Of the main British soaps I have only really followed 'Enders with any regularity; this involves dipping in every now and then and seeing whether there are any decent storylines that take my fancy. Recently I did begin to lose interest, but I was gripped by the story of Danielle, Ronnie Mitchell and Archie Mitchell, which culminated this week, in true soap style, at a wedding reception.

For those of you not acquainted a brief synopsis of the story is required here. When Ronnie Mitchell was 14 she got pregnant and was coerced into the giving up her baby by her father (Archie). She was later told by Archie that her baby had died. Of course, she had not in fact died and the baby girl, some 19 years later, comes to London to find her mother as the shy Danielle. Of course this is Eastenders so this has to be strung out over months, so Danielle spend several months trying to build up the courage to tell her mother, getting pregnant from a one night stand in the process, and having her mother accompany her to the abortion clinic still not knowing this was her daughter and the foetus about to be aborted was her grandchild.

Even before this weeks climax then there had been an emotional rollercoaster. Recently, Danielle had told Archie, a sinister control freak of a guy, who she really was, and he trying his utmost to keep the truth from coming out, knowing if it did, his lie abouth the baby dying would be revealed and he would Ronnie would be back to hating him (they has just started to get on again).

Danielle was a true underdog character; shy, timid, emotionally needy and at times rather annoying, but one could not help liking her and wanting her innocence to triumph over the control freakery of Archie.

This week then it all came out in explosive fashion, initial Ronnie is persuaded by he Dad that this girl is a nutcase, but later realises that she had been telling the truth and that Danielle was indeed her daughter. She goes running after seeing her walking away down the street; they stare at one another and a moment passes between them where Danielle knows Ronnie has finally realised this is he daughter, the one she has never forgotten about, or forgiven herself for giving up. Then, just when you think it is all going to be OK, as Danielle steps out to go and embrace her mother - BAM! - fucking Janine Butcher comes careering around the corner and runs her down. Danielle crumples and dies in her Mum's arms, choking out a hoarse 'Mommy' before expiring.

It was very well done I have to say, but did they have to make it so crushing there at the end. Couldn't she have made it to hospital and been touch and go on life support before pulling through? Is it to much to ask that with all this doom and gloom around us with the economic situation, that a soap could just provide an optimistic chink of light, a smidgen of hopeful escapism? No, no, this is Eastenders and they make a point of being depressing bastards. Tragedy is their modus operandi. The only other programme to be so systematically cruel to well-loved characters is The Wire, which is even more callous in the way life is snatched so easily from characters you have several seasons of love for.

This is of course not the first time that we have had people bouncing off bonnets outside of the Vic. Looking at the stretch of road where Danielle was run down, I was almost minded to ask BBC to explain how someone could have built up the necessary speed to run someone down, as it looked like a cul-de-sac, but given the previous accidents, I might have to settle for launching a petition to get some speed bumps installed.

I have a bad habit of continually ordering books and just stacking them unread in various precarious piles around my bedroom. With Christmas and my birthday now behind me this has now increased this stock of undiscovered worlds and interesting facts waiting to discover. To that end I am trying to do a around a hours reading a night, otherwise I just spend it watching TV or pissing around on the internet.

My plan is to have on the go one fiction and one non-fiction book at any one time. I have started to collate my mini library on the internet site Shelfari. See my profile here.

In the non-fiction corner we have the weighty tome that is David Marquand's political history, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy. I am only a quarter of the way into it so far, but it is an enjoyable and elegant book, in which Marquand identifies four broad ideologies that have influenced the development of British democracy since 1918.

On the fiction side of things I am reading a book I got for my birthday called The Island At The End of the World. I have only read the first few chapters so far, but it is an intriguing start; a man living with his three children on an island after a Great Flood, apparently instigated by God has washed the Earth clean of sinners. He is keen to keep his children from 'knowing the truth', but the book opens with him spotting signs on the horizon of someone else approaching in a boat, a prospect that has him gripped with fear.

This post related to the 2004 German film Downfall and the recent BBC2 drama, Margaret - mild spoilers ahead.

I watched the rather wonderful German film Downfall earlier this week; it is set in the final days of the Third Reich, as the Russians encircle Berlin, Hitler, played brilliantly by Bruno Ganz, spends the last days of the war in the strange alternative reality of the Fuhrerbunker.

The film was based on a combination of contemporary sources, including the memoirs of Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries, who decided to stay in the bunker until the bitter end. Junge is played in the film by the rather eye catching Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara.





Enough shallowness, for now at least, and on with a few more reflections on the movie. I did find it interesting as a piece of history, although I have done no research into its historical authenticity, what is striking is even though Berlin is almost in enemy hands and the German armies finished, Hitler is stuck in delusion that the situation can still be retrieved. He slips from raging against those that have failed him to ridiculous flights of fantasy, prodding a map and ordering his generals to mobilise armies that only exist in his head. Even then, right at the end, his generals who already knew the game was up, had difficulty saying anything to the volatile Fuhrer. I wondered if this was where the phrase silo mentality came from.

Added to that there is the strange almost manic, smiling hyper Eva Braun. There is a moment where she organises a party and there is dancing whilst shells fall, until it is cut short by a shell landing too close.

The end is chilling as the Russians close around the centre of Berlin, Hitler dictates his last political testimony and finally the realisation that it is over sinks in. Then slowly arrangements are made for the suicides; a doctor arrives to talk Hitler through administering the poison and how long he will have to pull the trigger once he takes the poison; you see his beloved dog put down and then the closing of the door and a gunshot rings out.

Even more chilling are the deaths of the six children of Joseph Goebbels (Propaganda Minister), who were given a sedative and then whilst they slept were administered cyanide by their mother, Magda Goebbels. It is all the more sad considering that Magda had an offer to get her and her children out of Berlin, but concluded that with no Third Reich there would be no point in her or her children living.

This evening I watched Margaret, the BBC2 drama broadcast last week about the events that led to the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. I certainly have no love for Maggie, but she was portrayed in such a way by actress Lindsay Duncan, that you did have a certain amount of sympathy with her at the end when the thing that gave purpose to her life is taken from her.



What struck me though, and at the risk of invoking some for of Godwin's Law here, were the broad similarities between these two downfalls. I am talking about similarities in the thought processes here, obviously the circumstances of Hitler's final downfall were more dramatic, and no matter what you might think of Thatcher, she is thankfully a million miles away from the evil that embodied Hitler. I did start to wonder whether similar traits do settle as the end looms inevitably into view, is their a similar pathology of collapse, similar to the collapse of civilisations for example? If so, what are the common threads and should we expect to see any in Gordon Brown's government?

Well judging by the two downfall examples above, I would say the common threads would be:

A leader that believes they are some misunderstood saviour. Check!
A leader that is completely out of touch with reality, who believes things can still come good, if only we believe and fight hard enough. Check!
An embattled leader surrounded by traitors, some imagined, but some certainly real. Check!
A leader that will eventually be forced to face reality, a brutal and sudden realisation at the last minute that the end has arrived. Check!

Brown's done; he just does not realise it yet.


As a final parting gift, a small amount of humour; one of the things that Downfall has become famous for is the YouTube spoofs. The majority of them are of the key scenes where Hitler completely loses it with his generals, with the subtitles removed and replaced with peoples more humourous text substituted in. Here is one that I found where Hitler let's loose about Twitter.

Went by in a flash didn't it? I wish it could have been longer, especially as I am now working for the next couple of days and feel disinclined to do so. Can't say that I did much, other than eat, drink and be merry with the family, but then what else can one ask for from Christmas? Kudos and thanks to Mum and Ralph for housing and feeding me once more, and to Dad and Sandra for providing Christmas dinner - all of it was much appreciated.

Normally, Christmas would also involve a fair bit of TV watching; catching those depressing as hell soap storylines, watching films that I saw on Sky or DVD two years ago and guffawing at the Christmas editions of the numerous panel quiz shows. This year though I barely saw any TV, not even managing to be one of the 14.3 million viewers that watched the much vaunted new Wallace and Gromit outing. We did however watch Wall-E on DVD (Oliver's present technically, but he fell asleep after 15 mins), which did strike an appropriately heartwarming note of robo-love lost and found; not to mention of course the irony of watching a film which is underpinned by a dark warning of human over consumption at just the point in the year when we do such a good job of it.

The telly barely made it on due to a certain someone playing with his noisy remote control train whilst simultaneously watching Ivor the Engine on DVD and listening to the Polar Express Soundtrack. Think this person might like trains? Who could it be?



Here he is at the head of the table, wearing his crown and dining what all monarchs of his age feast on: fishfingers, chips and peas.





I did not take that many photos, but those that I did can be found here. Lee took a few more, which can be viewed on his Flickr here.

Relating to this story. And I didn't think Blade was that bad....

What's with this quote though?

But prosecutors said an example should be set because of Snipes' fame.

So no leniancy because he is famous? Does that strike anyone else as slightly wrong?

S

I am gutted to read that Jenny Scott is leaving The Daily Politics show. I have got into the habit of downloading Daily Politics most evenings via BBC iPlayer, as the soundbyte political commentary of the rolling 24 hour news channels merely serves to wet my perverse appetite for the political stories of the day. At 30 minutes Daily Politics is just about the right length to get a the stories and some supplementary commentary.

Jenny Scott was an additional motivating factor for watching it I will admit. I would like to say this was all to do with the way she acted as a calm counterpoint to Andrew Neil's overwhelming ego and smugness, or the way she could be quietly incisive when interviewing, especially on economics, but yes, she is also, for one as shallow as myself, very easy on the eye.

S

At the weekend I watched Zeitgeist The Movie. It is an online movie which, over the course of nearly two hours, explores a variety of subjects all with an underlying theme of how society is deliberately fed a series of myths to keep us all cowed into submission. The film presents itself as a wake up call to the American people, but is it merely a weaving together of disparate conspiracy theories on steroids?

If you do have a spare couple of hours(and a decent connection) the film is certainly worth a look. It uses a combination of graphics, pictures, newsreel footage and a narrative that flicks between the filmakers primary one, and audio clips from such wide ranging people as the American comedian Bill Hicks to that great populariser of science Carl Sagan. Ironically, one of the audio clips in the final segment is from the British track-suited loon David Icke, whose ramblings included a declaration that he was the 'Son of God'. The reference to Icke is the last thing listed in the movies list of sources is perhaps telling of the filmmaker's knowing irony or, on the other hand, their complete naivety.

WARNING: Spoilers ahead

EQUALS ???

The film is split into three parts. Part 1 concerns itself with debunking the existence of a historical Christ, claiming that Christ is a mythic figure cobbled together from various pre-Christian belief systems. The usual comparisons like Mithras and The Epic of Gilgamesh are cited to show that elements of the Bible appear to have drawn on pre-Christian mythos.

After explaining to us that the Judeo-Christian tradition is a load of old cobblers Part 2 brings us right up to the modern era, putting what the film calls the '9/11 Myth' under the microscope. I had heard all of this before in Loose Change; the controlled demolition, the issues with NORAD, the Pentagon was hit by a missile not a plane and the claim that the purpose of the attack was all part of a grand conspiracy to provide a pretext for eroding civil liberties and illegal wars. These are well-trodden paths for anyone versed in the various conspiracies that have circulated since 2001.

CONSPIRACY??

The final segment of the film takes us back to the creation of United States and shows how the noble intentions of the Founding Fathers have been subverted by a clique of international bankers who have used their power and influence to subjugate the American people and make millions in the process. The creation of the Federal Reserve and a concious plan to draw America into wars (WW1, WW2 and Vietnam) are all cited against these Rockefellers and Stanleys. The elite clique at the top have politicians in their pockets and want a society that is uneducated, scared and in debt; they want war to drive profits and easily identifiable bogeymen to pin the blame on. The segment ends with the conclusion that this clique eventually want to see some kind of global government, and then slips into some quasi-spiritual ramblings (I suspect some from David Icke) about how we need to wake up and that 'love is the answer'. This final part of the film includes, as part of a critique of the mainstream media, clips of Peter Finch's captivating monologues from Lumet's brilliant 70's film Network. The inclusion of these clips may also give us insight to filmmakers sly intent, or an escape route they have provided themselves from some of their more 'stretching' claims.

On the films Statement page it claims that the research to produce it took 'over a year', so I am certainly not going to attempt a debunking of its specific claims. There are sources out there on the net for anyone with access to a search engine that can furnish truthseekers with voluminous tracts of information on the topics mentioned. The existence of a historical Jesus for example, is still the subject of much heated debate, especially in atheist/theist debating circles, and the conspiracy claims about 9/11 have also been challenged in books and TV programmes. I will just say that people should approach the films claim with an ample supply of salt to be pinched.

Between the eyebrow raising claims there are some genuinely important issues spotlighted by the film. The erosion of civil liberties, the state of education, the roll of the mainstream media and the validity of theistic belief are all worthy of discussion. The BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares espoused the idea of the 'politics of fear' more convincingly, but whether you take the assertions in either that or Zeitgeist seriously or not, the bottom line is that we remain suspicious and vigilant of governments that seek to strip away civil liberties based on erroneous or exaggerated threats.

To offer a claim by claim rebuttal may also miss the overarching theme of the entire enterprise in any case. The film offers a convenient ambiguity of purpose. Is it telling us the truth, or is it trying to shock us out of our herd instinct where we take spoonfed lies as the truth? If it is the latter, as I suspect, then the same principle should apply to Zeitgeist itself; people should not be unthinkingly hitching their intellectual wagons to just another bandwagon purporting to give an all encompassing truth. Is this the zeitgeist they are railing against? It certainly gives the filmmakers a convenient escape route when people offer rebuttals to the films claims.

There are reasons to believe that there such a sleight of hand going on here. The purported aim of the film is:

"..to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are."
Source: Zeitgeist The Movie Statement Page

If the film had been more considered and less ambitious, more balanced and less sensationalist, would it have the power to deliver the necessary jolt? No, it wouldn't. Zeitgeist is at the more polemical end of a recent trend in propagandist style documentaries in the mainstream media. The works of Michael Moore, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Super Size Me - all examples of anti-establishment, anti-corporate propaganda designed to shock and hit the box office hard. Like these movies, Zeitgeists strength should not be in the validity of the specific claims, but in the debate and thought it stimulates.

The inclusion of the clips from Network in which Peter Finch rails the ignorance and passiveness of his audience (see it here on YouTube) grants some credence to the theory that the people behind Zeitgeist being more concerned with the spineless and supine nature of the majority of society than of winning converts over to their brand of meta-conspiracy theory. People accepting Zeitgeist on face value then becomes the exact antithesis of the films underlying message.

Finally, the David Icke audio clip cited in the films sources looks supicious to me. Although the film is made for an American audience, I should not imagine that the filmmakers could be aware of what a laughing stock Icke is in this country. It just seems incongruous with the other sources and I postulate it is a deliberate and ironic inclusion. Here is a man who declared himself the 'Son of God' and ranted and raved about conspiracies. He predicted Britain would be hit by earthquakes. Does this seemingly erroneous inclusion hint that the film is self concious about how thin some of its own claims are and that we should beware false prophets? If it is an accidental inclusion, it is an amusing one considering the 'everything is a conspiracy' style claims made in the film.

There is of course one major flaw with using big claims to jolt people into critical thinking; they might just take you at face value and swap one set of erroneous beliefs for another. People are more than willing to do this unquestioningly. When reading of The Da Vinci Code reached feverpitch, a few people told me how it had made them re-think the roots and origins of Christianity. These were not serious Christians admittedly, but it goes to show that if you can string together a strong enough narrative that appears to be grounded in fact, people do not require much prodding, after all, this is what religion does right?

That the film suggests people are guided by a herd instinct and too readily believe everything they are told via the MSM, and furthermore that the education system is robbing people of their ability to think critically and question authority, only make it more likely that many people will accept the claims of Zeitgeist as fact without taking the time to check its assertions.

Conspiracy theories are such a prevalent part of our culture these days. They can reproduce much more virulently then before on the back of the internet and Web 2.0 technologies we take for granted these days. It seems to me that if you were a government with something major to hide the easiest way to counteract questions and investigations is to propogate conspiracy theories and then discredit them. The difficulty with the claim and counter claim , especially where based on very technical information, is that it is difficult both in terms of acquiring the necessary level of understanding and having the time to do the research justice, for an average layperson to navigate their way through the maze of evidence. People will therefore inevitably tend to start with their gut instinct and work backwards to find the evidence that fits it. From 9/11 to Global Warming, from the affects of passive smoking to the existence of Jesus, how much time between sleeping and paying the bills does the average person have to dedicate to 'critical thinking' on such matters?

These are only my thoughts on the film I should stress, certainly no one should take them as read. Go and do you own research, and above all, think about it.... critically.

Other Sources
Jay Kinney's review of Zeitgeist
Consider Christianity - review focuses specifically on the claims about Jesus
Some interviews with the filmmakers on YouTube - I just found this so have not had time to listen to them yet, but maybe validate my hypothesis (or not)

This is just about as perfect as it gets. Evoking memories of Beck's incredible live solo concert in Manchester about 4 or 5 years ago. I may not believe in God, but performances like this somtimes just make me wonder.... for a moment. Enjoy a maestro at work with my favorite track of his Sea Changes album.

S

Don't ask me what searches I was running through Google's permissive engine when I found this gem. Being a fan of Maria Sharapova purely for her atheleticism and serious commitment to the sport -cough cough-, I did not even know that she had been dating the lead singer of funk popsters Maroon 5. Here is what Mr Adam Levine allegedly said about her performance in the boudoir, and trust me this really is one time where the quote is worth reprinting in full:

"She wouldn't make any noise during sex," Levine said. "I can't tell you how disappointed I was. I really thought, like a lot of guys, that she'd be the loud screaming type. But instead, she just lay there like a dead frog. She even got angry if I started to moan, said it 'ruined her concentration.' It was so disillusioning that I went on Paxil for a month afterwards. Really, it was much more of a shock than when I found out there's no such thing as the Easter Bunny."

Ha! Mr Levine, who must have idled away the odd summer afternoon in touch with his manhood whilst listening to Shara's vocal exertions on the tennis court (probably going down to one of the Williams sistas again), can only have been seriously let down to discover is sexual performance illicited not even minor murmers, his probings causing fewer exhortations than an exchange of groundstrokes with Amelie Mauresmo. The presumption of the man, I mean does Captain Birdseye go home and eat fishfingers every night? I don't think so.

"But instead, she just lay there like a dead frog."

One can only imagine how Mr Levine came by this particular metaphor. Does it perhaps find its origins perhaps in the disparaging remarks of Allied soldiers during WW2 about their Gallic brothers in arms? Or is it more to do with Levine's disturbing visits to the local pond as he went through puberty? I start to feel thankful that the American Pie franchise ended when it did, otherwise I feel it inevitable that sex with a dead amphibian may have been next.

"It was so disillusioning that I went on Paxil for a month afterwards. Really, it was much more of a shock than when I found out there's no such thing as the Easter Bunny."

Make some noise damn you, I am so goddamn depressed! One hopes that the comments were made when drunk. One can only imagine how traumatised Levine was when he found out a giant bunny was not delivering his decorated eggs every Easter. "Yes, you know man, that lousy sex with Maria really knocked me for six. It was worse than when I found out there was no such thing as the Easter Bunny... In fact, it was almost as bad as when I realised Santa Claus was really my parents or when I erm...did stuff with that....dead frog.."

Ok. I am off to get some Paxil down my throat, this news as been more of a shock than when I discovered Maroon 5's first album was a huge pile of steaming funk-turd.

S