Enduring to be burned, bound, beaten, And to die by the sword if necessary; Verus and Priscus entered the arena, To stain Colosseum sand with blood.
Emperor Titus drained Nero’s lake, Built the vast Flavian Amphitheatre, Panacea to the idle citizens of Rome, Symbol of his beneficence and might.
Priscus, far from his Germanian home, Fighting within a symbol of Rome’s power, Which ravaged his life and fatherland, For them to decide if he is free or dies.
Verus, the hulking, bullish Murmillo; Trained to deliver heavy punishment, Priscus – lightly-armed, agile Thracian; Primed to avoid his rival’s huge blows.
Titus showed he was Nero’s antithesis; No hoarding of tracts of primo Roma, In a profligate orgy of narcissistic pride, Nor taking his own life to escape execution.
Domitian, the brother of Titus, watched in envy, The emperor-in-waiting who favoured Verus, And the direct Murmillo style of fighting, Titus favoured Thracian counter-punching.
Aware of the patriarchal fraternity’s preferences, The gathering looked on in fascinated awe, As their champions of champions clashed, Deciding who was the greatest gladiator of all.
Titus had stated there would be no draw; One would win, and one would perish, A rudis freedom staff the survivor’s trophy, Out the Porta Sanavivaria – the Gate of Life.
One well aware of the other, combat began, Scared eyes locked behind helmeted grilles, Grunts and sweat behind shield and steel, Roars and gasps of the clustered chorus.
For hour after hour, they attacked and feinted, Using all their power, skill and technique, Nothing could keep them from a stalemate; The warriors watered and slightly rested.
The search for the coup de grâce went on, Until both men fell, in dusty exhaustion, Each raised a finger, in joint submission, Equals on death’s stage yielded in unison.
Titus faced a dilemma; mercy or consistency? Please the crowd, but make them aware, Of his Damoclean life-and-death sword, Over every Roman and slave in the empire.
Titus cleaved the Rudis into a dual solution; Unable to beat the other, both won and lived, Limping, scarred heroes of baying masses, None had ever seen a myth form before them.
It was Romulus fighting Remus in extremis, Herculean labours of a sticky, lethal afternoon, In the end, nothing could separate these brothers; Victors united as Castor and Pollux in Gemini.
For life and limb on Rome’s vast stage, Symbiotic compensation of adulation’s rage.
Villicus Vadum: Soldier of Fortune by Stewart Stafford
I am the ghost of lupine Romulus, Founder of Rome, hear my tale, Of Villicus Vadum – young, driven, Steward to Senator Lucius Flavius.
Villicus wanted Flavia, the senator’s daughter, But she was betrothed to Marcus Brutus; A consul of noble and virtuous stock, Villicus conspired to take Flavia’s hand.
Treachery and deception were his tools, Knavish peacock of Rome’s epic stage, Sought to take Flavia from Marcus Brutus, To snatch and cage his treasured gem.
Bribed a false soothsayer to trap her, Believing her beloved began with V, Flavia agreed to elope with him to Gaul, With Brutus vowing deadly vengeance.
Fleeing to the bosom of Rome’s enemy – Vercingetorix, at war with Julius Caesar, Villicus offered to spy on the Senate, While plotting to seize Gaul’s throne.
Queen Verica also caught his eye, Villicus was captured by Mark Antony, Taken to Caesar’s camp as a traitor; Brutus challenged him to a duel.
Brutus slashed him but spared his life, They dragged Villicus to Rome in chains, To try him for his now infamous crimes; Cicero in defence, Cato as prosecutor.
Cicero argued Villicus acted out of love, And that his ambition merited mercy, Cato wanted death for his wicked threat, Julius Caesar pondered a final verdict.
Villicus – pardoned but banished from Rome, Immediate death if he returned to Flavia, Villicus kissed the emperor’s foot for naught, Flavia refused to join him in fallen exile.
Now learn from this outcast’s example, friends, That I, Romulus, warn you to avoid at your peril, Villicus Vadum, the wrath of the gods upon him, Until time ceases, sole spectre of night’s edge.
(Spoiler Alert: This review contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet, you might want to do so and then come back and read this review.)
“I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV
J. Robert Oppenheimer and America faced a dilemma in the early 1940s. The Japanese had brought the United States into the Second World War with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on December 7th, 1941. They had jealousy witnessed the Nazis’ astonishing gains in their invasion of Soviet Russia, and their eyes turned across the Pacific to the American behemoth, the biggest kid in the playground that bullies always want to challenge and dominate.
They were fanatics who viewed surrender as shameful and would rather give their lives in kamikaze suicide flights for their country and Emperor. This refusal to surrender meant America had to engage in fierce hand-to-hand combat to capture each island as they got closer and closer to Japan. Resistance would be even stiffer in the Japanese homeland and they estimated that America would sustain a million casualties in any attempt to take it. The atomic bomb could avoid all that, a shortcut to bring the Japanese to their knees and unconditional surrender.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is easily the best version of this story of the development of the atomic bomb yet made, and I’ve seen them all. Done wrong, the story of the Manhattan Project can be slow, talky, full of jargon and boring. Nolan’s film has a ton of information to impart, some of it highly technical, but it’s probably the fastest three-hour movie you’ll ever watch. The crisp writing and editing break each scene down into digestible bite-sized nuggets of foreshadowing and exposition before moving briskly on. Nothing and no one overstays their welcome.
Nolan has already made a World War II movie, Dunkirk. I thought his script there was undercooked and not as good as it could have been or got made out to be. His Oppenheimer script is a vast improvement and will almost certainly win him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
At the end of shooting Tenet, Robert Pattinson gifted Christopher Nolan a book of Oppenheimer’s speeches, which undoubtedly came in handy as background direct from the horse’s mouth.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Martin J. Sherwin did deep, gold dust research in 1980 by interviewing as many people who knew Oppenheimer and/or worked at Los Alamos as he could find, most of whom were still alive. Strangely, he procrastinated, sat on the research and never wrote the book! It became a running joke in his family. Fast-forward to 1995, when Sherwin resurrected his book deal with the same publisher and a new co-writer, Kai Bird and that incredible wealth of research finally was put to great use.
Published in 2005, the book won the Pulitzer. Nolan consulted with Bird and Sherwin, with Bird advising Nolan to frame the story around Oppenheimer’s later security clearance problems. He took the advice, and it works beautifully as a kind of Godfather II flash-forward and flashback mechanism to interrupt, rejoin, reexamine and reinterpret. Like The Godfather films, Oppenheimer is a tremendous lesson on the uses of power – nuclear, man-made and human-wielded on the battlefield, in relationships and in private backstabbing plotting.
The film starts with Oppenheimer as a young student being humiliated by a professor in front of his peers. In a controversial scene, Oppenheimer’s grandson has cast doubt on, he attempts to take revenge by injecting an apple with Potassium Cyanide, leaving it on his tutor’s desk before changing his mind. He makes a frantic dash to dispose of the apple. We see Oppenheimer doesn’t yet possess the killer instinct.
The apple is interesting, as it symbolises the forbidden fruit of nuclear fusion that Oppenheimer will become a deadly practitioner of later in the film and in his life. Scaled up, the spherical, “killer” apple becomes the Uranium Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. It’s also a visual reminder of another World War II genius who helped end the conflict sooner by cracking the German Enigma code – Alan Turing. Like Oppenheimer, his key war efforts later turned to suspicion and banishment by the powers that be. (Unlike Oppenheimer, Turing never became a public darling because his war activities were classified under Britain’s Official Secrets Act and remained unknown by the public until after his death.) Convicted of then-illegal “homosexual activities,” Alan Turing was given a choice – jail or be experimented upon like a lab rat. He chose the latter, was pumped full of female hormones, grew breasts, and they suspect he took his own life with a poisoned apple. The world lost the genius credited with being the father of modern computers and the internet aged 41. (Benedict Cumberbatch played Turing in The Imitation Game.)
Alan Turing
Cillian Murphy
There are career-best performances from Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt, in a subtle supporting role as his long-suffering alcoholic wife until she shows her true steeliness under cross-examination in an outstanding scene near the end. Oppenheimer was an odd man who stepped on toes, made a host of enemies and seemed to cheat relentlessly with any woman (usually married) who would have him. Statues were pulled down in recent years of people once thought heroic, and this film shows our hero has feet of clay. He is a deeply flawed and complex human being. The general consensus is that Oppenheimer was also the only person capable of fusing the disparate elements of The Manhattan Project and delivering the bomb to the US in time. It also examines that old chestnut: “Be careful what you wish for: you may get it.” Whenever people are involved in acts of heroism and are branded heroes by the media, they always shy away from the accolade as they wisely know it’s an impossible ideal to live up to that will haunt them later. There’s haunted, and then there’s Oppenheimer.
Robert Downey Jr (left) portraying the real Lewis Strauss (right)
Robert Downey Jr. is also noteworthy as Oppenheimer’s slimy nemesis Lewis Strauss, probably turning in his best performance since he played Charlie Chaplin back in 1992, although he did a good turn in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) too. He will almost certainly get a Best Supporting Oscar nomination and will probably win due to his four-decade-long movie career.
I wondered what Rami Malek was doing in it as a silent extra in two early scenes until he gets a showy speech revealing Downey’s Strauss villainy in full.
Josh Hartnett goes under the radar in probably his best work since his early years.
Nolan wrote the Oppenheimer script in the first-person and from his point of view. Matt Damon said he’d never read a script like that before, even the stage directions were “I” instead of “We see…” That carries over into the finale. Every other telling of the Oppenheimer story shows the dramatic-as-hell dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and its people. Nolan’s Oppenheimer doesn’t show it, as, from the protagonist’s point of view, it was a distant, unseen anticlimax. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee would no doubt praise the almost “Oriental discipline” of Nolan in not showing the victorious, phallic mushroom cloud as he had with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. (A heist movie that doesn’t show the heist, just the aftermath of the botched getaway and the hideout from it. Brave cinematic moves that are faithful to the viewpoints of their characters and that trust the audience to keep up with them and understand them).
Oppenheimer is the best movie I’ve seen in years. It isn’t a sequel, an unnecessary remake, or a dayglo kiddie videogame, toy or comic book experience. It’s the kind of movie Hollywood excelled at in the 1970s – dark, complex, fiercely intelligent and downbeat movies for adults. A movie ABOUT something. Remember those? Welcome back.
The sacked castle casts smoke on the lake, Cinders’ glow distinguishes it from the mist, The only gallows the noble knights adorned, Were ones lowering them onto their steeds.
Thundering warhorses charged the enemy, Storming across such a gallant battlefield, Mortal combat with axe, blade and sword, For king, country and all of Heaven’s glory.
Intruders rush over a downed drawbridge, Rotten and riddled in darkness incarnate, To a peregrinating, riderless throne room, A neophyte sovereign in gold leaf crown.
“I’m not just a boxer!” Muhammad Ali once said. He wasn’t. He was so much more than that. Apart from his fluid, balletic boxing skills in the ring, he was one of the first sportsmen to use psychology to wear down his opponents before a punch had been thrown. He was fighting some of the toughest, hardest-punching men in the world but he cleverly figured out that they had built up their bodies but neglected their minds. So he used words like weapons, chipping away at his rival’s psyche until they were beaten men and didn’t even know it. That tactic certainly worked with the brutish Sonny Liston in the 60s. Just watch the old black-and-white press conferences as Ali fires one verbal missile after another and world champion Liston can’t believe what he’s hearing from this cocky young pup.
Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay. He changed his name for this reason: “Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn’t choose it and I don’t want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name – it means beloved of God – and I insist people use it when people speak to me and of me.” He grew up in a time when black Americans were third-class citizens. He won the Light Heavyweight gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960, came back to America, and, when they refused to serve him in a restaurant because of his colour, he went outside and threw his gold medal in the river. Even after becoming Olympic champion for America, no one believed in him. So he believed in himself. He could use words to attack but he could also use words to pump himself up. He called himself The Greatest until he and the world believed it. It gave him the confidence, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, to make his dreams a reality against the tide of begrudgers who wished him ill.
He used words to taunt but he also wrote poems, told jokes and gave speeches to inspire. Some credit Ali with being the first rapper and creating hip-hop music.
In 1974, Ali had perhaps his most famous fight, The Rumble in The Jungle in Zaire, Africa against George Foreman. Nobody gave the ageing Ali a chance. If you watch the Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings, you’ll see the extraordinary mental process Ali engaged in to psych himself up for the fight. He begins at the first press conference asking who thinks he can win the fight. Nobody does and he seems down. Then he goes on the attack against his critics. Then he starts working on himself: “Everybody’s scared…there’s nothing to be scared of!” You can see he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying yet but he keeps going. He turned to his religion for reassurance: “All I need is a prayer because if that prayer reaches the right man, not only will George Foreman fall, mountains will fall!” Ali refused to watch Foreman training, even when they passed each other in the gym. He blocked out his fear. Then Ali tried a different form of psychology on Foreman, a similar brute to Sonny Liston. Ali was 32 then, his speed had left him and he needed a new tactic. He called it rope-a-dope in which he would go to the ropes and absorb punishment before launching a surprise counterattack when the other fighter was exhausted.
When fight night came, Ali started throwing right-hand leads at Foreman. As in any battle, doing the thing your opponent least expects usually ends favourably. A right-hand lead has to travel twice as far across the shoulder to land and it’s hugely disrespectful to any fighter especially the champion of the world to catch him with one let alone twelve as Ali did. Foreman, enraged, punched himself out in the blistering African heat and Ali shocked the world by winning back his world title at the past-it age of 32.
Ali was a political figure too. He became a black Muslim and changed his name, that was a political act. He was involved in the Civil Rights struggle with Malcolm X, that was a political act. And he refused to be drafted into the U.S. Army to go fight in Vietnam, there is no greater political act than that. He said: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people while so-called negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” Ali was stripped of his titles, boxing licence and was out of the ring for four years in his prime. He didn’t sit around and mope but went on a tour of American colleges to get the young people on his side (and against the war) with his wit, charm and intelligence. Another political act.
Those four years out of boxing cost Ali huge sums of money. Financial pressure and his enormous pride made Ali continue fighting long past his prime. His last, disgraceful fight came three months before his 39th birthday. An ailing, flabby Ali was easily outclassed and hurt by his old sparring partner Larry Holmes. It was an undignified end to an incredible career.
Then began the next great fight of his life when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome and the verbose Ali was replaced with a trembling, whispering giant. He still managed to light the Olympic flame at the 1996 games, a highlight for anyone who remembers it. His condition worsened in recent years until he was unable to speak. For the last 30 years, this has been his frail public image. If any good comes from his death, it will be that all his classic clips will get aired again so today’s youth can see what the man was like in his dazzling pomp.
Ali had a dark side too. Fellow boxer Joe Frazier helped Ali out financially when he was banned from the ring. Ali later turned on Frazier, ruined his reputation by calling him an Uncle Tom and a bitter feud developed between them.
It resulted in Frazier breaking Ali’s jaw and knocking him out in their epic Madison Square Garden encounter in 1971 (that resulted in Ali being out of the ring again for a good while). Despite having a white Irish great-grandfather named Abe Grady who’d married a freed slave out of love (not slave rape as Ali conveniently claimed), Ali said some nasty, racist things about white people including: “The white man is The Devil!” He even compared the white race to poisonous snakes. Pretty distasteful stuff but typical of the hardline rhetoric he was absorbing from radicals around him at the time. In 1972, Ali went to Ireland and received a rapturous reception from a then all-white country. Jose Torres, journalist and former world light-heavyweight champion who accompanied Ali to Dublin, said: “I want to tell you something now: I think that it was his experience in Ireland that reminded him of the goodness of white people and he began easing his attacks on the white man after that. It was when he began to take out of his dictionary the talk about the white devils. How could he think bad of white people when every street he walked down in Ireland, he had all these white people loving him?” In 2009, Muhammad Ali journeyed to Ennis in Ireland (below) where his great-grandfather came from and everything came full circle.
Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Ali is “a man more sinned against than sinning.” History will be kind to him.
When Elvis Presley died in 1977, the Soviet news agency Tass granted him American icon status along with Mickey Mouse and Coca Cola. Muhammad Ali has more than earned that status too. So long denied recognition, Ali forced the United States to overcome its prejudices and acknowledge him and his people. That is perhaps his greatest victory and a lasting legacy that will inspire people of every race, colour and creed for generations to come. May he rest in peace.
[SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie 12 Years A Slave yet, come back and read this when you have.]
The central tenet of all American movies is this: individual righteousness is more important than the group ethic. You’ll see it in everything from the Planet of the Apes series to the Jason Bourne movies to Schindler’s List. If your peers or superiors tell you to do something that you find morally wrong, then, however serious the consequences, you must do what is right by your own code of ethics. A surprising message from the United States.
That message popped up again in the superb 12 Years A Slave that I watched for the first time last night. I had avoided it as I thought it was going to beat me over the head with a message about race (as some slave dramas can do hysterically). With race playing so heavily in any slavery story, it is tempting to simplify everything into black and white with all whites portrayed as evil sadists and all blacks being innocent victims. Slavery, like all human constructs, was complex. Whites and blacks did things we would expect of them but also things we would not. By following Solomon Northup’s eyewitness testimony of the time from his 1853 book of the same name, 12 Years A Slave avoids pouring 21st century clichés and misconceptions into the script. It shows great subtlety and fairness in allowing light and shade in both the slaves and slavers and that is part of the film’s greatness.
The racial element is sometimes overstated in slavery tales, at its heart it was the rich exploiting the poor for monetary gain. That’s an ancient story in a different guise for a new time.
The script by John Ridley is superb. Using the language of the time (“until freedom is opportune!” “melancholia”) also brings realism to proceedings. Steve McQueen brings a lightness of touch to the direction of the piece.
White women come off particularly badly in the movie. They appear as manipulative, bloodthirsty Salome/Lady Macbeth types, demanding punishment of others from their men and getting it. The subtext appears to be, when supposedly caring, maternal females in a society are that cruel and malicious, what hope is there for the men? None, it would seem. Shakespeare got that spot on and the idea works well again here.
While Solomon is tricked into slavery by unscrupulous white men, it is a white man (hello Mr Self-Conscious Liberal and producer Brad Pitt) who gets his letter out to the North and starts the process of freedom for him. Pitt’s character is a Canadian carpenter working for Fassbender’s slave-driver Epps. Even though it would be financially beneficial to go along with slavery and profit from it, Pitt chooses to sabotage it and go his own individual way despite peer pressure from Epps.
The poster has Solomon running and I assumed he was going to become a runaway slave and kept waiting for the moment when he would make his momentous break for freedom. Surprisingly, once his pre-slavery identity is established, Solomon’s release comes through legal means that the white people abide by. There is no big action scene full of suspense as Solomon flees cross-country to reach the safety of the northern states. It is strangely anticlimactic but it is the twist in the tale as the film reminds us that he was one of the few people legally freed.
When 12 Years A Slave swept the board at the Oscars, some might have thought that the Academy was being politically-correct but the film and those involved in it deserved every award. Lupita Nyong’o is superb as the young female slave Patsey. Raped, beaten and the victim of a bloody, Christ-like flogging from her vile master Edwin Epps (another excellent performance from Michael Fassbender), the young model-turned-actress gives an astonishing, harrowing performance. There isn’t one false note in it. Lupita is one to watch for the future.
Actress Lupita Nyong’o accepts the Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role award for ’12 Years a Slave’ onstage during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre on March 2, 2014 in Hollywood, California. Kevin Winter/Getty Images/AFP
12 Years A Slave is one of the best films I’ve seen in years, right up there with Schindler’s List. Great movies stay with you for days after seeing them. In an age of ubiquitous bubblegum superhero movies that lose their flavour as you’re watching them, that is rare. Comic book movies celebrate violence without responsibility, 12 Years A Slave shows the reality of how violence brutalises everyone involved. With school shootings so common, that’s the message we need to get out to today’s kids more than ever.
I don’t know what the weather is like where you are right now, but it’s filthy here in Dublin this morning – dark, wet and windy. Even if it’s not like that in your neck of the woods, here’s something to set the Halloween mood – The Vampire Bodies of Europe. I’ve just added an article on that very subject over at my website The Vorbing; http://thevorbing.com/2014/10/the-vampire-bodies-of-europe/
Vampires may have been part of our heritage centuries earlier than we thought…
stewartstaffordblog 