Me and WotN caught up, over the weekend, with Runaway Jury. It’s kind of Sidney Lumet territory, but a few decades on. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some others will, and some others won’t. It contains some definite ‘as ifs’ which could alienate your affections. But it’s a good yarn and it moves along.

Anyway, the best of it is when two of the central protagonists, as played by Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, come face to face – in the men’s room, where else? – two opposed temperaments, moralities, world views; Hackman the Prince of Darkness if ever there was, Hoffman a man of Henry Fonda-level rectitude, standing for, and standing up for, the basic decency of the common people, American democratic values. A cliché as may be, but it’s one of those scenes, and you just know this as it starts: two veterans of the game, both packed with talent and experience, and working out against each another. Steiger and Brando in the back of the cab it isn’t. What can ever touch that? But think Nicholson and Cruise in A Few Good Men, or De Niro and Pacino in Heat, and you’re there or thereabouts. I’ll see the movie again some time for that scene.

Read the story of a brave Zimbabwean:

“Once I walked out of that restaurant, the choice was straightforward. I chose to stand up and speak out. I could easily have toed the line. That had been my usual style. For a long time I had been introverted and quiet – the guy, I suppose, who wanted to be the teacher’s favourite.”
…..
“I stood in that arena, a cricket arena. I had no power, I wasn’t rich, I was a sportsman who had some popularity. But I stood up to the President. What I said was: ‘Look at all the people you have killed, God will have his vengeance.’ …”

Thanks for the link to Lorenz Gude, who has his own particular memory of Olonga:

I saw Henry Olonga make a catch at Bulawayo in 2000 that ranks as one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever seen. It was one of those long looping drives that the fielder starts in for tentatively – only slowly realizing he has a shot at it and accelerates – ending by throwing himself full stretch to make the catch. There was Olonga, his whole body bouncing across the tussocks and bare patches of the Bulawayo outfield on his stomach, completely oblivious to the beating he was taking, holding the ball in triumph with an electric grin visible to all of us in the stands.

Here they are, then, the normblog Favourite Movies of All Time, as resulting from the poll announced on December 21.

There were entries from 151 people, and there were votes for 659 different movies. Of these: 414 movies secured only one vote apiece, 110 only two, 46 three, 27 four, and 10 five. These 607 movies sink below the radar and do not appear in the results (with an exception to be duly explained). The movies securing ten or more votes yield a top 20, and those securing between six and nine votes a top 50 (actually 21 and 52, respectively, on account of ties).

Here, first, are the 50 Favourite Movies, with the number of votes obtained by each given imediately after its place number.

01. 31 Casablanca (Michael Curtiz – 1942)
02. 28 The Godfather 1 (Francis Ford Coppola – 1972)
03. 16 The Third Man (Carol Reed – 1949)
04. 15 Dr Strangelove etc. (Stanley Kubrick – 1964)
04. 15 Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese – 1990)
04. 15 The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont – 1994)
04. 15 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock – 1958)
08. 14 Chinatown (Roman Polanski – 1974)
08. 14 It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra – 1946)
10. 13 The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen – 1998)
10. 13 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean – 1962)
10. 13 Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder – 1959)
13. 12 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles – 1941)
13. 12 This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner – 1984)
15. 11 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott – 1982)
15. 11 The Godfather 2 (Francis Ford Coppola – 1974)
15. 11 The Producers (Mel Brooks – 1968)
18. 10 Annie Hall (Woody Allen – 1977)
18. 10 Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino – 1994)
18. 10 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick – 1968)
18. 10 The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming – 1939)

22. 9 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola – 1979), Fargo (Joel Coen – 1995), North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock – 1959), Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly – 1952).

26. 8 Alien (Ridley Scott – 1986), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen – 2000), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones – 1979), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock – 1954), The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosowa – 1954), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick – 1980), Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson – 1987).

33. 7 L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson – 1997), The Maltese Falcon (John Huston – 1941), A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann – 1966), Manhattan (Woody Allen – 1979), The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman – 1956), To Kill A Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan – 1962).

39. 6 Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet – 2001), Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks – 1974), Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen – 1981), Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carné – 1945), Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming – 1939), Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut – 1961), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman – 1975), On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan – 1954), The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner – 1987), Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg – 1981), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg – 1993), Star Wars (George Lucas – 1977), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese – 1976), Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet – 1957).

Next a Top 10 Foreign Language Movies, requiring – to make up the number – going down to movies which obtained four votes apiece.

01. 8 The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosowa – 1954)
02. 7 The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman – 1956)
03. 6 Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet – 2001)
03. 6 Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen – 1981)
03. 6 Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carné – 1945)
03. 6 Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut – 1961)
07. 4 Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo – 1965)
07. 4 Au Revoir Les Enfants (Louis Malle – 1987)
07. 4 Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein – 1925)
07. 4 City of God (Kátia Lund Fernando Meirelles – 2002)
07. 4 Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman – 1982)

The Top 10 Directors (as measured by the votes obtained by their movies).

01. 50 Francis Ford Coppola
02. 48 Stanley Kubrick
03. 46 Alfred Hitchcock
04. 38 Joel Coen
05. 34 Michael Curtiz
06. 30 Woody Allen
06. 30 Martin Scorsese
08. 26 David Lean
09. 24 Rob Reiner
10. 22 Roman Polanski
10. 22 Ridley Scott

Many thanks to everyone who entered, all 150 of you. The other entrant was me. Blogger participants, many of whom posted their lists on their own blogs (click through the links to see), were:

AbbyBlog, A.E. Brain, Au Currant, backword, Beatnik Salad, Black Triangle, Blognor Regis, Blogorrhoea, Bookish Gardener, Chris Bertram, Cobb, Dodgeblogium, Edge of England’s Sword, EnviroSpin Watch, Horrors of an Easily Distracted Mind, it comes in pints?, Jim Dedman, Matt Welch, Mick Hartley, One-Sided Wonder, Ophelia Benson, Public Interest, Schmaltz und Grieben, Secular Sermons, Sitting on a Fence, A Small Victory, Socialism in an Age of Waiting, Solomonia, Sporadic Chronicle, Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker, Stephen Pollard, Susan Hill, Tom Watson, UK Free Democrats, Virtual Stoa, We the undersigned, What you can get away with.

Two years ago I ‘discovered’ Richard Yates. In fact, my daughter Jenny put me on to him, recommending his novel Revolutionary Road. I read that and, in short order, also The Easter Parade, Cold Spring Harbor and A Special Providence. This sequence was interrupted only by my reading Wildlife by Richard Ford, but I thought it was an acceptable diversion because he’s also called Richard. Anyway Richard Yates has a good feel for mid-twentieth century suburban America, though what the hell do I know about that? But I mean it feels to me as if he has a good feel for it. And in any case he writes compellingly about lives in which the options are narrowing, lives closing in and closing out; yet of the threads of hope that continue to run through them.

Revolutionary Road is Yates’s novel with the biggest reputation, I think, but The Easter Parade is the one I liked best. Alfred Hickling has this mini-review of it in yesterday’s Graun:

If Updike remains the undisputed master of modern American malaise, then here’s the man who, until his death 10 years ago, might have run a close second. What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Richard Yates? OK, I’ll come clean – neither had I until I read this, but it’s magnificent. From the first sentence (“Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the problems began with their parents’ divorce”) you are aware that you are in the presence of a writer who isn’t prepared to hang around. In prose as taut and cutting as cheese-wire, Yates deftly presents his tale of two sisters, rotting in the soft-furnished hell of 1950s suburbia. What is even more remarkable than his ability to shift from comedy to tragedy in the scope of a sentence is the ease with which he compacts the span of two lives into a brisk chronicle which manages to be concise without ever feeling thin. A slender book which turns out to be seriously heavy.

You might also like to keep up with the series by John Mullan on The Human Stain. This week he’s talking about amplification.

This is.

(Via Mrs Tilton, via The Virtual Stoa.)

… to see if it might help England win them back before the turn of the next century:

The Ashes urn, the potent symbol of cricket’s most famous challenge, is finally to be allowed by the MCC to make the 12,000-mile journey to Australia…
…..
There is an overriding reason to let the Australians keep it. As [Australian PM John] Howard said while England took a trouncing in 2002-03: “I ask our English friends to look at it this way: if the urn were to come to Australia, that would give them a much greater incentive to get it back.”

The incentive is already as great as it can be, surely. Australia, to England cricket and its supporters, is like – how can I put this tactfully? – well, like Manchester United to the supporters of certain other football clubs.

Gary Jones, across at Crumb Trail, links to an interesting article by Sadaf Shadan (registration required) about science research in the Middle East:

The impact of scientific research throughout the Middle Eastern nations is greater than ever before, according to a study from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), the organization responsible for the allocation of journal impact factors.

The study, published in the ISI newsletter Science Watch, took the number of research papers indexed by ISI between 1981 and 2002 to assess the scientific output and impact of a selected group of Middle Eastern countries. To ensure a meaningful comparison, certain countries were excluded because of their relatively large (for example, Israel) or small (for example, Libya) size of scientific enterprise.

With 2,492 papers published in 2002, Egypt tops the list. However, the increase in scientific output of Iran, which has more than tripled (from 501 papers in 1996 to 1830 in 2002), is considered particularly significant. An upward trend was noted even among the nations that contributed smaller number of papers. For example, Oman, which in 1981 had a record of zero publications, contributed 236 papers by 2002.

The survey found that the cites-per-paper figures for publications by Middle Eastern nations favorably compared to the impact mark of the rest of the world in the same field…

One of the nations that appears at the bottom of this list, both with respect to the annual output and the relative impact of its scientific publications, is Iraq. The recent turmoil in this country has undoubtedly damaged scientific research. However, work is already underway to tackle this issue.

In November 2003, leading Iraqi scientists from around the globe gathered at the Royal Society, the UK National Academy of Science in London for a two-day meeting to set up a new Iraqi National Academy of Science. In a joint statement, the 12 founding members said, “We are realistic about the challenges ahead that we face, but we share a common commitment to revive the scientific talents of Iraq, for the benefits of its people and humanity.”

Gary himself comments on the significance of the study’s findings:

I think this is important, an indicator of social evolution and progress that is often missed by those focused on economics and politics.

‘On form’, here, to be interpreted relative to the Guardian’s recent political record. Yesterday it carried a leader arguing – though this is putting it generously – that Jenny Tonge should not have been dismissed from her party’s frontbench or so sweepingly condemned for what she said. But the argument, if such it is, rests on the meaning of the word ‘understanding’ in this context, and the way in which it sometimes doesn’t condone and sometimes does. The Guardian thinks she wasn’t condoning; many others, including myself, think she was. (See also Natalie Solent.)

But it’s very simple to say these things clearly (or if you’ve mis-spoken in haste, or off the cuff, to correct what you’ve said by a further statement; rather than expressing yourself as having no regrets, which is what Tonge did). One can say, for example, as I myself do say:

The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory represents a major historical injustice, and is a daily crime against the Palestinian people. The sufferings which Palestinians are having to endure – again daily – and the grievances and the hatreds that these cause are understandable. They are a stain upon the Israeli nation. And, the longer they go on, the more they threaten the region, and possibly beyond, with a terrible catastrophe. For the use of suicide bombing as a response to all this, however, I can have no understanding or sympathy – especially not as a parent or grandparent – since it kills and maims people at random, including children and infants, and is a form of mass murder outlawed for generations by all civilized codes of warfare and resistance.

The Guardian editorial in question does not itself speak in quite the same language as mine, but in wanting to exonerate Jenny Tonge it does make some effort to observe the necessary distinctions, as she did not. The more surprising is it that it does exonerate her, without offering anything of substance on why a sympathy that can go as far as hers – beyond the grievance and its cause, to the murderous acts they supposedly lead to (bypassing the strategic and political choices made on the way) – is to be accommodated. And the more disgraceful.

Well, the Guardian gets the readers it thereby deserves. A whole clutch of letters on the same page on the same day tells that story. There is one there, on the other hand, which will save me having to repeat myself for the nth time. It’s from Michael Lewis:

Jenny Tonge has attempted to explain suicide bombing on the basis of the desperation of the Palestinian people. She is correct that the Palestinians are desperate, but wrong that this is the cause of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing emanates from the wicked, cynical manipulation by terrorist organisations of ordinary people. There are many desperate people on this planet and they don’t resort to suicide bombing. Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela reached their objectives quite differently.

Clear as crystal, yet the point so widely ignored.

Compare this letter from Irene Bruegel, seemingly writing in the name of Jews for Justice for Palestinians:

Far from encouraging suicide bombing, Jenny Tonge was looking to the roots of the problem: the human rights abuses, daily humiliations and overwhelming frustrations she witnessed in the occupied territories… Rather than condemn her, we need to build support for the majority of Palestinians who decry terror and for the increasing numbers of Israelis who recognise that Israel’s inhumane and illegal operations are the fundamental threat to their security.

The logic of the final statement here is faulty in that the things Irene says we need to do – and I leave aside one or two reservations I have about their formulation – can be done whether one condemns Jenny Tonge’s words or not. I am one of the signatories of the JFJFP statement, but I wasn’t aware that this committed me to supporting sentiments such as those expressed by Tonge. It’s something I’ll be taking steps to clarify.

(Updated at 2.50 PM) Two items in the same general area. First, Benny Morris in Haaretz responds to his critics:

The war being waged against us since September 2000 is three-dimensional: On one level, which is the one highlighted by Palestinian spokespersons, a struggle is being waged for liberation from Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; on the second level, the Palestinians – according to spokesmen for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants – are waging a war to eradicate the Zionist state and to restore their “rights” over all of Palestine; on the third level, the Palestinians’ struggle is part of the global struggle being waged by jihadist Islam against the “Western Satan,” with Israel being a vulnerable extension of Western culture in our region.

The passage overlaps with the arguments of Michael Walzer which I’ve linked to before.

Second, this is a tragic story. Note the two-sided nature of this tragedy, created both by the effort to expel Adel Hussein and the threat to his life if he is expelled. (Hat tip: GH.)

The crux according to Andrew Rawnsley:

In the feverish hours remaining before the vote, Mr Blair’s closest allies think the most crucial actor is not the Prime Minister, but the Chancellor. In the words of one of Mr Blair’s closest friends: ‘The big question is whether Gordon will have the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Nick [Brown], George [Mudie] and Barbara [Roche] and say: Stop it.’

Just how far the Chancellor is prepared to go to bring his backbench supporters into line will be influenced by what will be known about the verdict of Lord Hutton by the time that MPs vote on tuition fees.

Officially, Rawnsley goes on to say, nothing will be known. But he reckons something will seep down. There’s much of interest in his article.

This one looks likely to run:

One of British medicine’s most senior advisers on medical ethics has provoked outrage by claiming that infanticide is “justifiable”.

Professor John Harris, a member of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, said that it was not “plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal” – suggesting that there was no moral difference between aborting a foetus and killing a baby.
…..
“I don’t think infanticide is always unjustifiable. I don’t think it is plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal.”
…..
“People who think there is a difference between infanticide and late abortion have to ask the question: what has happened to the foetus in the time it takes to pass down the birth canal and into the world which changes its moral status? I don’t think anything has happened in that time.
…..
“There is a very widespread and accepted practice of infanticide in most countries. We ought to be much more upfront about the ethics of all of this and ask ourselves the serious question: what do we really think is different between newborns and late foetuses?

“There is no obvious reason why one should think differently, from an ethical point of view, about a foetus when it’s outside the womb rather than when it’s inside the womb.”

This can’t be the whole argument, since if it were it could just be run in reverse to show why abortion is wrong – which John plainly doesn’t think it is. So, then, is the rest of the argument that a just-born baby, like a foetus, isn’t yet a person? But that’s true of all just-born babies, not only those with ‘serious abnormalities’. And it’s true also of all babies even after some weeks of life. I propose no quick answers here. But more argument is needed than is reported. I know John Harris and I’m confident he has more, though I’ll reserve judgement on whether it’s persuasive. (Hat tip: Franco Aleman.)