The best things I’ve read lately (18/01/15)

Awful Christian movies, how Putin sees America and AOL’s answer to Nathan Barley.

I read a lot of stuff in a given week that’s worth sharing but for one reason or another I don’t write a post about. I’d previously tried telling people about them by tweeting links to them but I’m now convinced hardly anyone reads anything substantial because they saw it on twitter. So instead I’m taking inspiration from Jonathan Calder and Stephen Tall, and am going to experiment with a regular post rounding up the best things I’ve seen online.

A huge amount has been written about Fifty Shades of Grey. Rather less has been said about Old Fashioned an attempt at a Christian alternative in which a student is led by an older man into chastity rather than BDSM. Vox’s Brandon Ambrosino ponders why, despite a sizeable audience and significant financial resources, the evangelical film industry produces such uniformly terrible films:

Imagine a gorgeously wrapped gift sitting under a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. The presentation of the package, while pretty, is nowhere near as valuable as what’s inside.

Now, he says, extend that idea to Christian art. The artistic qualities of a work become the unnecessary wrapping paper. As such, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad they are.

That’s why it doesn’t matter that Old Fashioned is often very boring. It doesn’t matter that the script bursts at the seams with overwrought dialogue, or that the actors (outside of lead actress Elizabeth Roberts) offer phoned-in performances.

Director, writer, and lead actor Rik Swartzwelder might bear some of the blame here. After all, his resume, like many others in the Christian film industry, seems notably paltry. A good deal of what actors and directors know about their trade comes from on-the-job training, from working on set and in production studios under filmmakers with decades of experience. By isolating themselves from Hollywood, Christian filmmakers are passing up not only on “secular messages,” but on the mentoring that other budding talent are receiving.

As a result, Old Fashioned, rife with cliché, feels forced and unnatural at every turn. Even Amber — seemingly having read a screenwriting book or two — points out that Clay’s lofty discussions of love seem so “on the nose.” What critics might note as a flaw is seen, by much of the film’s core audience, as the whole point. The phrase “on the nose” usually connotes directly expository, even sermonizing dialogue, spoken unrealistically by the characters. But if you’re looking for a sermon in your art, as many Christian audiences are, “on the nose” becomes the reason the art exists.

In the Atlantic, Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy ponder how Vladimir Putin became so suspicious of the West. His actions are often attributed to his background as a KGB officer and the Cold War mentality that supposedly resulted. Hill and Gaddy convincingly argue that this is wrong because Putin appears to have come out of the Cold War favourably disposed towards America:

 Until he came back from [a posting as a KGB officer in the East German city of] Dresden in 1990 and began working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin may have never met an American in any personal context.

By contrast, his position as St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor in charge of external relations offered Putin many opportunities to interact with Americans, in a very different atmosphere from that of the 1980s. After 1991, the Soviet Union was gone, and Putin and the rest of the mayor’s team were trying to figure out how to run the city and make its economy competitive again. American and other Western politicians, as part of a U.S. effort to forge a new relationship with the Russian Federation, openly courted Putin’s boss Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin seemed to respond well to the overtures.

U.S. businesses that moved into St. Petersburg had to deal directly with Deputy Mayor Putin who, according to John Evans, the U.S. consul general in St. Petersburg at the time, was always helpful in resolving contract disputes between U.S. and Russian businesses. Within the city’s U.S. and Western business community, Putin was seen as “pro-business.” He gave no impression whatsoever of any anti-American or anti-Western views.

Rather Hill and Gaddy suggest that he’s formed his bleak assessment of the US based on its military interventions in Kosovo, Iraq and Libya.

If thinking about the bleak situation in Ukraine doesn’t depress you enough then let Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker introduce you to ‘Shingy’ AOL’s ‘digital prophet’:

Next, Shingy stopped by the office of Erika Nardini, the chief marketing officer of AOL Advertising, and handed her an iPad Mini. “Wanted to show you a little brain fart I had on the plane,” he said. It was a cartoon he had drawn of a bear wearing zebra-print pants and a shirt covered in ones and zeros.

“Love it, love it, love it,” Nardini said. “I’m thinking of the bears more as a metaphor.”

“A thousand per cent,” Shingy said.

And finally I absolutely had to include something from the return of John Oliver:

America needs Iran more than Israel

Next month, the Israeli Prime Minister will address the American Congress. It is not hard to guess the essence what he will say. As the Atlantic’s foreign affairs editor, James Fallows, observes his message regarding Iran almost invariably turns on a single metaphor: Iran as the Third Reich and the present day as 1938. Fallows parses this needlessly alarmist comparison and presents one of his own:

“In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon understood that despite long-lasting, serious disagreements with mainland China, it was far better overall to find a way to work with Mao and his successors, rather than trying to bring them to heel through continued isolation. There was more to gain than lose through this non-Chamberlain-style “compromise.” The government of Taiwan and its supporters in the United States bitterly resisted this change, but from America’s point of view they were wrong.

I believe that something similar applies with Iran as well. As with China in the 1970s and Cuba in recent years, there is no evidence that the national population itself has become deeply anti-Western or anti-American. Restoring relations, while it would hardly eliminate all disagreements, would have enough benefits to be worth pursuing as a strategic goal. Even if the pursuit doesn’t pay off, the potential benefits, from the American point of view, are substantial enough not to give up prematurely, by imposing pre-conditions that would make any negotiations impossible.”

The emphasis is mine. There do seem to be many Americans for whom their nation’s relationship with Israel is (literally or figuratively) sacred. They are prepared to pay a vast price for Israel’s sake. There are others who might not see things in such grandiose terms but nonetheless feel supporting Israel is morally right. I largely disagree but I think the graver error is the calculation that its support for Israel is also beneficial for America and perhaps even sufficiently beneficial that it would be worth forgoing rapprochement with Iran in order to keep neanyahu’s government content.

In fact, I would suggest the opposite is true. Israel has largely outlived its usefulness. During the Cold War it was “America’s aircraft carrier” in the Middle East: it repeatedly crushed the militaries of states that sympathised with Soviet Union and thereby shifted the balance of power in America’s favour. But things aren’t that simple anymore. The Israeli military is still one of the most effective in the world and it still fights on a routine basis. However, it seems unable to weaken its opponents. For example, its 2006 invasion of Lebanon actually strengthened Hezbollah by generating a wave of anger that broadened the movements appeal.

Even were it able to do more damage to its enemies, these are not groups America especially needs damaging. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah appear to be aspiring to attack American targets. And any Israeli involvement in fighting the groups that actually worry America – ISIL, Al Qaeda and the Assads – would be a huge propaganda boost for those organisations and therefore wholly counterproductive.

In fact, Israel is now sufficiently toxic in the Middle East that America’s alliance with it is now a liability. It makes it easier for anti-American forces to stir up hatred of the country and puts America’s other allies in the region in a complicated position.

Iran, by contrast, has a lot to offer the US. As a Shia nation it opposes many of the extreme Sunni groups that menace the US. The two countries are both bombing ISIS and supporting the Iraqi government to fight it. Iran borders Afghanistan and has a long history of opposing the Taliban though it has not necessarily pursued this in a manner America would like. The Taliban’s base has always been amongst Pashtu speakers, whilst Iranians have an affinity for their fellow Farsi speakers. The Islamic Republic was an early backer of the Northern Alliance that overthrew the Taliban in 2001 and enjoyed close relations with the American backed Karzai government. Resolving the nuclear issue would enable the US and Iran to begin discussions about co-ordinating their efforts against ISIL and the Taliban. It would also head off the prospect of a detente between Iran and the Taliban.

The US could also use the possibility of showing favour towards Iran as an incentive for Saudi Arabia – which sees Iran as its principal rival for influence in the Middle East – to stay in line with US policy.

Iran also has the second largest proven reserves of natural gas in the world, which is potentially handy when you consider that the World’s largest reserves belong to Russia.

For these reasons co-operating with Iran has the potential to expand American power, whilst its alliance with Israel depletes it. Iran may be a less savoury ally than Israel: its internal repression and backing for the Assad regime are worse than anything Israel has done in the occupied territories. However, Iran would hardly be the worst regime the US has formed an alliance with: Saudi reprehension is of a far more totalitarian character than anything seen in Iran. So when Tel Aviv and Tehran pull Washington in different directions, I can see no compelling principle that should prevent the US making the pragmatic decision to seek a rapprochement with such a potentially useful nation.

German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in the US

The Economist reports that:

German-Americans are America’s largest single ethnic group (if you divide Hispanics into Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, etc). In 2013, according to the Census bureau, 46m Americans claimed German ancestry: more than the number who traced their roots to Ireland (33m) or England (25m). In whole swathes of the northern United States, German-Americans outnumber any other group (see map). Some 41% of the people in Wisconsin are of Teutonic stock.

And that:

Today German-Americans are quietly successful. Their median household income, at $61,500, is 18% above the national norm. They are more likely to have college degrees than other Americans, and less likely to be unemployed. A whopping 97% of them speak only English at home.

They have assimilated and prospered without any political help specially tailored for their ethnic group. “The Greeks and the Irish have a far stronger support network and lobby groups than we do,” says Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador in America. There was no German-American congressional caucus until 2010, though there were caucuses for potatoes, bicycles and Albanian affairs. The German caucus has quickly grown to about 100 members, who lobby for trade and investment as well as the preservation of their common cultural heritage.

The strange death of the liberal blogosphere

There’s an interesting discussion going on a number of Lib Dem blogs about the declining number of Lib Dem blogs.

Mark Valladares has collated some figures on the number of active blogs on the aggregator site Lib Dem blogs. He finds this peaked at 235 in 2011 but is now down to 109. This is the lowest level since 2007.

He largely attributes this to the decline of the party in general. By contrast, Alex Marsh and Jonathan Calder suggest that this is more a reflection of the shrinking of the blogosphere as a whole.

I’m inclined to the later view. Firstly, because I think Marsh provides better evidence. Secondly, because of the news that the godfather of blogging Andrew Sullivan is retiring, I’ve been mulling precisely this broader issue. Particularly interesting was a piece I read by Ezra Klein arguing:

….at this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.

Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. “I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion.”

There is a dilemma here: do bloggers conform to the conventions of social media or reject it? Do we follow Rosenberg and write posts that are easy to disseminate on facebook or twitter? Or do we instead retain all the kinks that make blogging distinct from tweeting or posting?

Sullivan himself seems to argue for the later approach:

“Since I’ll be out of blogging soon and won’t have to immediately recant and correct myself, let me conjecture a different future. We may be at peak scale in terms of opinion/aggregation/curation websites right now. At some point, the sponsored content machine in which magazines moonlight as advertising and p.r. companies will sputter as readers cannot tell the difference between propaganda and honest argument, and have long since forgotten which site they read anything on. A site that lacks a cohering and distinct identity can become simply a competitor for an endless and often fruitless search for links, tweets and likes. At some point, readers will want a place they know and love and trust and that they will support with their own money. And they will want a return to more of the intimacy and personality of the original blogosphere.

In other words: I think blogging will have a big revival in the near future. I think the more successful sites will be those with smaller scale and more identity and a stronger connection with readers.”

And I can see the logic of that applied to the Lib Dem blogs. For example, if each post has to be freestanding then one couldn’t have running jokes like Jonathan Calder’s alter ego as Lord Bonkers. And part of the value of a post on electoral law by Mark Pack derives from the fact that most of his readers know his reputation and therefore trust that the post’s contents are broadly accurate.

There is, however, a flipside. It may be true that in the future we will see readers seek out something closer to the original blogosphere but for the time being going down that road probably means fewer readers.

I have seen this with my own outpost. When I resumed blogging 18 months ago I put a lot of effort into creating interconnected series of posts on particular topics. They just weren’t getting the attention to justify the extra effort involved.

By contrast, my posts that did get read were those that could be used as a source to pack up a post on social media. So, for example, my post with the self-explanatory title ‘Joss Whedon co-wrote Toy Story’ has on occasion got thousands of views a day after being shared widely on reddit, twitter and a tumblr with another self-explanatory title ‘Facts and Chicks’. A fraction of the tremendous number of people seeing the fact on those sites want to explore it further. That produces a still substantial flow of views to my site.

So why don’t I write all my posts about similar things? It’s the same reason I generally write posts that are longer than many readers would ideally want. I’m only partly writing to be read. Much of the appeal of keeping a blog is that I enjoy writing and the sense of having an audience is an impetus to sit down and type. The size of that audience is therefore not of overriding importance for me. I’d therefore suggest that any discussion of blogging ought to take account of the fact that there may well be a supply where there is not necessarily a huge demand.

50 Shades and Lawrence of Arabia have the same editor

It’s unlikely that David Lean’s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia (Rotten tomato score: 99%) and Fifty Shades of Grey (Rotten tomato score: 27%) will regularly be discussed together. One can, however, find the odd connection.

Firstly, there is a modest thematic one.

Secondly, both films were edited by a lady named Anne V. Coates. Among her other credits are: Erin Brokervich, the Eagle has Landed, the Elephant Man, the Golden Compass, Chaplin, Out of Sight and Murder on the Orient Express.

She won an Oscar for her work on Lawrence of Arabia and was nominated four times more. When the Motion Picture Editors Guild celebrated its 75^th anniversary by polling its members on the best edited films, Lawrence came in at #7. They also put Out of Sight in their top 100 making Coates one of the few editors to have multiple films in the list.

You can read an interview with her here: http://filmsound.org/murch/coates.htm

HT: Kermode and Mayo

Understanding Jon Stewart’s British fans

My formative political influences seem to retiring on mass at the moment. Andrew Sullivan gave up blogging last week and now Jon Stewart has announced he’s leaving the Daily Show. To give you an idea of how big a deal the Daily Show was for me, I actually used a quote from him to introduce my GDL thesis on whether the British legal system discriminates against Christians:

On one level my fascination with Stewart is even stranger than mine with Sullivan. Stewart’s perspective was arguably even more American. The Daily Show did occasionally send correspondents abroad but that was invariably to countries like Egypt and Iran that were prominent in American political discourse. When Tony Blair appeared as a guest Stewart both made and had jokes made at his expense about his ignorance of British politics.

Yet as a British teenager and undergraduate I couldn’t watch enough of the Daily Show: I not only viewed new episodes but also combed through the back catalogue on the Comedy Central website. And I wasn’t alone in my love. Weak rating might have lead Channel 4 to stop showing the series but what its British fans lacked in numbers we made up for in ardour. Jokes from the show were a common part of how a certain young political obsessive talked about the subject of our obsession.

So why did this (admittedly very narrow subsection) of Brits find a man from New Jersey talking about a politics we were not part of so interesting?

Part of it obviously was that Stewart and the Daily Show team were really good at what they did. The show was not only funny but also informative, and Stewart’s was very convivial company.

It was also the case that we were in denial about not being part of the American debate. We might not know who the German finance minister was or which party was in power in Slovakia but give us a map of a swing state in a US presidential election and we’d draw on the Republican and Democrat leaning precincts with ease. And the Daily Show made that a little more true. Take the recent disgracing of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who took an RGP to his career and credibility by exaggerating the degree of danger he was exposed to while embedded with US troops in Iraq. While much of the British media has had to run pieces explaining who Williams is and why he’s such an important figure in America, Daily Show fans already knew. He was a regular guest on the show and the sheer weirdness of a comedian masquerading as a news anchor while also sort of being one interviewing a news anchor who does a pretty good turn as a comedian.

The show arrived on Channel 4 in 2005 at a point where British politics was dominated by intentionally bland Blairism. In this context, the grotesqueness of the Bush presidency had a certain perverse appeal. Plus it felt like the one genuine controversy of that era, the Iraq War, had been dropped on us from the US. We wanted to see the authors of that catastrophe satirised and as they were in Washington not London that made turning to an American comic a logical choice.

One could also make a case that in a roundabout way Stewart was talking about British politics. To see why compare the Daily Show with John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. Oliver is often intensively parsing social issues or policy questions. That was less Stewart’s (and indeed Colbert’s) focus. Their jokes were primarily about the sorry state of America’s political culture and language. They would dissect or lunge at the mendacious way politicians tended to speak, the media’s tendency to work itself up into a storm about trivialities and to create generate non-stories from feeble evidence and most of all the tendency of just about everyone to apply lower standards to people on their own side than to the other. This is all lamentably recognisable to anyone who follows British politics. So while we were watching Stewart take apart American cable news, we were getting a primer on how to do the same to British tabloids.

The Finnish sniper with three times as many kills as Chris Kyle

How a Finnish farmer became the legendary ‘White Death’ who killed more than 500 Soviet soldiers.

Clint Eastwood’s new film American Sniper centres on a Navy SEAL named Chris Kyle who killed a 160 people during four tours in Iraq. That made him the most lethal sniper in the history of the US military. Since the film was released it has transpired that there is a Royal Marine sniper who has killed 173 people.

However, these men were far from being the most lethal snipers of all time. That grisly honour goes to Simo Häyhä, a Finish soldier who fought for his country against invading Soviet forces in 1939. Häyhä was a farmer and a huntsman notable only for the marksmanship trophies. He joined up at the start of the war and found himself as part of a unimaginably brutal war.

The Soviets had three times as many soldiers as the Finns, thirty times as many aircraft, and a hundred times as many tanks. Yet the Red Army was weakened by Stalin’s purges that had killed most of its officers. In addition, many of its soldiers came from warmer climates and were not used to the kind of brutally cold weather they would face in Finland. Nor did the Soviets have enough cold weather equipment. As a result despite their numerical advantage the Soviets made slow progress against the Finnish forces and wracked up casualties as they did it. By the wars conclusion the Red Army had lost 300,000 men more than 4 times the Finnish losses.

505 of those casulties were down to Häyhä including 25 in a single day. His method was to:

…don his warmest uniform and wrap it with a white snowsuit, mitts, and mask, wrap a few days’ worth of food in cloth, pocket fifty to seventy rounds of ammunition, and hike out into the bush with his rifle and a submachine gun. He would find himself a vantage point in some brush or in the boughs of a tree, and wait–sometimes for days–for a target of opportunity. The invading Soviets tended to adhere to established roads, and Häyhä would entrench himself in the terrain within view. Often he would choose to forfeit possible targets to engender a sense of security and lure more appealing prey like officers and supply trains into his sights.

The Soviets began to react to Häyhä’s success by ordering artillery strikes on suspected sniper nests, and employing counter-snipers. One Russian sniper killed several Finnish soldiers and three officers, and was on the hunt for a particularly troublesome Finn with a Mosin-Nagant M91. He made one kill early in the day, giving Häyhä a general location of his adversary. Häyhä slowly crept through the snow to gain position. When the sun began to set, the Soviet sniper decided that his chance was past and rose to his knees. The sun glinted on his 3x scope; Häyhä was still patiently waiting and caught sight of the movement. Häyhä put a single shot through the Soviet’s head from 450 meters.

What makes this spree particularly remarkable is that it lasted just a few months. In March 1940, only a few days before a peace agreement was reached, Häyhä’s face was struck by an explosive round resulting in an injury that would leave him disfigured for the rest of his life. Then even worse, he would see that peace agreement cede Finnish territory Russia which included his home. He did, however, have the consolation of seeing himself become national hero and being awarded five military medals.

Sources: Damn Interesting and Wikipedia 

12 questions I have about Spiderman joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Including tone, casting and whether Sony will retain enough creative control to muck the whole thing up. Oh and why I think the new films should be set in China. 

So Spiderman is joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. First, in some of the franchise existing films and then in his own standalone adventure.

The perceived failure of Sony’s Amazing Spider Man franchise seems to have forced the studio to share its licence to the character with the studio behind the Avengers, Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy etc.

However, exciting this news is (and indeed gratifying – I can’t be the only one pleased to see Sony’s bland and cynical efforts sputter to an end) it still leaves me with a lot of questions.

1. Which Marvel films will he appear in?

The standalone film will come out in July 2017. If he’s to appear in another Marvel film before then that leaves three options: Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy 2. We can be reasonably sure it will be Civil War: Spiderman was a big part of that story in the comics and fitting him into a story about space or magic would be a strange choice.

We can assume he’ll then be in Avengers: Infinity War otherwise this whole exercise seems pointless.

2. Who will play Spiderman?

The indications are that Andrew Garfield is out. I think that’s a mistake but hey ho. Fan casting is not my forte, so I won’t engage in it here. However, I’ll be interested to see who gets picked because this will be a good indication of the direction the films are going in.

3. Which Spiderman will we see?

There are actually two Spidermen in the comic. As well as Peter Parker, there’s also Miles Morales. Opting for Morales as their Spiderman would certainly allow Marvel to put space between their films and the ones that have gone before. However, it is unlikely. If Spidey is appearing in a Marvel film before his own one, it’s unlikely he will be getting an origin story. Therefore, they probably wouldn’t have a chance to introduce audiences to Morales.

4. Who write/direct the standalone film?

There’ll obviously be no shortage of people who want this gig. But this is a challenging proposition and Marvel will have to choose carefully.

5. What tone will that film have?

Both the Raimi trilogy with Tobey Macguire and the Amazing Spider Man films with Garfield were in a similar playful register. That does seem like the natural tone to adopt when dealing with these stories. Nonetheless, do we want to see it for a third time. The fact the character is probably being introduced in Civil War which is likely to be gloomy suggests perhaps they might go for a darker tone. But I don’t know how much appetite there will be Nolaned up Spiderman. So my guess is they will go in the opposite direction for the stand alone film and go for something closer to the action comedy of Guardians.

6. How willing will they be to retrace their steps?

They’re probably not doing an origin story. Nonetheless, they will need to decide how much of what we’ve seen in the previous films they want to revisit. Will we see another Green Goblin? Aunt May? Mary Jane? Gwen Stacey?

7. How will this affect the defenders?

An interesting complication to all this is that Marvel has teamed up with Netflix to produce a number of series following more ‘street level’ heroes operating in New York. Assuming they continue to set Spiderman in New York, common sense indicates he would be tripping over these characters? But these series look a lot darker and more adult than anything Marvel has done before which would rather jar with the likely lighter tone of Spiderman.

8. How many times can they blow up New York?

We saw it take a pounding in the Incredible Hulk and the Avengers. Are we going to see it being trashed again in standalone Spiderman films.

Might it be better to relocate the character. This would have been hard before because until recently only New York really had enough skyscrapers to make the swinging from building to building thing work. Now he could easily find plenty to swing between in Hong Kong, Shanghai or Dubai. A move to one of these cities might even enhance the films’ international appeal.

8. Who will call the shots?

Generally speaking in films it is the director who has creative control, while in TV the need to gell different episodes into a coherent whole means that power goes to the producer. Superhero franchises are something of an anomaly in this regard because they too require maintaining coherence over their different parts. Therefore, the greatest power in the MCU is not Thanos but producer Kevin Feige. He will, however, be co-producing the standalone film with Amy Pascal of Sony. What’s more the agreement between the two studios states that Sony retains ‘final creative control.’ So in the case of artistic differences who prevails?

9. Why is Amy Pascal anywhere near this project?

Speaking of Pascal, she seems to have landed on her feet after being sacked from her role as head of Sony studios. There she presided over not the leak of a huge cache of leaked emails (including ones in which she slags off the studios talent) and the debacle over the Interview.

It was also on her watch that Sony conceived of the Amazing Spider Man franchise as a way to keep using its licence to make films featuring Spiderman and prevent control reverting back to Marvel. So it’s odd that having exhausted considerable audience in this endeavour, she is now involved in a Marvel Spiderman film, the very thing they were supposed to prevent.

10. Are Sony’s spin-off plans dead?

I doubt there are many people excited about the prospect of a Sinister Six film let alone an Aunt May one! Nonetheless, Sony might still wish to milk its property by seeking out opportunities to give secondary characters their own films. This becomes an even less attractive prospect if these start using up slots that could be used for other Marvel movies. Lets hope the agreement between the two studios gives Marvel the ability to bury this idea.

11. Will audiences accept a third Spiderman in 10 years?

Macguire’s last outing in the red and blue spandex suit was in 2007. When Garfield made his first outing in 2012’s the Amazing Spider-Man a lot of people felt there was too short a gap. What wonders will they think upon seeing a third reboot of the character appearing just two years after the Amazing Spider-Man 2?

This plus the fact that we’ve now had three mediocre Spiderman films in a row, means that Marvel may well find audience goodwill to be seriously strained.

12. Can the MCU get too large?

If Marvel Cinematic Universe is becoming a crowded place. It already contains the Avengers and standalone films for its members, Guardians, the Defenders, Agents of Shield and Agent Carter, and is now adding Spiderman and any spin offs that flow from it. At what point does this all get too much for them (and indeed audiences) to handle?

Why we need to watch what happens in Delhi tomorrow

Delhi went to the polls on Saturday to elect a new regional assembly. The results are not due till Tuesday but exit polls indicate that the AAP or Common Man Party has scored a clear win over the Hindu nationalist BJP.

If this comes to pass it would be a significant result because:

1. It will be the first major setback for Narendra Modi

Indian PM and BJP leader Narendra Modi

Since the BJP and its candidate for Prime Minister Narendra Modi did the seemingly impossible and won an outright majority in the Indian parliament last year they’ve been having an excellent run. A pretty striking example is that the BJP is now the second largest party in Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir.

Delhi would break this streak. I would suggest that is to be welcomed.

I am rather conflicted about Modi. On an instinctive level I regard his sectarianism and links with violent Hindu extremists with horror. On the other hand, he probably is the person most likely to deliver the kind of economic reform India needs. My calculation is that an emboldened BJP is more likely to pursue its own sectarian agenda, whilst a chasten one will feel more need to keep voters on side by delivering economic results.

2. Congress is in a terrible position

I recall a joke on Have I Got News for You from the time of the first elections to the Scottish Parliament when the Conservatives were at the nadir of their popularity. The show was recorded before results had been announced, so presenter Angus Deaton warned “we cannot tell you how Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats or the Scottish Socialists have done. However, we can tell you the Conservatives have done very badly.” Similarly, while we await to see how the AAP and BJP will have done, we can say with confidence that Congress will have a miserable time when results come out.

Until two years ago, it ran both Delhi and India. Then it was hammered by Modi at a national level and Assembly elections in the capitol saw the BJP take the most seats followed by the AAP with Congress trailing far behind. The party then joined an AAP lead coalition. However, the AAP walked out a few months later claiming that Congress had sabotaged its efforts to combat corruption. Now, one exit polls indicates Congress may come away with no Assembly seats at all.

Essentially Congress’ predicament is similar to that of established centre-left parties in Europe. Its bond with its traditional voters has broken down and it is now perceived by most as a political machine rather than a genuine movement. That leaves it vulnerable to upstarts like the AAP.

In the light of the apparent result in Delhi, the Economic Times asks what must be a disturbing question for Congress:

If the AAP can smash the Congress’ entrenched base in Delhi in a matter of two years, what would happen if it decides to expand its role as a new “Leftof-the-centre” alternative to BJP by trying to occupy the receding Left turf in West Bengal as a new challenge to Mamata; or to emerge as an alternative in Bihar, in place of the much discredited JD(U) and RJD, to put up a credible resistance against BJP? The Congress too is aware that a victory in Delhi would boost AAP’s national ambition and chances.

APP could look at Punjab where it won two Lok Sabha seats as its another area for growth by breaking the bipolar politics of Congress and Akali-BJP combine. A victory in Delhi could boost the confidence of underprivileged social sections as well as minorities to look at AAP as the new force that can confront the BJP and Modi. Even a sizeable sections of urban middle class, the traditional supporters of the BJP may once again start looking at the AAP as a new platform to park themselves.

3. The AAP is an important test case in whether Occupy style protest movements can be converted into successful political parties

Arvind Kejriwal: the likely next First Minister of Delhi.

The rise of new radical left parties opposed to austerity like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain has been a subject of much analysis. However, this has generally viewed it through the prism of the Eurozone crisis. The rise of the AAP indicates there may be broader forces at work.

Like those European parties, the AAP has its roots in a protest movement: Indians Against Corruption. This emerged from the backlash against a string of high profile scandals including the disastrous Commonwealth Games held in Delhi and a rigged sale of 2G spectrum licences that appeared to cost the country $40 billion. It rose to prominence in 2011 at a similar time to the Occupy protests and the Arab Spring. It used similar tactics to those movements but reflected them through India’s tradition of Ghandian social protest. The movement came to be focused on a hunger strike by an activist Anna Hazare. This helped to force the government to create a stronger anti-corruption ombudsmen.

Hazare wished to keep the movement apolitical. But many other participants including his ally and likely new First Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal took a different view and the AAP was the result. Unlike most Indian parties it was based not on patronage networks but on social movements. Before the poll on Saturday it sent activists out into the poorer areas of Delhi armed with smartphone cameras to ensure that no one from rival parties could offer inducements to vote without detection.

There are two important lessons the likes of Alexis Tsipras might take away from the AAP’s apparent success. Firstly, moving from protest to party politics does not necessarily mean narrowing your base. Indians Against Corruption was a mostly middle class movement but now the AAP seems to draw most of its support from poorer voters (albeit still generally those in richer areas). Secondly, it viewed power in a very instrumental way. When being in power as part of a coalition was not delivering the results it wanted, it walked out. Now a few months later it seems like it might be about to be headed back into power with the majority that will enable it to push its anti-corruption measures.

Bitter Lake (review)

Adam Curtis’ new film contains plenty of interesting material but is undermined by a compulsion toward epicness.

“Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense, events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense and how that lead us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world. It is told through the prism of a country at the centre of the world: Afghanistan.”

These are the words with which Adam Curtis introduces his new documentary Bitter Lake. They are, however, misleading. Rather than an account of the alienation of Western electorates told through the prism of Afghanistan, what we get is an interesting history of outside interference in the country plus annoying and unconvincing forays into tangentially connected areas most of which have a Saudi connection.

If you’ve seen an Adam Curtis documentary before this probably won’t come as a surprise. He has a phenomenal talent. He can find footage most filmmakers would never think to look for and use it provide a way into complex topics. His visual style has its detractors but it has a transfixing effect on me. However, this aptitude is annoyed by a succession of rather annoying habits. His narratives often flit between topics connected mostly by Curtis’ imagination and big stretches of his narration amount to little more than a succession of glib statements.

This send up distills these problems very well:

His virtues are certainly on display in Bitter Lake. One cannot imagine anyone else illustrating the unreality of Western perceptions of Afghanistan with clips from a 1971 episode of Blue Peter devoted to a club of Afghan hound owners preparing to present their dogs to the King of Afghanistan during his visit to London. Nor had I heard before that one can only grow poppies in Helmand because of American irrigation projects in the area, nor had I seen the parallels between the Soviet and NATO projects in the country made so forcefully, nor had I heard the suggestion that British forces in Afghanistan were in fact not fighting the Taliban at all.

However, in places his narrative thread begins to visibly fray. To hear Curtis tell it the Taliban was exported directly from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. We are told a lot about the Saudi radicals who went to fight and the support their government gave them. These, however, constituted a small part of the resistance to the Soviets. More significant was that the Americans were conveying their support to the Mujahedeen via Pakistan’s intelligence agency, The ISI. This organisation was riddled with Islamist sympathisers and they pushed the aid towards organisations that shared their viewpoint. Yet Curtis doesn’t mention the role of the ISI or even its very existence at all. The only reason I can see for this omission is that spread of Wahhabism is a passion of Curtis’ – it was the subject of one of his previous documentaries –  and that Saudi Arabia features more prominently in that story than Pakistan.

This is not, however, the worst example of Curtis’ peculiar focus.  The fact of Saudi influence is indeed relevant to the story, it is just not less relevant than other factors he neglects to cover. Stranger are some things that Curtis includes but which seem wholly irrelevant. Consider the following part of his narrative. In 1973, Israel goes to war with its Arab neighbours. In protest at American support for Israel, Saudi Arabia dramatically scales back oil production. This in turn leads to a spike in oil prices which leaves the Saudis with vast amounts of money. They spend much of this bounty on weapons from British and American arms companies. However, when menaced by Saddam Hussein it becomes apparent that despite all these massively expensive purchases, the country would still need American assistance to defend itself. Osama Bin Laden was appalled by the prospect of infidel soldiers being stationed in ‘the land of two holy cities’ and this becomes the catalyst for him to take up arms against both his own government and the Americans. The problem with this is that the first part doesn’t actually relate to the second. Whether or not Saudi Arabia had bought planes from BAE systems it would still have needed American troops to protect itself from Iraq and Osama Bin Laden would still have been radicalised by that. Curtis appears to be talking about arms deals with Saudi Arabia solely because he wants to talk about arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

This is far from the most stretched connection. We get long digressions on the increasing power of the financial sector, a strange inclusion in a story about a country where 90% of people don’t have bank accounts.

Now in a digression whose apparent randomness even Curtis would have to admire, I want to talk about Michael Bay. In the video below the cinematographer Tony Zhou explains why the Transformers director makes such consistently bad films.

Zhou argues it’s not because Bay is lacking in technical skill. In fact, when it comes to injecting a sense of scale and movement into shots nobody can better than Bay. Rather the problem is that he’s good at it, so he does it even when shooting a scene to look massive and dynamic undermines the story it’s supposed to be telling.

I’d argue that Curtis has a similar problem. He is great at finding surprising connections and stories that span vast canvasses. However, this gives him an overwhelming inclination towards huge stories that try to explain everything. This is a shame because his best films like the Century of the Self and the Power of Nightmares have pretty clear topics that encourage him to be coherent and convincing. By contrast, his more recent films with nebulas topics like computing or freedom have brought out the worst aspects of his style.

Bitter Lake is about 2/3rds the better Curtis telling a compelling story about Afghanistan. Unfortunately for much of its run time the bad Curtis turns up to warble about “how politicians have lost control” or banks or something. I can’t say I cared very much what it was.