Fifteen Movies

My friend Denise has done one of those Facebook meme things, where you list 'fifteen movies that have influenced you and that will always stick with you', challenging her mates to do likewise. It didn't take me long to hammer out a list of my own, resisting the urge merely to list my favourite films, but having done that I felt an urge to say why I picked these. I did a similar thing last year with books. So, here goes...

1. Seven Samurai

My favourite film, bar none. It's intelligent and beautiful and humane, and there's not a wasted frame in it. I couldn't come close to picking a favourite moment - that opening silhouette of the horses against the sky, the shot of the village from above, old Gisaku's grimacing face, Kambei's haircut, Gorobei's chuckling, Kyuzo's duel, the flower, Kikuchiyo at the waterwheel, the horse in the rain... It's surely no coincidence that my favourite film as a child was, for a while, The Magnificent Seven, or that even now I'm a big fan of A Bug's Life. This was also, as it happens, the first subtitled film that I ever watched from beginning to end.

2. Star Wars: A New Hope

Look, I'm a bloke, what do you expect? I'm not sure any film has ever brought me as much joy. Unlike 'Seven Samurai', this isn't a film that could ever be on a pedestal; it has faults galore, and I can see them all, and I still love it. Sure, it'd be a better film without them, but it'd be a different one. I love it as it is. Sometimes our cracks are part of who we are. And I still think its opening sequence is superb.

3. Casablanca

Like 'Star Wars', the cliches really do have a ball in this film, and Pauline Kael had a point when she said that this is the classic instance of how entertaining a bad film can be. Still, it's sparklingly witty, has perhaps the most exhilarating scene in the history of cinema, and for me stands out as the classic modern take on the Arthurian love triangle. And, of course, it underpins both When Harry Met Sally and Deep Space Nine. Of course.

4. The Maltese Falcon

I like quest stories, and I especially like futile quests. John Huston did them better than anyone, whether in Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Man Who Would Be King, or in this early masterpiece. I'm not convinced that the film's quite as deliciously dark as Hammett's novel, but it has the great Peter Lorre in it, which more than makes up for that, and there's something awe-inspiring about how Sidney Greenstreet fills the screen!

5. Scaramouche

Yeah, I can't defend this. Even hardcore swashbuckler lovers get embarrassed by this one. So what? My younger brother has said that my love for even ropey swashbucklers is my curse, but I don't care. Scaramouche may not be The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Mark of Zorro, but I've loved it since I was a small boy, and I love it now. The colours are gorgeous, the dialogue is hilarious, Janet Leigh is stunning, the long swordfight is breathtaking, and the final scene is wonderful if you don't think about it for too

6. The Birds

Sure, it's not Hitchcock's best film, or even my favourite of his films - that'd surely be either Rear Window or Vertigo - but it was the gateway drug for me, to a point where I now have almost two dozen Hitchcock gilms on my shelves! I saw it when I was about ten, and to this day find it one of the most weirdly unnerving films I've ever seen.

7. The Silence of the Lambs

This was the first film I ever saw in the cinema more than once, and the first time I saw it my knees hurt for hours afterwards, as they'd been tensed so tightly during the film. I've since read and loved the book, and think this well deserved its Oscar Royal Flush; as adaptations go, it rivals To Kill a Mockingbird, and though this film lacks an Atticus Finch, it does at least have a Clarice Starling. For all that Hopkins gets the plaudits for this one, and for all that I've ruined the film for others by reading Agony Aunt columns in his voice, I still think this is Jodie Foster's film.

8. Reservoir Dogs

I saw 'Silence of the Lambs' more than once in the cinema, but the following year I saw 'Reservoir Dogs' four times. I've not seen it in years, and it's a conspicuous gap in my dvd collection, and it's not even one I'm in a hurry to fill, but its impact on me at the time was undeniable. The dialogue astounded me, the claustrophobic staginess of it thrilled me, and above all I was fascinated by the fact that the film was almost - though not quite - in real time. Real-time films like High Noon and Before Sunset have delighted me ever since.

9. Beauty and the Beast

Yes, I know it might seem odd picking this ahead of the Cocteau masterpiece, but let's face it, for all the silvery magic of the 1946 classic (and wasn't that a great year for fantasy films, with A Matter of Life and Death and It's a Wonderful Life all appearing at the same time?), it doesn't have a sleazy candlestick with a comedy French accent, or that expression the Beast pulls when Belle unreasonably refuses to join him for dinner. I love redemption stories anyway, and I have always liked this story of how a thing must be loved before it is able to love. And, of course, it's about an intelligent, sensitive, beautiful girl who loves a clumsy, hairy, awkward man with a lot of books. One can always hope.

10. Stand by Me

It's probably not even Rob Reiner's best film, but Stephen King is a master of conveying small town American life - or so it has always seemed, anyway - and Reiner brought King's strengths to the screen perfectly here. It's funny and thrilling and gross and sad, and is deathly serious when it needs to be. What's more, as a study in boyhood friendship, it's pretty much perfect.

11. Dead Poets Society

For all that he can be too sentimental and twee, I like Robin Williams in this one, and I've come to like Ethan Hawke too. I still cherish watching it in Dave's living room, and at Nayra's going away night, and in Becky's room in halls. Its carpei diem motto still resounds with me, and I always picture the film's final scenes when I hear the story of Laura and Rose and the microphone. Thank you, girls.

12. The Searchers

Its iconic images of Monument Valley, of Wayne's Ethan Edwards silhouetted in the doorway, and of the burning homestead are part of cinema history, of course, but the film has layers and layers below and beyond its visual magnificence. Astonishingly beautiful and painfully bleak, The Searchers is, aside from being probably the finest western ever, a profoundly mythic study in how frighteningly lonely and psychologically insupportable it would be to be the type of man that John Wayne plays in so many of his films. Even the comic scenes, which can look like a frivolous distraction, serve, like the Olympus episodes in the Iliad, to heighten the darkness in Wayne's own character.

13. Dangerous Liaisons

If Beauty and the Beast and the Star Wars films are stories of how a man becomes a monster and then finds himself again, Dangerous Liaisons shows us a monster who realises he is becoming a man and who destroys the only person he loves in an attempt to remain otherwise. Devastatingly intelligent, there's nothing about this film that I don't like. The script, based on Christopher Hampton's play, is as brilliant and cold as the hardest of diamonds, as good an adaptation of Laclos' novel as one might hope for, and the cast is exactly right. Even young Keanu Reeves is good as the gormless Danceny, though he's nothing to Uma Thurman, let alone John Malkovich, Glenn Close, and the luminous Michelle Pfeiffer.

14. Magnolia

I like non-linear storytelling a lot. Citizen Kane is great, Pulp Fiction fascinated me for years, and Short Cuts, when I saw it back in the day, was a revelation. Of all these complex cinematic tapestries, though, Magnolia, for me,  is the one I'm most likely to think of. I know: it's messy, and it's often ugly, and not all of the characters are particularly likeable, but for all the horror it shows us, for all the loneliness, and inadequacy, and guilt, and shame, it's ultimate a deeply compassionate and hopeful film, as profound as it is profane, drinking from the same thematic wells as Krzysztof Kieślowski's tripartite study of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but doing so in an intoxicatingly different and utterly inspiring way. I'm a sucker for films about redemption, and they don't come much better than this.

15. Withnail and I

You know what Paul McGann does when faced with the bull? That works. A friend of mine did a few months back, when he and his wife were confronted with an angry one. You can talk about the poignancy and the quotability of this film all you like, but me, I have two friends who escaped being violently gored thanks to having watched this.

Stop Projecting Your Euro Neurosis, Revisited

Will Hutton, in today's Observer, utterly nails the Irish issue, rightly pointing out how the British narrative of Ireland's financial meltdown is a caricature, determined wholly by Britain's own issues, rather than the reality of what has happened in Ireland over the last decade:

But in Britain the vast inflation of Ireland's public sector wage bill, the fecklessness of its bankers who allowed lending to balloon to four times Irish GDP, largely on the expectation of never-ending property price increases, and the grubby corruption of its political elite are all pushed to one side. Voices on right and left insist that what is happening in Ireland is the fault of the EU and the euro. If Irish interest rates could have been a fraction higher, they argue, like those in Britain, Ireland would not have had a property and credit boom.

The British narrative ignores Ireland's insane public sector pay bill, the fact that the economy had become addictively dependent on the construction industry and rising property prices, reckless bankers, and corruption, cowardice, and a lack of imagination among the governing parties and the opposition which lacked the nerve to challenge them on economic grounds. It blames everything on Ireland's membership of the Euro and sees the events of the last week as a grand Franco-German plan to take over Ireland.

Nonsense, of course, not least because Ireland's no prize nowadays and because given her debt, Britain could quite easily wind up in as bad a situation:

A second financial crisis would confront Britain with Irish-style dilemmas despite the independence of the pound. We have proportionally more bank lending in relation to our GDP than even the Irish, some £7 trillion or five times GDP.

Yes, Britain has worse debt levels than Ireland does, and it managed this without being 'trapped' in a catch-all interest zone, which is how the Eurozone keeps being scorned as. The Euro, as Hutton points out, isn't the problem here. It might, however, be part of the solution.

I'm not sure the Pope has said anything new here...

Back in September, when the Pope came to Britain, one of the things I wore myself out telling people was how rubbish the media are when it comes to religion; at this point I pretty much only ever trust John Allen, of America's National Catholic Reporter, when it comes to any news about the Vatican, say. This shouldn't be surprising, of course. There's an enormous amount of shoddy journalism out there, and when it comes to, say, science journalism, Ben Goldacre has had a field day pointing out how misleading it is. So, given this, I was rather startled to read today headlines like 'Pope says Condoms can be used in Fight Against AIDS'.

The story relates to some extracts that have been leaked from Peter Seewald's forthcoming book-length interview with the Pope, his third such; I've read the other two, and their 1985 predecessor, The Ratzinger Report, where the then Cardinal Ratzinger was interviewed at length by Vittorio Messori.

In this interview the subject of AIDS in Africa inevitably comes up, with Seewald asking about the impact of Church policy on the crisis. The Pope's answer is being leapt on by an ignorant -- and it must be said, hopeful -- media as the Vatican having changed its official stance on condom use. Here's the relevant passage from the book:

PS: On the occasion of your trip to Africa in March 2009, the Vatican’s policy on AIDs once again became the target of media criticism.Twenty-five percent of all AIDs victims around the world today are treated in Catholic facilities. In some countries, such as Lesotho, for example, the statistic is 40 percent. In Africa you stated that the Church’s traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church’s own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

B16: The media coverage completely ignored the rest of the trip to Africa on account of a single statement. Someone had asked me why the Catholic Church adopts an unrealistic and ineffective position on AIDs. At that point, I really felt that I was being provoked, because the Church does more than anyone else. And I stand by that claim. Because she is the only institution that assists people up close and concretely, with prevention, education, help, counsel, and accompaniment. And because she is second to none in treating so many AIDs victims, especially children with AIDs.

I had the chance to visit one of these wards and to speak with the patients. That was the real answer: The Church does more than anyone else, because she does not speak from the tribunal of the newspapers, but helps her brothers and sisters where they are actually suffering. In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract the disease.

As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

PS: Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?

B16: She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.

The first thing to note about this is that Benedict wasn't teaching here as 'The Pope'; this shouldn't be construed as an official stance of any sort. Rather it is a personal opinion, not to be understood as the Vatican's formal position, let alone an infallible doctrinal teaching. Elsewhere in the interview, Benedict is quite frank about the fact that popes can be wrong, and indeed he felt the need to preface his recent Jesus of Nazareth with the caveat that the book represents his personal thoughts, and shouldn't be misunderstood as something anyway binding on Catholics.

Secondly, what is he actually saying? He's saying that condoms aren't a practical solution to the problem, a position for which there certainly seems to be scientific support. He's also saying that condoms aren't a moral solution to the problem, in that they represent a banalization of sexuality; while you might disagree with that, it's certainly orthodox Church teaching. And finally he's saying that in cases where people are already ignoring of disobeying Church teaching, then use of condoms might represent a step in the right direction, a realisation that actions can have consequences and an attempt to limit harm.

This is commentary, not guidance. And it's not particularly earth-shaking guidance, either. Back in September I pointed out to friends that

'[...] the Pope has never said that condoms shouldn't be used when having sex outside of marriage. Not a word. All of his comments on the matter have concerned contraception within marriage. Why? Well, the Church regards sex as being exclusively for marriage - it is the act of marital communion, for want of a better way of putting it - and regards all extramarital sex as intrinsically wrong. Whether you agree with that is, in this context, neither here nor there. What matters is that the Church isn't in the business of advising people on how to mitigate things it regards as sins. It says, with God, "thou shalt not commit adultery" It doesn't say, "we'd rather you didn't commit adultery, but if you must cheat on your wife with some random skank, for whatever reason, well, it might be prudent to wear one of these things."'

Is he saying now that it would be prudent? As a theologian or an ordinary Catholic expressing his opinion, he is certainly saying that it might be better, that it might represent a step in the right direction. He's not saying that it would, just that it might. But as the Pope, the successor to Peter and custodian of the keys to the kingdom, charged with feeding and tending Jesus' flock, no, he's by no means teaching that condoms should be used. All he's saying is that for people who are inclined to ignore him anyway, a decision to use a condom could indicate a growing sense of moral responsibility.

Jimmy Akin sensibly analyses the interview fragment, and how it's been and is being presented, here.

One Crisis - Two Narratives

One of the most fascinating things about the terrible situation in Ireland nowadays is how there are very different narratives inside and outside Ireland to explain what's happened. To the largely europhobic British media, the story is simple: being in the Eurozone gave Ireland access to too much cheap credit, all offered at inappropriately low interest rates, which caused a credit bubble that has exploded. In short, it's all the fault of the Euro. Or, if you like, we told you so, and Maggie was right all along. Even the less characteristically europhobic elements of the British media seem to have bought into this story.

The Irish media, on the other hand, realises the Euro really isn't the problem, and the British crowing about it is far more reflective of Britain's issues than Ireland's. As Jason O'Mahony says in this superbly cutting post:

The Euro is not the source of our problems. Our exports continue to perform strongly. Please stop trying to project your Euro neurosis onto us. The Euro has flaws, but it is still where we need to be. We need to be competitive by cutting our costs, which we are doing, not by some Harold Wilson style three card trick.

It's true, after all, that our trade surplus is widening as our exports keep growing, and Goldman Sachs reckons that the situation is rather better than people seem to fear.

But if our estimates suggest anything, it is that the ultimate losses, and the ultimate burden on the Irish government, will be quite a bit lower than estimated by NAMA, which is likely to make money on its investments. Correspondingly, the government will significantly have over-capitalised the banks, perhaps by tens of billions of Euros.

Certainly, the situation is far more complex than us simply being trapped in the wrong currency. GS's analysis is summed up by saying that the fiscal crisis is a consequence rather than a cause of our collapse in output. This should make sense to anyone who's not been wearing ideological blinkers when watching how Ireland's economy has performed over the last twelve years or so; the fact that George Osborne was singing its praises at a time when the country was obviously an inflated bubble speaks volumes about his understanding of such matters, or at least it did four years ago; perhaps he's learned.

This isn't a matter of the wisdom that comes with hindsight; for years Garret Fitzgerald has been grumbling about how our national expenditure was too high while we simply weren't producing things and were dependent on construction to keep the wheels turning, Fintan O'Toole was pointing to the state's infatuation with a neo-liberal ideology that was pouring money into people's pockets and building nothing for when the good times ended, and David McWilliams memorably pointing out four years ago what the Ghost Estates around the country were destined to mean. I had huge arguments with friends before the 2002 and 2007 elections, with them happily voting for the status quo despite the writing being on the wall, or at least in the mainstream media, if they could be bothered to look.

Yes, it's true that easy access to cheap credit from German banks has played an enormous part in this whole farce, but this is hardly a matter of us being in the Eurozone. We have a young population that grew up with nothing and wanted to have everything; of course German banks, overloaded with pensioners' savings, wanted to lend to us. They'd lend to anyone! Look at Britain, with its national debt of more than £950 billion and its total personal debt of almost £1,500 billion! There's also the fact that not all of our debt has come from Eurozone countries -- our single largest creditor, to whom we owe a fifth of our debt, is the UK, with our third- and sixth-largest creditors being the United States and Japan. No, this problem wasn't caused by our using the same currency as our neighbours.

Inflation has been a huge problem in Ireland since the mid-1990s. I visited Berlin in 1996 and was struck by how expensive it was, and again five years later, before the physical adoption of the Euro as a real currency, and was amazed by how cheap it was. It hadn't changed; Ireland had. Inflation was rife, and property prices were rising, and rent was rising, and rather than bring in rent controls or otherwise try to cool the property market, the government instead decided to allow incomes to rise too, keeping taxes low and in 2002 raising all public servants' pay in accordance with a national benchmarking agreement.

More money was poured into the economy, driving labour costs up in the private sector and raising inflation in general, making us less competitive than we had been, all at a time when the hi-tech sector was feeling the aftershocks of the Dot.com Bubble bursting, and tourism was trying to cope with the double-whammy of the restrictions imposed by the Foot and Mouth Crisis and the of the collapse in American tourism following 9/11. Output declined, and the only thing keeping the economy going was the frenzy of construction, all funded by cheap credit, gambled on the new buildings being sold for a huge profit.

The buyers weren't there, though, as the credit began to dry up, and when the global banking system went into a tizz, the Irish banks, lightly regulated for far too long, turned out to be hugely overstretched. The government -- perhaps pressured by our partners in Britain and the Mainland who feared their own banks mightn't get their money back -- guaranteed to cover the banks, no matter what. This calmed things down, and we won plaudits internationally as teeth were gritted, belts were tightened, and costs were cut. It didn't work though, not least because it turned out that the banks had massively played down just how reckless they'd been and how overstretched they were.

This made it look increasingly likely that the bank guarantee would sink us, that it would, in hindsight, turn out to be an enormous mistake, though until a couple of months ago it was a mistake that could have been solved, in a sense, by the government changing the terms of the guarantee, pointing out that it had been misled about the scale of the banks' problems. The opportunity wasn't taken, though, and the government stuck to its guns, determined for whatever reason to keep to the letter of its word, thereby ensuring that people and institutions who had gambled with risky loans to Irish banks would get all their money back. And we all know what that's brought us to over the last fortnight.

It's difficult to tell, of course, whether the government is bluffing in saying it doesn't need a bail-out; there is a serious argument that it's more in the interests of the likes of Britain, Germany, and France than it is for us to accept their money -- and on their terms -- and that this is about preserving their banking systems and the European economic system as a whole. Of course, if that were destroyed, we'd be lost anyway...

So, are we doomed? The government and Goldman Sachs don't think so, and if it's just a matter of regaining confidence and keeping to our current austere path then we might be okay. Have we lost our sovereignty? I don't know. Did the UK lose its sovereignty when it called in the IMF back in 1976? If it did, did it get it back? Mightn't we do likewise?

Whatever way we look at it, those buffoons who babble about Ireland rejoining Sterling or even the United Kingdom, no matter how tongue-in-cheek their suggestions are, really need to calm down.