Review: The Skull, Adam Shand (2009)

This book is about what makes a virtuous cop. It's set in another era, but that era is so close to ours that you wonder how much of this man called The Skull can still be found in some members of today's police force.

It's a thoughtful rendering of a more rudimentary era the less attractive elements of which have been erased from memory and replaced in retrospective consciousness with certain modes of dressing-up, select song lyrics, and a pulpy affection that coats the more jarring edges of the time with its smooth efflorescence. It is based on five years of interviews with the protagonist - Shand tells us in one of his personal appearances in the book. And while he often recoils from making explicit judgements there is, buried in the language, a distinct tone of approbation for a fairly rough and simple man.

When I met Adam at a school reunion recently, I told him that I had enjoyed his earlier book on the Melbourne gangland killings, Big Shots. That book is about how apparently ordinary people change - a lot - once they start to become involved in organised crime.

This thoughtfulness is also evident in the pace of the books. They are fast-paced, on occasion confusing as it will happen to the reader that Shand refers to a character who had been present earlier in the narrative but who has slipped his or her mind. But this is not a great failing. More important, I think, is that the rapidity of the narrative keeps you thinking. It is likely that some readers will come back later and re-read these books, as they contain more than can comfortably be assimilated in one go.

For Shand is being ambitious. In The Skull, there are many rough characters who do questionable things but underneath the violence lies an enduring need for virtue, for order and sanity, and for society to stay the way it always has always done. To be good at policing, you must needs be a conservative at heart. Enforcing the statutes requires you to be constantly on the lookout for the detail, the anomaly, the tell-tale sign of something afoot.

When we chatted briefly at the reunion, Shand told me about his love of Hunter S. Thompson, the American journalist whose fame is so great in our circles that his book titles have become a staple of the sub-editor's daily spiel. 'Fear and loathing' is a trope so well-used that the subs instinctively lunge for it whenever a headline is required to highlight some out-of-the-ordinary and paranoia-inducing scenario currently playing out in society.

Thompson was also a thoughtful man, despite the glaring surface of his writing. A screaming liberal, Thompson's fame is based on a style of writing developed - out of the profound desperation of the hungry freelancer - in order to grab the attention of the community. He also gravitated toward subjects of such perverse fascination - Hells Angels, San Francisco bohemians - that success became more likely than failure.

Shand has written two books about crime. Now crime is a popular subject, and a lucrative one. The shelves of mainstream bookstores are stuffed to their very edges with true tales of carnage that are wrapped in blood-spattered, garishly-embossed and -inked covers. But what is certain is that his books sit above the crowd in terms of their aspiration and also their execution. For this reason, if you buy The Skull and read it, I'm fairly sure that you will not regret the expense. Highly recommended.

There's something about this election campaign that's making me just shut right down. Madonna King described the problem well on the ABC's Q and A panel discussion show last night. The politicians are focusing on "small-target" issues. The competition is hot but the candidates are making themselves invisible. As small targets, they're less open to criticism, blame, censure.

There was nothing at all small-target about the Q and A audience last night, I must say. Beamed live from Brisbane, the feed showed an engaged and vocal audience unlike the usual, restrained Sydney crowd. Maybe they were just so pleased to have the chance to have their say - they mostly stood up like kids at school to ask their questions, which they read off pieces of paper - or maybe it was just the typical rowdiness of a relaxed and down-to-earth Queensland crowd in operation.

King is a long-time journalist with a history of various postings around the traps. She now works for the ABC in radio, so she's accustomed to explaining things clearly. It makes you appreciate the value of good word choices. Listening to the politicians on the panel swerve away from the question onto one safer patch of ground or another, you appreciate it when someone actually says something neatly, without adornment, and without segueing effortlessly into an attack on someone else.

But you sometimes wish that the atmosphere generated at the Q and A show would trickle down to the party set-pieces organised for the benefit of politicians intent on maximising damage to the opposition whilst minimising their own exposure.

Of course, the history books show that making yourself into a large target can be disastrous. Just think of Mark Latham in the 2004 election, when he imploded spectacularly over a range of issues including logging in Tasmania and funding of private schools. No wonder today's politicians are more circumspect when choosing their form of address.

For my part, there's a small corner of my attention focused on the campaign. There's also a fair slice of guilt aimed at myself over my inability to stay interested. I read a headline on the news website and then blithely click on the story about genital mutilation instead of reading about the latest cuprit in the Rudd-kill leaks scandal. It's hard to keep up your interest when, somewhere else in the world, there is real suffering and real pain and real injustice. Worrying about injecting more stimulus into the booming Australian economy rates low in my mind when over 40,000 Australians are sleeping rough every night.

Perhaps Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, is right when he says journalists are not living up to the high calling they're supposed to be engaged in. Or maybe, like me, they're just not engaged any more. So spare a thought for the poor journalist seated, like a stunned mullet eating jelly snakes, on the campaign bus.

Review: Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2010)

Amusing and polemical and a bit goofily subtitled 'a personal journey through the clash of civilisations', Hirsi Ali's second autobiographical justification for her personal views on Islam and modernity is a gripping read. Many will flinch at how she seems to chime in neatly with the chorus coming from the conservative Right, but there's no denying the book's power to entertain.

Hirsi Ali's short digression on the importance of the family in the United States, for example, seems ad hoc and opportunistic, as though by affirming the role of this institution she's pandering to a core readership among her target audience. The key event, for Hirsi Ali, is the Enlightenment, after all, and it's not at all clear how the family unit owes its inception to this historical moment. For Western-educated liberals, in fact, the family often stands for regression and delay.

But Hirsi Ali's viewpoint is of especial interest because, as an outsider, she comes to the debate between Left and Right with fresh eyes.

Those eyes have seen a lot. At the outset, Hirsi Ali uses anecdotes from her past to paint a picture of dysfunction in Islamic societies. The men are trained, as her brother is, to be strong and overbearing. Her brother's ego is puffed up with overblown notions of conquest and success. The girls, on the other hand, are taught to just do exactly what they're told. The honour of the tribe demands total submission by girls to the wills of their male relatives, just as Islam demands total submission of all its followers to the precepts set down in the Holy Book, The Koran.

Her brother does well in school. He's a brilliant scholar, in fact. But then he starts to play hookey, go AWOL, and miss classes. The poor man ends up with a mental illness - a situation the society is depressingly unable to cope with.

Hirsi Ali also tells us about how poorly refugees cope once they land in the West. They have no concept of how to manage personal finances, for example. This section contains a lot to laugh at, but beneath the humour lies a substrate of deprivation that is so ingrained it predates history.

Women from nomad tribes simply cannot function in the West because they do not know, says Hirsi Ali, how to manage such simple things as a bank account. Girls need to be made financially literate if they are to live in the West, where personal independence is a keystone of the social contract. There are many examples like this in the book, and they are recounted with candour and honesty. They make it very good reading indeed.

But later on, once the ground has been prepared, Hirsi Ali makes a more problematic case for change. She wants a more engaged Christian Church. Muslims displaced to the West need a spiritual foundation to their lives, she says. Why not help them by introducing Christianity to them as an alternative mode of looking at the world?

Anything but Islam, says atheist Hirsi Ali. Anything but a religion that requires you to submit completely to God's will. Christianity, she says, can empower where Islam only represses.

The Western tradition of knowledge and science that has delivered such massive dividends, says Hirsi Ali, is founded on the ability of both men and women to question holy truths. Science emerged from a matrix of ideas and notions about truth. Islam is essentially inimical to such a world-view, and its followers once displaced to the West are prone to turn inwards and even rebel in shocking ways if given the chance.

Wahhabi doctrine is spread efficiently throughout these communities, says Hirsi Ali, and its proselytisers are liberally funded by Saudi petrodollars. To counter this push a new approach is necessary, she says. It is not enough to ascribe the fundamentalist view of things to a mere cultural tenet. It must be answered with force if it is not to take over in the West as it has in the Islamic world.

Hirsi Ali is a compelling polemicist and this book contains much to think about, especially in terms of how the human rights of immigrants should be understood. Governments are advised to read this book in formulating policy because it is a rare, coherent and convincing account of the way that Muslims retain ways of thinking that potentially corrode the social contract in their new communities. Hirsi Ali questions whether the West is able to counter these ideas and says that, especially for women, tribal attitudes to modernity will often lead to injustices and these are often punishable by law.

Western law, she says, has to catch up with this development if it is to adequately serve all members of society equally, as our cultural heritage demands.

A beautiful little movie with very little dialog, Eden is West (dir Costa-Gavras, 2009) is a modern parable of alienation. One tactic used to increase the unreality of the action is the film's reluctance to place names on physical locations. Elias, the protagonist, for example, arrives from the refugee boat at a tourist resort somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. It may be in Italy, it may be in Greece. In fact, it's not important.

But we learn the importance of clothing in denoting social status, and how important social status is in society in order to protect the individual from harm. Elias, a handsome young man who has learnt a smattering of French, frequently secures succour from people - especially women - he meets on the way, including a German tourist named Christina, an Italian woman farmer and a wealthy Paris woman.

But it's not just the women who have kindness to give Elias. There is a band of gypsies who rescues Elias from the cops and a Paris waiter who allows him to finish off the remains of a meal left on a restaurant table by hurried diners.

Elias gets to see how immigrants are exploited, too, when he's press-ganged to work in an electronics recycling factory somewhere in the Alps. The owners dock the pay of employees for everything, including the paltry meals they're served on paper trays. This episode ends in a fight and Elias, ever resilient, escapes across the railway tracks that carry monied commuters between the great cities of Europe.

With only one option in his possession - to link up with a magician who was visiting the resort and who gave the refugee his business card and told him to look him up in Paris - Elias weaves a path across France, finally getting a seat on a train after a fellow countryman gives him some money - but who steals his leather jacket.

In Paris, the hardship doesn't end but the temptations are greater. Elias sleeps one night in a tent on a grassy verge among urban outcasts as he gets closer to his goal: the Champs Elysees, where the magician works out of a strip club. But even when he finds the magician, Elias' travails will not finish. As the Eiffel Tower lights up in gold sparkles, the young traveller is drawn to its allure and makes his solitary way - now clad in a nice tailored wollen suit coat - down the tree-lined boulevard in search of respite from the constant shocks meted out to those who seek a new home in distant lands.

Coverage of the WikiLeaks Afghan "war logs" story has shifted to denunciations by civil and military authorities in the US and Afghanistan as the story disappears quickly from the pages of the world's press like a blob of oil dropped onto the surface of a lake. Soon, the ugly speck will simply sink unnoticed below the water's glassy surface.

In the UK, authorities have helped to accelerate this process by refusing to comment at all, thus depriving the debate of the oxygen it demands to exist.

Journalists at The Guardian and The New York Times, which were two of the organisations given access to the leaked documents ahead of their wider public release, are now focusing their attention on official damage control. There is no longer any attention being given to the contents of the "logs" nor is there any effort being expended to compare these detailed records against stories that have been delivered in the past to the public via official channels.

And with only a tiny fraction of the documents having been examined in the press, that's a shame.

In the week since the "logs" have been public, there has been inadequate coverage of their contents, in my view. First there was a flurry of outrage by the big two named here accompanied by second-tier stories from other major outlets. Then the focus shifted quickly to the "other side of the story": expressions of official regret at the release. We are about to enter the third phase of the process: silence.

Pic credit: Abdul Khaliq, Associated Press.

The Afghan "war logs" have yet to be fully exploited, says Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, talking with Tony Jones on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline last night.

"Yeah, that is true," answered Assange when Jones asked him if only a couple of thousand of the documents had been read by WikiLeaks and his coopted news organisations (The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel). "To read them and to read them in detail."

There's just so much material. We maybe had 20 people across the four organisations working on this full-time, and only [for] about a month for the other organisations and [for] about six weeks for us.

This naturally begs the questions as to how many of the documents were published without knowing the detail they contained. Jones obliged promptly and was, as usual, promptly answered by Assange.

It's fair to say that only two percent have been read in precise detail and the rest have been hived off using these classification systems. Now I presume what you're getting to is how did we split off the 15,000 that we have not yet released because we think they need further review to understand whether there might be innocent informers' names in there. After reviewing several different types of material, we saw that it was really these threat reports and some other classifications that contained information about informers. So those were all hived off.

WikiLeaks, it seems, additionally attempted to perform due diligence for the purposes of harm minimisation on the documents prior to releasing them. They contacted the White House to ask them to assist in vetting the documents for potentially damaging material in terms of individuals who had collaborated with coalition forces in Afghanistan. Their request was refused by the administration.

This process was mediated by The New York Times.

Dan Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, a private university in Massachusetts, told Northeastern's news website recently that due to its having brought journalists into the story pre-release for the Afghan "war logs" WikiLeaks "is now seen [by the mainstream media] as a more credible source of information than had previously been the case". Earlier it had been "heavily criticized" in the press, says Kennedy, for a leak.

But Jones asked Assange about the continuing desire of the NYT to distance itself from WikiLeaks which I reported yesterday.

It's quite interesting. Der Spiegel and The Guardian were not really like that. They really did come properly to the table. But the environment in the United States, the publishing environment, I presume, is really quite difficult when saying anything strongly against the war. In previous cases what we've seen is you can actually get important stories into The New York Times and into other mainstream press outlets like CNN. We did that with the collateral murder tape, which exposed the murders of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad and the slaying of 16 to 24 other people. But then what happens is editorial space is opened up for apologists who simply have opinion. So to get a story in about the war it has to be hard fact, you have to have the hard facts. But to get a pro-war story in all you need is opinion. I think that really represents just the sheer scope of the war industry in the United States.

It is just possible that the US press will be less likely to allow stories criticising WikiLeaks to have room in the public sphere by denying them access to opinion pages, but I doubt it.

It's pretty clear that Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and government bete-noir, doesn't much respect the media in the developed world. He's said so explicitly at least once in an interview - of which several have appeared over the past month or so.

Now, The Daily Beast reports that Assange is exchanging barbs with the ostensible newspaper-of-record, The New York Times, which received a copy of its latest leak - over 90,000 pages of classified US military documents known as the Afghan "war logs" - in advance of WikiLeaks releasing them to the public.

The NYT did wrong when it contacted the US administration before publishing its stories on the leaked documents, says Assange. And the NYT also omitted a link to WikiLeaks within the story - which would be unusual practice for the paper.

For its part, the NYT says that WikiLeaks releasing the documents to everyone "had potential consequences that I think anyone, regardless of how he views the war, would find regrettable". People could get hurt, the paper's editor Bill Keller, says.

Assange released the information to three mainstream news organizations because we had the wherewithal to mine the data for news and analysis, and because we have a large audience that would take this seriously. I think the public interest was served by that.

Of course the newspaper is in a different position, vis-a-vis both the administration and the public, from WikiLeaks. The paper has both gravitas and a need to control or manage perceptions of either bias or responsibility. It's a corporation, not a renegade activist outfit. It has a reputation built over decades that it needs to protect in order to assure its future profitability.

But Assange's criticisms both here and earlier make the paper look staid and conservative, as though its reputation is more important than the truth. That should be a perception that the NYT worries about since its place in the public sphere is cemented in its ability to uphold the public interest. That's what a newspaper of record is meant to do, regardless of how unstable and contested a term such as "the public interest" is.

Government condemnation of the leak can combine with the paper's controlling comments to further bolster WikiLeaks' standing in the community as the true upholder of the public interest. It's a fraught exercise for the NYT, and one that its corporate board will be taking a hard look at in the coming weeks.

It'll be interesting to see if any further mentions of the blue appear in the press.

A slick, white-trash road movie with a complex plot that hangs off a journalist's interest in a murky crime, Bounty Hunter (dir Andy Tennant, 2010) brings to the fore the comedic talents of two seasoned actors. Gerard Butler plays Milo Boyd, a bounty hunter. (For fans outside the US, a bounty hunter is a person who tracks down people who have breached bail conditions and brings them in to the police.) His sidekick is ex-wife Nicole Hurley, played by Jennifer Aniston.

Hurley is a journalist investigating an alleged suicide. But she's in trouble with the law because she decided to go to meet a source instead of fronting up to a court appointment to answer for a traffic infringement. Boyd is asked to bring her in. Instead of this happening, the divorced couple embark on a frantic search for the person responsible for the apparent suicide.

And love is always in the air in a brittle way that reminds you of some of Shakespeare's comedies, the ones where pretty, haughty women trade acerbic banter with handsome, cocksure males out in some remote French forest.

To spice up the romance, the filmmakers included a goofy Lothario in the person of Stewart (Jason Sudeikis), whose pants are too daggy, whose sweater is too pink, and who looks utterly ridiculous in a high-end Mini Cooper. Stewart adores Nicole, who cannot abide his advances and routinely brushes him off as she tracks down the murderer.

The chase takes the two protagonists to a race track, a country club, an "adorable" bed-and-breakfast, a casino, a tattoo parlour, and finally to the police repository where the final drama plays out. In addition, Nicole's saucy mother is an Atlantic City torch-song belle who starts drinking, it seems, at 11am just after she has removed herself from her twisted bedsheets. The fact that the last scene takes place in a jail cell tells you how low the filmmakers have aimed this self-consciously "edgy" romantic comedy.

But it's not all bad - mainly due to the acting talents of the leads. For a laugh the film can be heartily recommended, but don't expect to be swept off your feet. To be a tad swayed away from the vertical is all that the discerning viewer can reasonably expect from this lightweight film.

The Afghan "war logs" have been curiously absent from the headlines of Australian newspapers, who have long been acclimatised to a pall of silence used by our military to suppress the flow of information about their activities in foreign theatres of war. It's almost as if the media in this country has been anaesthetised by this kind of studied neglect so that they fail to respond when real and copious intelligence comes to hand.

The Guardian, the liberal UK newspaper, was one of three international news outlets to receive the documents, sometimes also referred to as the Afghan "war diaries", ahead of their release by Wikileaks on Sunday. Its coverage has been better than anyone else's, including that of The New York Times, another favoured news outlet which received the docs early.

What is clear is that the US and Australian governments regret the leak.

It is also clear that the full story will only come out in time as journalists read through and decipher the 90,000 documents and detect patterns and themes suitable for reporting in their newspapers.

Just having access to the documents is not enough. You need time to make sense of a resource so vast that a dozen reporters woking for weeks would only just arrive at a complete understanding of their ramifications. The military will be relying on this obstacle of time. In the meantime, they will also be looking at ways to shut down Wikileaks.

When the "Pentagon Papers" were released by The New York Times in 1971 - the last time a leak of this size occurred in the US - the administration took legal action against the whistleblowers. This time, WikiLeaks is a tougher target because it is based outside the US and because it has a high profile. Any action against founder Julian Assange - who says he likes "crushing bastards" - would be widely reported.

Australia has just been exposed to a two-part ABC Four Corners program on our soldiers operating in Afghanistan. It was a bland and anodyne, controlled and well-scripted example of reporting compared to the stories now appearing with the "war logs", which claim among other things that Pakistan's secret service has been aiding the Taliban and that the US runs a special "black" hit squad to carry out extrajudicial assassinations in Afghanistan.

Interesting how the National Press Club's debate of last night between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott has played out in the media, who seem addicted to the kind of conflict that the new PM seems determined to subdue. Gillard is colourless and boring. Abbott is dull and unconvincing. But I think there's something else at play here that hasn't been acknowledged.

Gillard has shown from her first press conference that she likes a measure of decorum in events she plays a part in. Her handling of the press gallery is masterful. She seems to abhor the usual high-octane barking of questions as journos would try to outdo each other in volume and persistence while putting their questions to the floor. Gillard does something to prevent this. She doles out the floor in a controlled manner. Sometimes she even knows the names of the journalists she points to. But she always makes sure they each get their turn.

This kind of civil tone is unusual and it is emerging also in the way Gillard answers questions. There's often a smile. There's a lack of temper. And there's a measured, calm demeanour that overrides any bid for apparently interesting content launched in response to loaded questions.

Abbott changed the game when he became leader of the Opposition. Gillard has shown that she is able to change the game too. Look forward to more civility and a focus on content rather than soundbites. Polling shows that female voters are listening to this new tone of voice with more interest than they did to the testosterone-driven harangues of male PMs past.

Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller in Green Zone (dir Paul Greengrass, 2010), a fast, high-octane romp through the dusty streets and half-destroyed palaces of post-invasion Iraq.

Once the bombing strikes ended in 2003 the question should have quickly turned to the pressing issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and where they were hidden. News crews from around the world staked out their patches in the Green Zone, only occasionally venturing out into Baghdad's grimy suburbs and preferring to cover press conferences organised by US military heads.

It's in the suburbs that the movie starts. Miller and his team make visits to city locations in an effort to uncover WMD stashes but repeatedly come up empty-handed. When he complains, Miller is silenced by a senior commanding officer and by Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a tightly zipped-up and besuited Washington bureaucrat with an agenda to push.

Frustrated, Miller seeks help from Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a tubby CIA operative in an ill-fitting brown suit who is on a collision course with military spooks, who are trying to protect the fiction WMD embody. So when Miller gets some intelligence about the location of "high-value target" General Al Rawi (Yigal Naor), he takes it to Brown and not to Poundstone.

Getting the intelligence happened by chance. Working in the field, Miller is approached by an Iraqi citizen named Freddy (Khalid Abdalla). Freddy tells him there is a meeting of senior Baathists happening nearby. Miller takes his team to the house. They enter it and capture three Iraqis but Al Rawi escapes. Thinking he is onto something, Miller is naturally disappointed when a rival group of US soldiers choppers in, abducts the captives, and leaves him bleeding from the nose.

Undaunted by the unseemly scrape, Miller attempts over the next few days to get to the bottom of the puzzle. If WMDs are absent every time they move in on a target site, where did the intelligence come from?

He asks Washington Post journalist Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). A senior official gave her the information, she replies. Didn't anyone verify it, asks Miller. No, she says; when you get raw information from such a source you don't ask questions.

Working with Brown, Miller works out that Poundstone had visited Jordan at the same time as Al Rawi. They had met to discuss WMD. Putting two and two together, Brown and Miller face up to the fact that the lies go right to the top. This insight is confirmed when Poundstone raids CIA HQ in the Green Zone and confiscates Miller's field intelligence.

Everyone is trying to find Al Rawi, but not all of them for the same reason. Some want to get him to talk - did the US lie about WMD? - and others want to prevent him from talking. The chase sequence that ends the film takes us into the suburbs once more. These are the same suburbs that the Iraqi tribal heads will argue about in the conference room in the palace under the "leadership" of the US-backed government head. Poundstone, watching the bickering, can only scratch his head.

As for Miller? He's just put back on the road to continue his work.

In 2010, the bombings in Iraq have slowed to a trickle thanks to negotiations that could have taken place years earlier. That they still occur is one reason this film had to be made.

Something personal belonging to all actors always seeps into their films and Mel Gibson - shown here as Detective Thomas Craven in Edge of Darkness (dir Martin Campbell, 2010) - is absolutely no exception. His role is characteristically off-beat and his performance is typically strong as the kind but no-nonsense Boston cop whose life becomes entangled with the functionaries and mercenaries employed by a secretive nuclear research lab where his daughter, an MIT graduate, works.

It's a role Bruce Willis could have played, but Gibson is easily the better actor. He's able to trade insults with thugs in expensive suits but also empathise with a single mother of one in such a way that he comes across as genuine, scared, determined, high-minded, and reassuringly down-home. Willis would have needed a lot more support to look as good. Gibson does it solo - in more ways than one.

There's no female lead other than his daughter, for a start. Removing the romantic prop could have left Gibson looking overly hang-dog, but the veteran actor embraces this weakness and turns it around so that he stands on equal footing with a range of characters who are, equally, sorely beset by the rogue operation that the US government has allowed to become a law unto itself.

The dialog is strong but often hard-to-hear, with actors such as Ray Winstone as the shadowy enforcer Jedburgh severely mumbling in Cockney while others, such as Jay O. Sanders as the cop Bill Whitehouse severely mumbles in Boston American.

Injecting Gibson into the mix enables these guys to perform strongly. The journalist, too, plays a key role well even though she appears for just a few moments. Played by Molly Schreiber she empathises with Craven's plight as he leaves his determinately middle-class house in the dead of night, and is rewarded by a parcel containing DVDs with evidence of state-sponsored crimes of the most devilish nature. Such a scoop comes to a working journo perhaps a couple of times in a lifetime.

For Gibson is intent on uncovering who killed his daughter. In the process, he runs a gauntlet of assaults on himself and others because the operation on the hill, called Northmoor, is doing government-funded work that it should not be doing. It is a scenario of egregious maladministration going to the highest levels of government, including a Boston senator creepily played by Damian Young.

The action is really good, as is the way the story unfolds in stages, although some mumbled dialog makes it hard to follow at times. Craven's misguided rant to the senator about PTSD aside there's little to object to in this film, and a lot to enjoy. It kept me riveted to my seat for the entire two hours' duration.

Nicola Collins, the creative force behind The End: Confessions of A Cockney Gangster (2008) started out in acting and also worked as a fashion model. Her twin sister Teena produced the film. Their father, Les Falco, is one of its stars. The two women were born in 1978 and this is their first production.

It's a film that probably had to be made. Subtitled and decorated with an interestingly dark and complex soundtrack and fashionable visuals, the film appears to target a US audience. Explaining cockney lags and geezers to Americans requires a few atmospherics and even more cognitive aids, it seems.

In a sense it is good that this film was made when it was. News stories appeared recently telling us that cockney would disappear as other slang used by London's disadvantaged youth takes precedence in cop shows and films. The film is a kind of pickling jar, and all of the men who appear in it tell us with some level of regret that they are aware of this demographic shift.

On the other hand, the men who face Collins' camera are a band of robbers, standover men, debt collectors who use questionable methods to secure their money, and probably even worse.

So while their attempts to justify their activities stand up while you're watching it and this empethy is testament to the filmmakers' skill, later on when you get to thinking about the ragged collection of clapped-out brawlers and thugs you realise that you wouldn't want to spend much time with any of them in real life. They come across OK in front of a camera but you know that everything else being equal the situation could turn ugly pretty quickly given the right circumstances.

The Collins twins clearly spent a lot of time and thought in producing this film. The hours of video interviews are skillfully assembled with an eye to retaining some form of coherent narrative arc, so that the segues between themes are seamless. As such they deserve respect, despite the suspicion that there's a certain quantum of ego driving the whole enterprise. And a bit of voyeurism, too. After all, this is a dying breed - as we've been told - and the new breed of thugs - and there must be one lurking about the traps, to be sure - remains undocumented.

Perhaps the twins could make a similar movie with that demographic in their sights. For novelty value this would top the current project, and for public interest too.

A Canadian film, The American Trap (dir Charles Biname, 2008) is probably a lot better in a lot of ways than the other film that pretends to solve the mystery behind the assassination of John F Kennedy, America's most-favoured president: 1991's JFK directed by the famed Oliver Stone.

JFK met his untimely end in 1963 in Dallas when he was hit, we are told, by a bullet fired from a gun held by one Lee Harvey Oswald. Biname and his writers suggest that the various US law-enforcement bodies, in league with the US mafia, were behind the hit.

Like Stone, Biname introduces us to an assortment of shady characters. In the film we're looking at, The American Trap, the majority of these are French-speaking Canadian drug barons who bring heroin into the US hidden in automobiles. Of primary importance is Lucien Rivard (Rémy Girard), a savvy and competent middle-man who takes orders from Paul Mondolini (Gérard Darmon). On the sidelines sits a spook, Maurice Bishop (Colm Freore). And in the middle there's an unfortunate and appealing woman named Rose Cheramie (Janet Lane).

The best part of the film is conducted in French and the dialog is very, very fast. This combination of elements means you have to concentrate very hard to keep up with the action. There's not a lot of leeway if you blink too often or even if you choose to take a sip of coffee from time to time. I recommend keeping your eyes glued firmly on the screen throughout the film's 110 minutes because one trip to the lavatory will mean sacrificing a heap of references that will be relied upon later by the filmmakers in yet another crucial scene.

This speed of conception is usually, in my view, an indicator of quality in a film.

As an index of how fast the film moves, no camera shot takes more than a few seconds. There's a lot of period recreation here, too, especially in Dallas and New Orleans. Many other scenes take place at disused industrial sites - which are timeless and therefore require no costly set-up. This was a clever decision by the filmmakers as it would have helped to keep down costs.

The plot is also clever and would definitely reward a second viewing. A primary event is the uncovering by the Narcotics Squad of a shipment of heroin from Mexico. The cop who uncovers this - based on a tip-off - is Jeffrey Cohen (Joe Cobden). But Cohen has bigger fish to fry and this will lead to his downfall in a typically understated scene shot along a Southern backroad with a refinery as backdrop. Cohen's downfall and Rivard's survival are the primary ways the filmmakers tell us that the nexus of effort coordinated by the spooks and the mob led all the way to the Dallas Book depository and beyond.

A lot less muscular than Stone's work, The American Trap is also a lot more interesting. Watch it again and again, because you'll find things out here that you missed the first time around.

Bob Ellis in The Drum paints a dark portrait of defeat for Julia Gillard if she calls the election now. On Twitter, Ellis' fellow ABC commentator Marieke Hardy applauds the screed for its "beautiful turn of phrase" and promises that her heart would continue to swell every time Ellis writes and publishes. It is, indeed, a compelling piece and a well thought-out one.

A lot of people don't like the Liberal Party and these punters - Ellis included - fear a return of the Libs above all else. They fear the fear-saturated pronouncements aimed at stifling any progress in society toward a better future. They fear the small-minded parochialism and the obsession with money above all else. They fear the powerful being given a free rein in the ongoing and practical debate about the place of regulation in society.

But I think Ellis is over-salting his stew. My personal prognosis vis-a-vis the election outcome if Gillard calls it tomorrow is less sour. For me, the big issue is not whether the Liberal Party or the Labor Party wins the election. The bigger issue is how the Australian Greens will fare.

This is because, as Gillard has shown amply since she took the helm of government, the two major parties are as one on a lot of issues that really matter. The Labor Party has done practically nothing in terms of renewable energy, for example. They have thrown homosexuals to the wolves by denying them the ability to marry. And they have chucked buckets-full of pabulum at the xenophobic minority by mooting a refugee processing centre in East Timor.

They have, in fact, done nothing the way they should have done as a progressive party. The 18 percent that the Greens are said now to command seems secure as long at the Labor Party does nothing on climate change, for a start. Given that the election will be called sooner rather than later, it seems there will be no time for that debate to play out, again, in the media. In fact, they do not want to go there because the Labor Party has already said that nothing will happen on climate change until the Kyoto Agreement runs out, in 2012.

Gillard is not one to go against the party line. Not in any way, shape or form.

So it seems that we will be led, for the next three years, by a conservative government either way the chips fall: blue or red. The difference will make itself felt in the number of people who defect from Labor to the Greens. I await the next poll eagerly.

The news media got its telescope stuck up its own backside today after veteran journo Laurie Oakes threw a curly question - like a gauntlet - at the feet of Julia Gillard during question time at the National Press Club in Canberra. The detailed question about what happened on the night Gillard overthrew Kevin Rudd fell flat, however, as the prime minister batted it away expertly. She batted not an eyelid, twitched not a muscle.

But news websites across Australia decided, en-masse, that this was a story and gave top-of-page prominence to it. This included all Fairfax websites as well as those controlled by rival News Ltd. A variety of headlines appeared within an hour of the televised press conference being screened. All were alleging that Gillard is trying to hide something.

But the question was a pure fishing exercise on the part of Oakes. No doubt his sources are impeccable. But from day one Gillard has said she will not divulge what happened during the meeting in question. Her reply today merely reiterated this decision.

Why are the media so bent on finding scandal and outrage? What is their motivation in attempting to scoop Gillard when she gave exactly the same reply today as she has on numerous occasions before? Why is Oakes more of a celebrity than a journalist? And how come nothing else from the day's proceedings appeared in the news?

The talk itself was routine but nevertheless revealing. Gillard was in campaign mode, indicating that, without a doubt, an announcement on the date of the election is imminent. She played up Labor's fiscal credentials, demonstrating how the party has drifted even further to the Right since Rudd campaigned three years ago.

There was no mention, for example, of the party's new climate policy. Gillard repeatedly thrust home the message that the Labor government had a strong fiscal record and would return the budget to surplus within three years - three years (a guess) before any other developed economy. She also said that it would be reckless to trust the economy to the Liberals - essentially turning a Howard-era threat back onto his party.

As usual, Gillard's performance was stable and flawless. It will take a question with more bite than the one Oakes threw down, to unseat her in the lists.

Forget Paul the prognosticating octopus. Old Spice Guy has captured the attention of the world. It's part of a sustained ad campaign by Proctor & Gamble, which owns the brand.

The Old Spice Guy ad won a coveted industry award at Cannes with his kooky palaver extolling the benefits of using the old-fashioned masculine scent. Now, creators Wieden + Kennedy have scored an even bigger coup by inviting Twitter users to send in questions - using the @OldSpice handle - that are promptly answered with a customised video.

mUmBRELLA host Tim Burrowes says he has counted 116 videos. There are videos for celebrities and for regular people with requests they send in. The reaction on Twitter has been uniformly positive, with posters lauding the creativity of this, latest, "viral" campaign. It's certainly an original and compelling use of the medium. The campaign gives new depth to the term "engagement" and indicates the direction media companies could choose if they want to get people talking about their brands in a positive way.

When a series of bombings struck London's transport system in 2005 we were overwhelmed with media coverage. Thousands of pictures and millions of words were generated, disseminated, and mulled over by reporters and the commentariat in Australia. The evening news was even interrupted when information first started to filter through from London, where it was still morning.

But our attention is selective and biased, as coverage of the bombings in Kampala, Uganda, yesterday attest. Very little is available in the Australian media. Despite the fact that Australian soldiers are still stationed in Afghanistan to combat terrorism, we are seemingly not at all concerned by the Uganda blasts. Or, at least, the well-informed editors of our newspapers believe they are not important enough to warrant front-page coverage.

Possibly more than 74 people were killed in Kampala yesterday. In London, the death toll was 52, with over 700 injured. It is still too early to know how many were injured in Kampala, but no doubt the count will be high with the second attack taking place at a bar where people were sitting outside watching the World Cup final game on a large-screen TV.

The first attack took place at an Ethiopian restaurant. Both attacks have been claimed by a Somali militia group, al-Shaabab.

Pic credit: Charlie Shoemaker/EPA.

Musical Chinese kitsch is not average fare although it's certainly entertaining. In this case, it was a symphony concert led by singer Wan Shanhong (pic) doing a medly of old numbers from the 70s and 80s that were based on old stories from novels from the distant past.

So the references were twice filtered, making it difficult to understand. But in any case it was all in Chinese.

The first filter is the 16th or 10th century novel the songs were based on. They're all very famous novels such as Journey to the West, which features Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. On top of this, a second cultural filter from the time the songs were written is applied. So it's a kind of palimpsest.

And it's high camp stuff. The full symphony orchestra adds power and drama to probably simple folk tunes, with swelling arpeggios and thundering finales in the style of the great period of classical Western music, in the 19th century.

There was one Chinese instrument in the orchestra, but the player sat idle for the most part. A multi-stringed Chinese guzheng is no match for a Western-style orchestra in full flight.

There was other drama, too. The organisers had placed decorative flowers around the border of the stage. But they blocked the view for people sitting in the front row. Many of these people simply stood up and took the fowers down, placing them instead on the floor. One security guard had a different idea, however, and replaced several bouquets.

The audience enjoyed the concert, and clapped along when requested by the singers. There were about ten different singers, all with powerful voices and fantastic costumes to match the stories they told. An interesting night out.

God rules under Gillard, it seems. The question - Is this a wimple or a hoodie? - is no longer relevant. Julia Gillard has come out in favour of the Right.

On the question of gay marriage, Gillard has explicitly adopted a conservative position saying, in an ABC Local Radio talkback session in Darwin this morning, that "Marriage is between a man and a woman."

"Obviously we live in an age when there are all sorts of relationships which are not marriages.

"I am in a committed relationship of that nature myself with my partner Tim."

I had expected better. In fact, I brought this to Gillard's attention on Sunday when the prime minister used Facebook to declare her love for "Australia and the people in it". I commented a few minutes later:

Help reduce suicide rates by recognising the right of gay Australians to marry.

The prime minister said she would "do her best". Well, if her best is to sacrifice the interests of an embattled minority in order to curry favour with the religious component of the population, then I have to say that I'm deeply disappointed.

I would have thought that a person whose own marital status comes under such close and sustained scrutiny would be more flexible. And so strictures put in place a couple of thousand years ago by followers of Jesus continue to determine who can fully participate in society - and who must remain on the margins. It's a crying shame.