Use It or Lose It

Is it contrarianism or cognitive dissonance?  Whatever it is, the press still likes to gloss over the inconvenient facts.  I'm talking about the latest in a round of media reports about the alleged 'death of the high street' and how voters blame 'the government', with the press gleefully predicting dire consequences for the Labour government if they don't do something about it.  What, of course, such reports fail to do is mention whether their polls also asked correspondents about their preferred shopping habits - do they actually use high street retailers for purchases?  Because I can guarantee you that a majority of those bewailing the demise of the high street will also happily admit to doing a lot of their shopping, particularly for more expensive items, online.  Either that, or going to out-of-town retail outlets or, at the very least non-high street retailers located in retail parks, away from the town centre.  I'm not criticising them for doing so, I do it myself, with my main grocery shops being done at Aldi or Lidl, but surely they must grasp that such a shift in shopping habits is precisely what is driving the gradual running down of more local retailers?  It's no good blaming the government, any government, for the situation - if you really love your high street so much, then you have to use it.  But, as noted, the predominantly right-wing media don't want to highlight this fact, as it would deprive them of a stick with which to beat the government.

Such disconnected thinking isn't confined to the issue if the dying high street.  You'll find it echoed in discussions of public services and public spending.  If asked, most people would say that they wanted things like the NHS, but, at the same time, would tell you that they also wanted lower taxes.  But lower tax revenues, of course, mean less funding for public services - if you want these things, then they have to be paid for.  Such people will usually try to rationalise their position by saying that whilst they were in favour of things like the NHS, or education, say (ie the things that they use and directly benefit from regularly), they will point to other areas of public spending which 'cost too much' or are 'a waste of money' - usually the sort of stuff falling under the loose rubric of 'benefits', which don't benefit them directly.  Of course, if and when their situation changes, you'll find them rapidly reversing their position on 'benefits'.  A large part of the problem is the lie that we've been fed for decades - one embraced by both sides of the mainstream political spectrum - that we can somehow have adequate public services without paying taxes.  It is something that few politicians seem to have the courage to challenge, fearing a voter backlash.  But really, it clearly has to be spelt put to the electorate:  If you want these services you claim to love, then they have to be paid for.  Moreover, not all essential public services will benefit you personally in the short term, but they do benefit society in general in the long term.  Selfishness is a poor basis for decision making when it comes to social policy.  Unfortunately, though, that's where we seem to be these days: the cult of the self, which seemingly prevents people from understanding simple cause-and-effect when it comes to their own behaviour: pay less tax and have poorer public services, use the high street or lose it.

Trix Warship

So, another new addition to my loco collection.  This one is the Trix model of the BR Western Region 'Warship' diesel.  It was produced from around 1960 until around 1970 and is probably one of the commonest Trix loco models you will find secondhand.  

  

This one, however, isn't entirely original.  Trix  modelled the locomotive in its earliest form, without a yellow warning panel or head code boxes, (early locos instead carried a bracket on their nose to take the train route reporting boards used on Western Region steam locos, with head code boxes fitted as new to subsequent locos and retro-fitted to the early examples), but a previous owner has added both.  Up close, you can see that the head code boxes are actually painted on, but nonetheless are surprisingly effective, capturing the front-end of the real locomotives as most remember them.  (Trix never, as far as I know, fitted head code boxes, but did, from 1967, add a yellow warning panel in the form of a crude and non-prototypical yellow strip across the nose at each end).  The lack of originality of this particular example worked to my advantage, as it put off the collectors and ensured that I got it for a reasonable price.  

The 'Warship', in common with most sixties Trix, is an extremely good runner and here is seen on the layout: 

It's seen hauling a rake of my Trix coaches, (some still have the Peco-style couplers at at least one end to facilitate their use with locos likewise equipped).  At one point it passes my other Trix loco, a Standard Class 5 (the other commonest Trix loco available secondhand and of similar vintage), also hauling some Trix coaches.  The Standard 5 and its train were actually meant to feature more prominently, but the coaches decided not to play ball, with the trailing four constantly uncoupling from the front coach every time the camera was running.  Another reason I dislike Peco couplings - many swear by them, claiming that they are 'oh-so-superior' to the Tri-ang type coupling, but I've never had an entirely satisfactory experience with them, finding them ready to uncouple on even the mildest of curves.

The Trix 'Warship' models D801 'Vanguard', the second, I think, of the class built and named for the Royal Navy's last battleship.  The real 'Vanguard' had a relatively brief career, falling foul of the fact that, by the late sixties, all of the Western Region's diesel-hydraulic locomotives were deemed 'non-standard' and slated for withdrawal in favour of diesel-electric locomotives.  After around only ten years in service, 'Vanguard' was withdrawn in 1968.  Many of its sisters lingered until around 1972 - I can vaguely remember, as a young child, seeing them at Salisbury station in the early seventies, when they were still being used on Waterloo-Exeter services.  So, the model has long outlived its prototype and is still going strong, as can be seen.

Dracula and Son (1976)

Another French vampire comedy from the seventies, the Christopher Lee starring Dracula and Son (1976) does have a link with 1974's Peter Cushing led Tender Dracula in the form of Bernard Menez, who appears in both.  While in the earlier film he is a supporting role as one of the two hapless writers who end up as guests at Cushing's castle, here he has the co-starring role, playing the 'Son' part of the title.  Dracula and Son is a far more straightforward parody of the vampire genre than Tender Dracula, lacking the surrealism of the latter.  The plot is simple - Lee's vampire count, (never named specifically as being Count Dracula, but close enough to make no difference), finally has a son after his marriage to a non-vampire woman (who he vampirises once she has given him a child), but to the Count's disappointment, his offspring doesn't actually enjoy being one of the undead, refusing to bite living humans to get blood.  Indeed, he grows up to be a shy, socially awkward, young man.  When, in the twentieth century, they find themselves effectively evicted from their ancestral Romanian home after it is taken over by the communist government, they decide to seek a new home abroad, but find themselves inadvertently buried at sea after co-opting the coffins of two dead French sailors.  While the Count washes up in the UK, his son is picked up by a French trawler and ends up in France, living amongst other illegal immigrants and trying to eke out a living as an undocumented worker, working as a nightwatchman.  The Count, meanwhile, finds himself accidentally becoming a film star who specialises in playing vampires.  When a new production brings him to France, father and son are reunited, but fall out over a woman - an advertising executive whose firm wants the Count to advertise a toothpaste brand.   Each tries to destroy the other in an escalating battle over the girl.

Dracula and Son opens like a Hammer film, with a lengthy prologue set in the nineteenth century in which a group of travellers in a stagecoach fall afoul of vampires as they travel through a spooky forest after dark.  Unfortunately, though these scenes are well staged, the nineteenth century interlude simply goes on for too long, chronicling Lee's seduction of a girl kidnapped from the carriage and the birth of their son, robbing the film of its early impetus.  A whole sub-plot involving a young man who was also a passenger on the coach and who encounters the vampirised girl years later, ultimately adds little to the plot, either, turning out to be a contrivance by which the mother can be eliminated from the narrative.  The film's main plot finally starts when the action flashes forward to the then present day and the two main characters are propelled, reluctantly, into the modern world.  Much of the humour of this section of the film revolves around the tribulations of characters who, in their own time and homeland, were feared members of the aristocracy, who find themselves much reduced in stature when robbed of their natural environment and resources.  While the son adapts somewhat more easily to his new life, he still finds himself constantly having to make excuses to his friends as to why he doesn't eat regular food and is never active during daylight hours.  His father finds life in London, at first, at least, to be something of a trial, forced to wander the streets by night looking for random victims, none of whom have the slightest fear of him, having no idea of who or what he is.  Once he becomes a movie star and effectively a member of the modern aristocracy - a celebrity - the film shifts to trying to explore how a traditional vampire might live in contemporary times.  His desire to have a coffin in his hotel room, or work only after dark, for instance, are indulged as simply being the sort of eccentricities that celebrities are prone to.  Visual gags, such as he and one of his vampirised female stars having their coffins side-by-side on a double bed, for instance, abound.

The film's final act, as father and son vampires battle over a girl, moves the narrative into farce, with the various failed attempts of the pair to eliminate each other: coffins are thrown out of hotel windows, clocks are changed to try and give the impression that it is still night and cause an accidental exposure to sunlight, for instance.  Much of it is mildly amusing, but never likely to provoke hilarty.  It's always difficult to fully assess foreign language films on the basis of an English dub, but doubly so when the film is a comedy,  Certainly in the case of Dracula and Son, one suspects that, as is often the case, much of the subtelities of the humour translates into English only fitfully.  (That said, I was at least able to see a dubbed version of the full movie, rather than the original US release version, which was heavily cut and dubbed with 'comedic' voices following a different script).  Despite these problems of translation, the film is actually very well mounted and, particularly in the opening scenes, quite atmospheric.  The central idea, of trying to imagine how a traditional Gothic-style vampire might exist in the modern world is a good one, (and was explored by a number of 'straight' horror films of the era, most notably the Count Yorga series), ripe with comic potential.  But Dracula and Son, while creating some enjoyable imagery and plot developments with regard to this concept, never really manages to develop them sufficiently to be entirely satisfying.  Nevertheless, Dracula and Son, even in English, is a well produced and sometimes amusing film, with decent performances from its leads - Lee plays his entire role completely deadpan, as if he was playing Dracula in a Hammer movie, lending the character a degree of dignity, even as the situation turns farcical -  and is well directed by comedy specialist Eduard Molinaro, who, a couple of years later, had a major international hit with La Cage aux Folles (1978).  It's not Love at First Bite (1979) or Young Frankenstein (1974) in terms of horror comedies, but Dracula and Son, thankfully, isn't Old Dracula (1974) either, delivering a gentle, low-key comedy of vampirism, with satirical asides on the nature of celebrity and the treatment of illegal immigrants, instead.

More Dream Analysis...

So, I had another of those weird and vivid dreams the other night.  As ever, I can only partially remember it, but the bit I recall most clearly involved me watching a TV report profiling some high profile Tory MP.  Now, when the archive footage of him rolled, I was - in the dream - shocked to see that he had this weird head, with no neck, its base almost as wide as his shoulders.  A bit like a Sontaran from Dr Who, (in fact, I remember thinking, in the dream, that this was the case).  But even more disturbingly, each side of his bloated head, apparently growing from his shoulders were a pair of fleshy protuberances which seemed to have a life of their own.  The best I can describe them is as being a bit like the head and neck of a seahorse, but larger, less well defined  and made of human flesh.  Each had only one eye, on the side furthest from his head and what appeared to be a mouth.  As the camera went in for a close up, I got a good look at the right one, as its eye turned to look into the camera and the mouth weakly tried to open.  But the weirdest thing about it all was that nobody involved in the TV show seemed to find anything strange about the MP's appearance - even when we had the close up of one of those shoulder things, nobody said a word about it!  Jesus Christ, I thought (in the dream), what's the matter with you people?  Can't you see that he's some kind of alien, or mutant, or at the very least grossly deformed?  Isn't it obvious that he isn't normal?  Somebody say something!  But they didn't.

I've thought a lot about this dream fragment since - it was so striking and surreal that it was impossible not to.  Inevitably, my thoughts turned to the question of whether it had any kind of deeper meaning.  The most obvious explanation was that my subconscious created the bizarre vignette as an analogy for what increasingly seems to be going on in real life news media.   Over and over again, politicians and other public figures seem to be allowed to do and say things which would have been unthinkable a few years ago, yet their words and actions are now treated as if they are somehow normal.  Nobody seems to want to call them out or draw attention to their outrageous positions and policies.  Moreover, so many contemporary political figures are so obviously insincere grifters, motivated entirely by personal ambition and greed, yet nobody in the media seems capable of seeing this, yet alone commenting upon it.  To be fair, the electorate themselves seem incapable of exercising any kind of critical judgement with regard to these individuals, seemingly not noticing their avarice and evil until they've elected them, then acting shocked when they turn out to be dangerous bastards.  So maybe someone looking like a Sontaran with two extra weird 'heads' growing on their shoulders could get elected as an MP and reach a position of prominence without anyone commenting on the fact.  Having said all that, it is, perhaps, a mistake to think that this is a new phenomena.  While I think it true to say that, in the past, certainly the post-war period, there were more politicians around who seemed motivated by things like civic duty and committed to the public good, people were still pretty bad at spotting the outliers, no matter how obvious they were.  Going back a bit further, let's not forget that much of the UK press (not to mention politicians) liked to try and characterise Hitler and Mussolini as normal democratic leaders (despite all the evidence to the contrary), decent chaps who, ultimately, would play by the rules.

But, getting back to that dream, maybe, as ever, I'm reading too much into it.  Maybe it was just a random weird dream, fuelled by watching too many monster and b-movies.  After all, dreams don't actually have to mean anything - they are a product of the subconscious and it is our conscious, waking, minds that seek to try and make everything fit into neat patterns with neat explanations.

Lethal Impact: GBH 2 (1991)

The last completed film of Cliff Twemlow, Lethal Impact: GBH 2 (1991) is, as the title implies, a direct sequel to his first feature, GBH (1983), with Twemlow (billed as 'Mike Sullivan', in common with a number of his later productions), returning as club bouncer extraordinaire Steve Donovan.  The character's apparent demise at the end of the earlier film is brushed aside with a passing reference, mid-way through the running time, to the police marksmen having missed him.  Rather than being six feet under, it seems that Donovan has spent the intervening eight years living in Malta, where we find him early in the film.  He quickly finds himself drawn back to Manchester, with former adversary Keller informing him that Donovan's teenaged niece has been drawn into the world of child pornography, appearing in an illicit video.  Keller has his own motivations for wanting Donovan back in Manchester - the same gang behind the child porn videos are also threatening his club.  Back home, Donovan finds the situation has gotten worse - his niece has committed suicide.  Naturally, Donovan goes on a lengthy rampage, tracking down those who made the video and violently disposing of every one of them.  He then expands his vengeance by taking out the gang of women used by the gang to recruit victims by luring them into a van, before working his way through the ranks of the entire gang.  People have shotguns fired up their backsides, ('How's that for a blow-job, boys?'), are blown up, burned to death and even decapitated after their tie is trapped in a descending lift's door.  Beatings and gunfights proliferate and the bodies pile up, attracting the attention of the police, although the Inspector in charge of the case isn't unsympathetic to Donovan's crusade as the death toll amongst gang members and peadophiles racks up.

As is the case with sequels, Lethal Impact is very much GBH, but bigger, with more fights, more guns and more of the sleazy side of Manchester's club scene.  Even Donovan's sidekick Chris, played by Brett Sinclair, turns up again - only to end up gravely ill in a hospital bed again, (although this time we at least see him make a recovery).  The difference is that this time around, it is all far darker, driven by the peadophile plot, (which encompasses every of the tabloids' contemporary 'peado panic' tropes - Donovan even finds time to deal with a peado priest), with the humour toned down and a dour atmosphere.  This version of Donovan, driven purely by revenge, spouting self-righteous justifications involving protecting children, for his bloody killing spree, feels far less sympathetic and Twemlow's natural charisma, abundantly evident in the first film, only shines through intermittently.  The film is also decidedly overlong, lacking the original's snappy pace, with the litany of killings eventually feeling repetitive.  On the plus side, bearing in mind the film's meagre resources, the fight scenes are well staged, as is the rest of the action.  Indeed, overall, Twemlow regular David Kent-Watson's direction is efficient, if unspectacular, handling the cast and locations effectively, with the streets, bars, clubs and hotels of Manchester giving the movie a feel of raw authenticity.  But even these virtues can't hide a certain air of desperation permeating the film.

There's no doubt that Lethal Impact represented one last roll of the dice for Twemlow.  Finding financing for his films was becoming more difficult, with several of his projects not progressing beyond demo reels.  To get Lethal Impact into production, Twemlow reportedly had to secure financing from some very dodgy Manchester clubland figures, which left some of the cast and crew uneasy.  The film also cannibalised one of those unrealised projects for the peadophile plot line, which feels very much as if it has been inserted into a straight gangster story, sitting somewhat uncomfortably with the gangster elements.  As with several of his other films, though, Twemlow was able to secure the services of a better known, mainstream, actor in a supporting role, in this case Terrence Hardiman, who plays Donovan's bereaved brother, Bill.  With a shorter running time, more humour and the peadophile and gangland aspects of its script better integrated, Lethal Impact would, undoubtedly, have been a far stronger film, much more in the mould of GBH.  As it stands, it is still intermittently enjoyable, but not as exhilarating an experience as the first film, which revelled in its lack of resources and rough edges.  Ironically, it is the greater slickness of Lethal Impact, the result not just of a better budget, but also the increased film-making experience of Twemlow and his crew, which makes it a less interesting film than its predecessor.  Not only did GBH have a certain novelty value, a perfect post-pub direct-to-video movie that had  seemingly come out of nowhere, it was its sheer roughness and gritty feel that gave it a distinctive feel.  Morever, the sheer enthusiasm of its makers comes through the screen, with the whole enterprise imbued with their joi de vivre.  The sequel, by contrast, feels more solemn, perhaps even a little jaded.  Still, it's always good to see Cliff Twemlow doing his stuff on screen - he might not have been the world's (or even Manchester's) greatest actor, but he had genuine screen presence and the sort of energy that could carry an entire film.  It seems fitting that his time as a low-budget filmmaker should have come full circle, beginning and ending with Steve Donovan.  Although the film ends apocalyptically, with a wedding massacre in which everyone seems to have been mown down in a hail of bullets, the end credits still promise us another sequel.  Sadly, though, it wasn't to be as, within a couple of years of Lethal Impact's debut, (in a club owned by one of those dodgy financial backers), Twemlow was dead at the age of 55. 

No Accounting for Some...

One of the perennial refrains of Britain's right-wing press goes along the lines of 'Isn't it outrageous that Labour wants to persecute our brave soldiers/policemen by investigating and sometimes prosecuting them for alleged war crimes and/or excessive use of force?'  Which ignores the fact that this doesn't just happen under Labour governments and that accountability is a cornerstone of any democratic system.  People can't be allowed to use 'It was a war' or 'We were just enforcing the law' as a cover for committing illegal acts - regardless of circumstances, they still must be held accountable for their actions, they have to be able to justify what they have done.  What the foaming-at-the-mouth headlines in the likes of the Telegraph, (which is fast outpacing even the Mail for insane and utterly delusional, fact free, right-wing rants masquerading as journalism), fail to mention, of course, is that the soldiers against whom prosecutions have been brought (or, at the very least, have been investigated with a view to possible prosecution), stand accused of the killing and abuse of non-combatants.  Regardless of whether such things happen in a war zone or not, they might well constitute war crimes, depending upon on the circumstances , and those involved have to be held accountable.  The same applies in police killings.  Strangely enough, we can't just take peoples' word that their actions were justified, otherwise every criminal prosecution would inevitably end in an acquittal.  Except, the right-wing press seem to be saying, these chaps are soldiers and policemen, for God's sake!  British soldiers and coppers at that: if we can't accept that they are beyond reproach, then who can we trust?

It's all part of the right's quest for exceptionalism.  While they like to pay lip service to the idea of political and criminal accountability, in truth, they think that it should only apply to 'other' people: the poor, non-whites, the left, immigrants and so on.  'Their' people should be excepted from the rules because, well, they are just of a 'better' type, or they represent a revered conservative institution, particularly things like the military and the police, that can be used as tools of repression against those great unwashed masses.  It's not even the big stuff that they feel that they should be excepted from in terms of accountability.  There's a whole stratum of white collar crime they quite clearly feel shouldn't be treated as crimes - fiddling the expense account isn't embezzlement, just a perk or breaking the speed limit isn't a crime if you are a middle class BMW driver as, obviously, you are far too superior a driver to cause an accident.  This view extends to stuff like tax evasion, which isn't a crime as long as the wealthy are doing it, but benefits fraud most definitely is, as it is only committed by nasty poor people.  Not that this call for exceptionalism is confined to the UK, it's a phenomenon you'll find, in one form or another, across the globe.  In recent times it has been fuelled by the rise of the super-rich, who definitely don't see why they, or their corporations, should be constrained by the puny laws of mere mortals.  Indeed, as right-wing politicians have, increasingly, cosied up to the billionaires in order to get their financial backing, the situation has become worse as it is clear that the price for their endorsements is a loosening of regulations and weakening of enforcement of relevant rules and laws.  All of which brings us back to the UK's right-wing press and their outraged cries for exceptionalism for soldiers and policemen accused of murder, corruption and abuse of power - their strategy is clear, if you can set a precedent for excepting one group from certain laws, hen you can free other groups and entities from those pesky chains of accountability.  Future Tory or Reform UK governments, for instance...

The Wrong Sort of Films?

Sometimes I worry that the kind of films I enjoy more than slightly undermine that veneer of sophisticated intellectualism that I like to project, revealing me instead as a rather shallow thrill-seeker.  Instant gratification, some might say, is the underlying theme in my cinematic tastes, whether that be in the form of a shot of furious action or a wallow in some sleazy exploitation.  It's not that I don't watch and enjoy other types of films:  I watch a lot of those continental films with subtitles - and not just the Italian ones with the gore and nudity or the French ones with Belmondo as a rogue cop beating up suspects and driving fast cars, or Delon as a charismatic criminal for whom women tear their clothes off at first sight.  No, indeed, I've watched my share of art movies and serious dramas.  All of this came to mind when, the other day, I sat down to watch Quest for Fire, the supposed intellectual and historically and anthropologically correct riposte to all those sixties and seventies caveman movies featuring the likes of Raquel Welch wearing fur bikinis.  You know the one - it was much vaunted sat the time as the cavemen all spokes 'languages' devised by Desmond Morris.  But that fact alone underlined one of the film's problems - if the language is unintelligible to modern ears and there are no subtitles, then what, really, is the difference between that and all the grunting that passes for dialogue in films like When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)?

One of the selling points of Quest for Fire was that the prehistoric environment it depicted was far more accurate than that depicted in earlier films: no dinosaurs anachronistically interacting with cavemen, it aimed only to depict the real fauna of the era.  Except that it didn't.  In fact, apart from the primitive humans, the fauna was a bit thin on the ground.  Sure, we got some circus elephants in fur coats pretending to be mammoths (much in the manner of 1940's One Million BC) and some supposed sabre-toothed cats.  Except that the latter were just lions with false teeth, whereas, real sabre-tooths were actually a completely separate branch of the cat family from modern day big cats, with extremely powerful shoulder and jaw muscles to best use those long teeth and short tails.  Moreover, sabre-toothed cats were found in the Americas, while the film seems to be set in Europe (although the habitats the cavemen travel through in their titular quest seem to range from Scotland to Africa - a heck of a journey for cavemen on foot, luckily, their tribe hasn't moved from the spot they last saw them at, despite a quest that must have lasted months, at least).  But Hell, Quest for Fire is very worthy in its intent, with every frame screaming 'Look, this is a serious film'.  Nonetheless, Philistine that I am, I kept hoping for a dinosaur or two to turn up and liven up the action.  I mean, it's very well made and does boast of featuring Rae Dawn Chong clad only in body paint for her entire performance, but if any film was ever in need of a girl in a fur bikini being carried off by a pterodactyl, it's Quest for Fire.  I'm sorry, I know that it marks me out as some kind of pleb, but really, I like my movie viewing to include something at least resembling action and excitement.

The Disappointing Truth

They always disappoint, don't they?  The 'big reveals' in scandals and long-running news stories, that is.  The media always builds this stuff up, teasing the prospect of future revelations, while dropping salacious scraps of inconclusive information, giving the impression that this is all leading up to some kind of spectacular denouement.  Like a TV soap opera, or a thriller movie.  And, of course, we lap it all up, just as we do those TV shows and films, buying in to all the drama along the way as a substitute for the excitement that is missing in our own real lives.  But in these long-running news scandals, just like in real life, we never seem to get the big pay off.  Instead, it all seems to fizzle out disappointingly.  Take the Epstein scandal - we've had yet more documents released today, following years of hints and teasing from both Trump and his opponents as to who is going to get burned by the inevitable breaking of the scandal when everything comes out.  Yet, in truth, despite all the stuff released, all the pictures and e-mails, that smoking gun never seems to appear.  The 'Holy Grail' of evidence which will point the finger at Trump, or anyone else for that matter, stubbornly refuses to materialise.  Everything is circumstantial.  The only major casualty so far has been the former Prince Andrew and even there the evidence is pretty much circumstantial.  Certainly nothing sufficiently concrete to warrant criminal investigations - his downfall has purely been the result of the reputational damage his association with Epstein has caused the Royal Family.

But such is the nature of this sort of stuff - it isn't just confined to political scandals like the Epstein business.  The media loves to push those narratives about how the US government has access to alien technology from crashed UFOs, or that the UK government has reams of files devoted to UFO incursions into British airspace, which it  suppressed to prevent public panic.  With each story they hint that astounding revelations are about to break: that dead aliens are about to be revealed, that files are going to be released showing that Harold Wilson held meetings with aliens in 1968 or that the US will roll a complete flying saucer out of the hangers at Area 51.  Yet all we get are the same tired old stories from the same tired old cranks about how they met a man from Rigel while working in a top secret US lab, or how they were taken on a ride around Mars in an alien spaceship - all with absolutely no evidence to back them up.  The big pay off just never comes.  Because, the cynic in me says, if it ever did, then the story would effectively be dead.  Sure, there would be plenty of stuff about how the aliens are getting a State Visit and meeting the King at Buckingham Palace, but that would draw them into the world of the ordinary, making them concrete presences, rather than some tantalising, shadowy mystery which sells papers.  Because that's the draw of these things - the mystery.  All mysteries, when solved, are somewhat disappointing.  In contrast to fiction, for instance, murders are inevitably motivated by greed, jealousy, passion or are heat of the moment incidents, the result of rage, drugs or alcohol.  Or some combination of the three.  Either that, or they are the work of a psychopath who, in contrast to movie psychos, has unfathomable motives and looks more like a mumbling tramp than a sophisticated professional like Hannibal Lecter.  As with everything else, the fantastic fantasy versions are always far more exciting and interesting than the mundane reality.  Which is probably why so many people seem to like conspiracy theories.  But that's a whole other post... 

Even AI's Gone Commie!

The insanity of the Daily Mail continues apace - it is now complaining that AI Chatbots have a 'left-wing' bias, because their answers to queries allegedly source 'left wing' sources 'like The Guardian and the BBC'.  This is so problematic on so many levels that it is difficult to know where to start with responding to it.  Let's start with their definition of 'left wing sources'.  Clearly, the BBC isn't a left wing source - it aims for political neutrality (and in reality tends to present an 'establishment' perspective on the vents).  But to the increasingly rabid Mail, (the newspaper that, in the thirties, once had Hitler as its 'Man of the Year'), 'neutral' is apparently the same as 'left wing'.  As for The Guardian, well, it certainly sits to the left of centre, but it certainly doesn't consistently articulate any ideological or doctrinaire left wing perspective.  It's well-meaning liberalism for the well intentioned but ineffective.  (I should know - I read it every day).  The biggest problem with this story is that it doesn't explain just how sources are attributed, or what the queries used in the data were about.  Now, I'm sure that the original report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) that the article draws on (and undoubtedly misquotes and misrepresents in order to fit the newspaper's own biases), probably does provide clarity on these matters, but the fact is that more people will read the Mail article than the report, so that has to be the basis of my analysis.

I'd hazard a guess that many of the queries involved probably have little to do with politics and it simply happens that the BBC and Guardian can provide more relevant information to the AI algorithms.  Moreover, on issues like the environment and climate change, say, they are far more likely to provide information in line with accepted scientific opinion than right wing sources like the Mail, who are far more likely to give credence to climate change deniers.  Indeed, I'd say that a large part of the reason for AI's use of non right-wing sources is because, in the UK at least, their 'journalism' rarely has a sound factual basis, instead being based upon bigotry, bias and deliberate misinterpretation of actual facts.  No wonder AI algorithms filter them out.  Obviously, though, the underlying problem with the story is its rank hypocrisy - a newspaper with and an increasingly extremer right-wing bias, (a lot of its output these days reads like agitprop for the likes of Farage), complaining that another source of news has a different bias.  Bearing in mind that the UK's print media is overwhelmingly owned by wealthy right-wingers, who use it to try and indoctrinate readers to their selfish agendas in order to try and influence elections, surely having a rival source of information which leans the other way can only be health?  Surely it would create balance in the news sphere?  But alternative viewpoints are simply not allowed in the world of the crackpot right.  Such things are dangerous.  They might encourage people to think for themselves - and we can't have that, can we?

Two Lost Worlds (1951)

An independently produced low-budget adventure film whose action sequences consist of footage from other films, Two Lost Worlds (1951) is a head-scratching experience for the viewer.  If you were to believe the poster and the above trailer, you might well be left thinking that this was going to be a full-blown 'lost world' picture, with the characters encountering all manner of prehistoric life after being shipwrecked on a remote island.  In reality, this part of the story is crammed into the last reel of a film which runs barely over sixty minutes and feels decidedly tacked on to what is otherwise a sea-going adventure story involving clipper ships and pirates.  In between these in sandwiched a romance.  The dinosaur sequences, (followed by the inevitable volcanic eruption that ensures all trace of the lost world is eradicated) feel jarring, as if they were an afterthought to try to both pad out the running-time and provide more box-office draw.

As noted, the main action sequences are all stock footage taken from other movies, with the pirate sequences coming mainly from 1940's Captain Caution, some of the 'Australian' sequences (the whole film was shot in California) use footage from Captain Fury, while the dinosaur fight and the volcanic eruption are the same ubiquitous footage from One Million BC (1940) that found its way into countless low-budget movies of the era.  Thanks to its meandering plot, the film never really builds up any pace, nor does it feel especially cohesive as a story, with each episode so brief as to feel perfunctory.  For contemporary audiences, the most recognisable actor is leading man James Arness (or Jim Arness as he's billed), who would appear in the somewhat more substantive science fiction classic The Thing From Another World that same year.  Director Norman Dawn had a career that stretched back to the silent era and had been something of a pioneer in developing the use of travelling mattes and was the first director to have used back projection - which is probably why the over-familiar battling dinosaurs footage is better integrated with actors from the film it is inserted into than usual.