Oscars Time – The Best Pictures (Part Two)

In Part One I looked at the historical films nominated for Best Picture, now I move on to the rest.

Les Miserables, is of course set in the past, but historical truth is not an issue. It has bigger problems – namely the book, the musical and the soundtrack. All three affect the film to its detriment.

The novel written by Victor Hugo is an absolute thumper. And it’s not only big on length; it’s big on scope. Within it are treatise on the role of the Catholic Church and its monasteries, a scene at the Battle of Waterloo, an insurrection and many dozens of characters over the course of around 20 years. It’s a tough book to pack into one film. Oddly however it works fine when packed into one musical.

But the movie adaptation of the musical is at a great disadvantage because it does not have the benefits that a performance on the stage has.
In the book the scene where Jean Valjean discovers a man who looks like him is being tried for a crime and he decides to front up at the court and confess to being the real Valjean is lengthy and intense. It involves Valjean having to go to extreme lengths to get to the court, which is in another town, in time. In the musical on the stage all this happens in the song “Who Am I”, in which he shifts from being in his factory to the courtroom by way of a nifty scene change usually involving some backdrop coming down and perhaps the stage rotating to bring the court to the front.

When watching this occur on the stage you know what has happened and that it is a device done to make up for the fact that you can’t very well have Valjean getting on horses and riding across the stage for a while to show him getting to the court. The change is quick and acceptable within the language of theatre. But the language of theatre does not automatically translate to cinema. In the movie version we actually do see Valjean in a carriage trying to get to the court and then him walking in, but it is all quite disjointed. The opening of the song has him in his factory, then it shifts to his home, then he’s in the carriage, then he’s in the court room, all the while the song continues without any break. And it’s actually quite a short song – about 3 and a half minutes. 

What works fine on the stage, and the suspension of disbelief you allow in that setting, looks and feels askew when on film.

Similarly in the confrontation scene where Valjean and Javert fight and sing, a crucial last verse is lost. It is lost because on stage it is acceptable for two characters to stop and stand opposite each other singing instead of fighting. Were that to have happened in the movie it would have looked out of place , and because of that a crucial part of the song – namely the swearing of Valjean that he will save Cosette and Javert swearing that he will capture Valjean – is lost.

The film also suffers from pacing issues that don’t occur in the theatrical version.

Take the end of the confrontation song. We go from that with a jump cut to little Cosette singing “Castle on a Cloud”. We have no sense of time or place. Is it at the same time? We assume so, but where is she? Is she near Valjean or far away? Consistently throughout the film director Tom Hooper refrains from any establishing shot. This has the effect of viewers losing a sense of perspective of the events, and also – and more importantly – it fails to give the viewer anytime to relax.

The film is not an emotional roller-coaster, more a plateau. It get to 11 on the emotion metre early on and tries to stay there the whole time. By the end I was too drained to be too emotional about Valjean’s death. I mean geez, how many tears can you cry in 3 hours?

Look it’s not all bad. Anne Hathaway’s version of “I Dreamed a Dream” is astonishing. Her performance is worthy of all the awards she has received. But it was so good that it really is the film high point and more so because Hooper doesn’t let you gather a breath. Even the scene changes that occur in the stage production from actors walking on and off the stage is denied the movie viewer with the quick cut to the next song.
Take the songs “One Day More” and “On My Own”. In the theatrical version, “One Day More” is an absolute emotional pinnacle and then “On My Own” comes along and you are rendered completely undone. In the movie both are sung well, and the editing and direction of “One Day More” is probably the best done of all the songs, but when “On My Own” is sung, the level of emotion I usually feel – even when just listening to it on a CD was not there. The reason is pacing and timing.

In the stage version in between “One Day More” and “On My Own” you have the intermission – a time to talk to others, to let out a big sigh and say “Woah, how amazing was that!” And then you go back in, refreshed, recovered from the emotional high of “One Day More” and then Eponine comes on stage and absolutely destroys you. But you are with her because you have had that rest, your emotions have been able to subside a bit and you are ready.

In the movie, “On My Own” comes on after the attack on Valjean’s house which comes straight after “A Heart Full of Love”  is sung. Eponine screams and averts the attack on Valjean’s house and then BAM! she starts singing “On My Own”. She finishes and BAM! they’re all singing “One Day More” . Not only did they change around the order of the songs for no discernable narrative reason, they also deny us (because it’s a movie) the uplift from “One Day More”, followed by the rest in the intermission and then the emotion charging of “On My Own”.

If a version of Les Miserables doesn’t have you thinking “On My Own” is a massive high point in the film, then I think it’s pretty clear it has failed somewhat.

For some the movie was too long; for me it wasn’t long enough. Every scene felt rushed – because they were trying to tell the story of a thumping big novel in under three hours, using the template of a musical which was written knowing the theatrical device of an intermission was available.  If any film adaptation this year deserved to be split into parts it was this one, not The Hobbit.

The film also suffers from the singing. Not that it was terrible. I thought Hugh Jackman perfectly good – indeed his version of “Valjean’s Soliloquy” gave it a punch that I thought lacking in the theatrical version, all due to his “live singing”. But while Jackman and Hathaway’s versions of songs is helped by the live singing, others are less fortunate. Let’s not sugar coat it, Russell Crowe is not a great singer. He sure as hell is no Philip Quast who sings on the “Highlight's” version of the theatrical recording. It was hard not to wish they had recorded Crowe’s songs earlier and bumped them up with some musical trickery. Geez, if it was good enough to do to it for Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, surely we could cope with it here.

Too often I longed for the original recordings. Sure I knew this was a different version of the musical, but at some point you really want to just hear some great singing. Indeed straight after seeing the film I put on the theatrical soundtrack and felt more at home. The problem for the film is that the musical version has been around for so long that it is tough to conceive a different version of the songs. I doubt that in 5 years time anyone will be listening to the movie soundtrack over the theatrical version. 

I also think the decision to sing all the dialogue as is done in the musical was a mistake. There is one scene where Crowe arrives at the Thenadier’s looking for Cosette and he says, without singing, “Where is the girl Cosette"?” In that moment I thought “Ahh there’s the Russell Crowe the great actor I want to see”. How good would it have been for Crowe and Jackman to have talked to each other rather than sing? Yes there are moments – such as during the confrontation where singing is required, but surely we don’t need Javert to hand Valjean his transfer papers in song. The singing took away from Crowe’s performance because he seemed to be concentrating more on the singing than on the acting.

And so is the film worthy of Best Picture? For me no. When the film version was announced my major concern was that it would be a dud – that it might ruin for me the joy of the musical. It didn’t do that, but neither will it live for me as the definitive version. When you think of the great musical films – West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Cabaret – the film versions are the definitive ones. The Sound of Music film is so pre-eminent that stage versions of it will now include songs written purely for the film version. I doubt any stage version of Les Miserables will include the new song “Suddenly”.

The film was an interesting version but my memory of it is mostly one of exhaustion. I’m not sure if I could watch it again in one sitting – I’d need the rest, and who knows, maybe it actually will work better at home on Blu-Ray or on TV. The adverts might actually give the viewer back the time to relax they need.
Among the nominees were two films who mixed the fantastic with the real: Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild.

I didn’t see Life of Pi in the 3D version so am not able to comment on whether or not that makes it more effective, but I can’t believe it would – especially as the 2D version was already pretty spectacular.

The classic “unfilmable novel” (surely by now we can discard that description for any book, given how many unfilmable novels have now been filmed) was rendered into a rather lovely film.

The story of the boy adrift at sea in a lifeboat with a tiger is at turns magical and realistic. The CGI Tiger is probably the best CGI yet done – perhaps highlighting that the human eye is less able to accept non-humans when rendered in animated form. No “uncanny valley” exists for animals. The story is apparently a fable on the existence of god. To be honest I thought it more a meditation on what “truths” we are able to accept. For all the wonderful opening scenes involving Pi’s introduction to religion I didn’t gain any great sense that what happens to him on  the lifeboat is at all related to god – whether Allah, Jesus or Ganesha – though the importance of faith is crucial.

It is a captivating film with many great scenes of such awesome beauty that you really can only marvel at the technology that enabled them to be created. The acting – especially by Suraj Sharma in the lead role as Pi – is of a high standard and it all confirms Ang Lee (as if any confirmation was required) as one of the best directors going around. The word is he’ll direct Angelina Jolie in “Cleopatra” which normally would sound horrendous, but because it’s Ang Lee, I’m interested to see what he’ll do.

I don’t think Life of Pi will win the Best Picture, and I’m not sure it deserves to. Yes it is a wonderful couple of hours with beautiful visuals, but the overall message that faith is important and we can believe what we choose to believe is all a bit of a nothing.



Beasts of the Southern Wild also involves a child and wild animals – in this case ancient aurochs which have been released by melting icecaps and also by the imagination of 6 year old “Hushpuppy”. Set on a fictional island in the bayou off the New Orleans levee it concerns a remote community who has next to no connection with the rest of the world. Among the inhabitants is Hushpuppy and her father. The two have an odd relationship – they live in separate rusty shacks – and his parenting seems to mostly be teaching her skills to survive in the wild.

While watching the film I was constantly reminded of the 1970s Australians film Storm Boy, which also involved a child and father quite removed from modern society who are forced to deal with the intrusion of the outside world.
The common reports on the film are that it is magical and unlike anything you’ve seen. Well possibly. But I found it boring as hell. It is an art-house film for the art-house crowd. It suggests its young director, Benh Zeitlin, has a big future ahead of him. But while I don’t mind non-linear narratives and open endings, I struggled to keep interested in a group of people who interested me on an anthropologic level, but for whom I gained little sympathy.

I saw it about two weeks ago and honestly I can’t remember how it ends. 

Silver Linings Playbook has the advantage in the Best Picture race of being the only one that deals with “average and contemporary” Americans. It concerns two people (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) who have mental health issues who inevitably fall in love and who perform in a dance contest together. While that is going on Cooper’s dad, Robert di Niro, who has massive OCD concerning the watching of football games, loses a large amount of money gambling on football. Inevitably (and not altogether realistically) the dance contest and the gambling intertwine.

Look it’s a nice film. Jennifer Lawrence is terribly wonderful. You ache for her at times. But the whole time I kept thinking that this is one of those families that only occurs in films or novels. Everyone is so damaged that it was less a portrayal of American society as a condemnation of the American psychological health system. As much as I enjoyed it, I couldn’t help agree with Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, who tweeted, “Apropos of nothing, I loved Silver Linings Playbook, but it really seems like that relationship could be a disaster going forward”.

In the end for me its downfall is that while I have met people like de Niro’s character (and may myself be at times like him when it comes to watching Adelaide Crows games) the main characters were movie truth people. They felt the type created for a novel or film – created to give us a quirky/unique view of modern life.
Such false creations are completely absent in the French film Amour, directed and written by Michael Haneke. It involves an elderly couple whose life is changed when the wife, Anne, played by Emmanuel Riva suffers a stroke.
It is such a shattering movie that is full of snippets of humour and warmth and moments that make you smile while your eyes get a bit watery.

It is honest, unflinching and brutal. It has absolutely no hope of winning Best Picture, but it is the one film of all the nine that remains with me. It is the only one of which I can recall a scene and feel a frisson of emotion. There is a scene which haunts me and which led after the films end for me to hold my wife in a long hug and that I wanted to keep going.

Amour is about life – life that doesn’t get much of a showing in films. The characters don’t have odd quirks or tics or exist in a world that is only found in movies. It is a quiet film – the dialogue doesn’t over power, there are many moments of peace, and the silence continues for much longer than any American director would allow. And yet it is full of such intensity that you come out completely spent.
It is clearly a French film – in more than just the language. And usually I favour the Oscars rewarding those films from the American/British/Australian side of filmmaking. The French have Cannes.
But Amour for mine is far and away the best film of the year. A film about grown ups for grown ups. It is challenging cinema; it won’t get an audience in the way that other lighter French films such as The Artist did, but it deserves to win the same award.

***

The list of nominations of course does not include the best nine films. Shockingly missing is Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. It’s often been said that The Master really needs to be seen twice to appreciate it. After watching it I had no real desire to watch it again. I thought it a bit of a lot that added to very little – as though the narrative collapses when attempts to discern just what it was all about. Sure it is notionally about the start of Scientology, but it is more than that, and oddly less as well because it is not actually about the beginnings of Scientology. 

I was ready to dismiss the film, and yet often over the weeks after watching it, I kept pondering scenes and the things said. I didn’t have any great desire to see the film again and yet I kept thinking about it, wanting to see those scenes again to see if they meant what I thought they meant. I read numerous articles on the film, wanting to get others’ interpretations.

I still think the whole less than the sum of its parts, but I would rank it second on my list of films of the year. And it certainly deserved to be nominated and Anderson sure as hell should have been nominated for Best Director.

Joe Wright’s version of Anna Karenina is a brilliant retelling of an oft oft oft filmed story. Wright sets the film partly upon a stage – yet not before any audience – and also on location. It mixes the theatrical and the filmic and does so in a way that makes Anna Karenina fresh. I only wish Les Miserables had been filmed in this manner, I think it would’ve  been one of the great experiences of cinema. Alas. Not to be. 

Oscars Time – The Best Pictures (Part One)

The discussion regarding many of the films up for the Best Picture Award at this year’s Oscars has concerned truth. Mostly this has arisen because so many of the films depict historical events – even if in the case of Zero Dark Thirty that history is quite recent.

Now obviously historical accuracy and film have long been bedfellows so strange that it seems quite remarkable that the issue pops up. It’s not a new phenomenon. Some of the the most beloved and greatest films of all time have factual blips or fudges. The plot of Casablanca absurdly hinges on the possession of letters of transit which have been signed by General Charles DeGaulle. Why on earth anyone in Vichy France – let alone the Gestapo – would value letters from the leader of Free France defies logic to such an extent that the entire film should be laughable. And yet it isn’t – mostly because it is not attempting to depict “truth”. It is about “movie truth”. In movie truth ex-lovers do run into each other in a gin joint and the bar owner is as suave as Humphrey Bogart and the woman is as perfect as Ingrid Bergmann.

Similarly The Great Escape does not depict the actual POW breakout as though it were a documentary – the Americans for one, had been segregated from the British prior to the break out. But again, while it’s clear the movie is tampering with the truth it is being done to depict the historical fact that 76 POWs in WWII broke out from Stalag Luft III and 50 were murdered. The film while taking liberties with time and persons does not break from the core reality of the historical truth. Those events did happen, they may have been harder in real life, they may have involved less humour and action, but if you come away from the film thinking that 76 POW’s escaped and 50 were murdered, then your knowledge of the historical reality is not wrong.

But the character on which Steve McQueen is based did not try and jump the Swiss border on a motorcycle. Does that matter? Not for mine it doesn’t, because it is not the core of the film, nor does it affect one’s understanding of that core truth.

For Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty the issue is primarily one of torture, but it is two fold: did torture assist the capture of Osama bin Laden, and does the film suggest that is the case? All evidence suggests that “enhanced interrogation techniques” contributed little if anything to OBL’s capture, and yet the first 40 minutes or so of the film depict torture being used. 

Torture is the foundation of the film. The best link we get shown between that torture and the death of Osama bin Laden is a man providing a name long after he has been tortured and which he gives because he has no desire to “go back into the box”. In reality, even this is disputed, and yet Bigelow’s film says it happened. This leads to the overall question of whether this is a film that glorifies or justifies torture at the expense of truth?

Objectively the film does not suggest torture directly led to the capture of Bin Laden, but objectively as well the film spends it first 40 minutes showing you scene after scene of torture and never suggests it is futile. Indeed later on in the film, at a point in time after Obama has been elected, a CIA official bemoans the ability to “prove” that bin Laden is in Abbottabad: “You know we lost the ability to prove that when we lost the detainee program – who the hell am I supposed to ask: some guy in GITMO who is all lawyered up?”

The suggestion that those in GITMO are now all lawyered up is laughable but because no one in the room suggests the character’s statement is invalid, it leads easily to the belief that torture is necessary and was necessary. It also idiotically suggests that those in GITMO are now treated like any other inmate in a US prison.

And so on the other side we have Bigelow and those involved with the film saying they are just showing what happened and taking no sides. Well that is fine if she was also showing both sides, but she doesn’t. I don’t think her film is pro-torture, but it sure as heck isn’t against it either. And that brings us to the movie truth of the film. For people watching the film the clear implication is the first 40 minutes leads to the last 40 minutes of SEAL Team 6 killing Bin Laden. It is not a case of the public misreading the film like those Republicans in the 1980s who thought Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” was glorifying America, rather it is the logical view. You can’t build a film on torture, imply it led to a snippet of info and then suggest “oh we’re not trying to say anything about whether or not it was successful”.

But given this, can we get passed the torture and praise the film in spite of it?

Well yes – and the film is in many respects quite brilliant. The acting is top notch; the direction – especially in the final act involving the attack on Bin Laden’s compound – is excellent. Bigelow is a great director of action scenes.

But I cannot walk past the reality that this film wants to suggest that it is an accurate portrayal of events and yet it also wants to pretend that it is an objective portrayal of those events. The telling of history, just as with daily journalism, is subjective. Choices are made about what to show, what to leave out, what to highlight, what to wash over. I don’t mind films with a subjective view of history, nor do I particularly mind subjective journalism; I despise them pretending to be objective.

I think the film is perhaps one of the best renderings of modern America, by revealing the belief of many in that country that so long as it is being done by America, then whatever being done is right.

The only problem is I don’t think that was the intention of the filmmakers.

Ben Affleck’s Argo, primarily because it is the favourite for the Best Picture gong, has also had to deal with questions of historical accuracy. It is again a case of subjectivity, but this time it is less of glorification of torture and more a glorification of America.

Hollywood films not surprisingly have regularly elevated America’s role in historical events. To an extent – so long as the kernel of history is not destroyed – I can cope with that. The Great Escape surely does elevate the role of the Americans, but neither does it suggest it was a US show. Similarly I don’t mind that Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan would have you think the yanks were the only ones involved in D Day. With that film the great falsehood is that it violates the inner truth that itself had constructed – namely that war is shitty and bloody and random and in which you die and not someone else occurs for reasons beyond logic. The end of that film however shows us that Tom Hanks dies because he set free a German who then returns and kills him. Oh the pathos!!

Argo does not so much elevate the role of the US in rescuing the hostages in Iran as it devaluates some of the role of the Canadians. And yet to my mind this devaluation is slight. It is clear that the Canadian ambassador and his wife were seriously putting themselves on the line and were clearly central to keeping the hostages alive. In the film Ben Affleck’s CIA character talks to the Canadian ambassador as an equal – never suggesting that the CIA was doing all the work; nor suggesting it was a minor thing that the Canadian was doing.

Historical truth in film is often battered like this, the crucial aspect is always whether or not this distorts our view of what actually happened? Last year the baseball film Moneyball depicted the performance of the Oakland Athletics in 2002. The crux of the film was that the team was made up of cast offs and nobodies who were seriously undervalued by everyone. The only pitcher mentioned in the film was a reliever who was referred to as the most undervalued player in the league. Amazingly with this bunch of players, defying the odds and proving that there are different ways to evaluate skill, the A’s get to the playoffs.

After watching the film you would never have heard of Miguel Tejada or Barry Zito. Tejada won the American League MVP that year, and Zito won the Cy Young Award for best pitcher in the league – both had been with the A’s the year before, and were there as a result of some magic new moneyball formula of recruiting. It’d be like making a film about Geelong’s 2009 season and forgetting to mention Gary Ablett Jr.

Moneyball, which is wonderful viewing, suffers the more you learn about the reality. This is always a good guide for judging truth in historical films. In The King’s Speech a couple years ago, Winston Churchill was oddly depicted as being in favour of the abdication of King Edward VIII when in reality (and to be honest, infamously) he was greatly opposed to it. But that does not destroy the crux of the film because it is a mere side note, that would be largely pointless to the narrative even were it not false. 

In that same year The Social Network took many liberties with reality. Most crucial was the suggestion that Mark Zuckerberg after creating Facebook and becoming mega-rich was still just a lonely soul wanting to connect with that one woman who dumped him in college.  It was bullshit and it’s not surprising that it was written by Aaron Sorkin who also wrote Moneyball.

With Argo it is pretty clear even without knowledge of events that much of what occurs – especially the ending is pretty much “film truth” not real truth. Things occur far too simultaneously – a scene where the CIA quickly approve flight tickets happens in a manner that suggests a damn quick internet connection in 1980. The group are shown to be in danger when they go into a bazar, in reality they never went in to one at all.

Many of the exaggerations are obvious, and I think even Affleck is aware that they devalue the film because over the end credits we are shown the actual photos of the participants next to the actors in an attempt to reinforce the notion that the film sticks close to the facts, or is at least a close representation of it. That alone does I think show Affleck trying to walk both sides of the street – that if documentary and “Hollywoodised” film.  Overall however I found the distortions in the film less important than those in Zero Dark Thirty, mostly because my sense was the film was attempting to show film truth rather than real truth. It was a spy film based on events, rather than a depiction of real events and on that score I certainly found Argo the more thrilling picture.

Stephen Spielberg knows all about film truth. When he made Schindler’s List his desire to make the film seem more truthful led him to shoot in black and white because that was the film of documentaries back when the events were depicted. Roman Polanski a decade later when he made The Pianist put paid to that lie that you can only show the truth of the holocaust in black and white film. When Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan he reduced the colour saturation by 60% to attempt to replicate the over-exposed photos taken on D Day by Robert Capa – ignoring that they were overexposed by mistake and thus were not a “real” depiction of the sight on Omaha Beach. For Spielberg reality is that seen in film (or photos).

Spielberg also cannot but fail to stop himself from adding to the events he is depicting with clear hokum.  He does this in Schindler’s List with the opening Jewish prayer scene and the ending scene at Schindler’s grave. In SPR he used the character we eventually learn is an Old Ryan to bookend the film and to totally ensure we understand that this film was important and about something. While in Schindler’s List this was more manipulative than anything, in SPR it destroyed the film because it makes the narrative a lie.

And so when I came to watch Lincoln, I was knew that Spielberg would not be able to contain himself. And from the first scene we see he couldn’t.

The film opens with Lincoln sitting while watching troops walk past in the rain at some army camp. He is confronted by 2 black soldiers. Normally this would be a quick “good luck men” type scene, but luckily, Spielberg has found himself the most articulate and forward thinking black soldier in the Union Army. Rather than any deference to his Commander in Chief, this soldier delivers a proto-Malcolm X type speech and then soon after helps out two white soldiers by completing a recitation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Well now.

In elementary schools throughout America today there most likely are people who know the full text of that speech, but it fairly well beggars belief that any soldiers while fighting in the civil war would have had the time or inclination to memorise the speech, let alone the awareness of the speech’s existence.

From that opening scene I was on guard and to be honest I viewed the entire film through the shadow of Spielberg’s need to stick to movie truth. When I heard about the fact of Congressmen from Connecticut voting for the abolition of slavery despite the film showing them voting against, I was neither surprised, nor bothered. The film is not about those congressmen, nor does the fact that the historical flub was done to heighten the tension of the final vote ruin the crucial truth of the film. What mattered more to me was that I felt very little tension at all during that scene of the final vote.

Seeing Congressmen who have only briefly been shown the previous 2 hours getting up and saying “Yay” or “Nay” rather lacks tension when you don’t even know if those Congressmen were expected to vote one way or the other. The film suffers from a case of the “we know what happeneds”. We know the vote passes because we know Lincoln freed the slaves. That’s why making your film’s climax an event we all know happens is very tricky. It’s why it is best avoided. It’s why William Goldman chose to end All the President’s Men with Woodward and Bernstein stuffing up and showing the Nixon resignation only on the teletype ending.

Lincoln is about the passing of a vote we all know will pass. We do discover some interesting things along the way, but it never deviates from that path. Ironically for a film adapted from a book called “Team of Rivals” we get very little on the rivalry. Tommy Lee Jones’s character Thaddeus Stevens  is shown to be opposed to Lincoln’s more moderate path but the two characters largely exist separately in the film. There is more rivalry between Stevens and Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, than with Lincoln, and indeed there is more rivalry between Lincoln and Todd than there is with anyone else. 

The Abraham Lincoln in the film is a folksy saint. That might be the truth but I knew going in that if there was to be any other side to his character, Spielberg sure as heck is not the director who would show it. Whether or not the film deviates from historical truth or not was of little concern to me, the bigger concern was that really, I didn’t care. When Lincoln is assassinated I felt little loss. It was just the end of a history lesson. I was more moved when watching the events being related in Ken Burns’ documentary, The Civil War. That’s a  major fault in any film, let alone one where the person dying is the name of the film.

Quentin Tarantino is not one for worries about historical accuracy. His Django Unchained plays loose with the facts from the get go when the opening credits state it’s 1858 “two years before the Civil War”, which is odd given the war began in 1861. 

Before we get to the history in the film, let’s first get past the shock. You’ll be stunned to discover that this Tarantino film draws on spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 70s, has lots of over the top violence and features Samuel L Jackson playing a mean guy who says “mother fucker” a lot.

I know – who would’ve thunk it.

Tarantino is a post-modern film maker. He has his characters use modern slang, wear sunglasses and use weapons at a time clearly before they were invented. He and his many, many devotees will dismiss any criticisms by suggesting he is standing on the shoulders of giants and rendering something new – twisting it though a new paradigm perhaps.

Yeah, but so what?

He has stated his desire with this film was to make a western for black kids to be able to watch and see a black man as the hero. And I guess if that is what you want to do then you might as well do it if you have the money and power as does Tarantino. Except he hasn’t made a western, he made a film set within the genre of western films. His film is to westerns as Sleepless in Seattle is to rom-coms, which wasn’t really a rom-com but a rom-com about the romance and comedy in rom-coms.  The best westerns are not about depicting a great western movie, they are about depicting life – think The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in West, Red River, Shane even Rio Bravo.

Those films – especially Once Upon a Time in West, did often draw in the history of film, but they were about more than just showing they can do that. They have a core to them that is completely lacking from Django Unchained. Mostly because great westerns – like great films – contain fully developed characters; Django Unchained, like all Tarantino films – contains flatly developed caricatures who have great lines to say, but very little to think.

Whether or not the events depicted are true representations of history is irrelevant because the characters involved in those events are not true.

Who cares whether Mandingo fighting really occurred or not, what is of greater concern is that the Leonardo DiCaprio character who watches the fighting is not a real person. He doesn’t talk like a real person – he just delivers Tarantino lines. There’s no inner workings going on; he’s just a dialogue spouting machine. So too is the main character, Django.  The device of Django seeing his wife in hallucinations is no substitute for actually writing scenes that explain to the viewer why there is such love. And when we finally meet his wife, she might as well still be a hallucination for all the part she plays in events.

The film has a great first hour, Django and Christoph Waltz’s character, Schultz, are a great team. I was happily going with them on their travels – the scenes involving the shooting of the sheriff and the Ku Klux Klan attack are great fun. But when they turn towards Mississippi and go rescuing Django’s wife, the film quickly becomes boring – tedium interrupted by scenes of violence that only further dull the senses or slap you about with a “look at this I’m showing how shocking things were… or weren’t who knows, Django is wearing sunglasses and talking like someone from Harlem 1970 so it all might just be a post modern bit of reworking of history”. That’s the problem with being so overly post-modern. You can’t toy with history and time and then demand to be believed when you perhaps are trying to depict something as literal truth.

Many people have questioned the use of “nigger” in the dialogue as though they would think some other word was used at the time. I had no difficulty with that word, however, whenever the slave “Stephen”, played by Samuel L Jackson, uttered the clearly post WWII phrase “motherfucker”, I was reminded again that this was a Tarantino film and truth was secondary to snappy dialogue and violence.

By the time the film enters the last 30 minutes, reality is long gone and the arrival of Tarantino himself sporting an Australian accent only serves to reinforce the stupidity of it all.

Only one scene, involving the Schultz character, shows any depiction of some inner truth. Schultz, a German is remembering seeing a slave being attacked by dogs at the bidding of slave owner, DiCaprio. While he remembers the horrific scene a woman nearby is playing Beethoven on a harp. He demands she stop as though the beauty of Beethoven should be divorced completely from a world where such evil could occur. The scene is excellent not so much for the addition it makes to the narrative but because it reminds the viewer that Schultz’s Germany which spawned Beethoven will also give rise to the evil of the holocaust. Schultz is also by far the best character in the film. The one person who almost approaches someone who might have once actually existed in a place on earth rather than only in Tarantino’s imagination.

The film is not even a very good western, let alone a film deserving of being nominated for Best Picture. It would be great one day to see Tarantino make a film that doesn’t explicitly reference films/genres from the past. It would be good to see if he can write a real character instead of someone who always knows the right thing to say at the right time. That will never happen of course. Not while he is getting rewarded and praised for making films like this.

PART TWO tomorrow.

Australia’s Unemployment Rate in January stays steady at 5.4%

Today the labour force figures for January came out and they had a modicum of good news. The unemployment rate stayed at 5.4%.

The decade long picture shows how long the rate has been bumping around between 5.0% and 5.5% (and seriously, how bizarre is it that a decade ago is now 2003?  Surely 10 years ago it was 1995!)

The close up picture of the past 12 months shows the upward movement might (might!) be plateauing, but I wouldn’t put too much in store by that red trend line, for mine there still seems to be an upward trend happening.

But 5.4% unemployment is still pretty damn good, so let;s not get too down on ourselves. It did come off the back of an increase in employment – in both seasonally adjusted and trend terms. But as you can see that trend growth is still unable to get above 0.1%. And until that happens at best you’re going to see is the rate stay flat, and depending on the participation rate, it could go higher.

Which brings us to the participation rate. It declined in trend and seasonally adjusted terms – from 65.1% to 65.0 in both cases.

And it has been a long slide from the record highs achieved in late 2010.

The question remains is whether the slide is a structural change reflecting an ageing workforce, or is it merely a symptom of the weak labour market and we one day will get back up to near 66% (my gut says no).

In hours worked in trend terms we see an ever so slight decline (there was as well in seasonal terms), but the boarder picture is the weak growth in hours worked since that late-2010 time. We might be at a historically good unemployment rate, but that doesn't mean the labour market is purring along. It’s pretty weak. It’s amazing how well it’s kept up really.

The weakness can be clearly seen when we turn attention to Full-time labour. Trend growth has been negative for 3 straight months. Not good at all:

Interestingly the unemployment rate of those looking for full-time work is coming back to the overall rate. Perhaps reflecting that people are giving up looking for full-time work and looking for anything they can get:

As to the sexes, both men and women are doing roughly the same. Not great but just keeping in the positive:

Now in the past few months the picture from Queensland has been fricken dire.

The austerity of Campbell Newman’s government has slapped the labour market in the sunshine state around somewhat (and by “somewhat” I mean in the sense of “I got hit in the head somewhat last night and had to call for an ambulance after I passed out”).

So it is only right that I point out the good news that this month in seasonally adjusted terms QLD had a win.   

But as I’ve always noted as well, seasonally adjusted terms are pretty dodgy at the state level (after all back in October last year Tasmania was the “boom state”). But even in trend terms QLD had a good month. Coming 3rd behind WA and SA. 

If we look at the longer term picture of the yearly employment growth we get more of a sense of why one good month of employment growth in QLD sure as heck ain’t time to pop open the West Coast Coolers and start partying like its the 1980s. As you can see of the top 3 growth states of January, only WA is really showing any signs of long term growth.

As noted above the participation rate has been a key for keeping the employment rate steady. This is also a factor at the state level.

QLD’s participation rate is second only to WA’s, but it has fallen drastically in the past 15 months.

If we look at the state participation levels since the Later 2010 period, we see all but WA have shrunk, and QLD has shrunk by far the most.

All this leads to a continued decline in the employment to population ratio. We’re a long way from the record achieved in early 2008:

And if we look historically at how the employment to population ratio has declined and risen during past recessions, you can see not only how weak the recovery post GFC has been, but also how structurally changed the current situation is.

The decline from the peak prior to the recession post the GFC (and yes I know there wasn’t technically a recession) is now longer than that of the 1981-82 recession. And our economy is sure as hell a lot better than it was then. The difference then was women came into the labour market in greater number than ever before.

We don’t have any untapped source of labour this time round, and actually the tap is turning off as the population ages.

It certainly makes for an interesting policy period for those pondering the economy.

Drum Post– Life (and policy) is complicated

My Drum post today looked briefly at the two speeches given last week by Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. I have a bit of a slap at Abbott for essentially keeping to the line he has been keeping to for 2 years that life will be great and wonderful under a Liberal Government because in 2004 the budget was in surplus.

Also removing the carbon price will make the world a joyous place with tangerine trees and marmalade skies and other wonders to behold.

I have no problems with the Liberal Party slapping the PM and Swan about the head for having said squillions of times that they would deliver a surplus. The ALP shouldn’t have ever been playing the surplus is great game. They should have changed that story 4 years ago. They had the perfect opportunity but they didn’t due I think to massive insecurity on the part of Rudd and Swan and as a result they’ve kept to that mantra ever since. Stupid oh so stupid.

But if we’re going to talk about surplus and deficit, please let us talk in a language that makes sense. The Liberal Party is talking about how much more taxation is being raised now than in 2007. Well duh. The economy has grown since then, inflation has occurred sine then. Of course more taxation is collected now than then.

Since 1970-71 the only time taxation revenue has declined was in 1991-92 – ie when the recession hit, and 2008-09 and 2009-10 – ie during the GFC.

So this government for the first time had to deal with 2 successive years where gross revenue declined.

If we put it in percentage terms you can see it pretty starkly:

The problem – and it was always a likely one (and thus, yes the Govt does deserve criticism for it) is that the expected growth of revenue in 2012-13 was rather ambitious.

If we look at the spend in % of GDP terms – which is the ONLY intelligent way to judge the level of revenue and expenditure compared to previous years it again comes out just how different the revenue picture is now compared to 2004-05 – which Tony Abbott in his speech referred to as a good comparison:

It’s worth remembering that when Peter Costello allowed (and quite correctly so) the budget to go into deficit in 2001-02 both revenue and expenditure were higher than what Swan is trying to do in 2012-13.

I think it is a pretty strong indictment of Swan that I would wager 95% of voters think it is the other way round.

My piece also looked at cost of living. In the past year the cost of living index has grown by less than the CPI – this is mostly because the CPI doesn’t count mortgage payments – so interest rates can actually rise causing inflation to fall, but cost of living can rise. At the moment it;s the other way round – interest rates have fallen, and thus inflation is a bit higher:

Age pensioners who as a rule don’t pay a mortgage don’t get that benefit of lower interest rate.

To cut through the mess of the above graph here’s the pensioners compared to CPI.

As you can see currently they are pretty close to the CPI – especially compared to 2005-06 and 2009-11, so it’s a bit tough to make a case that the CPI is currently giving a distorted picture. But what this graph does demonstrate, is that that is not a situation you can assume always occurs.

Andrew Bolt trends towards dodgy graphs

I don’t normally blog about Andrew Bolt, because really, what’s the point? The bloke struggles with basic levels of research (a fact I have encountered personally) and hell, his stuff is pretty much pure opinion (or the opinions given to him by his readers), so there’s not much point saying I disagree with him because, well everyone is entitled to their opinions.
But today he decided to try his hand with some graphs.
The settings for this foray in to the graphic world of data was a comment by Craig Emerson on Twitter with Dr Karl Kruszelnicki:

In response Andrew Bolt today wrote a blog post titled:

In the faint hope Emerson can be educated

And he opens with this line:

One man presents science on the ABC. The other is a senior minister in the government that’s imposed the carbon tax.

You would expect both not to be so ignorant about the very basic data on global warming:

Now it’s a brave man who starts calling others ignorant especially one who is not exactly known for his superb research skills.
In order to prove to Emerson and Dr Karl that they were ignorant Bolt tried his hands at graphing some data.
Now look. I don’t want to get all “demarcation dispute” with Andrew on graphs. Sure they’ve become a bit of my thing. And sure I probably have a passion for graphs that rather goes beyond the healthy stage. But here’s the thing. When I use a graph I know that I have to be just as careful in how I present that graph as I do when I write words, because you can lie just as easily with a graph as you can with words, and I don’t want anyone accusing me of attempting to defraud the public by presenting data that is actually false or misleading.
Bolt presents 5 graphs and I will show them all screenshot just to prove I’m not making this up (because by the time you get to the end of this you’ll be sure I am).
First he presents a “graph” from the Met Office in the UK:

It’s not really a graph worth considering because where the temperature was in January 1997 and December 2012 doesn’t actually say much about the trend, but it does nicely convey to his readers that there has been no increase in temperatures. This graph he’s clearly lifted from somewhere – probably the Watts Up With That website, as that’s usually where he gets his climate change “scoops”.
But then Bolt really goes wrong, because instead of grabbing a graph from somewhere else, he astonishingly decides to do some work himself and produce his own graphs.
He went to the great website Wood for Trees which has pretty much all the data on global temperature recordings you could want. It is a neutral site. No one disputes the data it provides. And best of all it allows you to use that data to make graphs. You can do graphs according to any time period and using a raft of different measures.
Here for example is a graph I made using the GISTEMP data (the NASA guys) from 1972-2012:

I have screen capped it all to show you how these graphs are made. Series 1 – (the red line) is “GISTEMP LOTI global mean from 1972”. LOTI stands for “Land-Ocean-Temperature Index. Series 2 (the Green line) is the Linear Trend from 1972 of “GISTEMP LOTI global mean”.
As you can see it’s a nice upward trend.
Have a look also at the top left of the graph. It clearly labels the red and green lines.
OK. Now here’s the graphs Bolt used and his captions for them (and remember he prefaced these graphs by saying “In the foolish hope that these two men may reconsider their opinions after consulting the evidence”:
First up is UAH. This is the data from the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and it measures “Tropospheric and lower stratospheric temperature data collected by NOAA's TIROS-N polar-orbiting satellites and adjusted for time-dependent biases by the Global Hydrology and Climate Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)”. OK that’s a mouthful but I want to be exact about what it is.

OK. Let’s have a look at this graph. Go up to the top left. What do you see? You see the red line is “uah/ from 1997”, which is what it should be, but the green line – the linear trend line – is from “rss/ from: 1997/ trend”.
That is, the trend line is not the trend of the red line. It is not the trend line of UAH data, it is the trend line of “rss data from 1997”.
What is rss? Well that is also done by NOAA but it is their “remote sensing system’s microwave sounding units”. It rather nicely has shown a flat trend since 1997.
But that is not what Bolt is saying this graph is suggesting.
What he is saying is that the green line shows the trend of UAH measurements has been flat since 1997 – it “confirms” it to use his exact word. .But what he actually has shown is two different measurements. And the measurement he has used as the trend line is from data that reveals a flat trend line. But what about the actual UAH temperatures? Have they been flat?
Let’s use the same data Bolt has used but instead of the “rss linear trend” let’s actually use the UAH data to make a trend – because that is what he is saying his graph displays:

Notice anything different? Like the fact the linear trend is now clearly heading up? 
How astonishment.
OK onto his next graph and here we at least see some honesty, because (what a surprise) it is the RSS graph! The trend certainly is flat – if anything it might even be going downwards.
I have no problems saying that, because I trust the data and I am not afraid of admitting what it shows – even if it contradicts the argument I might wish to make about climate change.

But after the one honest graph of the RSS he quickly moves on to the next bit of “evidence”. We now come to our old friend GISTEMP:

Notice anything about that top left corner? Yep the wonderful “rss from 1997” trend line.
Gee how did that get there?
Now anyone with mathematical knowledge slightly above that exhibited by the ape creatures of the Indus (thank you Black Adder) would look at that graph and think hang on, that green line isn’t anywhere near the middle of the red lines – which is usually the case for trends (scratch that, not usually – always). But not our Andy. He saw it, and slapped it on his page with a Huzzah you ignorant Craig Emerson, can’t you see even NASA knows temperatures have stopped warming!
Well OK, let’s put in the GISTEMP data to get a linear trend and see what pops up:

Hmmm. Now I may be seeing things all crooked after spending two weeks watching Channel 7’s coverage of the tennis, but that green trend line looks to be going up.
OK now he goes back to the UK Met Office and their “HADCRUT” data:

Don’t you love the nonchalant “ditto” like he has this whole climate change thing sewn up. And don’t you also like how when you look at the top left corner once again he is using the RSS data to represent the trend for different data. Once again even a basic knowledge of maths would have you realising that that green line could in no way be the trend of the red line.
But not Andrew Bolt. He saw that, saw nothing wrong with it. He put it on his blog and thinks QED.
Note as well that Bolt has used “HADCRUT3”, which has now been superseded by HADCRUT4.
OK what is the real HADCRUT3 trend

Again we see a trend line that is going up. Now sure it is only just going up and I wrote about this on The Drum a couple weeks back. Although it was only just going up I still noted it, even though I was trying to show that climate change is causing temperatures to rise. I did that because I am honest with data and am not trying to pretend the facts are one thing when they are something quite different.
Now Bolt used HADCRUT3. Why didn’t he use the more recent version, HADCRUT4? Maybe because then the trend would look like this:

You can’t even pretend that trend is flat. Also it clearly shows that even by the UK data, 1998 was not the hottest year.
I guess Bolt just wasn’t aware of that data.
Bolt then quotes NASA head climate honcho James Hansen:

An admission from the godfather of global warming, NASA’s James Hansen:

The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.

Well OK, but Emerson and Dr Karl was talking since 1998 which is rather a tad more than 5 years (I’m not 100% sure on this, but I sure as hell hope Bolt realises that 2012 minus 1998 is not 5). So Hanson’s quote would be worth citing if Dr Karl had said “the world has warmed in the past 5 years”.
Incidentally here’s the GISTEMP for the past 5 years

Yep it is flat.
But here’s the thing. Who gives a damn? No one tries to measure changes in the climate in just 5 year blocks because it is completely meaningless. Here’s what running (reader kalusfloozy rightly points out these means aren’t running [and I didn’t intend them to be either, so sloppy adjective use there]) 5 year trends look like on the graph I had earlier of GISTEMP from 1972

As you can see some went down, some went flat, some went up. But the trend since 1972 is obvious.
Now look, Bolt normally does such cherry picking. It’s intellectually dishonest, but maybe he actually does believe 5 year trends are important.
But when it comes to representing trends on a graph and suggesting that they show something which they do not, well that is not just intellectually dishonest; it is completely so.
But here’s the kicker he ends his graphs with a quote from Phil Jones regarding temperatures from 1995 to 2009. I’m not sure why Bolt is not concerned about the past 3 years, but oh well, let’s stick with what he thinks is irrefutable evidence.
The line Bolt quotes is this:

I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.

Rather hilariously he got this line from the great blog Skeptical Science (he even links to it!), which has the quote in full:

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Phil Jones: I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

Bolt for some reason didn’t graph 1995-2009, so I’ll do it for him, using HADCRU4 as that is Phil Jones’ data:

Bolt ends his diatribe of misleading information and context-slaughtered quotes by writing:

Do Dr Karl and Emerson truly dispute this evidence? Are they so in denial?

PS: an apology would be nice.

It takes a hell of a lot of front to demand an apology after misleading the public and displaying an utter ignorance of statistics.
Andrew Bolt doesn’t deserves an apology, he deserves censure.
UPDATE
Bolt has now changed his post stating:

(APOLOGIES - I originally and inadvertently used two graphics with the wrong trend line. This HADCRUT graphic is now corrected. The other graphic was of GISTEMP, one of the data sets showing a mild warming.)

That’s not quite accurate either. As you can see from above he “inadvertently” used three graphs with the wrong trend line, not two.  
He puts up the correct HADCRUT graph – still using HADCRUT3 not HADCRUT4. Rather oddly however he doesn’t put the the GISTEMP graph on this new updated blog, he just links to it. And he completely ignores the UAH graph!
Pathetic, really.
****
I note that on some browsers the graphs aren’t coming up. I use Chrome and it seems fine on them, but not on explorer (although you can right click and “show graphs”) and on Firefox it’s just the link. I don’t know why – as I put them up the way I do all my other graphs in the past. Will try and sort it out.

ELECTION NOW!!! or in September if that’s your thing…

And so today at the end of a very good speech, the contents of which have now been forgotten by everyone, Julia Gillard announced that the election will be held on September 14. Oh and she has new glasses.

This has pretty much turned everything on its head as prior to her announcement everyone was expecting the election to be held in errr…. September… or possibly October.

So yeah. Game changer.

On a practical level it’s great for the Public Service. Everyone will be able to schedule their holidays now. On the down side, that ready at hand stalling excuse of the APS in election years of “Well we probably shouldn’t start this project because they might call an election” is now sadly redundant. 

There’s been a lot (oh. my. god. a lot) of talk in the past 8 hours about how this will be the longest election campaign.

Please. The Liberals have been campaigning since about 22 August 2010 – Tony Abbott had already announced a “mini-campaign” for this week – which might possibly be the single most superfluous announcement he’s ever made.

The government as well has spent far too much time in campaign mode, and only one the carbon price was locked in last year did they start acting like a government.

Rather oddly the announcement of an election date has caused the media to go into apoplexy with talk of uncharted waters and (oh. my. god) it’ll be an 8 month campaign!! How will we cope!!!. It’s almost like they don’t realise pretty much all the states except Queensland have fixed terms. How do those people in those states survive living in such a bizarro world?

The reality is that we will have a long campaign, but not because the date was announced now. The election is to be on September 14. The last sitting day of parliament prior to that date is June 27.  Usually after the end of the winter sitting period, having passed the budget and indulged in the press galleries mid-winter ball, MPs fly off overseas for “USA-Australia” conferences and the like. Mostly politics goes off the boil for a few weeks. Not this year.

Who wants to go on an overseas jaunt when your opponent will be doorknocking in your constituency?

So that is ELEVEN weeks from the last sitting day till the election.

Now sure, the writs won’t be issued until August 12, so the Government will still keep governing, but in reality the campaign will have begun. The trick for both sides is how to pace themselves. No one wants 11 weeks of TV adverts, and I doubt either side could afford them – the ALP sure as hell couldn’t.

Similarly, the campaign bus won’t actually start till the official campaign does, so from 27 June till 12 August we’re going to a have a six week phoney campaign where every one will know the election is coming, everyone will know there’s no new legislation to be passed or even debated. That’s a hell of a lot of space to fill with some kind of substance, but not so much substance that you have nothing left to say in the actual campaign.

I suspect both sides will be looking at how the Americans do it because they have around 8-9 weeks from the party conventions until the Presidential election, and that’s the kind of real time frame we’re talking here – not 8 months.

This gap is why I had been thinking 11 October, because then parliament could have sat until August 29, and the PM could announce the election prior to the September sitting weeks.

But that’s all moot now, and as a fan of fixed elections, I think this is an excellent decision.

The other “big” thing has been that 14 September is Yom Kippur.

Well geez. Good thing we’re a secular nation with a separation of church and state. And for that matter, good thing we’re a nation that allows pre-polling.

My favourite aspect of this is the big outrage from everyone except the leaders of the Jewish community. As news.com.au even reported:

But director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Peter Wertheim, says the majority of Australia's 107,000 Jews would not be fussed about the date.

"To be absolutely truthful it is not a major issue for us, because every election takes place on the Jewish Sabbath," Mr Wertheim told news.com.au.

“Not a major issue” but you know, let’s pretend it is one.  It’s January 30 and already the bullsh*t scale of media political coverage has zoomed past that of 2012. Pace yourselves people, pace yourselves. At this rate there’ll be nothing left to beat-up come September. Oh who am I kidding. Of course there will be.

Look, we don’t have elections over Easter or on Christmas Day not because that would be a great slur on Christians but because it would be a complete chaos. People over Easter and Christmas on masse go away for holidays, and as a rule you want to hold elections on weekends in which people are not likely to be away from home. It’s the same reason they’re never held on the Queens Birthday or Labour Day etc.

We can’t hold an election because of a religion practised by about 0.5% of the population? And we’re not allowed to do that even though it will not actually stop those people from voting?

Surely there are enough real things to get worked up about than these faux outrages where no one is actually all that outraged.

So is this a political masterstroke? Well I don’t know. And neither does anyone else. It won’t stop many though from pontificating about it. The old adage is the government has a big advantage knowing when the election will be called. But this year because an early election would’ve meant a house only one, and because the ALP is behind in the polls, it was always going to be September-October (possibly November but that’d be a stretch).

So I don’t think loses much of a tactical advantage on that score.

The PM in her speech said:

But the benefit of fixing the date now is not just the end of speculation about election timing.

It gives shape and order to the year and enables it to be one not of fevered campaigning, but of cool and reasoned deliberation.

That sounds nice. But based on the past 8 hours, the signs ain’t good.

Australian Open: Recap at this point

OK, well we’re at the semi final stage in both the men’s and women’s.

The women will be playing soon, but before I get to that, let’s go back to my preview post wherein I covered the women’s side of the tournament like this:

In the women’s?

Serena Williams. She might even lose a set along the way.

At the time Sally Jackson tweeted to me:

Nice analysis but women's tennis is more interesting than just Serena.

And she was right.

I’ve never been a big fan of Williams. Mostly because of things like this:

And this. And because of things like this in her press conference after losing to Sloane Stephens:

Q.  What did you think of the quality of the match before you tweaked the back?

SERENA WILLIAMS:  I don't think my level was high.  I don't know how many unforced errors I ended up hitting, but for sure more in one set than I probably did in the whole tournament.

So I think her level was high.  But as for my end, I mean, you can tell.  You each can say this is definitely not my best match in months.

Yeah Williams was up 6-3 2-0, but you see, she really wasn’t playing very well. Her opponent? Well she was playing “very high” – you have to don’t you know to beat Serena (and of course you also need Serena to play really bad). Every defeat is always like that for Williams. There’s usually an injury or she really didn’t play well at all, unlike her opponent who obviously played the match of her life.

That said, I think the injury – both ankle and back were the key – let’s be honest, Serena Williams doesn’t serve 135km/h if healthy. Sloane played very well, but I don’t see her winning unless Serena twigs the back.

But even saying that – how great is it to see Stephens win? Talk about a breathe of fresh air in the game. Genuine delight, and certainly no flash in the pan. This win probably came earlier than expected, but that’s sport – it’s a test of body as well as skill, and there is many a player who “could’ve won” were it not for an injury. Winners get their body through the match somehow.

OK. Who wins from here? Hard to go past the two top seeds, but as I write this La Ni (or Ni La) just beat Sharapova. That means at least for a quieter match than would have been Sharapova v Azarenka. I’ll go for Azarenka to win her semi in straight sets, and the final in 3.

***

Here’s what the past 10 days have taught us about men’s tennis:

1. Novak Djokovic is now a legitimate candidate for the Top 10 of the ATP era.

If we go from 1973 when the ATP began – which is a few years after the “Open era” started in 1968 – it’s pretty easy to reel off the top 8 (the order more tricky):

Borg, Connors, McEnroe, Lendl, Sampras, Agassi, Federer, Nadal.

Without any doubt these are the best 8. They own it not just in Grand Slam titles but in time spent as number 1.

But who comes 9th and 10th? Strong cases can be made for Edberg (6 Grand Slams), Wilander (7 Grand Slams), Becker (6 Grand Slams), and maybe Courier (4 Grand Slams). I’d leave Leyton Hewitt out of that top 10 even though he was number one for the 9th longest period, because with only 2 grand slam titles he really didn’t cash in when he was at the top, and I doubt he was ever the prohibitive favourite in any Grand Slam he entered.

Djokovic with (thus far) 5 grand slam titles has to now be part of that conversation. And what really has elevated him into the top 10 for mine is his consistency. By reaching the semi final he has now made 11 consecutive grand slam semi finals. Only one other person has done that – Federer. Third best is Lendl with 10 in a row. So Djokovic is in big company. Incidentally Federer’s record is 23, so Djokovic only needs to keep making the semi finals until the Australian Open of 2016 to tie it.

By making the Quarter Finals here, Djokovic also extended his consecutive run of QFs at grand slams. Lendl had made 13 in a row, Djokovic is now on 15. Federer by beating Raonic took his streak to 35. Which is so long that it’s almost a bit silly. Djokovic will only need to keep making the QF until the Australian Open in 2018 to tie that. He will only be 30 by then, so it is certainly doable, but it requires no injuries and lapses at all.

Djokovic’s defensive play is beyond that anyone else has ever played. He just gets everything back, and gets it back in a manner that quickly turns defence into offence. It is the one area that I think he is better at than Federer ever was. 

At this point I put Djokovic 9th all time ATP era, and he’s only a couple titles away from being part of a top 9 in which his place in the order is up for strong debate.

2.  Generation Next ain’t there yet.

Ryan Harrison was pretty well embarrassed by Djokovic in the 2nd round, and Federer took care of first Tomic and then Raonic. Along the way Gigor Dimitrov lost in the first round as did Goffin. Jerzy Janoicz made it to the 3rd round, which will put him into the top 25 as he didn’t play in the Open last year. Andrey Kuznetsov did very well to beat 11th seed Juan Monaco in the first round, but he was then “bundled out” in the second by Kevin Anderson.

No one really stood up and said, I’ve arrived.

3. Generation Next is coming.

The 3rd round match against Federer was an excellent reality check for Tomic, and also for his critics.

It showed the BIG difference between playing an exhibition match against a jet-lagged Djokovic and playing a Grand Slam match against number 2 in the world. If there is one thing this summer of tennis should remind everyone it is that exhibition matches like the Hopman Cup and Kooyong Classic do not count for anything!

Here’s why – go to the ATP tour website and look at the Tomic-Djokovic match up. It is 3-0 to Djokovic. The Hopman Cup does not count. It is slightly as relevant as a pre-season AFL practice match.

For Tomic it was a big match – good for profile if he wins it, good for sponsorship, good all round. Djokovic was just hoping to have a good hit out and not get injured.

If the match is worth no ranking points, then that is how much it is worth in terms of reality. Sure players like to win, but it is a paid practice match. For Tomic the Hopman Cup showed he was in good form, but the Sydney International was the one that really mattered, and it was also the one that provided the true guide to his form.

At Sydney the highest ranked opponent Tomic beat was Andreas Seppi at number 23. In the Oz Open he beat the number 72 and number 120 in the world. So he didn’t really claim any scalps. BUT he did show he was good enough to be in the top 20.

His game against Federer was very good. He was able to stick with Federer for a number of shots, and probably deserved to win the 2nd set. But in tennis probably deserving doesn’t cut it.

Tomic’s serve is quality, and his forehand is very good. His movement needs to improve, but he is much better than this time last year.

Top 20 must be the goal this year and his game is certainly good enough – he troubled Federer for 2 sets, and while he went away in the 3rd, that is more about age and the difference between tournament best of 3 and grand slam best of 5.

So if you don’t like him, get used to not liking him for a while, because he will rise up the rankings. But it’s tough. How tough? Well after his great summer, where he won his first title, he leaves the Australian Open with only 70 extra rankings points than he had this time last year. To put that in context, he currently lies 765 points behind the number 20 in the world. He needs to play as good has he did this month, every month. And that is hard when you’re a long way from home, and you’re playing on the outside courts.

It is a tough, tough grind to get to the top.

Raonic as well is going to get “there”. He is now number 15 in the world. He reached the 4th round like he did last year, but he now has a couple tournaments where he has to defend points – San Jose which he won last year, and Memphis, where he came runner up. But for Raonic the big prizes are Masters events. At Indian Wells and Miami last year he lost in the 3rd round – to Federer and Murray respectively. With a higher ranking he might get a better draw that will see him face the big guys in the QFs – and every improvement gets him that much closer to the top 10.

His serve is such that in a best of 3 he really can do some damage. If he’s on, he’ll be impossible to break and even if he can’t break his opponent, you’d back him in a tie breaker. Oddly he has only made the 2nd round at Wimbledon the two times he has played it. I can’t see that remaining the case for much longer.

4. Nadal is a big loss, but the top 4 is closer to the rest than it has been

The top 4 seeds made it to the semis, but no one – perhaps not even David Ferrer considers Ferrer a tougher match up for Djokovic than would have been Nadal. But that aside, the QFs played by Djokoivc and Federer were top matches. Wawrinka stepped up and really should have won. A bit of luck, a few line calls… but there’s a reason why Djokovic is number 1, and it ain’t because he has won matches because of a bit of luck and a few line calls.

Similarly Tsonga played all over Federer at times. Federer stole the third set tie breaker when Tsonga’s game seemed bigger and better. Federer’s class rose to the top in the 5th, but Tsonga is coming, and looks like he has decided this is the year. He’ll become number 6 in the world after this – although until Nadal comes back that is effectively number 5. That means he has very good draws in the Masters events, and he has the game to win 2 sets off anyone – and in best of 3 that’s all you need.

The biggest disappointment of the tournament for me was Juan Del Potro losing in the 3rd round. He was my sneaky outsider tip. His loss meant Andy Murray played Chardy in the QF and, to be honest, by that stage Chardy had done his dash. At 25 Chardy will certainly rise up the rankings, but he was never going to challenge Murray in the way that Del Potro could have. But to win a QF you got to first get there, and Del Potro didn’t.

OK the semis:

In last year’s semi final Djokovic beat Ferrer  2-6 6-1 6-4 6-2. And if I had to predict the games scores as well as the result, I’d go with that line again. 4 sets. Sportsbet has Ferrer at $7.10 which is just stupid, and almost worth a punt. $7.10 in a two horse race? Absurd, especially when Ferrer is 5th best in the world.

The Federer-Murray one is juicy. Murray has hardly been stretched. He played Simon in the 4th round when Simon was physically exhausted just by getting out of his chair to go do the coin toss, and Chardy was not a great guide.

In the past the key aspect would have been does Murray have the mental game to win at this level. After the Olympics and US Open that question no longer arises (though I think it still will when it comes to Wimbledon). Since the Olympics, they have met twice – Murray won in Shanghai, and Federer won in London. These two are very even but Murray is slight favourite with the bookies and I think he should be. This has 5 sets written all over it. I think Murray will win, even though (as ever) I’ll be hoping for Federer.

I just think had Murray been playing last night against Federer he would have won, so Federer will need to play better than he did in that match (getting in more than 61% of his first serves would be a good start).