A review of the 2017 film “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer”

August 29th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

This is a very odd film in so many respects.

Above all, the storyline is so unusual: inspired by an ancient Greek tragedy (which is mentioned once very briefly), it is a psychological thriller in which lives are threatened and one is lost (the titular reference to an animal is a metaphor).

Although it is set in Cincinnati, the American family is played by an international cast: (a very hairy) Irish Colin Farrell as a surgeon and father, Australian Nicole Kidman as his wife. English Raffey Cassidy as his daughter and American Sunny Suljic as his son plus Irish Barry Keoghan in a stand-out role as the mysterious centre of the drama.

From the very opening, what we see is unsettling and unexplained and the narrative only moves very slowly in revealing meaning. Meanwhile our sense of unease is aggravated by the cinematography, with lots of tracking shots along corridors and wide-angle shots of characters in settings, and by the sound, with obscure classical music and frequent jarring noises.

The source of all this oddness is Greek director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos whose previous work was “The Lobster” and whose next work was “The Favourite”.

If you need conventional storytelling, this film is not for you. If you like something idiosyncratic and thought-provoking, this is recommended.

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A review of the 1995 film “La Haine”

August 24th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

A French-language film shot in black and white with the title “Hate” might not immediately appeal, but it won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival and it has become a major classic of recent French cinema. Written and directed by Mattieu Kassovitz, amazingly this was his screen debut and he was only 27 at the time. The work is so striking because the locations and the characters are so different from most French films and an array of cinematic devices is deployed to tell a hard-hitting story.

Shot largely in the deprived Paris suburb of Chanteloup-les-Vignes, the 24 hour narrative revolves around three friends: a Jewish man Vinz (Vincent Cassel), a black boxer Hubert (Hubert Koundé) and a young Arab Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) – note how the names of the actors inform those of the characters. There is a lot of (rough) dialogue with plenty of anger and violence but cleverly Kassovitz weaves into the tale some funny characters and situations – a bit like Shakespeare in his tragedies. You will never forget the ending.

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A review of “The Long Game” by Rush Doshi (2021)

August 21st, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Important and informative though “The Long Game” is, it is not an easy read. There are 400 pages of small and dense text with a good deal of repetition and almost 1,500 notes. But Rush Doshi knows what he is writing about and what he is writing about is of huge geopolitical significance. Doshi is the founding director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative and, since completing this book, he has become Director for China on President Biden’s National Security Council.

The work is a review of the rise and rise of China over the past three decades and, in the words of the sub-title, “China’s Grand Strategy To Displace American Order”. A distinguishing feature of the book is its use of an original and digitised database of authoritative Chinese-language Communist Party (CCP) documents personally excavated by Doshi who is proficient in Mandarin.

The central thesis of “The Long Game” is that China has sequentially adopted three “strategies of displacement” of American power, each triggered by sharp discontinuities in global politics.

First, following Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War and the Soviet collapse, from 1989-2008 it sought to blunt America’s power in Asia – a process known as “hiding capabilities and biding time”.

Second, following the Global Financial Crisis, from 2009-2016 it endeavoured to build a regional hegemony in Asia – a position dubbed “actively accomplishing something”.

Third, following Brexit, the Trump presidency and the coronavirus pandemic, since 2017 it has attempted to expand its blunting and building efforts worldwide under the banner “great changes unseen in a century”.

In respect of each strategy, Doshi looks in detail at what the CCP documents say and what the country does under three headings – military, political and economic – and emphasises how these three elements are closely co-ordinated to further the grand strategy.

Doshi dismisses the regular suggestions that American is in fundamental decline but argues that the US needs to counter China’s grand strategy in an asymmetric fashion that does not attempt to compete “dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for loan”. Instead he presents – rather briefly and broadly – a series of (costly) recommendations for blunting Chinese order and building America order.

In the course of China’s 3,000 year history, the so-called “century of humiliation” (1839 to 1949) is seen as an aberration which can and and must be corrected with China’s return to a central position in world affairs. Doshi suggests that China’s economy will equal that of the US by 2028 and that the CCP intends to complete this process of “national rejuvenation” by the centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 2049.

Can this be achieved without armed conflict? Since Doshi wrote his book, Russia has invaded Ukraine and you can be sure that military strategists in Washington and Beijing are already assessing the lessons for any move by China to regain Taiwan.

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Would you fly with Ethiopian Airlines?

August 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

There is an amazing story that two pilots with Ethiopian Airlines fell asleep at 37,000ft (11,000m), missing an airport runway before waking to land the aircraft safely.

The news raises the question would you fly with this airline? Well, I did – six times in two weeks as you will see from this account of a holiday in Ethiopia.

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A review of the film “Donnie Brasco”

August 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

For some reason, it took me two and a half decades to catch up with this excellent movie from 1997. By then, Johnny Depp – who takes the titular role – had been through the increasing madness of the “Pirates Of The Caribbean” series and endured two highly-publicised court cases with former partner Amber Heard. This work is a reminder of just how fine an actor Depp was earlier in his career.

Here he plays an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the New York mob and works his way into the trust of increasingly senior mafiosi. The tension is like a taut piano string and the outbursts of violence like the crashing of a piano lid. A lot of attention is paid to style: the cars, the clothes, and above all the language. There’s a wonderful sequence in which the informer explains to some FBI colleagues the different meanings of the phrase “Forget about it”.

The powerful central performance of Depp is backed up by superb support roles, most notably Al Pacino, the mob middleman Lefty Ruggiero whom Brasco befriends and who vouches for him with the other gangsters with profound consequences for both of them. Michael Madsen is always good and it was interesting to see Anne Heche in the only significant female role (a few days before I saw the film she died as a result of a car accident).

Surprisingly for such a quintessentially American movie, the director was the British Mike Newell who had previously made “Four Weddings And A Funeral”, as different as you can imagine from a mafia movie.

The most astonishing aspect of “Donnie Brasco”, however, is that it is loosely based on a real story, an undercover operation by FBI agent Joseph Pistone between 1976 and 1981. At the conclusion of the film, we are told that his evidence led to over 200 indictments and over 100 convictions and that subsequently he has lived under an assumed name with a $500,000 open contract on his head.

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The death of a talented pilot and the end of an historic aircraft

August 17th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

A few days ago, there was a tragic accident at an air display in Cheb in the Czech Republic. The pilot was Petr Paces who was a very experienced MiG 21 fighter pilot and captain of the Boeing 737 airliner.

Nothing is more important that the death of this man, but I have to record that the aircraft that he was flying was a World War Two Hawker Hurricane painted in the colour scheme of the aircraft flown in 1942 by the Czech RAF pilot Karel Kuttelwascher who was the father of my ex-wife.

You can read more about Karel Kuttelwascher here. You can read more about the Hawker Hurricane here. And you can see below a video of the aircraft which crashed at Cheb being flown by Petr Paces the day before his death.

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On the 75th anniversary of independence for India, how much is there to celebrate?

August 16th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Politics in India is much rougher and much more corrupt that in the democracies of Europe and North America. Assassination is not uncommon: the revered Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, and the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 were all murdered, although it has to be noted that these were not really political assassinations which happen more at local level.

Communal, caste and regional tensions continue to haunt Indian politics, sometimes threatening its long-standing democratic and secular ethos. The language used by political candidates about each other is often vivid. Nevertheless, for decades, India was a poster child for democratic development: a poor, sprawling, ethnically diverse country that nevertheless had regular elections and peaceful transfers of power – the hallmarks of a functioning democracy – albeit with the flaws inherent in such a system, including a single dominant party.

The parliamentary scene has been transformed in the last eight years with the BJP winning an overall majority in both the elections of 2014 and 2019. The leader of the BJP Narendra Modi is a dominant figure who is both popular and populist. He is the first prime minister since 1971 to win majorities in parliament in back-to-back elections and a survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies found that nearly one-third of people who voted for the BJP last time did so in support of Modi, rather than the party or their local candidate.

But Modi is a divisive figure who has been accused of an increasing personality cult and a serious undermining of democratic institutions and practices. Writing in “The World Ahead 2022” published by “The Economist”, Ramachandra Guha – an historian and biographer – has declared: “In the seven years that Narendra Modi has been prime minister of India, he has not formally proclaimed a state of emergency – but then perhaps he has not needed to. For he has ruthlessly used the instruments of state power to undermine the functioning of democratic institutions. He has tamed the media (India is currently ranked 142nd on the World Press Freedom Index), set the tax authorities on his political opponents, and jailed dozens of human rights activists. He has also sought, with some success, to bring under his control previously independent institutions such as the army, the central bank, the election commission and the higher judiciary.”

In a March 2022 article in the “Observer” newspaper, Nick Cohen wrote: “Narendra Modi and the Hindutva right are turning the world’s largest democracy into the world’s ugliest democracy. Muslims are denied the security of full citizenship. The independence of the Indian courts, the civil service, the electoral system and the media has been horribly compromised as the Bharatiya Janata Party creates, if not a one-party state, then at least a state where only one party can win.”

This is the conclusion of my guide to the Indian political system which you can read here. I have visited India and you can read an account of my travels here.

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A review of the recent French film “Who You Think I Am”

August 15th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Juliette Binoche is a talented and beautiful actress who has now appeared in over 60 French-language and English-language films. I really admire her work and must have seen over a dozen of her roles.

In this French-language work from 2019, she plays Claire, a 50 year old professor of French literature, who uses Facebook to create a false persona of Clara, a 24 year old working in the fashion business. The framing device for the story is a series of conversations between Claire and her psychotherapist.

The reasons for, and the consequences of, this subterfuge are only slowly revealed in a tale about identity, illusion, obsession and abandonment. Binoche, as always, is captivating.

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Aircraft carriers: how many of them are there and who has them?

August 14th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Currently I’m reading a book by American researcher Rush Doshi entitled “The Long Game” and subtitled “China’s grand strategy to displace American order”. Recently I read the section on China’s development of aircraft carriers which led me to wonder: how many aircraft carriers are there in the world and which nations have them?

As usual, a good source is the relevant Wikipedia page. From this, we learn that at present there are 46 aircraft carriers in service. The countries that have such vessels are Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Most of these nations – 10 out of 14 – only have one or two (Russia only has one just now and the UK only has two). Two them have four: China and Japan (but China has two more undergoing trials). Not surprisingly, the US has the most: 20 with another six in reserve, undergoing trials, or under construction.

I’m no military expert, but I wonder how vulnerable aircraft carriers are in the age of cruise missiles. I hope that we never have to find out.

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