[the host] synthesis of fragmented parts

Straight after watching The Host [2006] just now, South Korea's entry in the monster movie stakes, a film which which premiered at Cannes and was praised by North Korea, it was hard to evaluate. Some woeful acting, a 1950s production values monster, badder than bad baddies ... and yet ... and yet ...

Now, some hours further along, I'd like to post on it. First off, I realize I was wrong about the monster. This sums it up better:

Said monster is an interesting looking creature. About the size of a small bus and tadpole shaped, it has two massive frog-like legs, a long, whip-like prehensile tail and a half-dozen other little tails jutting off it’s hulking body. It’s impressively designed and even more impressively rendered on computer.

So, to the film itself and this is one of the better statements I've been able to find:

The opening attack is sensationally well directed, and if the rest of the film never quickens the pulse in the same accelerated fashion, it does give the story both its principal excuse (the monster grabs the granddaughter) and something just as satisfying if unexpected: a portrait of parents, children and the ties that bind, sometimes to the point of near-strangulation.

“The Host” may be born out of sociopolitical tensions, scares about SARS and the avian flu, or Mr. Bong’s imagination, but it’s also a snapshot of a modern South Korea bordering on social anarchy, one in which a fatalistically obedient old-timer and his three preternaturally immature adult children face down a rampaging beast along with clueless doctors, Keystone Kops, faithless friends and even hordes of paparazzi.

That it's a mish-mash of themes is a bit harsh - better to use the word pot-pourri and you know, it really does have some endearing elements to it. It's hard to know what to make of the lead character, Korea-famous actor Song Kang-ho but he turns out to be a hero indeed, in his clumsy, yet resilient way.

Perhaps the show stealer is the grandaughter, child actress Ko Ah-seong, who is eaten and then regurgitated into a sewer by the monster who uses it as a larder for later use. She displays a fragile maturity and at the same time lacks that brashness of today's kid actors, which makes her believable.

There are some great images in the film. The point where Song Kang-ho escapes from the hospital where he was being lobotomized, only to actually step outside a trailer into a red cross area and with U.S. troops about to spray Agent Yellow was both surreal and chilling, reminiscent of the Manchurian Candidate. The rain sequence also stuck in the memory.

To draw the threads together and sum the film up in a few words, this is as good as any:

What separates The Host from the traditional monster movie is not only the thrilling, high-quality special effects, but the absolutely hilarious interactions of the Park family; Imagine a Korean version of The Royal Tenenbaums trapped by the love child of Godzilla and Alien, you have an initial idea of the delights to be found in The Host.

If you haven't seen it already and you get a chance, it is worth it.

[priorities] thinking straight

[special relationships] will oceania turn out to be the bloc of choice

You've obviously read this:

The government has sold its last remaining shares in the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire to an American company. The move means Britain no longer has any stake in the production of its Trident nuclear warheads.

Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Nick Harvey said:

"The whole argument used for Britain having a separate weapons establishment is that this is required by the non-proliferation treaty, as technology sharing is not allowed."

Is this such a horrendous move? After all, the UK does not act in the foreign theatres in an independent fashion. More often than not, it is through NATO and the special alliances. On the nuclear issue:

The Amsterdam Treaty states in Article J.7 that "The policy of the Union in accordance with this article shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defense policy of certain Member States and shall respect the obligations of certain Member States, which see their common defence realized in NATO, under the North Atlantic Treaty and be compatible with the common security and defence policy established within that framework."

There is, in fact, a deep rivalry between the EU and NATO:

The lack of cooperation is evident in Brussels, where NATO and the EU have separate headquarters eight kilometers apart. On the military level, the two organizations have competing rapid reaction forces. They compete on foreign aid missions, sometimes racing each other to the destination. They maintain separate military planning headquarters. Taxpayers foot the double bill.

The countries at the center of this competition, analysts say, are Britain, which wants to preserve and strengthen NATO, and France, which wants the EU to grow into a more robust defense institution, independent of NATO.

The construction of NATO:

Originally consisting of 12 countries, the organisation expanded to include Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955. However, then, as now, the alliance was militarily dominated by the United States.

In April, 2008:

President Bush advanced his plans Thursday to build a controversial missile defense shield in Eastern Europe by winning the unanimous backing of NATO allies and sealing a deal with the Czech Republic to build a radar facility for the system on its soil.

This set the cat among the pigeons - there is a souring of relations which manifested itself in the Poettering snub of President Klaus in the European Parliament and in the Declan Ganley matter. Europe is divided between the power bases of the EU itself, NATO and the U.S.A., a major player in its own right within European member states.

Digressing for the moment, it's old news that the EU parliament wants to silence dissenting voices but I also read, in the last few days, a proposal to prevent the UK from legally opting out of the European Union, should they wish to. I can't find corroboration anywhere for that one but it seems that 19 Labour MEPs plan to vote for that.

If that were so, it is yet more evidence that the socialistic EU is more than a little paranoid about Britain's further shift towards the U.S. - the warheads stake which opened this post is testimony to Britain's comfort in seeing U.S. strategic interests as not greatly different from our own.

Britain's ties to Europe are geographical and through the royal bloodlines but its ties to America are more "family like". Family members do fight but ultimately, when faced with a common foe, do close ranks. The U.S./British relationship has had its moments:

The United States put heavy pressure on the United Kingdom to dissolve its Empire, and this dissolution took place (due to post-war economic exhaustion, British public opinion and other factors, rather than U.S. pressure) in the 1947-1960 period.

... but it has ultimately stood firm. This special relationship has come under scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic:

The U.K. International Development Secretary has recently proposed a change in the current relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. He accentuated on the need for "new alliances, based on common values". He was verbal against "unilateralism" and called for an "international" and a "multilateralist" approach to global problems.

... and:

In candid comments that will embarrass Mr Bush and Mr Blair, [Kendall Myers, a leading State Department adviser, suggested] America "ignored" Britain [on Iraq], and he urged Britain to decouple itself from the U.S. He asserted that the "special relationship", a term coined by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946, gave Britain little or nothing.

"It has been, from the very beginning, very one-sided. There never really has been a special relationship, or at least not one we've noticed." The result of the Iraq war would be that any future British premier would be much less cosy with Washington than Mr Blair had been, and the Prime Minister's much vaunted view that Britain was "a transatlantic bridge" was now redundant.

Mr Myers said Donald Rumsfeld's comment before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that America could go it alone without Britain had been a clarifying moment.

It remains to be seen how non-President-elect Obama redefines the relationship but such comments as the above are era specific and the overall history has been one of strong economic and undoubted cultural ties between the two, when all is said and done.

It was probably no accident that in Orwell's 1984, the blocs were:

The novel does not render the world's full history to 1984. Winston's recollections, and what he reads in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after World War II, the United Kingdom fell to civil war, becoming part of Oceania. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union encompassed mainland Europe, forming the nation of Eurasia.

The third super-state, Eastasia, comprises the east Asian countries around China and Japan. Mentioned also is an atomic war, fought mainly in Europe, western Russia, and North America. It is unclear what occurred first: the civil war wherein the Party assumed power, the United States' annexation of the British Empire, or the war during which Colchester was bombed.

The hostility to the U.S. in Britain is as nothing to the hostility to the EU [read the comments as well]. There is life after the EU and Britain should look to re-integrating with its two strategic partners, the U.S. and the Commonwealth. Look at the trade figures alone and it's not as if we wouldn't trade, bilaterally with EU member states - it would go back to an EEC model in that respect.

Don't forget the Chinese in all of this:

[T]he news that CIC is putting $5 billion into Morgan Stanley gave a new perspective to Chinese involvement in the West’s largest financial institutions. The sheer scale of the Morgan Stanley deal was striking. And over the past few months, investment from the Far East has become almost commonplace. In contrast to the protectionist fervour that forced a Dubai company to sell several American ports that it acquired through the takeover of Britain’s P&O, there has been barely a murmur of opposition to this trend.

There is a definite unilateralist voice in America - this article decrying the financial ownership of the country by foreigners:

As www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:

* Sound recording industries - 97% * Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79% * Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75% * Metal ore mining - 65%

... and so on and don't forget the SPPNA, which is due to kick off in 2009.

All that having been written though, I'd still say that blood is thicker than water and the most natural allies for Britain are still the U.S. and the Commonwealth. Within the UK, the problem would be the Scots and Welsh, for whom EU supported devolution would suddenly lose one of its main funding sources - British contributions to the EU.

The Scots and Welsh would then have a clear choice - remain with an ailing EU or rejoin the UK. With 83% of the UK English, they'd be in a bit of a quandary.

[hearts and minds] the battle does not recognize christmas

Jona Lewie sang: "Wish I could be home for Christmas." That's hardly likely for thousands of allied troops in Aghanistan, Iraq and other trouble spots.

In short, there is no real plan to come home, except at presidential level:

On the contrary, in the dying weeks of the Bush administration, the US is robustly pushing for an increased military presence in the Russian (and Chinese) backyard in Central Asia on the ground that the exigencies of a stepped-up war effort in Afghanistan necessitate precisely such an expanded US military presence.

The military industrial complex is pushing for a continued presence:

United States military leaders and Pentagon officials have made it clear through public statements and deliberately leaked stories in recent weeks that they plan to violate a central provision of the US-Iraq withdrawal agreement requiring the complete pullout of all US combat troops from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 by reclassifying combat troops as support troops.

One key aspect is the insistence on including the Wahhabis in the Pakistan issue:

Again, the Bush administration's insistence on bringing Saudi Arabia into the Afghan problem on the specious plea that a Wahhabi partner will be useful for taming the Taliban doesn't carry conviction with Iran.

In fact, what it does is bring two powers who ordinarily would not be natural allies, except on geographical grounds, to find mutual interest in military and aid pacts. For all Russia's weakness compared to USSR days and for all Iran's saddling itself with a nutter for a leader and a nation sapping theocracy of the worst kind, the U.S. itself is none too strong economically these days either.

Then you can bring in China and India. The U.S. is powerful but look at that combined opposition and it is opposition to what looks, to them, as the territorial ambitions of one superpower, under the guise of "anti-terrorism".

Looking at it from the American point of view, there is prima facie evidence that the Muslims are conducting a covert assault for the hearts and minds of Europe and failing that, at least in body count. They are also looking to expand their influence worldwide in accordance with their perceived destiny. In the non-Muslim world - trouble and chaos, in their world, peace and harmony.

While long-term demographic trends favor stability, European societies will have to live for some years with the large cohort of young people born before the recent decline in fertility, the youth bulge that will not shrink until after 2020.

The intervening years could well provide a bumpy ride. If the poor and deprived come to link their condition to their religious identity—if the young, poor, and Muslim overtly confront the old, well-off, and Christian—then Europe would face a turbulent future.

Having said this, modern European society does not seem hospitable to institutional or dogmatic religion of any kind.

The trouble for the west is that, with the leadership having abandoned the pretext of a Christian society manning the ramparts against the infidel, all there is now is some sort of wishy-washy humanistic, pc, government enforced love-each-other nothingness to counter the assault, along with a drug-addled, disillusioned, dumbed down new generation who would ordinarily have been counted on to fight for God, Queen and country but who now openly question each one of those.

This is a lose-lose scenario out there. Just as the American hawks conceded that Vietnam could not be won, so they apparently concede that Afghanistan and Iraq can't be won either. Therefore there are two choices - stay there and battle on or pull out completely.

The global political minds are at odds over which will turn out to be the more efficacious. Leaving morality aside, the choice is to either hit with maximum prejudice and do the job properly, with huge concentration on psy-ops and decent supply lines or else forget it, get out and leave the diplomats and trade delegates to get on with it.

[just when you thought it was safe] it comes from nowhere

Just how dependent we are on other people is illustrated, in full measure, by these two bald statements about the round the world solo race:

His Ecover 3 yacht had edged ahead of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Dick when winds of 55 knots caused his mast to break. "It basically went from being a near gale to a hurricane and the mast didn't like it," said Golding, 48.

In a separate incident today:

Elies is unable to move freely after [breaking his leg] when a large wave slammed his boat in the Southern Ocean. Elies, who is also complaining of chest pains and is confined to his bunk, is in radio contact with Guillemot and his condition is described as stable.

Race organisers asked ... two competitors to divert to offer Elies psychological support. They will receive time credits for making the diversion. 33-year-old Smantha Davies ... said: "It's only when you see that for real that you realise how, how much of a Russian roulette it is out here."

This race is billed as a "solo" race but look at the support - radio contact, GPS, fellow sailors able to sail over to help, coastguard and anxious friends and family awaiting word. Plus the necessary money.

One thing I learned in Russia was that there is no survival without a support network because the government sure as hell is not going to do anything. So you create your own with assistance and in return, you must give back, otherwise that support fades away. There is no other way over there.

No man is an island, as much as he [or she] would like to be independent. At any moment, usually when things are going swimmingly, it can all suddenly change.

[which song] sing along if you wish

This song was:

1.  first performed for Countess Sophie Weissenwolff in the Austrian town Steyregg;

2. written with a different subject in mind originally;

3. not written to be sung in Latin;

4. used in Fantasia;

5. also used in Hitman.

Clue for no points:

MP3