seoul”

May 14th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

This is a work that underlines the international nature of modern film production. It is set in South Korea and filmed there and in Romania. The story concerns a French-Korean woman but it is written and directed by a French-Cambodian man. The dialogue is in both French and Korean with some English. The funding is even more diverse. And it was the Cambodian entry for the Best International Feature Film at America’s Academy Awards. But the subject matter – the struggle for personal identity – is a universal theme and rightly the work has spoken to audiences around the world.

Davy Chou was inspired to make the movie by the experience of his friend, a French-Korean adoptee called Laure Baoufle, who is credited at the end. The central role is taken by another French-Korean adoptee, but a young woman whose previous work has largely been as a visual artist and here makes her acting debut. It is a tour de force performance in which she is rarely off the screen and portrays a wide palette of emotions.

The film starts with the arrival in South Korea of Frédérique ‘Freddie’ Benoît in the bustling city of Seoul apparently “by accident”. Whether or not this was her original intention, she decides to try and connect with her biological parents, but will they want to see her after an interval of 25 years? If they do, how will they and she respond? The narrative jumps from a long ‘present’ section to two years later, then five years further on, and finally one year later. This eight-year period ought to be enough to clarify things but the ending is still enigmatic.

We are used to protagonists, perhaps especially young, female ones, being sympathetic characters, but Freddie by turns is amusing, engaging, irascible, manipulative and even cruel while always being insecure, confused and selfish. Yet her story – shot with cinematic flair and striking music – is never less than mesmerising.

Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)

A review of the new Japanese film “Plan 75”

May 11th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

In 1973, there was a film called “Soylent Green” which depicted a future Earth (it was set in 2022!) in which rapid population growth and deficiences in supply of food had combined to necessitate that the working classes be provided with artificial nutrients and voluntary euthanaesia. There is a very moving scene where an aged character played by Edward G Robinson takes part in assisted dying to the music and imagery of his choice.

In 1976, another fearsome vision of the future was offered in “Logan’s Run” where, in a post-apocalyptic society with scare resources, those reaching the aged of 30 (I was 28 at the time of viewing) are required to take part in a death sequence that they are told will lead to reincarnation. Michael York plays a character called Logan who goes on the run.

Now we have the Japanese film “Plan 75” which is set in a near future where the Japanese government offers financial and social incentives to anyone aged 75 or over who will sign up to an euthanasia programme. It is no accident that the film is set in Japan and is presented in such coldly realistic terms: almost 40% of the country’s population is over 60 and the average longevity of its citizens is 87 for a woman and 81 for a man.

The film is written and directed by a middle-aged woman called Chie Hayakawa and she has chosen a slow and subtle presentation with no drama or tears. We see the Plan 75 programme through the eyes of three characters: an unemployed and lonely woman of 78 who volunteers for the programme (she is played movingly by the veteran 81 year old actress Chieko Baisho), a young staffer on the programme who starts to see things differently when a relative comes forward for euthanasia, and a middle-aged woman from the Philippines who sorts out the belongings of the deceased.

Many people – including me – would support a legal option of assisted dying with appropriate safeguards, but envisage this as an opportunity to die with dignity when pain and suffering are the alternative realities. We don’t want the old or the ill to feel unwanted or unsupported but, as this film underlines so poignantly, this is too often the case when lack of support and absence of companionship can make life feel like little more than a waiting room for death.

PS: I am 75 next month.

Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)