Barbie (2023 Dir. Greta Gerwig)
One of these three plays Barbie in the eponymous movie. No, not that one, not her either. That one. I know!? Weird, right?
Not the least weird thing about the ‘Barbie’ film is the casting. Margot Robbie is just not…Barbie enough…but she does invest the role with a certain joie de vivre and that’s something. Our Barbie (‘Stereotypical Barbie’) lives in a lovely dollhouse world where all the Barbies party and sort of wander about doing physics and stuff. The Kens don’t do anything and are deeply stupid. (Our Barbie’s Ken’s job is not surf lifesaver, as so many people mistakenly believe. His job is ‘beach’). Fittingly, Ken is played by Ryan Gosling, but it might as well have been Ryan Reynolds or…
Continue Reading →Oppenheimer
(Directed by Christopher Nolan) (2023) On 16 July 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a test site named “Trinity”, in New Mexico, USA. It went so well that, on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 am, the US tried it on an actual city: Hiroshima. A blinding flash shot over the city, and then some 100,000 people were vapourised. The morning turned dark; a priest, Father Kleinsorge, wandered in the garden of his mission, dazed and bleeding, to see his housekeeper, Murata-san, crying out “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai!” (‘Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!’).* Of course, President Truman’s…
Continue Reading →Classic Misdirection
Misdirection, in which the manipulator, by sleight of hand, draws a crowd’s attention to one thing to distract it from another, has an honourable place in the field of magic…. …and a dishonourable place in politics. Remember when political apparatchiks spread the word that 911 was a good day to put out bad news they’d been hiding? We’ve seen 4 inspired examples of misdirection just in the last few months, coming from Joe Biden‘s goons in the Department of Justice: MARCH 17, 2023: Hunter admits the Laptop from Hell is his. MARCH 18, 2023: Trump to be indicted in New…
Continue Reading →Black Mischief
Reflections on the Rainbow Nation, South Africa ‘You know,’ he added reflectively, ‘we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums . . .’ ‘What is all that?’ asked the Emperor. ‘Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.’ (Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief, (1932), p. 128). South Africa’s once diamondiferous soil was always leavened with blood, running down the anthill to the lowest point of Kimberley’s…
Continue Reading →The Guns of August Revisited
(By Barbara W. Tuchman, 1962) Tuchman’s classic history of the stirrings of WWI deserves a fresh look, when one compares some of the events leading to and culminating in August 1914 with some of the events leading to and maybe culminating in August 2023: 1910: Edward VII dies / 2022: Elizabeth II dies. A comet appears in both years (“When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” – “Julius Caesar”) “All the old buoys which have marked the channel of our lives seem to have been swept away.” (Lord Esher, 1910)….
Continue Reading →