There’s a scene in which Michael Caine’s Jasper, an ageing hippie, and Clive Owen’s Theo, the reluctant hero, share a blunt (‘Strawberry Cough’).  Jasper points out that marijuana remains illegal even in a post-apocalyptic world where women can no longer give birth and the government rations out suicide kits (‘Quietus’) to the elderly. At the brink of certain extinction, unreasonable and ridiculous laws will continue to exist.

Children of Men, based on the PD James novel of the same name, finds mankind at a precarious precipice – children are no longer born and the youngest person in the world is nearly 18 years old. Economies have crumbled, war has ravaged major cities and most countries have closed off their borders (a UK newspaper headline reads ‘All Foreigners Are Now Illegal’). What makes this different from other post-apocalyptic fare (Mad Max, The Postman, The Road) is that the film acknowledges a severely broken but functioning system of government that is in place. Public transportation still exists, people still go to work, cosmetics are still advertised and you can still buy a cup of coffee. Personally, I find this more plausible than a scenario in which humans become feral rodent-eating hunters.

Today, when immigration is such a contentious and volatile issue and there seems to be a real food and water crisis, Children of Men can be a little uneasy to watch because face it, the future is bleak and depressing. Tragedies (as the past ten years have shown us) seldom bring people together. Children of Men, however, ends on a very uplifting note.

The film has several contemporary (refugees are rounded up in cages and there’s a scene reminiscent of pictures from Abu Gharib), pop cultural (Banksy, The Libertines’ ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’ etc.) and biblical allusions. Kee reveals her pregnancy to a stunned Theo in a barn and later, jokingly tells Theo that she’s a virgin. If you pay enough attention, there’s a lot to take away from the film. Action scenes are coherent unlike lazily cut scenes prevalent today. There are at least three outstanding long takes that seem nearly impossible to film and the soundtrack is near-perfect.

Children of Men is easily one of the most beautifully shot and visceral films ever made. If I had to recommend one film from the last decade to someone who has never watched a film his/her entire life, this would be it.

“I guess to understand this John, we have to understand the thought processes of the looters as they were looting. And I guess what they were thinking was, ‘Oh look at all that looting, I wonder if I should join in. There are a number of factors urging me to do so. I feel a sense of social alienation as if people like me have been abandoned by mainstream society as the unwanted dregs of a skewed and unfair system. I feel a lack of hope – there are few jobs even fewer good jobs. I just can’t seem to find the opportunity to escape from a cycle of poverty, broken homes and broken communities around me. From generations of decline and neglect, let down by the state, let down by my family, let down by a pitiless capitalist system which has scant regard for the unfortunate. I feel disenfranchised by political system and class that fails to engage or represent me and when I see the excesses and unbridled inquisitiveness of the economic food-chain, the corrupt and self-interest in my nation’s media and politics I feel even more abandoned not of my making.

Adding all that up and seeing the opportunity for some seriously cut-price bargains – well, no price bargains – well I still don’t really feel like looting.

Oh hang on, I just remembered. I’m a c*nt. Count me in!’”

— Andy Zaltzman (The Bugle, Episode 164)

Julia Gillard’s carbon tax announcement over the weekend is currently the most popular topic of debate here and I’m a bit taken aback by the amount of venom spewed over an average increase of living expenses of just under $10/week.

Here’s a wonderfully written albeit, slightly snarky post on the recent goings-on.

This taps into a very prominent feature of our political landscape: the constant line from Tony Abbott that Australian families are hurting, that Aussies are doing it tough, that life is somehow getting harder, that the cost of living is on the rise.

Shenanigans, Tony. Let’s get one thing very clear. Australians, en masse, are enjoying a better standard of living than has ever been enjoyed in this country’s history.

And not just marginally, but by a huge degree. Really, along with a few other developed countries, we are enjoying a better standard of living than any group of people has in human existence. We have every kind of food and beverage from around the world deliverable to our doors. We have technological advances that make a decade ago look archaic. We have goods and luxuries of every conceivable kind; cheap and accessible. We have more and better options with transport, entertainment, comfort, place and style of residence. We have the most advanced medicine and best life expectancy of all time.

[You shut your goddamn carbon-taxin’ mouth]

I’m trying to write more regularly, so expect some rambling.

We used to watch a lot of Star Trek: TNG back in the day and there was this one episode I’m sure my parents were a little uncomfortable with - ‘Justice’. After around 10 minutes of watching the half-naked inhabitants of Rubicon III indulge in guilt-free sex and other pleasures (and my mother’s glares), we were asked to leave the room  (damn you, understandable but misplaced fears).

I finally watched the episode last night, 16 years later. It was pretty silly but thematically more substantial than I recall. The USS Enterprise makes contact with a planet whose peaceful inhabitants live in fear of their god, an advanced alien being kicking it out in the planet’s orbit. When Wesley Crusher breaks a trivial rule, the Enterprise has to prevent his execution and this isn’t easy considering they’re sworn to the Prime Directive. The reason I prefer TNG over the original series is because of the former’s obvious moral core.

Anyway, Captain Picard saves the day with a speech.

I don’t know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible. But the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions.

Let me digress, but only slightly. The IT law overhaul in India is clearly a bad idea but shouldn’t we be worried that there are people out there making arguments like this?

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart‘s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.

The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?

…

I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?

(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)

Brilliant article by Salman Rushide on what makes a good literary adaptation. 

What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there’s no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it’s the thing that gets us through. 

…

But those who do not know who they are, are doomed too: individuals who sacrifice themselves for the sake of pleasing others, comedians who stop telling jokes because they find themselves in a humourless world, serious people who start trying to tell jokes because they fear being thought humourless, people in a new situation, a new relationship, a new university, who act against their natures because they think that’s the way to make things easy for themselves.

Whole societies can lose their way through a process of bad adaptation. Striving to save themselves, they can oppress others. Hoping to defend themselves, they can damage the very liberties they believed to be under attack. Claiming to defend freedom, they can make themselves and others less free. Or, seeking to calm the violent hotheads in their midst, societies can try to appease them, and so give the violent hotheads the notion that their violence and hotheadedness is effective. 

[Tip of the hat to The Mute Oracle and Kalafudra]

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a “Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.

I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of “prejudice” or “ignorance”, but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

…

But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.

Read this beautifully articulated argument by Johann Hari in its entirety here.

Update: We live to die another day.

The LHC gets switched on in a few hours and contrary to what lunatics may want you to believe, the world will not be swallowed by a black hole. What interests me more is as to what *will* actually come out of this 6 billion dollar science experiment. Will they find the Higgs boson? Or will Hawking win that wager?

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, governments cooperate to build this giant dodecahedron (after receiving step by step instructions from a very ambiguous extra-terrestrial intelligence). After spending trillions of dollars on a project that many believed would shape humanity’s future, remember what happened?

Nothing.

“The land of Mahatma Gandhi has been bloodied by terrorists whom we shall not spare; Terrorists are waging a war against India. We should be prepared for a long battle against terrorism.”

- Narendra Modi in response to the recent Bangalore and Ahmedabad blasts