Same Script, Different Backdrop!

The Ugly American (1963)

Director: George Englund

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This film was regarded as Marlon Brando's favourite, but unfortunately, it was made when Brando's movies did not sell well, as they failed to engage the American audience. The ending of this film reveals everything; this was how the American public saw it: too preachy. As the American Ambassador delivered a long, verbose speech on TV, viewers simply switched off the TV halfway through his speech.

The message behind the story was genuine, but those in power were not willing to admit that foreign policies were the leading cause of most international conflicts. At a time when Hollywood was producing films that praised America as the saviour of the free world, this was a new perspective. When John Wayne's westerns justified the invasion of Native American lands and the killing of Native Americans, this was different. During World War II, it was necessary to portray the Axis Powers as the axis of evil; however, in the Vietnam War and the resulting unnecessary casualties, the public began to question. Why interfere in fixing a political situation in a country that does not want help? Was the desire to save the world from communist ideology so intense that it justified the collateral damage?

Thai Script

The story recounts a fictitious nation called Sarkhan experiencing civil unrest. The citizens are dissatisfied with their Prime Minister and hope to bring about change. The northern part of Sarkhan (North Sarkhan) has adopted communist ideology, strongly supported by China and the Soviet Union. This references the Vietnam situation. The Americans, along with the ruling government, are constructing a new highway. The people believe it will not benefit them and openly voice their resentment. There have been a few explosions and killings. The American ambassador (played by Marlon Brando) is determined to continue, as it serves their interests in keeping the communist North in check. All these details mirror what was happening in Vietnam.

Vietnamese - New Script

For the keen-eyed, it is evident from afar that the shooting took place in Thailand. The protestors' placards all display Thai script. As is well known, Thai script is quite distinct from Cambodian or Vietnamese. The Thai and Cambodian scripts both evolved from the ancient Khmer script, itself derived from the Pallava script of South India, which is rooted in the Brahmi script. Historically, the Vietnamese used Chữ Nôm with Chinese characters. Still, later Chữ Quốc ngữ, a Latin-based script introduced by Portuguese missionaries, became the standard for both public and private communication.  

Vietnamese - Old Script

60 years later, in 2025, the world remains burdened by the interference of major powers in the local affairs of smaller nations. In the post-WWII era, the Cold War was a significant factor. The self-appointed leader of the free world, the USA, had to ensure that the communist influence was reined in. Now, geopolitics and the need to provide the uninterrupted availability of supplies of power, minerals and trade are the main reasons. Come to think of it, it was the same when the European East India Companies first set sail to the spice islands. One went the wrong way and insisted it had reached India and started calling the Natives of the New World Indians!

P.S. Surprise, surprise. There appears to be a subtle connection between the individuals leading the Gen-Z revolution in Nepal, specifically Hami Nepal, and the US-funded NGOs. 

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Another old profession - gossiping!

Civil War (2024)

Director: Alex Garland

The world thought the USA's second Civil War was about to start when Donald Trump lost his second term in office. The Capital Building ambush by Trump's far-right supporters on 6th January 2021 was forever enshrined as the biggest desecration of the American democracy.

In this movie version, it is sometime in the future when America is in a civil war. America is divided into areas controlled by regional militias and other extreme factions. The President is re-elected for a third term, and people are unhappy. There is mayhem in the country. Local vigilantes have taken control of most areas. In essence, it is like a war zone.

Amidst this chaos, two photojournalists have to travel by road across the country to Washington, DC, to interview the President. The film is about their experience of seeing America in a civil war.

I was intrigued by the special privileges and status that journalists hold when they carry out their jobs in high-risk areas. The Geneva Convention has determined that they should be protected. Journalists have the right to report things as they see, as they are supposedly giving firsthand accounts of events. They are given special privileges to attend events deemed of public interest. Journalists are also protected from having to reveal the source of their information.

As the world awakens from its long slumber, the question is whether the journalists' accounts of events are indeed the undeniable 'truth'? If schooling taught us anything, it told us that History lessons taught to us are testimonies written by victors. We are often fed with contradictory news in the immediate past and the present. It is expected to get many versions of what is happening in Ukraine, such as who is winning and who has more casualties. In the Israel-Hamas conflict, every journalist from either side paints a different picture of the situation on the ground.

Previously, the CCP insisted that Urghur Camps in Xin Jiang were reeducation centres, whilst many opposers of China insisted they were nothing like internment camps of dissidents.

Another thing that keeps cropping up is fake photos of victims in war-torn zones. It is often mentioned that many of the so-called 'victims' were paid actors who kept on appearing again and again at various disaster sites. An Afghani girl with amber-hued irises who emerged during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was seen resurfacing during the Syrian civil war. Then, the tale of the walking corpse. I guess journalism had lost its professionalism and integrity.

          

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We haven't changed!

Emancipation (2022)
Director: Antoine Fuqua

This movie is about an Afro-American slave in Louisana who lived around the 1860s during the American Civil War. A man who never knew his ancestry, age or birth date. His master called him Peter, so Peter he was. All he ever wanted was freedom and to be with his wife and children. What he got was incarceration, and he was transported to slog it out as a manual labourer on the expanding American railway line. Even though he heard about a decree that freed slaves, all he got were abuses and beatings. The photograph of his bare back, laden with keloid-filled scourge-whipped scars, was a selling point for abolitionists. This graphical representation not only manifests the pains the slaves had to endure in the development of the country but also shows the gall a fellow human being would inflict on his own kind. 

Parents tell their children to be kind and loving. The Book instructs us to love one another and that God created us in his own image, but that advice is only applicable to his own kind or the white race.

'Scourged back' of Peter or Gordon (~1863)
The former slave whose photo was
circulated by the Abolitionist Movement
during the American Civil War.

150 years moving forward, are we any wiser? I do not think so. Our wisdom remains skin-deep. We continue beyond one's colour and justify our evil deeds with the selective interpretation of the Book. Despite all these, we are told to stay hopeful and be the change for better things to come.

To appease the woke generation, films like these reinforce the idea that continued racial persecution is the primary reason for the discrepancy in living standards of blacks in America 150 years on. Academicians like Thomas Sowell continue denying this postulate. He vehemently stresses that affirmative action only produces a weak generation.

As a history student at the primary school level, what I grasped from my school books was that people from the North felt terrible for the slaves and wanted to free them. How naive?

In reality, it was all about economics. Abe Lincoln had no undying compassion for the blacks. He had no unending desire to break bread with them or drink with them. He only wanted to free them and pack them off to Africa, maybe Liberia. The South depended heavily on slaves to move their labour-intensive agricultural sectors. Cotton picking and sugarcane production needed much manpower. The South was not willing to surrender their slaves so easily, hence the Civil War.

Unfortunately, even though The Emancipation Bill was passed, the former slaves were ill-prepared to withstand the pressures the Bill brought. Lincoln was assassinated. The blacks had the power but not the ability to partake in deciding their fate. Then came the Ku Klax Klan and their hooded witch-hunts. Jim Crow laws ensued. All these measures did nothing to their well-being. 

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The movie revolves around Peter's escapades as he escapes from the clutches of slavery to the grasp of the guard dog, the jaws of the swamp crocodile, and the end of the barrel of the gun. He was finally rescued by the Union Soldiers and lived to tell his account of his misadventure.

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Will love keep us together, forever?

Minari ('Water Celery' American-Korean, English; 2021)

Written and Directed: Lee Isaac Chung

Most immigrants stories harbour melodrama which relies so heavily on wanting to play the victim card. They often portray their hosts as dysfunctional and that the pathetic immigrants are bullied and blamed for things that are no fault of theirs. Well, this one is different.

They left their motherland because it was too complicated there. Life in their newfound land is no leisure cruise either, they soon discover. Spending hours looking at chicken backside for the onerous task of chicken sexing is not cerebrally stimulating, but it pays the bill. When Jacob decides to move from California to the Ozark Land (Arkansas) for farming, his wife, Monica, thinks he is bonkers. With a young teenage girl to groom and a 'hole in the heart' stricken tween boy who needs regular medical attention, Monica is sceptical of the whole endeavour's success. Maternal Grandma, Soonja, is summoned from Korea to help to mind the kids. Herein starts a problem. The kids do not look at Soonja as Grandma material. She does not speak English and does not tell stories.

Monica, the religious of the two, hopes to find solace in the church and its congregants. Their first attendance proved an inconvenience as they could not fit into the mostly white crowd. Jacob getting along with his farming with the help of a war veteran, Paul, who himself is pretty fanatical with his religiosity.

Jacob feels that all life challenges can be met with sheer human intelligence, whereas his wife believes that God's grace guides us. So, when drought hits the land and he cannot get customers for his produce, the couple has to make tough decisions about their marriage.

Are decisions in a marriage a compromise? Is love strong enough an anchor to steer the metaphorical family ship through the storm? Can traditional teachings and intangible beliefs provide a bedrock in bringing everyone together to weather hurdles in life?

A sober, slow-moving movie tackles many immigrants' issues in a subtle, unhurried and non-condescending way.

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Wake up to a living nightmare!

Professor Thomas Sowell, the 90-year-old veteran economist and social theorist from Hoover Institute of Stanford University, is still active on social media. He is quick to give his opinion, backed by statistics and historical events, to run down ongoing national policies. He is an opinionated person and at one time was drawn to the idea of communism. His rationalisation for gravitating toward the left is that it is just human nature. He wants to share when one has nothing; conversely, he does not share when he tends to lose his 'hard-earned' possession. Sowell hails from Harlem, working as a postal worker as a young man and pulling himself up by his bootstrap to his current stature.

He often campaigns against affirmative action and minimum wage. He asserts that the Black American community had a better quality of life when the aforementioned policies were pinned upon them. Another recurrent theme in his rhetorics is the importance of the family unit in the upliftment of society. He does not justify the 'Black Life Matters' movement. Instead of blaming mistreatment of the blacks in the hands of a white-centred government, he puts the blame of disparity of the community on the 67% black families that have a single parent to manage their home. Between making ends meet and fulfilling personal needs, the parent has no choice but to leave their kids to the unsupervised influence of members of the neighbourhood. 

On the future of America, he sees a very bleak future. He pinpoints a decline in values like honesty and a sense of entitlement towards this end. To illustrate his point, he compared the black-outs in New York in 1965 and 1977.

During the 1965 power outage,  the incidence of crime was the lowest, whereas, in 1977, it saw plenty of looting and arson. Sowell posits that the 1965 society was one that saw the destruction of WW2 and the hard times that followed. Hence, they had some common decency to protect property and practised traditional morality. The later generation feels that by their existence, they feel entitled. Everybody owes them a living. If they fail, they quickly recoil to blame history, ancestry, and how the earlier society had oppressed them and continue to do so.

That is the mantra of the woke generation - every moment awake is a living nightmare.

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Law is maintained only as long as it is respected.

I always wondered what is it that maintains order in our lives. What ensures total silence in the cinema when the movie is starting? What is it that assures that the viewers in an art gallery do not go around touching their exhibits with their dirty stubby fingers? What forces a patient to pay at a clinic after a consultation and the customer settle his bill after enjoying (or hating) his meal? They can jolly well just scoot off, now that their mission is accomplished. 

Well, it can happen with the occasional client who refuses to pay, but that is not the norm. Perhaps he is dissatisfied with the service or just because he can. Rather than creating a scene and draw unwanted publicity, the service provider would probably write it off as miscellaneous loss of doing business. To the rest, they know the long arm of the law would get them. They know that as the majority support orderly running of life transactions, they would not garner support against a sea of law-abiding supporters no matter how justified the lawbreaker can be with his wrongdoings. 

The balance will be tipped when the majority starts distrusting the institutions that maintain law and order. Anarchy prevails when the majority begins disrespecting the law. Law must be just and seen to be fair. Public perception is all to it. People hold law enforcement to high esteem not because they are scared of the law, they simply respect too much. 

Ask the British East India Company and the British Empire. They would tell you how a puny force managed to overpower and bring down a nation of many millions over - too much respect given to authority.

Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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You say you want a revolution

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020; Netflix)

Everyone wants to live in a utopia. Even the Islamic jihadis, who are hellbent on destroying everything nice, are looking for that heaven on Earth. The human race continually feels dissatisfied with the way things are run and yearns for reforms. 

Firstly, the society starting with the moderates will initiate the move to change. The ruling regime would appear set in their old ways and seem apathetic to the demands of the majority. Like the 'Emperor in his new clothes', they would be pleased in their own echo-chamber. 

People would rise to the demand for their place in the sun. People would win. Sadly, other self-serving radicals will piggyback on the movement. Controlling a large crowd is no easy task. Emotion runs high, and quickly the peaceful demonstration escalates into a violent protest. Even if the moderates managed to change the status quo, the comrades in arms with different ideologies would steamroll their own agendas. The system will become corrupt. Bear in mind there would exist external forces who are one-track minded on collapsing the whole society so that they can infiltrate with their own plans.

There is an eerie similarity between 1968 America and the 2020 USA. 1968 saw an angry America sending his not-so-fortunate sons of the soil for the slaughter in Vietnam at a draft rate of almost up to 35,000/month. Sending young American men as sacrificial lambs in a land 10,000 miles for a mission so bizarre as countering global Communist threat. That would cost LBJ's re-election ambitions, and the Americans wanted to make their dissatisfaction felt. It was a tumultuous year with Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, the Democratic hopeful being assassinated. Many civil society group members would congregate outside the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago to express their dissatisfaction in the US involvement in the Vietnam War. 

The Chicago 7: Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, 
Lee Weiner, David Dellinger Rennie Davis, 
 Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin

What started as a peaceful protest quickly escalated to a blood bath when the crowd became rowdy and the police used their might to subdue the mob. With accusations of high handedness by the police and malice intent of protestors, eight civil society group leaders were charged for intending to start a riot. Bobby Searle, the founder of 'The Black Panthers', was initially included in the charge list but later dropped during trial after a blatant disregard for his civil rights.

This movie narrates the drama, and high tension that hung during the trial of the accused (Chicago 7) in a courtroom presided by an old school judge whose standards would raise many eyebrows by today's standards.

Many liberal and left-leaning thinkers assert that the general anxiety of the American is comparable to that of the 1968 generation. With increasing death toll due to Covid, the uncertainties associated with the post-Covid world and the possible imminent loss of world dominance to a Communist country, people are generally angry, in their assessment. This, they say, is the reason for volatility of public as evidenced by Black Lives Matters movements, increasing Islamophobia and hostility to immigrants. Of course, it is not so straight forward. The world has become more complicated since 1968.

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For some, life is a play toy!

Zodiac (2007)

Growing up with an 'over' exposure to many crime dramas, I used to wonder if there were any real people who find intense pleasure in murdering people. And I am referring to a select group of psychopaths called serial killers. And that they did what they did with high precision, covering their tracks well, intelligent chaps who would tease the police with crumbs of clues and laugh all the way to carry on with their next crime.

I started wondering why all these killers were all whites and are all centred in the USA. The concept of serial killers only became popular in the 1970s, but in reality, the Germans through the 1929 silent movie 'M', introduced the idea of a pedophilic serial-murderer. The first modern serial killer, according to criminologists, must surely be Jack the Ripper in London. Generally, serial killers carry out their crimes in a particular fashion, maintaining a high degree of control over the crime scene, having a solid knowledge of forensic science that enables them to cover their tracks and leaving a sort of a trademark signature. It is as if they are perfecting a grand work of art.

Charles Sobhraj

It is generally believed that outside the USA serial killers are rare. There is a reported killer nurse from London and another in South Africa. If one was not in the habit of nitpicking between serial killers, spree killers and mass murderers as well as semantics, he would find many in Asia in the form of Charles Sobhraj (@ Bikini Killer), Lê Thanh Van (Vietnam), Chisako Kakehi (Black Widow from Japan), Yoo Young-Chul (Korean Hannibal Lecter), Tsutomu Miyazaki (Japan), Javed Iqbal Umayr (Pakistan) and Ahmad Suradji (Indonesia).

What makes 'The Zodiac Killer' interesting is that his crimes were never solved. Even though the Zodiac Killer operated in the state of California, in the northern part predominantly, the non-cooperation between police counties made the exchange of information difficult in solving the cases. He terrorised in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At least five murder cases are linked to him, but Zodiac claimed to have killed 37 people.

He got his name when he sent a cryptic letter to the newspapers after his second murder. This film tells about how this case tormented a San Francisco Chronicle reporter named Paul Avery, his colleague a cartoonist Robert Graysmith and an inspector Dave Toschi. Even the prime suspect was always Arthur Leigh Allen, all search warrants, handwriting experts' analysis of the Zodiac letters and also the DNA of possible saliva on the Zodiac letter stamps came out to nought.

Many theories have been flying around about the real killer. Amateur investigators, armchair critics, TV and documentary makers, geeks and nerds all have been churning out their two cents' worth on identifying the perpetrator. Some even suggested that he could have been apprehended for unrelated crimes and could have died before making a full confession. Even the Unabomber, an American mathematics professor turned terrorist, was a suspect.

Cryptogram sent by Zodiac to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

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Can truth be stranger than fiction?

Body Of Lies (2008)

The talk about this film came about after the recent catastrophes in Christchurch and Colombo. What started of possibly the work of a lone wolf disillusioned wacko or deviant religious groups may actually be hiding the deep-rooted tentacles of international psyops.

In the case of Christchurch shooting in a mosque, it may not just the work of a lone wolf going on a shooting spree because he cannot stand what he sees around him, but cannot do it in his home because of tight gun laws but in New Zealand instead. He may be just a pawn in a greater chess game involving players at very high levels via remote control.

And the bombing of the churches in Sri Lanka is not just due to vengeance to the Christchurch mishap. A disgruntled Sri Lankan Muslim did not suddenly decide to be a human bomb to settle a score. Investigations slowly reveal that the perpetrators originate outside the country and gleam in joy seeing the devastation, creating anarchy and benefitting financially by fueling the feud.

Everyone has a theory to explain why each thing happens. Every narration seems to have its own gravitas. The problem of verisimilitude (truthlikeness) is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.

This 2008 espionage film shows how politics is manipulated by the powers that be. The rich and powerful convince the masses through their narration. Set in the Middle East, CIA uses their intelligence and undercover agents to infiltrate, manipulate and assassinate people at will just to keep the American interest in check. Democracy, freedom and justice have nothing to do with it. History has proven that what we thought as creative writing may be just a reflection of what happens on the ground.

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