The price of everything

Little by little, we went insane

“It was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions made by five American Presidents belonging to both political parties.”

• Peter Coyote (narrator), The Vietnam War, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

 

“The Vietnam War is both the most powerful film Burns has produced, and the most despairing. There's no optimism here, no moments of lyricism.. By the end of the fascinating, sometimes wrenchingly hard to watch 18 hours, it's impossible to regard the Vietnam War as anything other than an agonizing failure, one that taught Americans to be cynical about a government that lied to them, sent Americans off to risk their lives, and made one costly bad decision after another.”

• Kristi Turnquist, The Oregonian.

 

If it looks like insanity, smells like insanity, tastes like insanity, feels like insanity and struts about barking, “This is insanity”, then perhaps it might just be insanity.

We were in the jungle. We had too much money. We had too much equipment. And little by little, we went insane.

Not the words of Mario Draghi – yet. Nor of Jerome Powell, Mark Carney or Haruhiko Kuroda – yet. They are the words of film director Francis Ford Coppola in relation to his magnum opus, Apocalypse Now, a film that so outrageously exploded beyond its budget and beyond any reasonable compass that during its making it started being referred to as Apocalypse Later..

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The psychotic freakshow rolls on

“I’m not guilty ? Does that include the time I stole a comic book when I was five years old ? I’m not guilty of the charges which have been filed against me.”

• Ted Bundy, quoted in Conversations with a killer: the Ted Bundy tapes.

 

“Theresa May has admitted that she used to “run through fields of wheat” with a friend and that the local farmers “weren’t too pleased about that”.”

• Theresa May admits 'running through fields of wheat' is the naughtiest thing she ever did, The Daily Telegraph, 5 June 2017.

 

Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs forms part of the answer to perhaps the best pub quiz question ever. Namely: which three films are the only ones to have won the so-called ‘royal flush’ at the Oscars (i.e. Academy Awards for best film; best director; best actor; best actress; best screenplay) ? Which were the other two ? Ah, that would be telling.

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Watch bonds

John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing is the last great hoorah for pre-CGI special effects in film, courtesy primarily of creature effects maestro Rob Bottin. Everything you see on screen is “real”, in a way that digitised extra-terrestrial gore will never quite manage to be – the same way some folk prefer vinyl over CD. The premise is straight from the Cold War deep freeze. A crashed UFO long buried deep in the Antarctic is uncovered and its pilot, none too happy at the turn of events, thawed out.

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Less is more

“There is a profound conflict of interest built into the [fund management] industry’s structure, one that grows out of the fact that (mutual fund) companies are independently owned, separate from the funds themselves, and managers profit by maximising the funds under management because their fees are based on assets, not performance.”

• Louis Lowenstein, The Investor’s Dilemma.

Having finally gotten around to watching John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, we can side with the consensus: it’s a modern day classic. It clocks in at just 90 minutes, but there’s not a single idle second. The whole film is pared down to the bone. And it’s a ruthlessly efficient exercise in sustained suspense. The film is an elevator pitch made flesh: if you want to stay alive, don’t make a sound. Simply brilliant.

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Speaking truth to power

“You won’t learn much about capitalism at university. How could you ? Capitalism is a matter of risks and rewards, and a tenured professor doesn’t have much to do with either.”

• Jerry Pournelle.

 

Being There is a bizarre little curate’s egg of a film. Directed in 1979 by Hal Ashby, who by all accounts at this stage in his career was no stranger to substance abuse, it also happens to be Peter Sellers’ last film, and it maintains an elegiac quality throughout. The film is punctuated by illness and loss. Sellers plays a simple-minded gardener named Chance, unable either to read or write, who has spent his entire life tending the garden of a wealthy businessman. After the death of his patron, and after a sequence of improbable coincidences, Chance ends up as a strategic adviser to another wealthy businessman, and then to the US President himself. Devoid of artifice, and with no practical experience of the real world, Chance is an almost total cypher, a latter-day Candide, whose only engagement with the outside world is through gadfly consumption of TV, and who speaks only in the language of gardening. Asked about his recommended economic stimulus, he replies: “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.” Naturally, his near imbecilic horticultural argot is universally mistaken for genius. After his second patron dies, pallbearers at the funeral conclude that Chance has the best prospects for taking the next US Presidency.

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The EU

 

 

• With apologies to Tommy Wiseau.

 

This will be our last commentary of 2017. The commentaries will return, after their winter hibernation, in January 2018. We wish all readers a Merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year.

You can listen to our latest podcast with Paul Rodriguez of thinktrading here.

 

Some backstory is probably required. Now the subject of The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s latest film, The Room is a cult classic ‘disasterpiece’ written, produced, directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau, and widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made.

The EU is a story of our life and times as, perhaps, might be imagined by Tommy Wiseau.

 

Dramatis Personae

The UK: entrepreneurial, but with mixed fortunes, specialising in banking

Brussels: devious, untrustworthy bitch

Jaycee Juncker: Brussels’ mother

Germany: friend of the UK, a psychologist

Eastern Europe: Young, mixed-up kid, means well

France: the UK’s best “friend”

 

All of the drama is set within the EU. Various characters flit in and out, often for no reason, but nobody ends up going anywhere. (Perhaps tellingly, we are never shown what is outside the EU.)

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Are they yelling in Atlanta ?

 

“No predictor of the future – not even Orwell – has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote Network.”

• Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

 

 

In Paddy Chayefsky’s dark 1976 satire Network, disillusioned news anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) announces that he will kill himself on live TV. The station pulls him off air but he’s allowed back in front of the camera to preach what will become a very popular gospel of anger. In the film’s most iconic moment, at one point he urges viewers to stand up, open a window and shout, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more !”

Just before the film reaches its denouement, Beale jeopardises a takeover of the network by a Saudi conglomerate. Network chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) is dispatched to bring Beale back into line:

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