If everyone but you is wrong then you are wrong.

Here's my statement;

If everyone but you is wrong then you are wrong.


With these caveats; 

(and people who somehow don't read or process these but who still insist on leaving a comment, enjoy my utterly silent passive-aggressive rage in response).

If we are talking about an industrial art, something like cinema or mass publishing where it only really works if a very huge number of people are willing to buy it.

More simply, if we are talking about fiction and products of the imagination. (Not, primarily moral or political matters, like if everyone is into rape or slavery except for you then you still get to be right.) and it’s for a mass audience, in that case, if the vast majority of people who are into it are making a category error, that is, they are viewing it in a way you regard as incorrect, then in-effect, you are making the category error.

Because - the only thing that allows this thing to exist is the mass audience that funds and sustains it. And since its not deeply attached to real life, however they see it is a more true expression of how it is than whatever the cultural minority say about it.

So, in those conditions_, if everyone but you is wrong, then you are wrong.

Usually this is an irony thing and usually it’s the smug intellectual bourgeoisie lecturing the great mass of meatheads on how a thing they like is actually an ironic refutation of exactly that thing they like duuuuuh.

I don't think I've ever really bought that argument, for a variety of reasons

One - I'm usually less pissed off or alienated by this thing than other balloon-headed milk-weeping choleric intelligentsia.

Two - I hate irony itself more and more each day.

Three - As a distaff member of the bourgeois-hating bourgeoise, as you are driven by a desperate need to locate yourself as separate from and slightly better than the great mass of ambulant spam cans who drive and fuel our great society, so I, a superior intellectual, am driven by an equally strong need to show myself as seperate from, and slightly better than, You.

So as you are driven by genetically-deep drive to constantly explain their sadly mistaken cultural takes to the lumpen kulturpfutz, so I must equally chide and educate you.

Four - But, even so, if this thing, this movie, this set of toys, this musical thing, is driven almost entirely by people who take the message at something closer to face value than you, if them buying it allows it to exist, and if it’s an imaginary thing which by bullshit postmodern rules only really fully exists when and while being regarded and thought about, which requires a human mind to interpret it, then doesn't them having more minds, and also literally paying for its existence mean their brain-votes outvote your brain-votes?





WHY BRING THIS UP NOW?

I've completely run out of ideas for this blog so looks like we are doing culture war now baby. The years of content are over, Pundit here I come.

And this recent interview on the 40k company podcast has Tim Molloy making the very-often-repeated by anxious lefties argument that Warhammer 40k is not a desired end-state and we shouldn't identify with it like that.

Which annoys me for two reasons I think.

One - I think very few people do actually identify with it like that, at least without realising what they are doing and being able to stop.

Two - If a twelve year old (probably boy) didn't look at a Space Marine and go 'pew pew! Space Marine! Gonna fight the baddies!', then Games Workshop, and all of the jobs of the people in Games Workshop, probably wouldn't exist.

More precisely, some degree of heroic identification with the setting is absolutely necessary to the company’s survival and has been a fully integrated thread in its makeup from day one.

So I got kind of ratty as what I perceive as liberal chiding and left-wing self-flagellation by groups and individuals who's jobs depend on people not really listening to that chiding and moralising, and who are doing almost exactly the same thing just at a slightly different level.

Because absolutely no-one is playing in or imagining the Imperium of Man as North Korea in space, which is what it would be like, because it would be made out of starvation, boredom, ethnic hatred and rape. And I don't remember seeing much of those in any Blanchitsu articles.


"Ahhhh, you, a child, probably bought and painted that Space Marine thinking you were playing with a hero.

Whereas I, an *intellectual*, agonisingly converted my Inquisitor model and speckled them with a heartbreakingly accurate depiction of situation ally correct industrial decay and in-world derived skin problems, in full understanding of the innate tragedy of the setting.

Yes I do indeed go 'pew pew' with my models, and yes I did glob together a bunch of plastic to represent a person who, if they were real, their main job would be torturing and murdering people.

But, when I go 'pew pew', I do it in a morally and politically sophisticated way, you fucking twelve year old casual.

Also, please buy our all-new Boxed-Set I just opened a mortgage on a house."

The Grey Cities

Here is the small version of Karls map.
See below the cut for my original images.

Like a frayed coat named for its tarnished gold buttons, or like a map so paled by time that the only name it carries is that of the weights used to pin it against the gathering wind, the land bears the Cities name. The cities, the land, and the culture of that land, all are referred to as-one:

The Grey Cities.

The final fortress of civilised humanity. The last spark of Esh, slumbering in Uud.

The continent, (or one half of the paired sub-continent of Blackwater), runs roughly two and half thousand miles from Declension to the western coast. From many-walled Yga to the cold, uncertain border with the north, it reaches two to three thousand miles. The Waste frets and ebbs, pressing in, then falling back, gnawing at the borders of the land. The Cities total area varies according to the age, and the fortunes of man.

The rivers run east-west, to an almost unnatural degree. This may be due to deliberate engineering in the distant past, or Diadem-age reality shifts.  The greatest rivers run from the Realities, through the Blackriver plain, past the Cities, and seep into the sea of ash on the western coast.  Some spill out into the Waste.  A few loop back in, watched, guarded and carefully patrolled. Their cold, black water gives the realm its name and the soot-coloured sediment carried all the way from the Realities is claimed to contain some of the stern magic of the Mountains with it. Yggsrathaals Children find it vile.

There are hundreds, perhaps a thousand Grey Cities. Though before the Great Theistic war, there were many more. The oldest and the greatest are Galdor, Vocht, Declension and Yga. Nearly as well-known are Eimyrja, Hulfr, Morewen, Cinerium, Sintel, Sceadweald, Kaal, Foign, Wraeth of the Ruins and Glaem.

Each is unique, but a few things unify them all. All are based around a sacred megastructure, almost all are built on, or by rivers or some other fresh-water source, and almost all are centred in a pool of exploitable arable land. As well as this, many cities carry, somewhere close, or even surrounding them, a near-ungoverned borderland; the Zomia.

Though their climate and geography vary hugely, the power and influence of each city can be measured by its shadow. Like a weight pressing into a blanket, each carries with it a radius of power, spreading into its hinterland, centred on its secret core and the forgotten rituals performed there by the Emperors of Reality.

So, we measure from the outside in, coming closer to the centre, and the secret of the city with each move.

But we begin at the point furthest from the cities core;

THE MARGINS

At the height of its power, in the dark times before the Tolerance and the Treaty of Birch Falls, the Waste sent tendrils into Cities. Mists rose, even in the centre, and a capillary of ash and cold grey cloud crept through the land, surrounding cities and cutting them off. This was an age of isolation and war, the borders of reality crashed inward, Yga was nearly lost and Theistic violence nearly claimed all.

Since then, reality has reclaimed much. But far from all. Many cities fell, lost to the Waste and carried away.

These are the Margins; any land which is not safe from the advancing Waste.

We could call all of Blackwater marginal, since almost all of it is in danger, but in practice, the margins are places on the northern or southern borders, facing the Sea of Ashes to the West or some of the Blackriver Plain to the east.

Here, things are liveable, for now.

Here the shadow of the cities casts the desperate, brave, or utterly mad. The losers of wars, criminals, despised cults and religious groups, deranged idealists, brave watchers of the Waste-bound paths, barbarians, wanderers, nomads, and, of course, heroes.

The margins lie on the borders of Blackwater itself, but a little closer, and within the body of the continent itself, are the Zomia

THE ZOMIA

The Zomia of the Grey Cities are defined not by their geography, (although that plays a role), but by their relation to state power.

A Zomia is a bubble of uncontrol within a cities sphere of power. They may rule in theory, their flag or blazon may fly, they may collect 'tribute', and other cities may consider it within their range of influence, but tax collectors don't leave their fortress at night, or at all, and soldiers patrol in groups, if they are even present. The Zomia is a kind of mirror to the city, an anti-self that holds it in equipoise.  On one side; order, hierarchy, power and control, and on the other; wildness, anarchy, danger and, sometimes, terror. It is a place in which it is very, very hard for a Grey City Government to get what it wants.

A Zomia can take many forms. In almost every case, the land is sparsely populated, unsuited for agriculture and very difficult to navigate.

In the very centre of the Cities lie great forests of gnarled black wood, spreading for hundreds of miles over cracked and fractured land.  Wreath of the Ruins is surrounded by the Kataferz, the Midnight Wood whose trees grow so densely they block out the sun and whose brambles, nettles, poisoned vines and seeping willows press endlessly at the edges of Wreaths settled lands.

Vocht has The Vochtweald, a high plain of near-bare limestone Karst, visible even from the towers of the city itself, but never entirely subjected to its rule. Here sinkholes open beneath the traveller, the rocks form bizarre labyrinths.  Caves and strange passages are everywhere, tiny villages eke out survival on small patches of rare fertile soil.  The Maroons of the Vochtweald, made up of escaped members of Vochts servile and criminal classes, rule here, if anyone does, from caves and fissures and secret adobe settlements high in the Weald.

Yga has the Swamps of the Moon; mile upon mile of reeds, waterways, buzzing flies, rotting ruins and mad tribes.  The pearly waters hum, even at night, with the spiralling flies and the croaking of the Ghoul Toads.

And swamps are common in the Grey Cities, where the Black Rivers slow and overrun low lands.

Though all are different and each unique, the Zomia all play a similar role. They are refuges, places of rebellion, criminality and escape. Whomever is unwelcome in the city can flee to a place where the laws of the city run thin and power becomes a simple matter of the strength of your arm and the brightness of your smile. A harsh law, but less harsh for many than life in the city.

Though the Zomia, the Margins and even the City itself can be thought of as a place for adventure, the same cannot be said for the next ring.

(Though it may be simply the kind of adventure that differs).

THE SAFE AND SILENT LANDS

Not truly safe, but often silent. The City must feed, and here are fertile lands which satisfy that hunger. Each city sends out a spiderweb of farms, plantations, villages and cultivators, a halo of worked fields, managed growth, herding and gathering. In the south and west many cities occupy shallow river valleys crammed with intensive rice production. These huge concentrations of food are engines of cultural, economic and military power.

During the fall of Esh, Blackwater was the final destination for refugees from all the worlds and climes of the Diadem. They brought their crops with them and Blackwater has a diversity of food and useful animals greater than any biome of modern earth, a mad bricolage of plants and cultivation which has found a rough equilibrium over the millennia. As the altitude, soil or climate shifts, every crop imaginable is brought to seed.

These are the true treasures of the Grey Cities, the cause and prize of most of their wars. Food gets you soldiers, soldiers get you land, land gets you food. The Zomia and the Margins rarely face the threat of organised war, and few armies ever penetrate a Cities defences to overthrow another’s government. It is these places which face the action and consequence of war. When armies march, they do so up and down rivers, through villages, over fields.

Even in peace, here in the weird arable lands, every village has a secret. Only a mile off the main road you might find an isolated place settled a thousand, or five thousand years ago. Some villages and market towns have griped under the cities as long as they have existed, some were even here before the cities, before the great flood of population the endless cultures of Esh swamped their lands and changed everything forever.

These places are caked in their own strange rituals, fetishes, festivals, conspiracies, cults, bribes, banditry, inbred families, local ways, micro-cultures, social dramas, hidden structures of power,

and brutal generational feuds over the placement of a garden wall.

The city sucks in talent, youth, beauty, craft, intelligence and anyone who can't fit in. What is left, in the safe and silent lands, is often the opposite, the husk of these qualities, and the more quiet, strange, changeless and conservative such places get, the more so they wish to be.

But now we approach the true heart, the city itself. And rising in the distance we see something larger, and stranger than any city seen on earth, the Megastructure.

THE MEGASTRUCTURE

Every Grey City is built on, in, under and around, a sacred Megastructure. These are cyclopean, half-buried in the earth, taller than any tower, their geometry labyrinthine, non-Euclidian. Each is unique.  No two megastructures are the same. The Grey Cities are like termite hives on top of modern art.

Citizens cling to the Megastructure. They pile palaces, fortifications, hospitals, schools, apartments and tenements upon it, they ring it with ghettos, weave highways and plazas under, over and around it.

They climb it, hang from it, string bridges like necklaces and cable cars like pendants. Ropeways runways ratways, houses facing near-vertical stairs.

The Megastructures *are* the Grey Cities in some ways. Many have an abstract of their megastructure as their emblem.

But they are forgotten things. Not because they are not obvious, but because they have always been there; stained with millennia of wear and alteration, built on, covered over, (but never broken into), marked, adapted and ignored. Sacred and inviolate yes, (reach out to touch one for luck or swear 'by the structure' to confirm an oath), but also irrelevant. They are changeless, eternal, they never directly affect anyone’s life, any more than the sky or a distant mountain might do so. They never do anything. And so they fade into the background of culture and life like the statues of the heroes of another age.

And at the centre of each structure, even more hidden in plain view, even more forgotten through remembering, is its secret heart, the Forbidden City.

THE SECRET HEART

"The Palace of the Emperor", "The Temple of Reality", "The Castle of the Hierophant", "The Labyrinth of Truth".

Always at the centre, always hidden. Near-forgotten, sensed but not seen.  Vast, sprawling, as old as memory, melted in the soup of time, caked over with ritual, a City within the City.

The Grey Cities are governed by various Councils, Tyrants, Bureaucracies, Parliaments, Senates, Stewards and Seneschals. But though they govern, they do not Rule. Theirs is not the face upon the coins. Each city has an Emperor, a High Priest, one of the Ancient Lines of Aeth, the Holy Few, the Pure, the Saviours, the Optimates of Esh.

It is their face upon the coins, their symbol worked into the flag. Sometimes their name *is* the cities name, or one much like it. The ruler of Yga is simply called "Yga", the city was named for their family line. The city is governed in their name. The council bears their seal. Their title has faded into the bubbling froth of time for so long it has become an imprecation or the emphasis to a curse.

These lines, these families, are older than memory. They reach into myth. They built the city, or designed it, or ordered it designed. They brought Humanity here.

The stories differ. Myths and legends, history and fact, merge into one another.

At one point there may have been more, but plague has ravaged the Aeth population of Blackwater in the past, and those few who remain descend from its survivors. It seemed then that the lines of some Hierophants might go extinct. And some did, sacred clerics broke their way into silent apartments to find nothing but bodies and flies. And those cities quickly died.

None have been seen for millennia. They are too pure, too sacred, too holy and too vulnerable to be allowed contact with the dangerous and sickening air and the low corrupted people of Uud.

Every few centuries a great artist is allowed to see the silhouette of the Protector cast against the finest silk, or see their face in the reflection of a reflection, (and even getting this close requires years of testing, fasting, checking, meditation and prayer). They draw the Sacred Profile and this is used to update the coinage and official seals, regalia and state propaganda.

This is as close as anyone from the outside gets.

Those in the Grey Cities rarely see the stars but they would recognise the feeling of the stars. Something distant, cold, eternal, unchangeable. So constant and immutable that it fades from active memory. Symbolic of 'the way things are'. Not the picture, but the frame.

These are the Emperors of Reality, the Saviours of Humanity.

The palaces have grown over time, like everything in the Cities. Wings, walls, complexes, sub-palaces, theatres, hidden towers and ritual mazes. Thaumaturgic observatories and memorial tombs. Frozen planar gates, kitchens, servant-caste micro-towns, lost oubliettes, armouries, empty training halls, chapels and cathedrals. Secret ways, menageries, aviaries, libraries, swimming baths, aquariums, dancing halls, orchestral pits, surgical theatres, libraries, waiting rooms, ontological generators, meta-cybernetic psycho-conductive control spaces, entropic dampers and toilets. All empty, or nearly empty now. Traversed at fixed intervals by masked paladins, cleaned and maintained or quietly mothballed, shuttered off and left to moulder.

The palaces have eaten their rulers and the lines of the Hierarchs have shrunk inside them like a desiccated nut shrinking in its shell. They are sealed off from the world they struggle to preserve - they know little of it and it knows little of them.  Caked over with ritual, bands of process, laws - layers of rentier Brahmins; whole families and sub-castes whose only purpose is to be slightly more pure than the next ring out, and to transmit a message or communique to the slightly more-pure ring closer in.

Here at the forgotten centre the High Aeth, the Sustainers of Reality, perform their sacred rituals of control, holding back entropy, energising the great machine to force back the Waste, to keep reality Real.

By their Great Working is Yggsrathaal frustrated and Humanity preserved.7

..............................................

Aaand, the Kickstarter has literally only a day left so if you want a mini at (imho) better-than-heroforge levels of rendering and design, then here you go....

Pertuarbo - Identification Through Recognition

Sometimes you feel for a character not because they represent an ideal of the way you could be, or are an engine fuelled by some secret desire or feeling you didn't know you had, or because they fill some role in your complex ever-evolving internal psychodrama, but because they are an autopsy of you, all of your crappy, low level bullshit laid out in front of you as if it was dissected from a corpse.

Look at this angry boi, like a lemon crossed with the end of a battery.

From Wikipedia; "ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame to ones frustration.

The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration.

This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defence mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws.

The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."

and that's why I like Pertuabo, Primarch of the Fourth Legion; Iron Warriors and all-round insanely resentful bitter-ass hyper-talented petulant man-child. Or more accurately, that's why I feel for Pertuabo, he is my worst self, realised, because if one thing defines my shit personality, its ressentiment.

Yes I could probably fix most of my problems.

No, I'm not going to.

Yes I want your respect.

No, I'm not going to ask for it.

Instead I will sit here silently resenting you for not automatically praising me.

Bitterness is the key, and a constant low-level anger mixed with poor self-esteem.

Resentment of beauty.

Resentment of social ease.

As a man probably/possibly somewhere on the aspergers spectrum, in some ways at least. Who's formative years from early teens to late 20's were spent regarded, in physical terms, as a vile thing, (and its pretty much too late for that self-image to somehow get worked out of my system), a kind of perpetually-guttering rage at people who are easily and fluidly social, and at sexual and emotional ease and success, and those who fit neatly into some real-world social context, who have a place in the world, that surrounds them and responds to them, (and if you take all of those, that pretty much includes everyone and everything) I find myself increasingly, and purposelessly, fruitlessly bitter.

I am a bitter man. I feel as if the world is slowly falling away from me and that the nature of society and perceived reality will be increasingly defined by people who's views and intuitions I do not share. Many times when witnessing these conversations I have thought of myself as a man a long way out of time.

Part of this is semi-honourable. The almost perfect synergy between slightly empty agreeableness and being 'marketable', between capital and being nice, so that the rapid reproducability of niceness is supercharged by the amount of money that can be made out of it, and that feeds back into the larger system of industrial cultural production as an accepted standard for behaviour, until the way you act in a board meeting or the way you act in an interview with your boss is simply the way people are supposed to act.

Although, I'm not really angry at nice marketable people for any good reason. I would be vaguely angry at them anyway. I just happen to be (slightly) correct this particular time by chance.

And yes I could probably do something about my loneliness and low-self esteem myself, because these are ultimately internal processes which bleed out into behaviour and the experiential world.

OR!!!

I CAN COVER MYSELF IN ENDLESS LAYERS OF INCREASINGLY COMPLEX CYBERNETIC ARMOUR!

AND BUILD A GANG OF SHIELD-BEARING MASSIVE IRON MURDER-BOTS WHICH ARE SLAVED *DIRECTLY TO MY WILL*!!!

Nothing will hurt me if I am surrounded by robots

AND BUILD A GIANT STEEL LABYRINTH WHICH I CAN CARRY AROUND TO LIVE INSIDE AND ENDLESSLY RE-COMBINE SO IT IS *IMPENETRABLE!!!!*

IRON WITHIN, IRON WITHOUT MOTHERFUCKERS!

Rififi

(More Patreon castoffs.)

Good news everybody! I got the DVD player on my laptop working, so now more films picked up from the local markets, charity shops and DVD exchange stores will be happening.

Holy shit this is a great film. It's also Patrick catnip, we have a cold, intelligent lo-fi macho man with a gram of honour (maybe half a gram in this one), lots of procedural scenes of men in rooms planning things, some scumbag opera elements and then a thrilling moral vortex at the end.



THE DRAMATIC AXIS OF 'HEISTS'

About plans in films. When was the first 'heist' scene or film and how did it develop? It's a really particular form of drama which builds and pays off in a really particular way. First the formation of the plan and its development, then the central axis of the story when the plan is set into motion, and then the payoff or execution of the plan as the heist takes place.

And the payoff can be played a number of ways, icily cool with a dab of charm as in Rififi, or a slow descent into tragicomic failure and horror as we realise the plan, or the people executing it, weren't that good after all, or an oceans 11 situation where its mainly charm, mild peril and a sheen of cool.

But the state of mind and the sources of drama when experiencing 'the heist'. First a great collection of seeds or objects of thought, of strong, specific problems which must be overcome, and scenes of people outright just thinking in which the main drama comes from seeing a bunch of people in a room trying to solve a problem.

But the exact nature of 'the plan' itself must be partially occluded. Because during the execution of the heist, there have to be moments of revelation and understanding on the part of the audience where we go "ah ha, that's why they needed that particular specific tool or idea, it was to solve this problem".

But if the entirety of the plan and its intentions had been laid out before us as it was pictured in the minds of the criminals, then there would be none of that particular kind of surprise, so there have to be things they know that we do not.

And, depending on the heist film, there can be elements we, the audience know about, that the criminals do not.

Rififi only has one of these I think. Towards the end of the heist a pair of bicycle cops turn up by happenstance and see a stolen car the criminals have used and this throws a wrench into their plans, (but isn't actually the element that brings them down).

So maybe Rififi is unusual in that its exchanging of knowledge between the audience and the planners, the agents, is almost completely one-way, they always know more than us, or they do _during the heist_ at least.

Anyway, - the manner in which the drama of Heists pays off is that the mind of the audience is asked, or required to range in time over the projected future and rememberd past. And yes this is true of all stories to some extent but here it happens in a really specific and detailed way.

During the planning, scouting and building part, where the agents are working with a plan visible to them but partially occluded to us, the mind of the audience ranges forwards in time; why do they need this particular thing, why do they seem to regard this small detail with unusual importance, why are they worried about this and why do they require these particular resources. We are *shown* the field of action, often in detail, sometimes in the imagination of the agents. Everything says "this is the field where things will happen, these are the times when things will happen, these are the threats"

(I wonder if you could do an abstract three act play that was purely about putting on a three act play? As in, the first act or scene was them planning the second act, the second was them trying to enact it, and the third was them responding to the second act.)

Then the action itself is made up of all these elements, some points of drama we understand from the beginning. In Rififi Tony and the gang know the place they are robbing has a top of the line alarm system (futurism, a little peek of sci fi) and they have to think and think of what to do about it. They develop a counter but we don't know if that counter is really going to work, so that is an axis of drama the audience knows about.

(The alarm system during the heist, and the way its described, shot and built up, makes it the prime 'enemy' of that part of the film. It's just a fucking box, but the scenes in which they try to foil a pre-prepared version and the alarm goes off again and again and again, and the final solution, muffling its 'mouth' with foam, and then the scene in the heist where Tony approaches it, and this utterly cold unflappable man is clearly nervous as shit like he isn't even during the physical threats of the film, all of that makes this box a kind of Minotaur. It is the monster in the maze and it is shown as such.)

And there are elements where we only half-know why they are important, like the flower delivery and the chronometrics of the street outside. And we know they talked about the people living over the store but were weren't told explcity that these people were going to be assaulted, gagged and tied up. Which is an opening piece of brutality and real unpleasantness from our agents, who we have been with the whole film.

And then there are elements which seem entirely new. Like the rubble falling from the hole in the roof which might set off the alarm, but don't worry, they predicted that and brought an umbrella on a rope which catches the rubble. So that's a little piece of 'false' drama, where it wasn't really going to be a problem but we felt like it was.

And the silent enactment of the theatre of the heist is made up of all these little fragments of drama and tension woven together in a patterning, so that known and predicted threats with hoped-for solutions are mixed in with half-described threats where we get to see what the solution will be, and with entirely new (to us) threats which the team predicted, and then with a single threat, at the end, the bicycle cops, new to both us and the agents, where we have to see them (or Tony in particular) work out how to deal with it.

A lot of the other heist films I've seen feel like pale or comic-booky (in a bad way) imitations of this. With more and bigger threats and technically larger drama, but less precision, invention, feeling, exactness, sense of life and carefully patterned drama.





HUMANITY AND THE CRIMINAL CULTURE

This is a really intensely human film. There are only good performances in here. One film that this really reminds me of and which was shot about the same time I think, is The Blue Lamp, an Ealing Police/Social Drama film set in post war london and following the cops on their daily rounds with the drama of dealing with one particular criminal.

That film is like a light mirror to this one and I could imagine a character from Rififi crossing over to appear in The Blue Lamp. But like Rififi that is set in a ruined, or very poor postwar city (we see the bomb sites in London, though the city in Rififi looks relatively unscathed), with lots of industrial spaces, and it is an in-depth look at and valourisation of (to an extent) a particular largely-male subculture with its own rituals, uniforms and codes of behaviour. They even both have musical numbers in the middle, Rififi has a cabaret act which acts like one of those scenes-within-scenes in Renaissance Chivalric poetry where a tapestry or something briefly forms a sub-world, in this case giving the code of machismo that rules the criminals world, and the Police have a choir they sing in.

But all the roles and all the criminals and all the 'dames' who wait at home for them, covering for them, lying for them, loving them and resenting them, all of these are incredibly well acted and they all pop with such vibrancy and depth and livingness.

(Also its interesting to see that the stereotype for Italians is the same in France as it is here in the U.K.)

And this adds hugely to the film and is one of the things that makes it a watchable scumbag opera - that these people, who are verifiably bad, and probably Tony, the main character, is the worst of all the 'heroes' are so deeply emphatic and you really feel for them. And they have their good qualities and their codes which they keep to. So when bad things happen, it pulls you in. All of this humanity is like barbed hooks on the story making it hard to look away. You fall in love with all these people a little bit, which is a hell of a trick to play.


And Tony, in particular, the main guy, this person who if you were to tilt the camera or the moral axis of the film just a little would be this totally unsympathetic monster, who essentially fucks up the lives of everyone around him through the course of the movie by pulling them into his vortex of despair because the one person he wants doesn't love him. Who, when asked what he's going to do with the big score they just made, which they risked *everything* to get, just replies "I don't know". Because he won, and he's still not happy. The whole heist, the whole thing for him was just an auto-reaction to not being loved and to being alone and an attempt to regain some power over the world.

There are lots of these very macho films where the dominant undercurrent, the mood music you don't really feel in any particular scene but which comes to dominate the film, is this deep feeling of sadness, isolation and tragedy, with a bit of gothic doom. It's a very male-feeling emotion in these films.

Like Robocop - "Murphy had a wife and child .... I can feel them but I can't remember them."

And Rififi has a very Scorsasi-like mixture of valoruisation and condemnation of this culture of machismo. The long axis of the film says no, this is bad and tragic and destroys everything around it to no useful end, but the individual elements, the moments, all say yes this is some pretty cool shit.

We live in a dignity culture (for the most part) that evolved, or changed from an honour culture, and we have a fetishistic attraction/repulsion towards the remnants or ruins of that culture living in our own, like legacy dna in a cell. So there are a lot of these elements in our fiction, like the Klingons in Star Trek, we have these proud warrior races and these gangster cultures and these occasional knight stories and the thing of them all is that they live within these honour cultures which are counterpoised and in conversation with our own, enfolding, dignity culture.


It just occurs to me that a movie, or any kind of story is like a scam job where, if you fall for it, you actually get the money.

So the story is like a huckster saying hey hey come over here, care about these characters, take a look at their world, sense these objects, _this is something you can believe in_.

And if you do go over, and you do believe, if the scam works, strangely, you can get exactly what was promised.

Robin, Zorro, Batman

More crap from my dead Patreon, a bunch of very-rapidly-written comments on films.

Disneys Robin Hood

A strange thing seeing this film is that as I watched I realised we had it on VHS when I was very young and at that age I watched the shit out of this film.

I knew I had seen it before but as I observed I understood that I was deeply, insanely familiar with every single element of the film, I even recognised the line of animation on Sir Hiss (he's drawn a little ragged with pencil strokes shooting off his curves as if he were covered with fur, I can't tell if this is a deliberate aesthetic choice, a mistake or a corner-cutting thing like a lot else in this film).

Anyway, TLDR; animation-wise; Eh. Character animation is charming and little of it is actively bad but staging and general visuals clearly could have been addressed with more attention.

Voices; wonderful.

Story; solid.

As part of the Robin Hood Legendarium; respectable.

Its introduced with Alan-a-Dale as a Rooster Balladeer, and he tells us this is the animal version of the story, which they tell themselves.

The narrator-in-story and the explicit callout to the balladic nature of the thing was something I thought worked really well and fit with the whole Robin Hood thing. I could have done with more of that.

The Robin-Little John relationship is great and the intro starts perfectly with this segue from the sung to the acted to full-drama. You could do that a lot more and use sung narrative sections more thoroughly to move through the 'text' (fuck you Derrada).

Another element is, becasue its a kids film, Robin is kinder than in many others and we follow the children about acting out 'the adventures' of Robin Hood from their perspective. So its described as a story, and the legendary quality of the story is re-described from a childs point of view from inside the tale.

And at one point friar tuck tells Robin and Little John "One day you will be seen as great heroes", and part of  the film is a kind of reputational attack on Prince John, it even gets a song, "The Phoney King of England", so this kind of imagined justice-across-time in which Disney and other balladeers are delivering what the characters really deserve in the eyes of history, valour and greatness for Robin, and eternal shame for John, so the story itself becomes and agent of justice, is interesting.

It only striked (strook?) me now how rarely you see Robin alone in any filmed version. He always has a BFF or group to talk to and perform for. I suppose this must be true of many characters but the Robin & Pal walking through the forest theme is a strong one in the lighter and more hopeful versions.

Huge props to the voice casting and the Voice acting. Story takes place in a kind of nebulous accent-world split between English voice actors and southern-states U.S. voices and they mix together really well.

Peter Ustinov and Terry Thomas as Prince John and Sir Hiss are fucking GREAT. I had so much fun with those characters and the vocal performances were riiiippe peaches to pluck.

John is really into gooold, and has a mother fixation, which is a trip because in the Ridley Scott Hood his mother is Elenor of Aqintane, who is an aging badass in that film, so that's a weird relationship repetition.

Phil Harris as Little John is maybe the grooviest merry man ever and comes out with some wild lines "Begone long one", "My esteemed royal sovereign of the realm, the head man himself.. you're beeaaautiffuulll"

And these are maybe the merriest merry men since the Flynn version.

It's also fully about taxes and poverty since being too into gold is one of the few dark traits you can safely give a Disney villain without it getting too psychological.

Anyway, I love this film and I have no idea if its because its actually good or if it just burned itself so deep into my child brain that it created, in-vitro, the Robin Hood obsession I am currently acting out, thereby leading me back, Ouroboros-fashion, to the point at which it began.

Robin and Marion

Sean Connory is really brown in this film.

He's pretty brown the rest of the time but you don't really process it until you see it here.

This is a really good film which I absolutely did not_understand when I saw it as a child on T.V. Its maybe the only Robin Hood film I know of that addresses the sad coda to the legend in which everyone seems much more human. And this film is only about that time, its a pure elegy.

In some ways its a weird mirror to Ridley Scotts version. They both start at the siege in France at which Richard was killed and make Robin one of his men. They both have Robin pissing off Richard, being sentenced to death and then being saved by his death, and the both have Robin being pissed off at the stuff he did in the Crusades. This film and the Scott versions are the only ones in which Robin directly describes the massacres he took part in.

They both have magnificent feral kings. Richard Harris's King Richard might just have the edge over Danny Hustons. Here he has a close, nightmarish shadow-friendship with Robin that strongly indicates some depth of mutual feeling and the slow spiralling into horror that took place over it. Richard really has to kill Robin because he is a mirror to the kind of man he used to be, or could have been, before he went full Deus Vult. Robin is too good a man to be around him now and his presence is agony.

Richard dies in Robins arms and then its back off to Sherwood.

Medieval Combat - You can tell a lot about the moral aesthetic of a history film in the first few moments of its depiction of combat. Medieval stuff ranges from pseudo-modern action movie stuff like Ironclad and GoT, to painterly, like the Ridley Hood and the Cromwell film, to Gilliam/T.H.White, where everyone looks like a bit of a tit.

Robin and Marion is somewhere between the painterly and Gilliam. The first shot is of two men in bucket helms trying to dig a heavy stone out of sand and load it in a Trebuchet. Their big helmets bang together. The film makes quite a bit of mileage out of big helmets and difficult armour. Its not quite comedic but it does take advantage of them to de-glamorise its less liked and less primary characters. Scale male spikes and pricks like the real thing, big helms swallow the face.

(I think this is the closest that most films come to how it would be to actually watch medieval combat, simultaneously Giliam-esqu ridiculous but also intensely violent and serious and somewhat cool.)

Robin, Marion and the Sheriff all get to look a little cooler, but they hold reasonably close to a pseudo-medieval aesthetic.

There's almost no King John. He's Derek Jacobi in this and has one scene. He's pretty good. Also he has a pre-teen wife who he's eager to bone. What the hell was up with the 70's and Ebophilia, damn there's a lot of it in that decade.

The main villain is the Sheriff, though the least likeable element is the Norman Lord sent to mess with the Sheriff and make sure he gets Robin Hood.

I'm discounting the Alan Rickman version when I say this, because aesthetically and behaviourally, I think he was definitely playing 'Prince John' even though he was technically the Sheriff. But I think this is the only version I have seen where Nottingham is the main antagonist and the fuller, deeper character of the opposing side.

Robert Shaw just does a really amazing job portraying this careful, calm, meticulous and deeply tired and pissed-off beyond pissed-off state functionary. He has the mixture of coldness, competence and tacit honour and empathy that I tend to like in a character a great deal.

His Sheriff is educated and can read and write, which is why he's been passed over for advancement by the Norman Aristocracy. The class (and, at this time, nearly quasi-race/ethnicity) differences are something that only really comes up in Walter Scott.

This is a guy who is very good at is job, is trapped in the same role he has always been in, not really kind, but not evil or abusive either, has some respect for his men, doesn't like fucking up, gives an impression of deep inner tiredness, like he has played this level on the video game many times and seen how it goes. He's continually low-level irritated with the Norman aristocrat he's saddled with and is completely aware that he can't beat Robin Hood tactically, the only way to do it is psychologically.

There are lots and lots of scenes of people running about doing adventure stuff and Shaws Sheriff just calmly watching to see how things will go. A surprising scene after Robin carves his way out of a trap, killing his guards, he quickly does ruthless triage on the wounded, "you can save this one, these two are gone", then kneels by the corpse of his soldier "I should have taught you better".

The tactical running-around part of the plot is brought to an end by the Sheriff essentially bating Robins ego and narcissism. These are his weaknesses in every story.

Robin rides out to fight him, unwisely, and they have a very pseudo-accurate Mallorian knights duel. When you have two guys with chainmail and straight-edged blades, on foot, they do indeed, as Mallory says 'trace and traverse near two hour'. There is a huge amount of slashing and minor wounds inflicted until one gets sloppy due to fatigue and the other goes for a foign, a piercing blow, which seems to be pretty much the only way to end one of these things.

(Oh and all of this is filmed in France or Spain or somewhere, which, does it fuck look anything like the U.K. but it definitely does look medieval, with all the buildings and roads etc)

That's the guy stuff over with, but this is one of the few Robin films thats rather ambivalent about guy stuff.

Even right from the start there are strong themes of violence being pointless, stupid, ridiculous and vile. Robin and Richard break up because Richard wants a castle stormed to get the treasure he thinks is inside. Robin won't do it as its only women and old men inside and he thinks there is no treasure. (There isn't, its a rock buried in a Turnip field).

Richard dies to a single arrow, as in history.

The whole thing about re-awakening the old feud and battle between Robin and the Sheriff is simultaneously kind a cool but underneath it both men know that its pointless and self-destructive. It's just that neither of them really wants a way out. They lack whatever it is that lets you imagine another life.

The relationship with Marion is the core of the film, which, typical for me, I didn't bring up until now.

The tenderness and sadness and joy of the relationship between Robin and Marion is really the heart of the film and makes it the most grown-up Robin Hood film (so far at least). These are two people who were passionately into each other as near-teenagers, and since then, as far as we can see, their emotions have been in some sense, on-hold.

Or they literally became different people and lived different entire lives and are now back in contact with only the memory  of a very distant love between them and neither of them really know if the memory is real or if they would still feel that way about the person they find. But they do.

So its lovely but its also tragic and horrific. When Robin basically ran out on Marion back in the day she ended up trying to off herself, screwed that up and ended up in a Nunnery.

It's very clear, and only becomes more clear as the story goes on, that Marion really, really _really_ lived Robin and that he seriously fucked her up in a variety of ways, without ever really realising, and especially when he fucked off to the crusades. When he comes back he 'saves' her, by force, from the Sheriff.

It's not really clear that him saving her is materially much better than what would have happened to her anyway. But they are back together now and all the old emotions boil up to the surface.

And its beautiful but also terrible because a mixture of the socio-political situation and Robins ingrained personality means he can only really do one thing - fight injustice, regardless of whether its practical or not, regardless of whether he can win or not. Its a mixture of genuine idealism and decency and some narcissism and hunger for death and violence. He's just going to keep doing it, no matter how old he gets. And Marion knows this, and knows this will slowly take him to pieces both psychically and probably morally as well, and she is much more aware of time than he is and unable to live in his fiercely maintained delusion of youth.

So in the last scene, after Robin has been utterly sliced to shit by the Sheriff, and as the small force of people he put together in the Greenwood is being cut to pieces by armoured men at arms, Marion quickly and efficiently poisons both of them.

And the final part is Robins rage against his betrayal, followed by understanding and acceptance, and then the Last Arrow.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Watched this over two nights finishing last night.

The 90's were a warm time. Thinking about it, its surprising how much there was in there about families and family bonds.

Robin broke up with his dad and comes back to find him dead, is pretty hung up about it - fam.

Robin promised his childhood friend and now war buddy and also p.o.w that he will look after his sister, Maid Marain - friend.

Meets Morgan Freeman in prison, & then escapes with him - new friend.

Oh, Morgan Freeman was in love with a woman who is now dead, I suspect, another thing I didn't notice as a child is that Morgan Freeman family are dead and that is why he wont dishonour them by breaking his oath and why hes willing to go of to the edge of the world with Robin.

Old Duncan who helped raise Robin and then watched his dad die, got blinded and is upset - famly/retainer.

Marion is King Richards cousin - family.

Little John brings his family along and they are main characters, we meet his Son first, and his wife has a meaningful speaking & acting role later.

Morgan Freeman helps deliver Little Johns baby son after a dangerous pregnancy and so teaches Friar Tuck not to be racist - family/friendship.

There's no King John in this, but Alan Rickman fills the role, like, to a fucking intense degree. He's probably the most 'Prince John' character ever on screen, more even than Commodus from Gladiator. Anyway, Guy of Gisbourne is his cousin and gets referred to as 'Cuz' all the time. - Family.

Alan Rickman outright tells a little girl he never knew his parents and had a terrible childhood in a scene which as an adult I think might have the slight inference of rape about it, anyway - Negafamily.

Alan Rickman has a Crone witch who acts as a kind of evil loco Parantis, she refers to his blood as 'our' I think - evil family.

Will Scarlett, who hates Robin, turns out to be his half-brother, Robin destroyed *his* family as, being a 12 year old he didn't like his dad banging a peasant after his mum died, but Robin accepting Will and being happy he has a brother is a big deal in the film - family.

Ends on the wedding, not the sad epilogue, and fucking SEAN CONNERY comes back for one scene with the big Water Crane Richard Reveal, even though he hasn't been that much of a presence in the story, and it still works? He gives Marion away in the wedding as a kind of superdad.

I'm wondering if I've missed any.

Oh yeah there's a really intense near-rape scene in the end of the film which holy fuck you would not get today. It plays pretty good though. Another thing I didn't notice is there is a weird joke there where Alan Rickman is in the middle of trying to rape Marion and his crone makes him stop for a second so she can put a pillow under Marions head.

Oh I think I kinda developed a crush on the Witch through my watching of this.

That's, how many?

Morgan Freemans dead family.
The Royal Family, with Marion in, that Nottingham is trying to rape his way into.
The Locksley family who are all ded but for Robin, but hey! He has a brother!
Nottinghams dead evil or witchy negafamily (oh, he kills his cousin in this).
The Little family.

So there are four to five family structures interacting in this film.


Alan Rickmans performance and Kevin Costners performance are both really interesting, in different ways.

This is maybe one of the all time great Rickmans, every single tone and moment is just perfect, almost everything he does is funny and at the same time he actually feels dangerous, despite the fact that through almost all of the film all he does is lose.

Kevin Costner - this is some wierd shit. like, he's almost terrible and its near distracting and you could build a very strong argument that the film is good in spite of him. His tonality is all over the place and he's really not charismatic at all.

Or is he? You still want to watch him after all. He does feel like the star of the film, even if not a very bright star. It's strange.

Absolutely everyone else is fucking golden in this. All of the minor characters are on point, except for one guard who says "A leper, what?" but that's the only really dud performative note in the film, and whatever Kevin is doing of course.

Unsung hero - Micheal Wincott as Guy of Gisbourne, someone who's whole job is to go back and forth between Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman and make them both feel like dangerous badasses until Alan kills him. He does it brilliantly.


DEVIL WORSHIP

It's not about taxation. It's not about Prince John. People are plotting against King Richard but only really comes out towards the end.

So why is Nottingham so bad?

He literally worships THE DEVIL. And hangs out with people dressed as the KKK/Death Eaters and has a fucking WITCH. The end scene even has an upside down crucifix and a pentangle. That's how you get a Middle American audience on-side right away, the baddys are DEVIL WORSHIPPERS (and also cruel to the poor plus freedom and stuff).



SOCIAL FUCKING JUSTICE TO FUCK

The Robin/Azeem relationship, and the way it was acted, works really really well.

It doesn't necessarily make much sense, but it works on the hearts of the Audience, and Robin Hood is a commoners ballad so ok.

Marion dressing like a man and fighting is in at least one of the historical ballads. In this, Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio is really good. Since she is allowed to be both brave and afraid, she feels more human than most of the main cast. She also gets to kill a guy with a chicken on a stick.

Man its gotta be awkward when Richard sets eyes on Azeem at the end.

One person is directly racist/prejudiced in the film and they learn their lesson over one scene.



NOT MAKING SENSE

Despite me, and other reviewers being snide about it in the past, most of the things that don't make sense about this also don't make sense in the ballads. Here Robin goes from the cliffs of Dover to Hadrians wall to sherwood forest in a day, but the ballad robin had some late-series game of thrones teleport shit going on and would pop up wherever also.

Nottingham having a time machine to fetch Pagan celts from, the age of migration? They would be christian. Pre-roman britian? Ok. And then unleashing them on Robin doesn't seem that awful.

Azeem can auto-generate barrels upon barrels of gunpowder in a forest in a handful of hours, in middle ages britian. Likewise you can forge swords in the forest without too much trouble, you just need a montage.



This was a good film, and a very warm film. There are questions here about what 'good' is, because this film has a lot of dumb elements which stick out and you can't help but think they are gauche. But if you look at it, there are a really large number of well made but dimly sensed things operating under the surface, like the family stuff I wouldn't have noticed unless I had sat down and thought about it, and the collapsing of space and time into legendary space and time as the film goes on is arguably 'stupid' as it moves away from pseudo-reality and so doesn't make sense. But it WORKS, and the film flows. And for all the weird fucking accents and shit the performances all work and are allowed to work. So I think this is actually a very well made film which also happens to be gauche. And all the warping of history and circumstance is actually pretty standard and traditional for the Robin Hood canon.

Americans are always irritating when they say things should have 'heart' because it sounds basic as shit, but in art even feeling is a made thing, its just made invisibly, and warmth is a low-status feeling which is actually hard to examine because it is felt dully and comes from the body, but if you take time to regard it, warmth has skill and thought behind it, as well as life and vigour, so when we say something is 'fun' we should probably show it more respect because most things aren't.

Robin Hood 2010 by Wiggly Scott

I'm 90 per cent sure that Ridley Scott is into some serious woo-woo.

Every frame of this film looks like fucking visual poetry, like raw fucking cinema jammed into your eyeballs. You could screenshot at literally any moment and send it like a postcard.

Its a baaaaaaad story. Its about three stories and one of them is about Masons trying to save the world. It's trying to be pseudohistory, and it looks fucking amazing, if you send Ridley Scott in a time machine to the 12th century or whenever and let him make everyone get into rows so they made a nice shot, it looks like that.

But its dumb as a pig underneath and the fact that its trying to be a gormet burger movie really, and slowly, hurts it because the machinery underneath is silly.

Russel Crowe is a super tuff-but-honourable man of the earth who just works at a job murdering people. Danny Huston is a great king Richard, they are in France killing people.

The kings and nobility in this are largely really good. They feel of the time and embedded into the world, like, they often havent shaved and are clearly trapsing around generally pissed off with each other. But they have a kind if feral regality that comes through in the acting and the mis-en-scene. Hustons Lionheart is like this, the French king has it too and then Prince/King John has it. It's that mid point between age of migration nutter-with-a-sword and Luis the 14th prancing about Court Kings, they feel like they could maybe deck you but they feel royal.

Robin proves his honesty in an ill-advised way, not only is he the only murderer with a heart of gold there but he feels super bad about the crusades. So mark two for that trope.

Richard dies! Pretty fast, so that's a MAJOR element of most RHood stories just gone.

And then its politics.

Like every other RHood film was legendary, this one, like the Phantom Menace, is genuinely about war and taxation, and premature nationalism, and democracy and the masons?

So the first film is Robin finding the body of posh Robert Locksley and agreeing to take his sword home to his dad who he had a bad relationship with (fathers & sons, strike 1 for that), and then he goes back to Nottingham and fakes being Robert with consent so Maid Marion his wife doesn't have to lose the castle.

Thats one story.

Then there's Prince (now King) John being a tit.

And evil french king guy hires Mark Strong to betray eng-er-land so the French can invade.

But King John is useless, Richard was a warmonging murdering idiot, soooo, would it really be that bad if the French King invaded?

In this yes because his main guy is played by Mark Strong and all his dudes are super rapey and purposlessly evil so you know the French are baddys.

And then at the end Robin Hood, who's not even pretending to be Locksley any more, is allowed to lead a whole army and fight the French and kills Mark strong with a arrow and cinematography.


(Cate Blanchett is a great actress and I like seeing her on screen doing all kinds of stuff but there are two things I think I never feel looking at her, one is any sexual tension between her and anyone else on screen, like I never get that 'oohhhhh, they gonna fuccck' feeling. *I* had that feeling, looking at Hela in Ragnorock, but that was between me and the character. The other is any real sense that she is in danger. Blanchetts seems, somehow invulnerable? There are two 'threatening marion' scenes, one light peril and one super-rapy, but I got no sense in either of them that anything bad might actually happen to Cate. I mean what are they gonna do to her? She'll just knock them out right?)

And *then*, there's the shit where Robin Hoods dad was like a proto-mason? Like a reformer of some kind who thought kings needed permission to rule? And robin saw him die and had trauma, and Robert Locksleys dad max von sydow, and William Hurt, playing William Marshall (maybe the only actual good guy in that real history - PERFECT KNIGHT BOOOIII) were his bff's.

And Robin, by chance, ends up meeting up with these people, and pretending to be Robert for them. And it turns out he gets his suppressed memories back. And they are all part of this secret political movement, who are basically the masons, or like, chartists? And this is like a freedom thing? And they make King John sign Magna Carta for freedom and to beat the french and this is the fulfilment of Robins dads dream?

That is some wieeerd shit. It might be ok in a more bullshitty film, like mel gibson shouting Freeeeedooooom! But this at least looks like real history, the film takes quite a bit of effort to make us feel like we are there. And I like Magna Carta, its pretty great, but its not the declaration of independence or the rights of man or anything. The politics of that time are really nothing like those of ours. And all the English nationalism, I mean most of these people would be different breeds of franco-norman speaking french amongst each other no matter where they were.

So, yeah, Ridley Scott is probably a Mason?

And then there is the Greenwood where Cate Blanchett is doing social work with some feral orphans who wear these really creepy green-man masks.

Oh and thers Robins men, his war buddies who are the merry men, there is a lot of that.

There is one greenwood scene where Robin does a robbery, it feels like Ridley put it in because he felt like he had to, but its kinda clogging up the film(s) he wanted to make which were about Cate Blanchett, 12tch century military stuff and masons conspiring to save the world.

I'm pretty sure he actually believes some form of the Von Danekin stuff from the new Alien movies too.

Its strange how he can be simultaneously highly skilled and intelligent but also kinda fucked in the head. I think his wierd history and politics ideas are part of the reason his more recent films are, really well made and incredibly CINEMA, but also dumb? They have a point to make and the point is usually wrong.

Oscar Isaac has great fun being Prince/King John, he has all the funny lines and, maybe the best actual beard of any John. And again we have the peculiar aspect of the character, repeated in every version, that he is kinda craven and manipulative, but not a coward, he will actually fight when it comes down to it, and even seems to enjoy it.

And he is the first Hottt John I have seen (unless you are into Rickman), he got that bod goin on! And has loads of scenes where he and Lea Seydoux are being perved up and its pretty great.

Max Von Sydow is great to be around, even Mark Addy is good. The Sherriff is a nonentity in this.

Cate gets her marion dressing as a man to fight scene, but she almost doesn't need it? There's not great cinematic inversion or feeling of 'whooo, marion can fight' because its Cate and you largely felt she could fuck someone up already.

Mark Strong gets a lot out of being bald and evil. His baldness is a highlight and he is extremely evil. I didn't really feel any depth of connection between the adversarial relationship between him and robin. Like most things in the film he is just there, looking great. Like a table with a bunch of random but beautiful objects on it.

Its strange what quality is in a story. If you measured this purely by its parts, it would be the best RObin hood film evar. There are no individually duff notes. Everything done is done beautifully and with skill. It's visual poetry. But its dumb as a post and there' barely any story there.

Compare to Prince of Thieves which is full of questionable bits but fucking hits you with story and feeling and every scene connects and flows, meaning piling up into the next, even though the details are dumb.

The Mark of Zorro

1940 I think, with Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone

I also loved this movie.

I found the missing link between Robin Hood and Batman. (This is very nearly a B&W remake of the technicolour Flynn Robin Hood from two years earlier).


Robin Hood Elements

EVIL TAXATION - baddy is mainly into over-taxing peasants and hero is against this.

Round and Long - Craven round-faced scheming villain backed by Basil Rathbone playing his tall, long-faced super-tough and macho nearly-as-good-as-the-hero lancer.

Basil Rathbone! Well, he was only in the Flynn Hood, but he is utterly wonderful here. His fencing scene with Tyrone Power is fucking legendary. The movement is so much better than anything seen in any recent film.


.........................

Brief interruption on movement in 40's and 50's film.

- Camera stays back & moves minimally. You see the *entirety of the body*, including the vital shifting of the weight through the feet.

- Both actors can really fucking move, as in they can perform those actions in real life. This is utterly different to the art of disguise practised in most other cinema.

- Its really more like Hong Kong 90's cinema in the way it addresses movement.

- They both feel incredibly lithe and active even in scenes when they are not doing physical stuff.

There is a dance scene in the film which is exactly as good.
..........................


Ok back to more Robin Hood/Zorro similarities

Hero is a glam son of the nobility helping out the peasants.

Friar Tuck figure, here is, well pretty much exactly the same guy only spanish, I think he may even be played by the same person.

Simultaneous restoration of order and of social justice. Hey, you know those two things humans like most, stability and equity? Well it turns out you can have them both *at the same time* with no complications! In Robin Hood this is accomplished by the distant King Richard who represents both at the same time, and in Zorro it is Zorro's dad, the old *good* governor who got kicked out.





Batman Elements

Instead of wearing green with an open face, the hero has a masked, all-black attire which he dons to battle the forces of oppression. There is no Greenwood in Zorro so instead, the Greenwood disappears inside the personality of the character.

Like Batman, Zorro disguises himself, not so much by the indecipherability of his alter-ego, but by changing the perception of his real self. In society he acts the vain, femme, ridiculous fop, while *in reality*, a secret we, the audience are in on, he is the super tough and extremely heroic and brave (also principalled) masked adventurer.

The Scarlet Pimpernel did this, and I think there may have been people before that.

So we get that strange energy produced by the heroic figure not living up to his social role in the sight of the world by having a secret power and hidden nobility (but no-one must know!). Here Zorros's dad thinks he is a vain flibbergibbet and is totally disappointed in him, until the last act when boom, he reveals his true heroic self.

Tyrone Power looks like he is really enjoying being a ridiculous fop in this film and it shows.

Batman has a super-fast black car that gets him in and out of patrolled urban centres quickly and easily, outrunning the pursuing forces of corrupt order in the night. Zorro has a super-fast black horse that does the same thing.

They have a Special Sign. Batmans is used to summon him, Zorro's is something he leaves behind.






Purely Zorro Stuff

Neither Batman or Robin Hood make sword fighting their Main Thing. Robin does sword fight a lot in the ballads and at the end of many of the films but its not exactly a signature weapon.

Zorro is a main excellent fencing dude, its the thing he does best and the thing he always does. His special sign is made from the slashing of a blades tip.

Class Stuff - Robin and Batman are both distaff members of the ruling class but also pretty alienated from it. Zorro, in this film at least, is much more a fully integrated member of the ruling group. We see him first off in spain, hanging with other toffs, then at home he wears magnificent clothes (in his persona as a fop, but also just generally) amidst poverty. He hangs out with his posh family and meets with other poshos.

The end scene is something unlike either Batman or Robin Hood. All the landowners are summoned to see Zorro hang, the peons are protesting outside the compound at the same time. Zorro breaks out and reveals himself to his dad and the other landowners.

Then the rich and the poor effectively team up in a big riot to kick out the bad, corrupt ruler and his troops. Which I don't think has ever happened in real life, and was fucking nuts, but was also quite nice.

The clothes are fucking Maaaaagnificent. Maybe not as good as hollywood technicolor feudal english costumes, but really fancy as shit.

Zorro is also Catholic and Latinoooooooo. Compared to the pre-reformation Robin and the extremely waspy batman. Both of whom are right in the centre of anglo normative masculinity.

Now, this is a positive-to-Latinos film from 1940 in which all the Latinos are played by Anglos, (including the most english mexican ever in Basil Rathbone), so basically your tolerance or opinion may vary. But *relative to its age* and its intended audience and the social circumstances around it the spirit of the thing is an open one. So if you don't like the strange chocolate box version of Latino historical culture then fine but that dance scene is still fucking amazing and the bit with everyone singing in the church with not-friar-tuck is really cool.

The Burton Batman

I got to see this at the Cinema for anniversary thing. There were not many people in there.

The Gotham sets they built for this were fucking beautiful Maybe the most Gothamest Gotham you ever did see.

It just feels really different to CGI, everything has this dirty tactility. Nearly but not-quite comic-booky.

Man Micheal Keaton is a strange Batman. We only really get this after seeing a shitload of other Batmen and seeing how a bunch of different people do it, but what on earth is Keaton doing. He's maybe the most normal Batman, he's like a guy who just happens to be Batman on the side but mainly is a normal guy.

The scene where he nearly but not quite tells Kim Basinger that he's Batman is really sweet.

He is also the most alarmingly static Batman in terms of movement. Keaton is not really an action hero, especially not by modern standards and that suit won't flex *at all* so a lot of Batmans fight scenes are other people moving and him not doing much, or only doing one thing. Which actually isn't that bad an idea for a fighty hero. There are a whole bunch of (ok, two) scenes where a kung fu henchman is introduced and does some wild expressive theatrical kung fu moves and Batman just punches him, or has a wierd wrist extendy thing that hits him in the nuts. It's like the film is making fun of the idea of movement a little.

You can do a *lot* with mildly dutched angles, shadows, smoke and deep focus. A lot of the best shots in this are more visible in the Cinema than they were on VHS or television and they are pretty strong and pretty simple. Often these mildly expressionist conversations with one person in the foreground and another in the background.

There's not actually that much Batman/Bruce Wayne in this. He's really the mystery being investigated by Kim Basenger and reporter guy. In terms of screen time I think its about a third Joker, a third Batman and a third Kim Basinger, which if you did in in a modern version people would say 'more batman' but really Kim Basenger is actually really good  I think in this film, more than I noticed when I saw it back in the day.

Jack Nicolson is much more of a "star" of the show and his Joker is pretty different to a lot of other versions.

He's like a real guy, with a name and a history, and not just a force of chaos. Here he's Jack Napier, hyperviolent mob enforcer who gets betrayed and takes revenge but also goes mad into the bargain.

He's  more directly interested in art and that feels like Nicholson touch. I get the sense for a lot of this that Jack Nicholson is just playing a dark-side Jack Nicholson. He's also much more directly sexual in this, he gets betrayed over banging Jerry Hall, has an unnerving sub-plot with her and his entire interest in Kim Basinger is 90% trying to bone her and 10% Batman. There is a scene in which a mutilated Jerry Hall wears a porcelain mask which scared me as a kid and did a little bit again this time, though when you look at what is actually shown, its very little.

Its wierd when you see the joker who mutilates his girlfriends face and makes her wear a porcelain mask, walk into a gallery and start defacing art after killing nearly everyone there, and then sleazes onto kim basinger in a really rapey way, and you think "damn, I used to work with that guy".

There are lots of weird games with Jokers makeup - he's stained clown-white for real and wears human coloured makeup to blend in, which comes off in dark and amusing ways. Its a much more cinematically interesting version than the Ledger thing where the makeup goes on top of the face.

Also, Joker has waaay more comic-book toys than I've seen in any other film version. I guess Chris Nolan was really *not* impressed with the idea of a flower that shoots corrosive acid or a shock buzzer that really kills people.

And he doesn't really have much of a grand pseudo-philosophical point to make, he just likes murdering people and has fun doing it, and likes being famous, and really hates Batman.

I saw an interview where someone asked Raphe Finnes about what you need to do to play Voldemort;

"You just need to really hate Harry Potter."

Leman Russ is a Chad Primarch

(I had a meltdown due to depression and stupidity and deleted my Patreon. By sheer happenstance I am also currently totally out of imagination and invention. So now you get my Patreon shitposts, which, I am sorry ex-patreons, but at least you didn't get charged right?)


Listening to the Horus Heresy audio dramas on Audible. Leman Russ is one of those characters who, when you seem then through the palimpsest of different writers and books, I have gradually come to despise. He's cool essentially because the writers like to wank over him and in any particular scene they make him look good, but once you see his actions over a long period of time, the momentary charisma wears off and he is gradually exposed as a complete tit.


- Likes to wank himself off over his role as 'executioner' - the only reason its him is because he was the second found, is mindlessly loyal and Horus was busy with grown up shit to do.

- Likes to wank himself off over his role as 'executioner' despite this meaning hes essentially willing to kill his own family (and he does refer to them as Kin in 'The burning of Prospero') even before the Heresy. And he gets mind-wiped after each one it seems.

Seriously, imagine boasting "I'm totally willing to kill members of my own family and positively eager to be mindwiped after doing it!" - that's Leman Russ.

- Own legion is mutated to fuckery as in will actually turn into werewolves, but sees no hypocrisy in wanking himself off over being 'The Executioner' of other Legions for 'being corrupt'.

- Was easily manipulated into the Burning of Prospero and single-handedly lost Mognus to chaos even though Magnus reeeaally didn't want to fuck off to the eye of terror.

- Pulled that crap with Angron where he lost a fight to put Angron in position to lose the battle, hoping to 'teach a lesson', too fucking stupid to realise that he was dealing with a deeply traumatised nihilist and that Angron got his meaning full well, he just didn't care because he fucking hates himself and his own legion.

- Genuinely thinks he can take every other Primarch outside Horus, despite only beating Magnus because he was in the middle of a Schtizo breakdown, only really drawing with Angron, getting knocked out by the Lion. Is he fuck certain to take them all out.

- Keeps his home world as illiterate savages cause it makes his legion 'better', despite that being more hypocritical even than usual for the Great Crusade.

Sacrificed almost all of his Legion (who could have been chilling on Terra, protecting Big-E who Russ supposedly luuurves) in order to stab Horus with a magic stick, once.

- Oh and that time he blundered into a fight the Lion was having during a compliance and, pissed at being left out and not willing to wait for answers, opened, fire, accidentally killing a bunch of 1st legion Astartes, and the Lion didn't even lose his shit with Russ *quite yet*.

- Own legion happily uses Rune Priests despite Russ supporting banning the Librarius at Nikea. He says its ok because they 'come from a tradition', well so do the Khans Stormseers and the Khan (sane motherfucker that he is) supported the Librarius as a good solution. Russ didn't just want no-one to have psykers, he wanted no-one but him INCLUDING the Khan, to have them.

What a complete tool. Russ is a massive chad. He coasts on charisma and a general assumption of his competence despite, when you analyse his record, clearly not being that good.

Ranger

This is one of the shortest ones I did, it seems to work ok though?

..................................................................................................

Wait.

Listen.

Just breathe for a moment.

There, south east, about a mile, a silence in the song.

Following. Can you know that?

It's not random. A hunter or chance traveller would have kicked out bird plough, a scattering of rising birds. This wasn't that.

So it’s something quiet, that moves well. A big cat maybe?

Too close to winter, could one still be roaming around?

Maybe. It's possible.

And following you? Tracking the scent of multiple armed strangers?

Maybe, it it's starving. Wounded maybe. Can't catch anything faster.

But you don't think it’s that.

Somebody once told you that the land speaks to you. It was one of the stupidest things you've ever heard. All you do is pay attention.

It's hard to do though. (And a lot harder if people can't stop making NOISE! How in the Dream of the Gods have your friends survived this long? Stumbling, stamping, snapping twigs, snapping branches even! Coughing, wheezing, gasping, laughing and talking, always talking talking talking, you may as well have brought a bell factory with you.)

Of crucial importance are socks.

Once they get wet, from rain or swamp or sweat, they chafe. You blister. Then they wear through and the blister bursts against shoe leather. Then you are down to two miles in the hour and continual pain.

You can dry wet socks by wearing them on your hands at night, by the time you wake up they are warm again and ready to wear.

Nobody ever brings enough socks, or takes enough care of them.

It's that and water, and not dying of cold. That's all you really need to know.

It's going to try to kill you tonight. Whatever, whoever, picked up your trail at the river (you dried clothes on branches afterwards - thread caught on a branch, you would bet that's how they got you) and it will likely rain tonight, that will dampen the fire, and the spirits. Everyone will want to sleep.

That would be the best time.

Walk.

Don't stop. Don't look back. If you find their sign then they can find yours, (an old rule you learned the hard way).

They will be here, in this spot, in fifteen, twenty minutes. You can't let them see that you stopped, or that you discussed something.

Depends how good they are...

They'll wait, they try to kill the sentry, then attack while everyone sleeps. Over in five minutes if they get it right.

It's good out here, one of the few surviving natural lands. And sad. Those living in cities and valleys think they live in a large world, they only dimly intuit that they are trapped.

The world was vast once. You could start walking and go.. well, anywhere. You could never stop walking if you wanted to. These wild lands, as vast as they are, are but a slim margin of wilderness trapped between the Queendoms, the Cities and the Waste.

As to the depths of the Waste, who can speak of them? Who can survive them?

Some have called you 'Waste Walker' - a crazed phrase. As if there could ever be such a thing in that crawling anti-nature. You have gone deep enough into the margins of nothingness to know that. That bleak un-world is like a book of nonsense verse or an idiots code, read upside-down, changing with each page turned.

Tumbling arcologies of pale smoky glass, swarming hive-fields of mindless pseudo-insects, the live plain piling like the stories of seas, a gloaming dusk-streaked sky that seems to melt like old paint, the roaring of Gogmagogic Name-Takers, swollen to grotesque stupidity with swallowed names, their facile cunning lost, locked together in brutal dominance displays that shatter the Alkali plains into shards like ice with the fury of their rage. You never dreamed they could grow so large.

The maddening Sargasso greyness of the place, and the transverse un-sense of its shadow ecology, can only be survived, not explored. And then only through a combination  of insane hypersensitivity to any imaginable threat along with impulsive and immediate counter-intuitive action.

The Waste plays games with you. You must play back, and do what it cannot expect. If you act too rationally, if you stick too much to any particular plan - then it’s as if a hand moves against you invisibly, out beyond the wreathes of mist and falling ash.

(One day, maybe, you will try the trek to Phosphorfall. Just to see if you can make it. just to see if there is anything beyond. If Uud still lives beyond this small dream.

Here, though, it’s quite pleasant, with only a handful of almost-predictable things trying to kill you.

You will get lost.

Perfect.

"Hand me that drink will you?"

The Deoth looks surprised. You realise you haven't spoken since this morning. You smile.

Where would be best? The crags somewhere. Amongst what the mage calls 'karst', the pillars of white rock. That would be a near-believable mistake to make. Lead them into the karst.

They will follow you in. The hard stone will hide tracks. The pillars will give cover.

And where to be seen making it?

Here is good.

"Wait." You say. And walk a little. Back and forth. Back and forth. A tread here, a mark there. Five, six minutes of lost time.

Lean on this stump and make sure to take of a smear of moss.

Some like you have disappeared from the world of Humanity, walking off into the high country or the deep swamp, surviving on their skills somewhere impossibly distant from the noise and murmur of thinking beings.

You know a few of them. You can see the attraction.

But not you, or at least, not yet. You keep coming back, back to the noise and the stink, the booze and the idiot politics. Why?

You need things, very occasionally, complex or manufactured things, and for those you need coin.

But it is not that alone.

It feels good to be of use.

There are things out here in the wild, things even you cannot avoid or escape, and which even you could not fight alone. More is needed. Not just numbers or bodies but different skills, different thinking.

And it feels good to be needed. These people, clinging to their valleys and their river and stone, sometimes seem almost blind in how they live.

You down the drink in one. They've never seen you drink before and someone makes a joke. Not that city-Aeth with the quick hands though, they might not know you are being hunted but they know trickery when you see it.

You hurl the booze-bottle into the bushes nearby, empty.

"I thought," the Aeth says, "you told us never to leave signs behind?"

"This way." You reply. "We don't have much light left."

"Are we stopping to camp?" Asks the Deoth.

"Yes. But before that, in about thirty minutes, we must kill a silent hunter in a labyrinth of white stone. Then we can eat."

..................................................................

Oh and there's seven days left to go on the Kickstarter and I think there's new stuff on there?