April 2025 - billions must peter o'toole

A 10-entry Cultural Review post ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?

In an atmosphere of resentful reluctance, I have reduced my cultural summation posts to lists of ten things only. Hopefully some of you will find this more manageable to consume.

(I don’t know how to put in-post links to navigate between titles so if you do leave a comment.)

• 1st April - The Lion in Winter (1968)

• 3rd April - Just Cause (1995)

• 4th April - Baertrum Arturos III, Bounty Hunter

• Knight of the Dragon

• 8th April - The Maltese Falcon

• 10th April - Lord of Illusions (1995)

• 11th April - Flow (2025)

• 14th April - Chaos Hounds

• 17th April - Was the Emperor Right?

1st April - The Lion in Winter (1968)

King Peter O’Toole has Family Drama!

This film was such a dense counterplay of words that I could not force a blade between them, and such a monumental masonry of PERFROMANCES (everyone performs in caps), that to look at them one is standing always in the shade, making it hard to see the whole thing. Its tremendous fun and a bit overwhelming.

A labyrinthine brutal knotwork of intense and corrupted family interrelations where every personal conversation is a political conversation and where every political conversation is a conversation about love, desire, vindication or retribution. The savage angles of the human heart compressed by power. Ridiculous, sometimes slightly overworked, word-play where double, triple, and quadruple meanings breed and fight amongst each other, (plus the people behind the tapestries). Well if you don't like the human heart what are you watching movies for?

To say this isn't a good you would have to come up with some bullshit definition of what a 'film' is to keep it out, ('can't be too much like a play etc etc') or to be very deeply allergic to cringe, which explains why Pauline Kael didn't like it.

It is very very play-like, and quite a bit cheesy. (One slightly out-of-world comedic line in the middle doesn't work well, and ferrets the foundations of the empathic speech which proceeds it. Perhaps the play, or the film, needed a bit of lightening there or people would stop listening. There is a multiple-people-behind-tapestries scene which hovers around farce.) Or you could say there are just too many clever words so being clever becomes the meat of the thing.

We might also say that its twists and involutions are too manifold, too much in and outing, twisting and turning, for a normal audience. And we could say that it is not a good 'text', according to whatever some french fool says; everyone ends up back where they started, nothing is resolved permanently, things just continue on, what even are the "themes"? It doesn't even have a single clear subtext so how can it be any good?

It just can.

3rd April - Just Cause (1995)

Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne team up together to stab a black man to death! [spoilers].

An odd '90's Thriller' notable due to being a bit mid and having rather queer racial politics. Sean Connery plays an anti-death-penalty law professor who is pulled into defending a black guy accused of a horrific child murder in a small southern town. He was railroaded by cops I tell you!

And yes he was railroaded by the cops…. because he actually did it, and is SUPER-EVIL.

The brilliantly, (obviously, but this is movies), manipulative Ruby Dee and has teamed up with Ed Harris' (having a great time), also even-more-super-evil death row inmate to manufacture a post-facto case that will get him off. Also he's planning to kill Sean Connery's wife for reasons. It was all part of his plan!

Weird in that this is made up of two multi-racial alliances; Sean Connery and sketchy Laurence Fishburne, (who are meant to be enemies, but who clearly get along), vs Ruby Dee and Ed Harris (who work together behind the scenes). Eventually Sean Connery gets Ruby Dee out of prison, who then abducts Connerys wife, they fight and Fishburne and Connery team up to defeat him.

There is no point in the film where Connery's character *feels* weak, deluded, vulnerable or tricked, though the script seems to be written with the assumption that he should be. Those events certainly take place on screen but its impossible to imagine they are happening to *this* protagonist. In the last act Connery mans up and gets smart to defend his family but he feels like he was always like this? He’s Sean Connery for gods sake.

The friendship between Connery and Fishburne is the most lively relationship in the film. Ed Harris hadn't yet gravitated to his post-'Rock' man-of-gravitas space-dad furrow; I think they let him do more and weirder shit at this point in his career. He is putting on the fireworks for this one! Ruby Dee is pretty good at the simultaneously extremely suspicious but also charismatic killer.

A weird film over all! Only in the 90's baby!

4th April - Baertrum Arturos III, Bounty Hunter

A lovely Necromunda miniature. Holy fucking christ this guy has a lot of closely-interrelated detail. His wig has guns, (surely inspired buy that One-Piece character?), he also has some kind of quick-draw cyber-arm thing going on, and a needle pistol. Add to that; braid-skulls, bronze gorgonarium pauldrons AND a bronze chin guard. I do not object to the detail as-is but perhaps to the concatenation of detail that flows up around his left arm, and clusters around his magnificent head. I like that Baertrum stalks the Underhive with only a single needle pistol. He is making a point there.

Knight of the Dragon

A bad spanish movie that should have been good.

This is straight up a bad film, with glimmers of what it might or could have been existing like shards in its suppurating flesh. There are three good elements; Klaus Kinski, Miguel Bose and whoever was in charge of the alien/space effects, and one actually (unintentionally), funny thing; Harvey Keitel is in this.

The like a single Geiger sculpture in a room beset by stupid clowns. And I do not mean stupid in a good way, or in an even slightly funny way, but in a deeply grating, unfunny, wearying, sad and depressing way. This film is full of BROAD Spanish 'comedic' performances, which are not funny in the slightest, and with random interjections and little 'bits' that also manage to not be funny at all. Its like being on a slow broken down bus going somewhere you do not want to go, but at least it will only take 90 minutes, and then finding the but stops every ten minutes for dense theatre kid goons to leap onboard, to improv and shake their cups in your face.

There are moments where the film kind of forgets that it is bad and tries to speak in the language of image and action. These parts are not necessarily 'good' if taken on their own, but are so good compared to the rest of the film that they are acts of beautiful relief.

Klaus Kinski is amazing on screen in that; he is really acting, I mean he feels like a real, vivid, living character in the midst of all this bumpkin crapulence. He looks utterly evil all of the time but turns out not to be? A pleasing element.

Miguel Bose also sincerely plays his eldritch 'Star Knight', and goes well with the penny-Geiger space suit. He feels wonderful, and that he speaks only in psychic noises which few understand actually works out pretty well.

The 'Dragon' Space Ship and its interiors are another high point. Clearly done on the cheap relative to a U.S. production, it still seems to have been done as well as possible to me. A friend compared the Space Ship to Gaudi's Cathedral.

The one (inadvertent) funny aspect is that Harvey Keitel is in this film, amazingly and incredibly mis-cast against every other person in it. They are dubbed into grammatically normative English in Spanish accents while Keitel speaks in his broad New Yawk accent, but in cod-Shakespearian 'thees and thous'. He verges between discomfort and clearly no longer giving a fuck. His presence is a continual form of mild surprise; wait is that Harvey Keitel? we think every time he is on screen.

Don’t watch this.

8th April - The Maltese Falcon (book)

Simple Prose, Forensic Description and Invention.

Hammett is no Chandler. His prose, (considered purely *as* prose), is mid but lively. He is an incredible describer and inventor of interpersonal scenes

We enter no-ones soul but we see everything they *do*, right down the bodily arrangements, micro expressions, shifts in vocal tone, where their eyes are resting and the nature, (though not meaning), of their smile. It was remarkable to think back to the film of 'Maltese Falcon' and realise that there was simply no direction needed for the actors. Everything they do with their bodies, eyes, hands and voices, their exact physical interrelationships, and of course all their words, has been described already in lovely precision by Hammett and the actors are simply fulfilling that description.

The relentless, precise, physical and social invention, and the arrangement of these layered micro-dramas, lies implicit in the text as Hammets work. This is a mode of invention quite alien to me.

The Social World of the Imaginary 1930s

Of course the world of the Maltese Falcon isn't the 'real' 1930's , any more than that of a modern novel is the ‘real’ now, but there are still fascinating bits of social life poking through for a modern reader;

Nobody showers much (perhaps they are regularly changing linen underwear), but they all prepare a great deal before leaving wherever they are and presenting themselves to the world.

Everybody walks, or gets a cab. (Cabbies are ever-present). I think no characters in ‘Falcon’ drive their own car. No-one can get hold of anyone else, they leave messages in offices or at hotels, wait, or turn up randomly. Go to the movies if you want to sit down for a few hours - they seem to run continually, all through the night, which it always seems to be, even if it isn't.

Dark World of Clues

This is a City drama; people need to move around, become visible and invisible, indeterminate, to trace and hide from each other and to become acessable all within a few hours, to have stories about where they were or were not, or might have been. San Francisco is a little like a dungeon, or more a huge old house like that of Gormenghast, with the addition of the invisibility and anonymity a crowd brings. Everyone furiously inhales the morning paper like they are devouring a groupchat. Of course they all intuit and infer each others actions through minor lines in this mornings rag.

Don't forget your cash, people have a LOT in their pockets. Everything they do and everywhere they go, leaves traces of physical evidence, which makes this a dark world of Clues. Here's what Joel Cairo had in his;

"There was a large wallet of dark soft leather. The wallet contained three hundred and sixty-five dollars in United States bills of several sizes; three five-pound notes; a much visaed Greek Passport bearing Cairo's name and portrait; five folded sheets of pinkish onion-skin paper covered with what seemed to be Arabic writing; a raggedy clipped newspaper account of the finding of Archer's and Thursby's bodies; a postcard photograph of a dusky woman with bold cruel eyes and a tender drooping mouth; a large silk handkerchief, yellow with age and somewhat cracked along its folds; a thin sheaf of Mr Joel Cairo's engraved cards; and a ticket for an orchestra seat at the Geary Theatre for that evening.

Besides the wallet and its contents there were three gaily coloured silk handkerchiefs fragrant of chypre; a platinum Longines watch on a platinum-and-red gold chain, attached at the other end to a small pear-shaped pendant of some white metal; a handful of United States, British, French and Chinese coins; a ring holding half a dozen keys; a silver-and-onyx fountain pen; a metal comb in a leatherette case; a nail-file in a leatherette case; a small street guide to San Francisco; a Southern Pacific baggage-check; a half-filled package of violet pastilles; a shanghai insurance-brokers business card; and four sheets of Hotel Belvedere writing paper, on one of which was written in small precise letters Samuel Spade's name and the address of his office and his apartment."

Everyone feels dehydrated and perhaps a little pungent; downing wine and whiskey, never water, (though Spade chugs Bacardi in his flat), meals of pickled pigs feet at the Hoffbrau, walking miles here and there, oh and smoking relentlessly. What does Sam Spades breath taste like? What about the lovely Brigid O’Shaunassey? They taste of booze, blood and cigarettes. They taste good; this is a brutally sexy and earthy world. In comparison to our reality, there is a kind of sheen of behaviour between society and sex, people don't reference it directly, but it feels like way more people are actually having it. The men in particular, (well, Sam Spade, and a few others), are really directly horny, grabby, aggressively sexual and directly masculine. The battle of the sexes is hand to hand, but also, fertile, vivid, lively.

The Conversations of Sam Spade

An expert in saying as little as possible while still seeming to talk. A masterpiece in information control, in getting other people to consistently tell him things and if not to trust him, but to believe they have little choice but to trust him And an expert in casually extorting money from everyone around him, large bills and small.

There are a huge, even remarkable, number of conversations and negotiations in which Spade enters with precisely nothing, (he only ever finds things out at about the same rate we do), and charms, bullshits, threatens, barnstorms, bribes or cheats his way into knowing something, or having something, he didn't have before.

A man with nothing in his hand, sitting at the intersection of frightened, desperate people who all know more than him, about something, but who fear each other. He even tries this with the District Attorney! Gives them the whole "I won't stand for this/you get nothing without me/this is my burg" spiel. A lot of these things wouldn't work *in real life*, (probably Sam Spade would have been shot or arrested in the first few chapters is this was done IRL), they do work in fiction, and in *this* fiction, which is what matters.

Just what reputation does this man carry anyway? He feels like an invisible Kingpin of San Francisco. All the Hotel Detectives know him, the police all know him and seem to trust him, he's on first name terms with the District Attorney. His *lawyer* fears him, (which is not how these relationships usually work). Clearly San Francisco is his Place of Power - removed from it, from his contacts and the reputation he trades so carefully upon, he would be a different matter. Its strongly suggested Spade was a cop, was he more than that? A lawyer? Something else? He feels too street-brutal to have ever been a paper-pusher.

Through every interaction, challenge and conversation, we see Spade driven by a combination of greed, some honour, curiosity and above all, a simple desire to win, to not end up 'the sap'. That may be it, he has been tricked, (and later drugged), and he can't allow himself to 'lose'. The things advantage gains him are less meaningful to him than the advantage itself.

The Mystery of Sam Spade

On a first reading, with no cultural knowledge, and no clichés or ideas, the reader must be thinking, damn this guy is a real son of a bitch, maybe he did do it? Is this a story of a man hunting his partners murderer or of a murderer trying to escape?

The story ends, like it begins and runs for the first third, entirely without the Maltese Falcon, because as wonderful as that artefact is, the core of the story isn't really about that but about what's going on with Sam Spade. While the technical plot is about the Maltese Falcon, (“the dingus”), if the story is about something, it’s probably about; Just what kind of guy is this guy?

Highly intelligent, brutal, manipulative, horny and aggressive towards women. Very, almost ridiculously confident. He’s a big man, and physically strong in a way that Humphry Bogart isn't. We don't know if he killed his partner. It kind of seems like he might have; he was certainly sleeping with the mans wife. He could very easily be a villain; he's greedy, horny, manipulative, deceptive, he lies to everyone, he might be lying to himself.

And its about what's going on between Sam Spade and the three women around Sam Spade, who each seem to represent aspects of his damaged soul, and potential futures for him; we have Brigid O'Shaunassey - his arguably evil intellectual and moral equal, and perhaps True Love, Effie Perine, his boyish, young and noble lawful-good secretary, and Iva, the blonde, needy and nasty wife of the now-dead Partner.

The relationship with O'Shaunassey in particular, reminds me a lot of that between Odysseus and Athena, which is; as soon as they meet each other, they lie to each other, Athena definitely knows Odysseus is lying and Odysseus probably knows Athena is lying. Thus they proceed via a game of mutual manipulation, which becomes the language of their relationship, for each can only really be happy, be themselves, when they are not being themselves, but through this game. So too do Spade and O'Shaunassey grow closer through this theatre of deception, which is their own true language, but a limited one, for through it they can never truly know each other, but only orbit.

In the end Spade sacrifices O'Shaunassey, loses Effie (due to being a scumbag), and ends up saddled with Iva, who he probably deserves to suffer under. Everything is cleared up, sort of, and Sam Spade is revealed as a good man who acts bad, rather than a bad man who acts good, (probably.)

10th February - Lord of Illusions (1995)

A rather vibrant gay love story.

I enjoyed this film immensely. I put it in my clade of 'horror' films that are not really that actively unnerving or troubling but more exciting, wonderous thrillers.

Everything about it is slightly silly but heartfelt and it looks wonderful. Scott Bakula plays an edgy, ripped, occult detective who spends a lot of the film topless or in very tight vests. In terms of pure personality he might be the least interesting character in the film but he does his damn job and plays the hero well.

THE 90'S!!!!!!

What a vibrant multicoloured noir. The arrangement of colour in this film is lovely, everything feels simultaneously dusky and glowing, like a late-summer feel. There are almost no monochrome spaces and the darkest darks feel velvety and blue. The Cult Headquarters feels like the backlot for a Faith No More Music Video. Someone had fun making this stuff! Probably Clive Barker, who got to live out his fantasies of being an actually-magical super-stage magician. The 90s clothes are wonderful. Vests! Vests for all!

PLOTS AND PHONES

Pre-mobile and post-mobile plotting might be the biggest shift in simply how stories are plotted than anything in recent history. At least, trains are only so much faster than ships and horses, telegraphs only that much faster than trains, static phones only that much more ever-present and convenient than telegraphs. The omnipresence of mobiles just creates an utterly different informational world. The raw plotting of 'Lord of Illusions', the way and manner in which information is exchanged, has more in common with a film from the 30s than one from even 10 years later, in 2005.

(In a way I think we might have expected the existence of universal mobile communication to ‘push’ the mystery, or the intrigue, deeper into a psychological interior space within each character. Since there is little physical boundary to communication, little theatrical interplay of ‘clues’ (as in the Maltese Falcon), the borderline of truth and deception now lies at the surface of the skin, and in the meaning of what was said, or written. I wonder if this did or did not happen in fiction as phones became prevalent? It feels like it did not.

THE SEMI-SUPERNATURAL UNDERGROUND

For an RPG-head, this *feels* SO 90's. It’s hard to explain to the uninitiated but there is a paraverse of 90's to 00's supernatural underground-feel stuff related to Neil Gaiman, World of Darkness, Unknown Armies (though think that was a bit later), even 'Chill' the RPG. Stuff like Buffy & Charmed also partly sprang from this world. A world of neon-lit occult stores, criminal palm readers, surprisingly relaxed police, superstar magicians (who know real magic) and powerful, but not all-powerful Sorcery, which comes from both stage and gutter. Hellblazer also belonged to this world.

It feels to me like the world behind the stage of a great opera production. Everything is dirty, and nominally 'poor', but it’s the poverty of the stage, and even the dirt is gaudy, pink-lit, slightly fey, arched, glittery and weird. The heightened world of the 1990's Occult Detective. We had a good long summer there.

BUTTERFIELD AND THE CULT

The actors for the evil manson-like cult and for Butterfield, the very extremely gay and evil snaky replacement cult leader, are really fun. The Cult actors really go ALL IN on being disgusting weirdos! Good work guys. Young Butterfield is played well by J. Trevor Edmond, and older Butterfield exceptionally by Barry Del Sherman who, when he is on screen, is always the most interesting thing; a heterochromatic, super-gay, occult anti St-Peter in relentless skintight pants. I missed him when he was gone and I am glad he got a chance to die twice. The end scene for the cult as they are biblically punished in the basement of a building, with scenes from dreams, is more wonderful than frightening, the logic of nightmare or folk tale.

GAY LOVE

The whole thing comes down to a weird magical/gay/existential love affair between Kevin O'Conners callow 'Swann' (who hesitates before sacrificing innocent children, the coward), and Daniel von Bargens nihilistic Sorcerer Nix, who just wants to destroy the whole world, apart from Swann - but Swann isn’t even that into him! Harsh. Love hurts man.

11th April - The Duellists (1977)

"Gentlemen, we must once again duel in the most photogenic place imaginable."

"Aye and it should also be a bit symbolic too."

"Indeed, but mainly INFCUKINGCREADIBLY photogenic."

Today, the phrase "a film by Ridley Scott is a shotgun blast into a tank of electric eels - anything could result, but once, it meant nothing, for who is Ridley Scott?

He is this guy.

What a fucking gorgeous film; shot by Gustave Courbet, Millet, Caspar Dave Friedrich, with interiors by Pieter Claesz*, shadows by Caravaggio. So shadowed and textured it feels sometimes like running your hands along something, the rest of the time, like staring at a painting.

This is a film about Harvey Keitel (Lieutenant Gabriel Feraud) having a mental, and really taking against this one particular guy; Keith Carradine (Lieutenant Armand d’Hubert), and challenging him to duals again and again and again.

In a way this is a very 'Knightly' story set between men in a highly ritualised warrior culture where 'honour', reputation and self-perception are all and about the deep, really existential conflicts between a mans self-perception, his social perception, and the meat and marrow of his life.

'Honour' is easy for Feraud because he is kind of dumb. He has no life, no self, outside of his military identity, no cause or even the imagination of one, outside of his service to Napoleon. His life and dream exists in total and happy subordination to the Emperors dream, (it is the pride of his regiment and an insult to the Emperor that gets him into his first fight). Brave, honourable, violent, impulsive, contemptable. Late in the film Edward Fox's 'Colonel' externalises and describes this in a way Keitels character never could; "Our lives are the Emperors, we belong to him."

For d’Hubert - he is a bit more bourgeoise, more socially competent, smarter, a climber, a man who perhaps could only have risen so far in Napoleons service, but he knows this about himself, and as much as he, rightly, thinks Keitel is a savage spiteful idiot, he is slightly ashamed of himself, for being political, for being agreeable, for wanting to live, having ambition, wanting a wife, and children, and a comfortable house, he is not entirely 'honourable', not committed to a life of death. So what Keitels character sees in him; a fungible, socially pleasing, posh climber, is actually there, a bit, and so for him there is a conflict, and a deep one, between two half-seen versions of a man he would like to be, and for him, perhaps more than for Keitel, there is the matter of how he is seen;

"You are a noted fire-eater"

"You have a certain reputation"

"The honour of the Regiment"

One of the later duels is even a fucking picnic with the regimental staff nomming on sandwiches as they watch these two guys try to take each other out.

Later on we meet Albert Finneys Joseph Fouché, (IRL cunt), and his magnificent cravat, (Finney appeared for a £25 cheque, I hope he split it with his costumier, his performance is magnificent but the Cravat plays a vital supporting role), who is perhaps what Carradine might become if he surrendered fully to his more fungible side - a pure politician, not especially malignant, (in this story at least), but without a gram of 'honour' - a relentless survivor.

It's because he has both these qualities, and because he knows he does, that Carradines character is 'weak', or that he is in conflict. With his voice and his neocortex, he complains relentlessly about these stupid fucking duels, but with his body he still goes to them. He does not go to them in good heart, because part of him wants to be there and part does not. To simply say 'no, I'm not doing it', what would be the result? Partly social - he would lose reputation and perhaps status within the regiment, which is his world, and that might effect his career there , (though the endless duelling has done that already, and I wonder how his commanders *really* feel about his duels? They complain about them, order him away from them, but perhaps they themselves are a bit like him?). More importantly he would lose contact with, would deny, a part of himself; the honour-bound death-oriented heroic sense of a certain kind of man, an image which can be ruinous, and destructive, (Keitel is all this), but also powerful, brave, and inwardly strong, someone who is not 'fungible' or agreeable, or political, but singular individual, indifferent to social manipulations, bold and driven by ideals. A Knight, of a sort, in short. Wouldn't we all want a little to be someone like that?

Even when Carradine can simply let Keitel die, he cannot, and goes to lengths to save him, because that would be an escape, a full surrender to his social, fungible, rational self and he just can't *quite* let himself do that, to fully and entirely become that guy.

The film, in its end, is a kind of reconciliation between these two selves, with Carradine finally holding Keitel at his mercy, having partly-outwitted, partly out-lucked him, and essentially commanding Keitel to knock this shit off - "according to whatever rules of single combat you hold dear" So he has 'won' honourably, sort of, and reconciled his two selves.

(Its also a little bit disappointing, on one level I was hoping they would take each other out.)

While its physical beauty it owes to Scott, surely this owes much of its compact, elegant and reasonable arrangement to Conrad, and to Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, the screenwriter, but the physical beauty is so very great and so very well arranged, almost a love-letter to the grain of chemical film.

Hey have you thought about how fucking beautiful FILM GRAIN is lately? Well you will after watching this.

I imagine Ridley Scott driving the crew, the cinematographer and the set designers fucking crazy, going over every single piece of straw or broken waggon wheel with a literal tweezer, shifting the line of soldiers half a foot right or left, speeding up or slowing down a washerwoman, getting the pseudo-natural lighting just a tenth of a tone more or less white or yellow. Its incredible to think how little, physically, is in this film, in pure material terms, and how wonderful every single object that remains appears. (I'm slightly annoyed there aren't more photos online of the Caravaggio & Rembrandt interiors), these tightly compacted scenes arranged with visual and social virtuosity, little emblems or picture frames; glyphs that condense and transmit the spirit of an age. True art in that. Even the sky seems to collaborate with Scott at points! The clouds move at his command!

*Thanks to my artistic friend for the painter recommendations.

12th April - Flow

I thought this was good, a small boy talked continually through the latter part of the film. (I mean in the cinema.)

Pseudonaturalism

I still don't know quite how I feel about the elegant pseudo naturalism of the animals.

Flow is a wordless story of different species interacting in complex ways. It is something of a mirror to an hundred DreamWorks, Disney, et-al productions about animals teaming up and having adventures. In those fictions, the animals are strongly anthropomorphised, made cartoony and given human voices and personalities. In effect they are stories of humans in the clothes of animals, while 'Flow' tries to tell a much more naturalistic story with less anthropomorphised behaviour.

I felt a tingling dissonance with this.

Wordless

The script and story for 'Flow' are very good as they can deal only with actions and situations in a limited environment. From this they must develop the full range of drama. That the story keeps doing this and keeps doing it well, is an achievement as great as the beauty of the animation.

The wordlessness and perception through pure action places the mind into a different state, almost as wordless as the scenes themselves, the attention is fixed upon the development while dreams of meaning and possibility drift more than they would in a verbalised film, gathering like clouds. This is something that happens in good silent movies. (This also made the small boy more annoying than he would have been in a different film where the characters would have talked over him.)

Direction

A tracking camera follows our hero Cat, bouncing slightly with the tiniest simulation of physicality; something that must have taken ungodly care to create and maintain.

With a fully realised digital reality, there is no danger of the camera not getting whatever it needs, so the purpose of the 'camera' (really an x/y/z axis point in imaginary space), shifts away from pure capture of image towards more embodying our presence in the word, making constructions of numbers and light feel like a physical reality. In this a great well of craft, subtlety and trickery are employed, both to make the 'camera' serve and show the story and to beguile us with something like the language of known cinema, to seduce us into belief.

Water

Flow is about a world flooding and a cat trying to escape the water. Rivers run, large floods surge in rolling waves, pale, flat water invisibly creeps, rising and quietly absorbing the living world, transforming mountaintops into islands. Later, storm-wracked seas roll, canal-cities glimmer, the Cat falls, drowns, dives, swims, adapts. The waters pseudo-silent underverse is briefly visited. In interviews I read that every different instantiation of water in the story required entirely different programming methods. This seems oddly appropriate to me; that the most transformational of elements should resist systematic codification and simulation, demanding instead, that its priests approach the throne each time via a different route, and in a different manner.

What Happened to the Humans

'Flow' is set in a world empty of humans, and not too-long vacated. We do not know if this is our world in some future time, or one currently unknown to us. The mystery of 'what happened to the humans' is partially, slightly, answered, but not fully. Hardly a flaw as this is not the main flow and centre of the film, but a tantalising idea and one I couldn't stop thinking about. The evidence left behind suggests concepts of environmental change, spiritual sublimation and ascension, perhaps a post-post-future world living on apparently simply technology with much deeper structures underneath. It feels melancholic rather than doomy.

Clever Animals

The animals are a bit too intelligent and a bit too co-operative, probably, slightly. And this perhaps conflicts with or bends aslant the strong tendency towards non-anthromorphism. Why do I feel like the Secretary bird had a philosophy? It can certainly navigate a boat, as can the Capybara after a few tries.

I’m a nerd so my mind turned immediately towards partially-uplifted species. Or species living on a late-earth or post-earth which had been remade or returned from extinction with a few edits here and there.

Of course this is likely just the chosen language of the film. I can't even tell if the less-anthromorphic but still slightly-anthro-behaving animals actually annoyed me or if I am just being snitty about it. I do have a mild bug up my arse about 'nice' human stories being told through relations between species where, they may not be inherently opposed to each other, but they tend to occupy less-overlapping worlds and not to interact much. In some ways it might be more 'honourable' to fully cartoonify the animals and have them interact as humans than it is to only slightly anthro them and have them act as unusually-clever creatures. Maybe I am the only one being autistic about this sort of thing.

I think I was very slightly adjacent to this film. That small boy didn’t fucking help!

14th April - The Hounds of Chaos ride forth!

Some from Warlord Miniatures, the Terror Bird from osminiatures and the very weird looking kind of giraffe guy.... I cannot remember, perhaps he rode straight from the Realms of Chaos themselves.

Part of a Chaos Beastman army for The Old World, base partly on very early Realms of Chaos and the first Konrad novel by David Ferring. A Warhammer World where ‘Chaos’ meant ‘literally everything GW has in its toybox’; so a grab-bag of different miniature lines, colourful kitbashed miniatures and oddities. The true face of Chaos; a 1000 entry randomised list.

17th April - WAS THE EMPEROR RIGHT?

Arbitor Ian does perhaps the deepest deep dive into an issue that has plagued and vitalised internet forums for many an eon. Can the ultimate super-murderer space dad be justified? I was expecting this to be more cringe and reddity but it goes to some unexpected places, (at least unexpected to me, considering my opinion of Arbitor Ian).