Spectre: A spectacular demolition derby and the new totalitarianism

Not things I do

There are a number of things I will not attempt to do just because I will find myself utterly inadequate to acquit myself well. Dancing to Michael Jackson or Madonna because they have so out-danced us that one might well look like an embarrassing middle-aged dancer (EMAD) whatever you do to their music. Just imagine yourself trying to moonwalk or vogue – don’t try it.

The other is trying to review a James Bond movie, I just can’t whether by plot, by thrill or by feel, and there is just too much going on and as the thrill puts you at the edge of your seat, the overwhelming willing suspension of disbelief.

I was out of town earlier in the weekend, but I had decided to see the latest in this over five decades old movie franchise on an IMAX screen which takes you sound and vision from just watching the movie into becoming a part of the movie itself.

Thrills and destruction

I got my ticket to watch Spectre in a premium seat with somewhat tasteless sweet popcorn and a Pepsi Cola.

It took a while for the plot to develop, from the scene in Mexico of the Day of the Dead festival that started off with James Bond up to spying antics of listening in, shooting down and eventually creating a greater incident of bringing the building down. At which point I was already gripping my seat and kicking about in syncopated excitement, I did not realise I was kicking the lady sat beside me.

One could be forgiven for thinking Spectre was a Demolition Derby, albeit of buildings, and there were three such massive destructions of buildings, interspersed with three thrilling helicopter episodes with all the conflagration that might ensue, there wasn’t much to the torture scene or the gadgetry whilst the violence was moderate to extreme.

The script itself tried to tie together the historical James Bond adventures and I could not help but notice that Daniel Craig was credited as one of the co-producers.

Without giving too much away, the ending tended towards the romantic and James Bond resisting his killing machine instincts.

We have much to fear

In the subplot where politicians and apparatchiks felt that human assets in intelligence work were now outmoded and to be replaced with information surveillance linking the intelligence gathering networks of nine countries and play on The Five Eyes Intelligence Sharing Network and expanded to Nine Eyes.

With the introduction by the UK Home Secretary of the Draft Communications Data Bill more commonly known as the Snooper’s Charter, I will not be surprised if Spectre does not contain a subliminal message to all of us.

The egregiousness of the political elite to invade every recess of our lives on the premise of we being better protected if they can invade our privacy untrammelled with the view to contriving situations that suggest we are in such grave danger that can only be avoided by our ceding more of our liberties to unlimited surveillance.

Quite a lot to fear indeed

More so, the greater danger here is the extent to which politicians will go to obtain the right to trawl through our lives and with that information being stored somewhere, there are powerful and nefarious agencies or organisations will also do anything to gain a front seat and full access to whatever the government has about us.

This Big Brother situation is one we must never allow to become the law of the land, the inch we have already given the government has grown into lightyears of unfettered access, we are tending to totalitarianism in everything but name in a democracy.

This seam has been exploited in our name and in secret, but for the providence of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden that has forced a modicum of accountability into the discourse as to what we can allow democracies to do, yet the government is hardly giving up anything, rather they want to codify their excesses into law and legitimise this abuse of process.

I liked it

I thoroughly enjoyed the film and waited through the credits before leaving because we must after the entertainment spend a few minutes acknowledge the teams that worked together to create such movies and not wait until the Oscars to discover beyond the actors who did what so well that they have been acknowledged by their peers.

I might watch Spectre again, in the company of friends.

Alan Turing: The Imagination Game

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine.” Recurrent quote in The Imitation Game.

Father and victim

In Sackville Park, Manchester sits a statue with a plaque at its feet, one line, less prominent but quite important, "Victim of prejudice." That was a bygone age where the other sexuality was criminalised and with it came the law, heavy and merciless in its application.

Yet, to this man we owe more than we can ever fully appreciate him for. It was his genius that gave birth to the computer.

I type away literally oblivious of the real history of computing that Hollywood has attempted to serve us in film, one that opened in cinema theatres just over a week ago.

Of the film

Interest and engagement have gotten me have viewing The Imitation Game twice already, it is the story of Alan Turing and his work in breaking the encryption of the German Nazi Enigma machine.

One cannot say that the depiction in film is entirely true to the facts especially in the part where Alan Turing might well have been slandered in the film by being accused of being a spy.

The film itself is worth watching, it is interesting, engaging and somewhat plays around the youth, the genius, the sexuality, the persecution and the prosecution of the man, the man who died on the 7th of June 1954.

There is much acknowledgement of his seminal work, honours that have come posthumously and the royal pardon granted from 2013. [Computing Machinery and Intelligence – Turing, A. M. (1950)]

My crazy

This is not a film review, I somehow cannot help myself when I watch films, and I have to find something of the essence of life in the drama and the action.

I liked the line, "Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine," which passed from Christopher Morcom to Alan Turing to Joan Clarke and back to Alan Turing in the film.

However, the other bits that got me thinking in my usual penchant for over-analysing plots and plays are some of these things.

How crossword puzzles were used as a means to interview personnel for code-breaking, the conventional wisdom was to use linguists to decipher German code, Alan Turing however saw these as puzzles.

And so …

Somehow, what Alan Turing did was to eliminate chance from solving logical problems, at least that is one perspective to things.

Once the Enigma code was broken, the greater task was keeping it a secret and consequently, when it comes to tough decisions, who makes them and what goes into it? That was what Ultra was about and apparently that is why the allies won WWII.

That is why the Imitation Game was more like the Imagination Game for me, what he imagined became the reality of the world of computational power at the fingertips of mankind today. Alan Turing was an exceptionally gifted man, his homosexuality should never have taken such a genius away from us.

Other readings

Alan Turing: a short biography by Andrew Hodges

The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook

Half Of A Yellow Sun - Review of the movie

The flag of the Republic of Biafra - Courtesy of Wikipedia

A history missing

I was born just before the first military coup in the fledgling Federal Republic of Nigeria, far away from the madding cacophony and chaos that presaged the breakdown of order, the massacre of Igbos in the North and the civil war.

We returned to Nigeria, in the year the civil war ended, my parents excited and ready to participate in the new Nigeria led by the military leader Yakubu Gowon, whose surname became the reconciliatory acronym of Go On With One Nigeria.

The history of Nigeria that I did in school ended just after Nigerian independence and took off again after the end of the Civil War. It meant we as Yorubas from the South-West of Nigeria could choose wherever we wanted to live in the country, as we first set up base in Kaduna and then in Jos.

The stories that informed the reasons for the turmoil in the Western Region, the corruption and misgovernment that led to the first and second military coups of 1966 and the swagger of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu were just the subject of folklore.

Making history obvious

The closest I came to appreciating what happened in the Civil War was in the photographs taken by Peter Obe, in a book titled, Nigeria: A Decade of Crises in Pictures (Paperback) which contained iconic and haunting photographs of the Republic of Biafra during the Civil War.

Enter, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a novel that apparently wove the realities of Biafra into a human interest story of everyday lives and how people were affected by the war.

I never read the book, but I have just returned from watching the Half of a Yellow Sun film showing in just one cinema theatre in Manchester.

Having read and watched reviews of the film, it had somewhat prepared me for possible disappointment, but there was a compelling need to see for myself.

Half of a fading sun

The film was well made, the acting superb and worthy of great accolades, but I am not sure if what is said of the novel did translate properly to the screenplay that became the template for the film.

I cannot say that I learnt anything I did not already know of the Republic of Biafra apart from the visual representation of the geographical landmass that constituted Biafra.

The flag of Biafra, composed of a horizontal tricolour with the yellow glow of a rising sun was as optimistic as the braggadocio of the man that led the secession from Nigeria, but one can safely say the sun had already set on Biafra from the get-go.

A warped history

Whether much could have been done to have the original coups more encompassing that it did not seem like an Igbo coup in a futile power grab can be the subject of extensive debate, but the birth of Nigeria as an independent country was as flawed and fractured as it could ever be.

There probably was never a golden dawn of Nigeria beyond the speech that the Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa gave on the night we gained independence on the 1^st of October, 1960.

A privileged view of the war

However, back to the film, the narratives were unusual and somewhat foreign in my view, as it revolved around two highly educated daughters and their love and family lives.

Thandie Newton playing Olanna with her love interest Odenigbo played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and her sister Anika Noni Rose as Kainene with her American husband Joseph Mawle as Richard.

I did not recognise the songstress Onyeka Onwenu for her part as Odenigbo’s mother; times do mature the visage of those one once knew so well, decades ago. Since, I am not a Nollywood fan, the other actors were just actors.

Half of a Yellow Sun in the movie was the Biafran War from the perspective of the very privileged and well-connected in the early 1960’s.

An unfamiliar Nigeria

Throw in infidelity, a love child, an adoption, an interracial marriage and the luxury of being able to pack a bag and drive off in a car when trouble came close, and this became a very different Nigeria from that of those who did see suffering.

The violence and tragedies in the film cannot be said to have done justice to bringing life to a history very few Nigerians born after 1970 know anything about.

Yet, there were two characters that found opportunity by being in privileged surroundings, Ugwu the houseboy who witnessed much, said little and had the benevolence of being sent back to school where at the end of the film we are told became a writer and Baby, the love child who was accepted by Olanna as her daughter and eventually became a medical doctor.

Just a good film

I do not know if the film was to spare us the gruesomeness of the war or it was more intent on the love soap opera at the expense of the war.

Yet, the mind of Odenigbo was interesting enough about his revolutionary zeal and his fearful view of Nigerian identity as was the capitalist machinations of Kainene as a profiteer in the war, who in one of her runs went missing and was never seen again.

A good film in general, but not one to do Nigerian history at a leisurely pace with sweet popcorn and Pepsi Cola.

Bisi Alimi: Please Vote for 2013 People's Choice Winner: Asylum - Bisi

The emotion is palpable

I am literally moved to tears with great emotion anytime I watch this short film, the episode of New Dawn with Funmi in 2004 on Nigerian television where a young man Bisi Alimi came out as a gay man during a daytime live broadcast.

The event changed the lives of these people, Funmi Iyanda’s show was taken off-air the next day and Bisi Alimi came within inches of being murdered in Nigeria.

Things ought not to be so, but that is the kind of society that led Bisi Alimi to flee Nigeria and gain asylum for himself in the United Kingdom.

A man of great conviction

Since then, Bisi Alimi has been a vocal and efficacious activist for the rights of gay black men, their access to services and treatments and finding a platform from which gay black men can be proud to be who they are and live without fear or threat to their lives, contributing to society as any good citizen.

Bisi Alimi is in great demand to speak around the world not only on his experiences but on policy, advocacy, human rights and other socio-economic factors that affect gay men of colour all around the world.

He has met representatives and heads of government in Europe, Africa and the Americas challenging people to think different, get involved and speak up for rights, fairness and justice – he is an amazing, jovial, friendly and wonderful human-being – you cannot but be touched by his force of personality which is for good and for right.

Please Vote

This story is told in a documentary entered for the PBS Online Film Festival - Episode: 2013 Festival | Asylum - Bisi

I ask you to watch the film and vote for it here to become the 2013 People’s Choice Winner.

Thank you.

Achtung! Schwarz Neger

Coming to your local cinema

As if we were to expect anything less, the proud members of the Aryan race who being the grand-brood of the former Hitler Jugend that grew up to serve in the Panzer divisions that overran Northern France during World War II released their training video to much acclaim.

It featured a lion being taunted or rather, baited with a large juicy piece of bloody fresh meat; the lion snarled and roared then having had enough of the baiting lunged for the chunk of spicy beef, but just missed it by a fraction of an inch – they captured it all on film; what the director wanted was the action-play, even the National Geographic Channel would be put in the shade with this excellent storyboard and real life action.

Sorry, I must be writing about something else; I meant, the lion was a recruit being goaded into aggressive soldier behaviour and the bloody fresh meat was really a narration given to incense the soldier enough to show raw aggression, as one would expect at war.

A black narrative

That narration went thus – “You're in the Bronx, a black van pulls up in front of you and three African-Americans get out and start really insulting your mother... act!”

Now, that is some imagination the instructor has, the stuff that good German military prowess is made of.

From that narration, one would suppose the Bronx is one hell-hole, a black van is a vehicle of aggression, African-Americans are savages and this soldier loves his mother. To have abuse heaped on his mother by black strangers would have been enough to get any soldier-boy to ACT – I suppose that means charge with a gun and kill all the black men – amazing how words can create pictures in ones mind and urge you to express an aggressive emotion.

The habit of generations

Well, it was the same German army that had holiday snaps from Afghanistan posing with skulls, dare I say, the skulls once belonged to living members of the human race, the same troop had a World War II symbol on their vehicle – what skullduggery.

This is becoming a very long story being fleshed out in needless translation, I would say, the instructor simply bellowed with a very loud voice pointing the forward direction – “Achtung! Schwarz Neger” – you do not need much more to get the best out the German Army.

The Brit babes do cry in Persia

It will get worse

I had just left a comment on Chxta’s World that this saga of naval personnel selling their stories could not get any worse. On reflection, I did somewhat anticipate this media frenzy in my first write-up on this matter.

Here is what I said then in Stripping the “Great” out of Britain on the 4^th of April.

The naval personnel would return and be made to recant all their recorded confessions of having trespassed on Iranian nautical territory; the tabloids would lay out full spreads of the gallantry of the lady and the men in the midst of enemy territory …

However, by the time the tabloids have unravelled this saga and milked every ounce of newsworthiness out of this farce, nothing great would have been achieved for Great Britain.

Well, I was wrong with my comments on Chxta's World; as we race for the lowest pits of ignominy; the Iranians are now going to oil up the paths that we do reach ignominy faster than anticipated.

They are now going to release their film of the capture of the personnel to counteract any inkling that any of the personnel were treated in anyway but nicely and humanely.

It would appear that the Iranians are still gong to trump the British in this propaganda game as it goes to expose the rank incompetence in both the Defence Ministry and Foreign Ministry, that of the naval personnel is a foregone conclusion.

In releasing both a CD and a book, I can almost bet on the editor of the film becoming the toast of film festivals around the world for best editing. Sadly, in this case, the naval personnel would have no mobile phone footage of their saga to challenge Iran’s sound and vision documentary of events.

Expect this film to enter the Guinness Book of Records as the most bootlegged film ever.

For once, even I cannot wait to see the footage as the foolish British media find out that they have paid out large sums of money for piffle at first and that now they cannot get exclusives to the snippets of new Iranian film – The Brit babies do cry in Persia.

If the naval personnel had any dignity left, they would go quietly into obscurity before their private shame becomes a public stock and rotten eggs show.